This Artwork Does Not Exist

[tomhoward]

I found it interesting to note how viscerally uncomfortable I felt while looking at some (or, most) of these pieces.

Of course not all art has to be pleasing to the viewer, but confronting/challenging art is made deliberately that way by the artist, and the process of experiencing the art involves understanding the feeling and learning something from it.

It's a different feeling altogether to be discomforted by art, but for no purpose.

[narag]

Honestly, most of them feel very bland to me. Often in the same way, with the blank white square as the extreme case, but there are a number of other series typical of its style.

The algorithm could use some additional imbalance-creating modules.

[mattlondon]

Looked like generic anonymous hotel/office art to me.

Technically this is great, but I guess I am not able to appreciate the art itself... but then I get zero feeling from "real" art as well. Shrug

[salt-licker]

100% this. In some I think I can see recognizable images (a car? A bird? A human face?) bizarrely decomposed and distorted. Combined with the manically meticulous, not-quite-repetitive patterns and discolorations, the pieces have a distinctly tortured quality to them.

[lucidrains]

Hi all, this was trained by Michael Friesen (https://twitter.com/MichaelFriese10). I liked the latent space so much that I decided to share it with everyone. Have fun! I'll add some html to credit Michael with the training once I find the time.

[valentinvieriu]

Credit should have been mentioned at the beginning of the project. HTML is not that hard!

[arxpoetica]

By and large, the artwork generated herein totally speaks to me.

This is almost beyond the uncanny valley for me.

[3131s]

I don't get all the hate here either. Some of these are very pretty.

[mnl]

Funnily I get nothing from these. I can't see any tension in the compositions. They're aimless. I guess it's what I'd expect from mixing attributes from other paintings.

What did the painter want to do here? I don't know, I can't detect a painter to begin with.

[earthbound19]

For me it's about 1/3 hit 2/3 miss, and those that hit I usually want to tweak the composition or alter it somehow. Rarely am I completely satisfied with output from it, but that does happen.

I would take many of them and scale them up to a resolution that would work for LARGE prints, with a tool that does its own upscaling/stylish embellishing (like Dynamic Auto Painter), then work them up further in digital.

I think it's a fantastic tool for brainstorming ideas.

Anyone know the license terms for images generated by this web site?

[arxpoetica]

Actually—my mind just took a trippy turn on this—

At an abstract level, this stuff is still derived from works done by humans.

I can't process this (at the meta level), ha ha.

Basically, the universal question, but where does art begin, and where does it end. This is in essence, taking something already abstract (I'm assuming) created at the hands of expressionists, and turning it back into something—random—

AGGGGGHHHH I can't process it!!!! ha ha

[tetrisgm]

So what's next? Combine this with thispersondoesnotexist? Generate fake descriptions about the art? Make a real-fake exhibition? Make a fake Wikipedia entry?

I guess at one point, all this makes it real art, where the artwork isn't the object, but the craftsmanship is. Might be interesting to put the repo on display at a gallery.

[lucidrains]

I moved on to molecules https://thischemicaldoesnotexist.com Perhaps short stranded proteins are next

[aiCeivi9]

So far the best I have seen is https://thisstartupdoesnotexist.com/

[hhs]

> Might be interesting to put the repo on display at a gallery.

This is what artists like Marcel Duchamp did when selling “readymades” with the conceptual art movement.

[earthbound19]

It is arguably already "real" art. Art does not have to be physical to be "real," it can be virtual; art does not have to be made by humans to be "real;" art made by an AI is real, etc.

[valentinvieriu]

Hehe, is funny how some ideas are just swimming in the minds of contemporary people. This is what I'm doing with https://art42.net

[buboard]

make a virtual world game where everything (faces, bodies, dialogue, animations, bedrooms) are generated by GANs. Put people inside, plug a needle in them, connect them to the matrix, and profit.

[MarkusWandel]

Funny that of all the "This X does not exist" sites, this one only gives relatively small, low-res pictures. Because I'd totally print out some of that stuff and hang it up!

[valentinvieriu]

I've launched a similar project some weeks ago. https://art42.net see the previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22344254

[chungy]

But then it would exist :)

This generator of all of them seems to raise the more existential questions. What does it mean to exist? Surely art is art regardless of whether it's on a physical canvas. Just the act of generating it and serving pixels changes the state from "doesn't exist" to "does exist"...

[dwd]

Mount a flat screen on the wall and refresh periodically. I would do that if it could be trained with specific artists I like.

[gridlockd]

It's exponentially more expensive to train these at higher resolutions.

[buboard]

perhaps you can use another NN to up-scale them

[coldcode]

As an abstract digital artist I find most of these not interesting enough for me but the real issue is a GAN cannot make images that are big enough to print without looking like crap or taking forever. A decent sized 30x30in looks good at 300 dpi which is 81M pixels. I need a decent computer and video card to work at this size. A GAN would need to be massively bigger to function at this scale.

[arketyp]

GANs can be made fully convolutional so that you can generate images of abritrary size. But the training of the latent space will still be limited by memory and speed, so you'd end up with images that are perhaps quite repetetive in nature.

[pxndxx]

I've always wanted to do something like this, but wired up to your webcam to detect when you blink. When you do, update the picture to a new one, to make extremely ephemeral art.

[nkrisc]

So it will be like a timelapse video but in every picture you have your eyes closed?

[hhs]

In 1929, Rene Magritte made a painting of a smoking pipe and, on the bottom of the picture, he wrote “this is not a pipe” in French [0]. So, this website seems to be using that same surrealist theme.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

[david-gpu]

I think the domain name is simply following the pattern of other domains for AI-generated images, such as https://thispersondoesnotexist.com , https://thiscatdoesnotexist.com , https://thisrentaldoesnotexist.com , etc.

For these and more, see https://thisxdoesnotexist.com

[dawnerd]

This is basically a NIN album generator.

(Of the ones I've seen)

[eyelidlessness]

I had the same reaction to quite a few.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xg-Wk2DEXs

[7777fps]

My reaction was "These are all post-rock album covers".

Compare to the real things: https://www.factmag.com/2016/04/20/best-post-rock-albums/

[joosters]

I think the more shocking version would be ThisArtworkDoesExist.com - just fill it with some of the worst 'real' modern art that has somehow got displayed in a gallery.

[pzumk]

Just forward the domain to the $ 120.000 Banana [1] or something even more ridiculous.

[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...

[frereubu]

Reminds me rather of that not-technically NSFW image generator based on Yahoo's NSFW-detecting neural network, particularly the art gallery section. (Probably NSFW, by the way): https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/

[nkrisc]

Unlike "This Person Does Not Exist", this artwork does, I should think, now exist.

Is it possible to create artwork that doesn't exist?

[bloak]

It exists, but is it art?

[mjfl]

how long is it going to take someone to download 100,000 of these, hang them up on a bar wall somewhere and sell them for $20 apiece?

[abriosi]

https://thiseyedoesnotexist.com/

[Juliate]

It's abstract per construction. There's no intent, no meaning, no purpose, no origin, no artist into these.

[6nf]

I agree. Pure art!

[pjbk]

Now get a robot to paint it.

[buboard]

Thanks. i downloaded some prints for my next exhibition, ironically called "originals". art is in the eye of the downloader

[mattkevan]

Really tempted to paint some of these, thereby closing the human > machine > human loop. Could be an interesting experiment.

[gildandstain]

My (human) collaborator and I took on something like this a couple of years ago: https://veronica-projectspace.com/zack-davis-rebecca-friedma...

[rolling_robot]

https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

[jeffmcmahan]

The results are indistinguishable from real modern art. That is to say, this AI is really bad at producing art.