Portraits with A.I

I have always wanted to be an artist. I love what we are able to create from our imagination and the different renderings we are able to present it in using various creative mediums. Its just exciting and awesome what hundreds and thousands of artists are able to do from history unto this point.

But now we have entered an era where art is going to made by A.I.

Well, the question is if A.I. can be called creative or can it be creative? A.I. is not here to replace humans for sure, but yea it can be creative because it can create something abstract or even meaningful by learning on hundreds if not thousands on artforms created by artists over a period of time.

Isn’t it what we humans too do? Aren’t we inspired by Nature, which is the greatest art by an Almighty Artist. Don’t we also get inspired and try to replicate or create our expression of artworks done by other artists from the past? Van Gogh to be one of my favorites!

I have not explored the space of Art Appreciation, but if we enjoy galleries of art by humans, I guess we are entering a period where we are going to spend a lot of time curating Art and Content generated by A.I.

You may not realize but there are many of these already reaching our fingertips already.

Anyways I am not going to write here about startups, innovations or content that’s made by A.I., maybe I will write about in another article

aiportraits.com

I wanted to share portraits of mine which was created by a project that was started by Mauro Martino and Luca Stornaiuolo at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The site was aiportraits.com, but right now it seems to be down which is sad.

The algorithm doesn’t just copy the lines of your facial features, but it uses them as a base to generate an entirely new portrait.

The site uses an algorithm trained on 45,000 classical portraits to render your face in faux oil, watercolor, or ink. There’s a huge number of styles included in this database, covering artists from Rembrandt to Titian to van Gogh, with each input producing a unique portrait. As the researchers point out, unlike earlier AI methods that created similar AI portraits, the algorithm here is not merely “painting over” your face in a new style. Instead, it uses what’s known as a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate new features from scratch.Certain elements within any selfie may prompt the algorithm to use a specific style. In the images below, for example, researchers say the algorithm “decides upon a Renaissance style, highlighting the elegance of the aquiline nose, the smoothness of the forehead.” If you try a few different selfies, you’ll certainly get different results.

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/7/22/20703810/ai-classical-portrait-apps-selfie-web-transformation

You can also read this article by Mauro Martino if you are interested to know more at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-portraits-experience-being-portrayed-algorithm-mauro-martino/

aiportrats.org

I even came across another app called AI Portraits but this was having an app that you can install on your mobile and it was hosted at aiportraits.org, I think this is a different app from the earlier mentioned app. But I was quite interested in the art this app was able to create from my picture in a certain kind of mashup or composite. But it wasn’t able to generate those historical portrait styles as perfect as the aiportraits.com as the ones I have shown above.

Now you decide is A.I can create or can be called Creative 😀

In the meantime, if you want to use A.I. to do this kind of creative stuff, then there is a lot of articles and learning materials out there that teaches you how to do this. You can read a ton of it using this link:

https://www.google.com/search?q=working+with+GAN+to+create+images&oq=working+with+GAN+to+create+images&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l2j69i65l2j69i60.4424j0j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I don’t know how many are going to read my article and what all query is going to come to me, but feel free to write to me if you have any open queries and I will try my best to address it or even point you in its direction.

For now this is what I have got to share 😀

Falling in love with the Starry Nights

Many years back, when power outages were common in Kerala, I happened to be there during my summer vacations. And these half an hour to one hour period of power outages were actually a blessing because it got me close to the night skies. I had never seen so many stars in my life until then. Growing up in the city, you don’t actually get to see stars in a light-polluted night sky. So this was my introduction to the night sky. It was love at first sight, I was breathless, wondering what is all this. Oh wow, what first came to my mind is the true meaning of the poetry taught in primary classes “Twinkle Twinkle Litte Star, how I wonder what you are “, really that was a moment of wonder.

From then on started my journey into the field of astronomy. Well i am stopping here for now, i will be back to update this article with more of this journey.