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1SecondPainting: Generate abstract paintings in one click

423 points| wimpypistol | 5 years ago |1secondpainting.com

138 comments

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[+] captn3m0|5 years ago|reply
I got this one, which doesn't look abstract: https://1secondpainting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/8.png
[+] adamhearn|5 years ago|reply
Technically it is possible to generate that randomly, no?

Obliviously this site is fake, but that’s besides the point.

[+] Namari|5 years ago|reply
It looks like the 10 first ones are mangas. I wonder if there is a pool of pictures the AI gets inspiration from
[+] wimpypistol|5 years ago|reply
Haha yes, I first tested this with procedurally generated anime characters and must have forgot the first 10. Thanks for pointing it out.
[+] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
Cool!

Please use this technology to make a 4K video of an infinite zoom through the art.

i.e. generate an image frame, zoom in 1% near the center of the image, re-anneal the art to fill in missing resolution, repeat.

It would be analogous to the infinite exploration of the Mandelbrot fractal set.

It might help us intuit the black box of the algorithm as well if it reaches some periodic local minima and keeps reproducing the same art sequence.

[+] ellis0n|5 years ago|reply
If zoom is possible, depends by method of generation
[+] d--b|5 years ago|reply
There is definitely a recognizable style of NN-generated art. It looks "piecewise-consistent". After a few years of seeing these I find them really boring and unpleasant to look at.
[+] jakear|5 years ago|reply
Many would say the same of the artists the NN’s mimic. Perhaps they’re doing better than you give them credit ;)
[+] browsergap|5 years ago|reply
I disagree. The gestalt works in a lot of these the same way as in gallery abstract art
[+] lokl|5 years ago|reply
I think AI is currently able to generate images I find pleasant to look at, but they have no impact on me beyond that momentary enjoyment. It is still decoration and not yet art, according to my personal definitions.

When I can tell an AI to make an image about the Spanish Civil War and it produces Guernica, then I will be impressed in the way human artists impress me. And then we will have a powerful new tool to communicate. I would like my own personal Guernica each day to help me learn about something happening in the world.

[+] mikepurvis|5 years ago|reply
But how much of that is context? Is the absence of deeper impact because you're aware that a soulless NN produced these, or is it something intrinsic in them?

I'm not at all an art expert, but I definitely looked at several of them and could easily picture a critic describing the significance of the relationship between the shapes and colours.

[+] jjk166|5 years ago|reply
"Well you asked me to paint an authentic Guernica so of course I had to bomb Guernica"
[+] jameslk|5 years ago|reply
This doesn't sound like it would be unrealistic. I think this can be partially solved by two systems: one that paints and one that finds the best painting to match a current event (in the form of a topic). The latter system could be trained on a set of paintings and corresponding topics or meanings, and then uses this training to match newly generated paintings to topics/meanings.
[+] staycoolboy|5 years ago|reply
> It is still decoration and not yet art, according to my personal definitions.

This isn't a personal definition. There literally is a distinction in fine arts study.

[+] raziel2p|5 years ago|reply
Judging by the URL of the images themselves these seem to be pre-generated, which makes me think there might have been some human selection process to filter out the badly generated ones.

Still some really cool looking art in there, though. I'd be perfectly happy hanging some of these up in my apartment.

[+] synnick|5 years ago|reply
The language on the landing page suggests that every time you click Try Now a new image is generated.

> Click the button below for an AI-generated abstract painting. Built for artists, developers, and hobbyists.

Really though there is a gallery of around 10,000 pngs on a Wordpress site.

Fake it 'til you make it!

[+] gsleblanc|5 years ago|reply
The first ten images are... interesting.
[+] jjk166|5 years ago|reply
I got one which was just an anime face (not similar to, an actual professional quality animation) which leads me to believe it's passing through images it trained on (or making extremely minor changes to them).
[+] valentinvieriu|5 years ago|reply
Congratulations on the project! This looks very similar to my project: https://art42.net I've used the higher resolution model 1024, and I also chosen to generate the picture in advance. It's expensive to generate them realtime.
[+] fareesh|5 years ago|reply
This isn't live/dynamically generated, but if it was, what would be a good way of architecting it in a basic implementation? Say you keep the WordPress site, do you then just send a request to some endpoint that is served by python which keeps the model in memory for quick responses?
[+] lostmsu|5 years ago|reply
When I was doing AI lyrics, I just ensured that the same seed generates the same text. So server just pregenerated several thousand texts into a queue, which you drain from instantly upon a click to get random.

The generated texts are then cached, and if not visited for a while - expire. But thanks to the ability to regenerate the same text from seed are still accessible from URL.

https://github.com/losttech/BillionSongs

[+] Keverw|5 years ago|reply
Very cool! Wonder how the copyright works on this sorta stuff. Since you fed your AI with actual images of other people art... but a art student would study other people’s art too. So not sure if AI would be seen as a copy or a derivative work. Seems like if you were designing a game and needed random art to fill frames on a wall could be cool to use these. But I feel like the legal part of doing that might be a little murky and unclear and probably even varies by country since still a very new technology.
[+] fxtentacle|5 years ago|reply
This appears to reuse NVIDIA's StyleGAN network, just like artbreeder.io which was previously on HN. If I remember correctly, NVIDIA's terms don't allow non-research use.
[+] coldcode|5 years ago|reply
As a digital abstract artist who also does generative art, I find making the tiny images sort of funny. How about making a 30x30 inch painting? If it takes 1 second to make a tiny 250 pixel image how long would it take your system to make a 9000x9000 image?
[+] itronitron|5 years ago|reply
I'm curious to know from the people commenting on this thread that they would buy one of these generated paintings whether they would still be interested if the paintings were artworks made by people. I'm guessing that there are two distinct markets here.
[+] estsauver|5 years ago|reply
I really like this as well, and would love a higher resolution generator. I'd definitely put a few that were generated on a wall.
[+] ryankrage77|5 years ago|reply
Very similar to https://art42.net/, which has a larger selection of images (10,000+, whereas 1secodpainting has only 9989 pre-generated images).
[+] stevehiehn|5 years ago|reply
Where is the 'order now' button? I'm not even kidding, I would put some of these prints on my wall!
[+] jimbob45|5 years ago|reply
If I hung any of these in my house and signed them with random names, no one would be able to tell that they weren’t organically made.
[+] SergeAx|5 years ago|reply
It made me think about couple years old trend of style transfer using GAN: "make your selfie look like Van Gogh". Generating abstract painting may be reduced to transfering average style of several abstract painters onto random seed image. But then it should be a trivial task, even possible to do client-side, no GPU.
[+] alexmingoia|5 years ago|reply
I think it would look much better without the colored border, or any border.
[+] MarkLowenstein|5 years ago|reply
Gorgeous! Would absolutely pay for most of these. Best thing though: this is the first software I've ever seen that advertises "in one click" yet really requires only ONE CLICK.