Video: Artificial intelligence "revived" the heroes of famous paintings, cartoons and presidents from banknotes
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
One graphic artist decided to use modern technology to see how the characters of great canvases, as well as other drawn heroes, could look like if they suddenly came to life and left pictures, television screens, banknotes … The name of this experimenter is Nathan Shipley and he lives in San Francisco. The results of the artist's work, or rather, the artificial intelligence controlled by him, are impressive. Mona Lisa, characters of popular cartoons, politicians …
As an object for reincarnation, Shipley usually chooses a historical personality that impresses him, or a character (real or fictional) whose photographs do not exist.
- For example, I have always dreamed of knowing what Mona Lisa might look like, and now I have her realistic face, which is quite similar to her. I do not presume to assert that this is exactly what she was in reality, but it is quite possible, - says the artist.
To create “real” people from the drawings, the intelligent machine finds a person with the same face shape from a network database created by Nvidia. This network is created using a GAN (a kind of machine learning framework) and is based on a dataset of 70,000 human faces (called FFHQ). Artificial intelligence learns to generalize what a human face looks like, and then can generate new human faces that don't really exist, but look very realistic.
“Artificial intelligence only“knows”what it has already seen and filters the world through this lens,” Nathan explains. But this is how the machine sees it, based on the specific location of the variables. And, in my opinion, this is very interesting.
Of course, as a result of such a reincarnation, not everything goes smoothly and it turns out in detail correctly. For example, the artist Frida Kahlo, who "descended" from the picture, loses her monobrow, the freckles of the artificially created girl Lil Michela disappear, Rembrandt turns out to be less curly, and Ben Franklin from the banknote ends up with an earring in his ear. But these, according to Nathan, are just a few and very curious examples of how each specific combination of variables recreates a face based on a large number of accidents and inconsistencies.
Since his youth Nathan has been working with a variety of computer programs, using them in animation. He has lived in San Francisco for 10 years, working on animation, VFX and creative technology projects at Google, Intel, and advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Well, experiments with transformations of famous characters have recently become his main passion.
Shipley uses a whole range of programs in his work: Photoshop, After Effects, C4D, Maya, Nuke, but the most interesting tools usually come from the Github repositories released by machine learning scientists and researchers.
Nathan says that it only takes a few minutes to create each realistic image from a drawing. However, to understand how this is done, he had to go a long way of research - trial and error.
“I even attended the GANocracy conference at MIT last year,” says the artist proudly.
The reaction of ordinary people to Nathan's work is very different - from "This is amazing!" to "Creepy!" and "It looks like a photo of my cousin!" In any case, no one is indifferent.
By the way, the artist has not so much examples when he creates "real" versions of drawn or cartoony people, but vice versa: the experience of creating cartoony versions of real people. For example, Barack Obama.
Perhaps someone would think of creating a cartoon using this image, and then those who like to study the biographies of American presidents will get to know this controversial personality in world politics. In the meantime, you can read about what the world leaders looked like and did in their youth.
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