By Megan Lanham
In recent years, it has become possible to extract visions and concepts from deep learning systems and neural networks. A neural network is a computer system that is closely modeled after the human brain and nervous system. With this discovery, it has not only attracted attention to AI researchers, but also by many people who love to create and experiment.
The open source character of interfaces and the high interactivity of notebooks within neural networks have made it possible to play around and dig down into the artificial consciousness.
One fun and comprehensive way to do so would be the application GANbreeder, recently rebranded Artbreeder. Artbreeder is a user-friendly application by Joel Simon. It is a BigGAN model set pre-trained on ImageNet, Kaggle sets and other visuals from existing DNAs in a collaborative process with other users, artists and viewers.
If you pay a visit to Artbreeder, you will be confronted with several of its diverse range of generated original images. Each Artbreeder image is created with input parameters that you choose by modifying the aspects of other images. The site stores the lineage of each image so that you can see all who contributed to the final design.
At the moment, there are nine sections on the website; General, Portraits, Landscapes, Scio Bio Art, Paintings, Characters, Albums, Furries and Anime Portraits. The project is in constant development, so new functions and models are being updated all the time.
From here, the user can pick a category and then a creation method. They can compose, which allows you to take aspects of multiple images within the website to create a whole new image; upload, which allows you to upload an original image; and animate, which allows you to animate transitioning frames from three different works of art. From there, you can go even further and tweak a piece to your liking via additional features and parameters until you have a desired final result.
This is a very versatile, unique and overall fun website to play around with. The fact that such diverse, original images can be created out of an AI is fascinating. If you are looking to kill some time, I’d suggest trying this out.
