Thanks to CryptoTwitter I've recently stumbled into an fairly abstract world of image modification and art creation through the use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. It's fascinating to see the kind of results it spits out based on your inputs and some minor modifications. I won't try to explain how it works in this post so if that's what you are looking for then I must disappoint you because today I'll only give you a sneak peek of what's possible to achieve with one of many AI image generating tools out there, called ArtBreeder.
There is quite literally no limit to what you can create with it other than your imagination.
Among many things, you can bring back to life famous statues, black and white images come alive with the addition of vibrant colors, make yourself look like the main character of your favorite cartoon, make the most grumpy person smile, see what you'd look like if Marilyn Monroe was your mom, turn Hitler into a black man, create abstract landscapes and even more abstract art with a click of a button.
No special skills required.
Just a lot of free time, imagination, patience and experimentation.
One of the first things I tried to accomplish was to see if I could bring this ancient Roman statue back to life. After many attempts and countless iterations I was finally pleased with how this one turned out.
Quite accurate, don't you think?
It's captivating to see how easily we can now recreate people from the past and create a fairly decent approximation of how they would look if they were alive today from a single picture of a statue and with zero skills whatsoever.
I'd imagine this is something professional digital artists would spend days on trying to recreate and here I am today - with no skills whatsoever - completing it in under half an hour.
How amazing is that?
Moving on, the next thing I did is rather simple and I've seen people do it in photoshop fairly quickly and easily but we don't have those skills, do we? So we turn to AI which turns any noob into a professional digital artist and we successfully manage to bring color into a black and white image. To spice it up we've also hiven her a few botox injections in the forhead, around the eyes and nose in order to shed a couple of years.
I'm pleased how it turned out.
Think about the possibilities here.
Maybe you've got an old image of your beloved grandparents that you'd like to bring color to. Well, now you can. Simply digitalize it, upload it to ArtBreeder and start tweaking it until you get the desired result. You can try combining your image with a similar image which is in color and achieve great results. If it's not enough though, try editing it's genes. It's so simple, intuitive and self-explanatory that I won't bother describing it.
Another fun thing to try out is to cartoonify yourself.
Starting with just a self-portrait (although this is obviously not me in the image) you simply crosbreed it with a cartoonish image found on site to create your first iteration. Then take that image and crossbreed it with another cartoonish portrait or just start modifying it straight away in the gene-editing section, tweak it left and right for astonishing results.
If that's not your gig you can always try taking an image of a man, crossbreed it with a bald female alien to end up with a quite dope looking chick in the end. Heck, some of you deranged bastards might even create a waifu for your sick selves. If that doesn't float your boat, turn the slider the other way and make a horrific bald trans male instead.
As I already said, there is absolutely no limits - other than your imagination - to what you can achieve. I find it quite fascinating to see what this AI can achieve with just a couple twists of the nob.
Although I have yet to come up with the ultimate troll, a decent black Hitler, I've managed to transform a random girl (likely not human but rather a character created by the AI) into Marilyn Monroe's latino daughter.
Just like every other creation on ArtBreeder the process itself is very simple and intuitive but if I get enough requests I'll make a full how to about it.
Last but definitely not least, is the landscape feature.
This is where you can create very abstract pieces of art simply by combining images, tweaking their inflection points and crossbreeding your input with its children or with other images from the library. I know what you are thinking and yes, I'm aware of how fucked up this sounds but I'm not making this stuff up, that's literally how it's called. I find it rather humorous in a very sick and perverted kind of way and thus I didn't want to change the wording because I'm a sick bastard, ain't no denying that.
This is my favorite piece.
An alien world from a galaxy far, far away or maybe our dystopian future?
It all depends on how you perceive it. That's what I enjoy about abstract art. Different people will view the same piece of art in different ways, depending on how their brain is wired.
What do you see in this image?
Which one of my creations did you find most amusing?
Let me know.
If you decide to take ArtBreeder out for a spin, pop the images you create right here in the comment section and I'll reward the best ones.