Gurney Journey

Suppose you made this rough sketch and wanted to finish it in a photo-real or painterly style.

This time he told it he wanted it to make the sketch look like "A portrait of a young woman by Norman Rockwell." 

The system was also able to translate the sketch into the features of famous celebrities:

Selena Gomez

Scarlett Johansson

Nicole Kidman

Emma Stone

All of them have big problems with the hair, but they're recognizable, and let's admit the tech is in its infancy and will only get better.

If you're an artist, you might find all this a little scary, threatening, or astounding. I do too! I feel like we've been introduced to a magical genie who can bring whatever we wish into existence.

Some have responded by calling for laws to ban the technology from creating images in the styles of living, working artists. What if someone created a print for sale that was supposedly painted by you or me?

I think we have to be careful how we respond to this apparent threat. Let's keep in mind that the technology is transformative, meaning it doesn't copy/paste images. It creates something new. And artistic styles can't be—and shouldn't be—copyrightable. These tools are here to stay. They're only going to get more advanced, and they're open-source. Also the people who are developing it are artists, too. 

I'm wary of laws or AI bots that restrict the growth of this new art form, or that drive the prompts underground. Instead of involving politicians and lawyers and AI bots, we should encourage a culture of mutual respect and fair play. Perhaps we should encourage generative artists to share their prompts when they use a living artist's name, and never to mislead their audience into thinking the work was actually painted by that artist. Basically, people should give credit where credit is due.

How do you think we should regulate or guide this new art industry?

I'm honored that Vox media asked me to be part of this video about AI-generated artwork. 

How would you imagine a painting of a robot with flowers growing out of it?

"A happy robot with flowers growing out of his head, clouds in the background, digital art." 

It's a whimsical idea that might make a fun concept for a children's book.  

"A detailed painting of a rainbow colored robot with flowers growing out of its head."

"A painting by Caravaggio of a robot head with flowers growing out of the top."

Mr. Barry edited a digital book that you can check out for free called 1000 Robots on Archive.org. He chose the subject matter of flowers and robots because "I find the idea of an artificial intelligence painting robots to be simultaneously humorous and endearing."

"A painting by Norman Rockwell of a robot head with flowers growing out of the top with clouds and a rainbow in a background, digital art"

The technology seems adept at understanding the artistic logic of the prompt, both in terms of style and content. But there are a few incongruous elements, such as the weird red cable that arcs over to the rainbow.

Mr. Barry says: "While the model is capable of generating other types of images, I found paintings to be the area where it truly excelled aesthetically."

"A colorful painting by M.C. Escher of robot head with flowers growing out of the top"

The survey of styles resembles a Society of Illustrators exhibition or a professional illustrators' workbook. The foregoing two pages don't strike me as particularly reminiscent of Rockwell or Escher, but to me they score quite high on internal coherence and aesthetic appeal.  

Right now only a few people have access to this tool, but presumably it will soon be widely available essentially for free.

"a dramatically lit brightly colored detailed painting of a robot artist painting a picture"

The power of this artificial intelligence gives me a mixture of feelings: I'm surprised, delighted, intimidated, and a bit breathless at the speed of the progress. 

The resulting images have suffered from problems of logic and global coherence.

For example, here's what you get if you give the computer the prompt “A rabbit detective sitting on a park bench and reading a newspaper in a Victorian setting.” (Latent Diffusion LAION-400M via @loretoparisi)

The overall logic is much better. Now he has legs and is really sitting on that bench, even casting a shadow. But the image is still not perfect. What's the black loop in his left hand? And why doesn't he seem to be holding the newspaper with his right hand? 

Here's one more example of how the technology is improving, using the prompt “teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s” 

The first version using older tech (laion400m) looks like a paste-up of unrelated elements.

Here's what Dall-e 2 came up with: a pretty believable image with consistent lighting. 

Open AI released this YouTube video to introduce the sofware.

This technology scares some working artists and illustrators. @VividVoid says: "DALL-E is breaking my heart. AI art is about to lay utter waste to traditional visual art forms. This will be so much more destructive than what the Internet did to music. It will be a technological conquest of one of the great human avenues of spiritual transformation."

AI skeptic Gary Marcus doubts whether the technology will ever replace artists because it is just crunching big data sets. It's not learning from embodied experience, nor does it understand symbolic or semantic concepts the way a human does. Marcus says: "This whole thread is weaponized cherry-picked PR; the antithesis of science."

If you paint in traditional media you may not pay much attention to tutorials about 3D computer graphics.

 Scientists have succeeded in mapping the neurons and connections of a fruit fly brain.

Ian Hubert spent about three years developing this short film called Dynamo Dream.