Robot Produces Paintings With That 'Imperfect' Human Look 74
kkleiner writes "An artistic robotic system named e-David has been developed that produces paintings that appear to be created by humans. Using an iterative process of brush strokes and image comparison, e-David's assembly line welder arm can paint in up to 24 colors and add shading where needed. The robot even cleans its five brushes along the way, according to University of Konstanz researchers who developed the system as an exercise in machine learning."
Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
how it models imperfection so perfectly
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Actually it's more efficient. By allowing the analog medium to introduce imperfections you don't have to.
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why not just eliminate the messy paints and introduce imperfections algorithmically
But that would completely ruin the potential application in crafting master forgeries.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
This concept is nothing new - As a musician, I know that the majority of digital recording software supports adjustable rhythm "randomization" to "humanize" drumming, for example. You start with machine-perfect rhythm, then slide the knob down a tad to "Neil Peart," then near the bottom of the knob's travel you get "sloppy drunk John Bonham."
-- Ethanol-fueled
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This thing certainly won't replace art, but that doesn't mean it won't make life difficult for at least some artists.
The reason being is that there's a big difference between "art" and what most artists actually do to pay their bills, if they're lucky enough to actually be able to pay their bills without having a day job. For a very specific example, a lot of photographers pay the bills doing stuff like weddings and glamour shots. Art it really isn't, but it's something folks are actually willing to pay cas
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Light Verse by Isaac Asimov (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Verse_(short_story)
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Paid off the mortgage on their apartment?! Holy cow! That's great!
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Paid off the mortgage on their apartment?! Holy cow! That's great!
May I venture a guess that you're an American?
In most of the world, there's no requirement that you have to rent it for it to be called an apartment. You can own it, and indeed mortgage it.
And strictly speaking, this is the case in the US too - a condo is just one type of apartment. Although colloquial American word use tend to call all owned apartments condominiums, that's not strictly true. A condominium is only partly owned, while an apartment can be fully owned too, including the land, utilities and
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Well, of course a condo is a type of apartment by the very meaning of the word, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone owning or renting a condo from calling it an apartment. Having an apartment has a pretty solid meaning over here, and a condo is higher on the scale of ownership so people will call them condos. It might be different elsewhere but not in the west.
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>>"Having an apartment has a pretty solid meaning over here"
Not according to the 8M+ people living in NYC. Lots of people own apartments. The vast majority are not condos (they are coops), and people just refer to them as apartments. You were trying to be snarky, but failed.
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Holy quote cherry-picking! Why don't you finish reading the posts you reply to.
It might be different elsewhere but not in the west.
Mimicing does not make art (Score:5, Interesting)
This lacks one vital component: Creativity
A painter may think "I may want to make that woman's eyes a bit more smiling", and then do so. Or think "If I add a stone fence between the buildings, it will look more severe".
Or even "the sky would look better with a green streak".
So while this might be a nice exercise in machine learning, don't insult its good workmanship by calling it art.
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And what I'd like the best is the ability to reproduce paintings. I really like art, but I can't stand the 'artsy' types that claim that the original paintings are somehow magical. Sure, photographic reproductions are total shit but if this robot can be taught to make stroke-for-stroke reproductions - it'd be priceless.
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A lot of "creativity" is overrated.
QFT. It's not the same with paintings, but most people find modern (popular) music creative. AFAIK it's not done by robots yet, but most of it is taking samples from other songs, writing lyrics according to known formulas, and autotuning the singer's voice.
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linkie [ign.com]
Or if you want to hear one of the pieces it created go here. [youtube.com]
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Stroke for stroke copy ~= $500 (Score:2)
Copying stroke for stroke is a different thing altogether. There is a whole industry for this. http://www.artsstudio.com/ [artsstudio.com] Price ranges with quality. Genuine paintings done by hand go from $200 to somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000 I think. They are not priceless. There is something about human nature the values the original. The price of art is a pure economic ideal. It is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it, so you can't really argue that someone overpaid.
The high end copies entail using t
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I believe, that creating a system that can analyze the precise colors (using a spectroscope) and a robot that can mix pigments to produce the desired reflection spectrum is absolutely feasible. It'll be e
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A robot will never create art. They are machines. Art requires a soul.
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Yes. Human art requires an artist.
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I think what was being asked was "would you be able to spot the work created by a human, amongst those created by a robot". I ask because I've been to the Tate Modern numerous times, and quite frankly some of the stuff showed no sign of creative talent nor intelligence. Of course, you can argue that art it subjective (and I would completely agree), but then there are critics who don't believe that [wikipedia.org]:
The public doesn't know good from bad. For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don't know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn't matter if they [the public] like it.
I like to quote Brian Sewell, because it makes people aware of what an utter cunt he is.
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And machines can't have souls because... ?
Re:Mimicing does not make art (Score:4, Informative)
You should read the article...
It specifically mentions how the machine is not remotely "creative" or even trying to mimic creativity.
Re:Mimicing does not make art (Score:5, Interesting)
When dealing with most visual art, you're restricted to viewing the end product. If I go to the Louvre or the MOMA, I can look at the finished products but cannot see the process by which they were created. These paintings, for the most part, are "art", based solely on their end-state; and the fact that they are in a museum of art.
So what happens when you have a painting made by a machine put up in a gallery next to a painting done by a human being, and you can't tell which is which? A "Turing Test" of sorts. What if you hook the viewers up to an FMRI and see that both paintings generate an equivalent emotional response in the viewer?
If the machine-made painting is "not art" because it was made by a machine, what does that mean for human-made painting? Is it no longer art because it was indistinguishable from something that we've determined is non-art?
At that point, what is the definition of "art"? And the criteria for determining what is and is not art?
Do you remember that guy who had paint forced up his rectum as an enema, and then he stood over a canvas as is sprayed back out? This was considered art (by the artistic community). If that meets the standard for "art" then I'm willing to give a robot (and its creators and programmers) the benefit of the doubt.
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And the criteria for determining what is and is not art?
The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.
In this case, some of the robot's paintings are quite artistic... but it's not the robot that selected the subject, captured the right feeling, chose a composition that accented it, etc. What happened here is that the robot reproduced some artistic images that were created by a human. Art? Sure. Robot art? Nope.
In the case of your hypothetical art Turing test, where only the end p
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I swear that if you took random sunsets from Google Maps and turned them into artistic-looking drawings/paintings they'd pass the "Turing test" with flying colors without any human being directly involved in the capture or composition. With all the bizarre things called art, it's almost impossible to say something was not somebody's "creative vision" even if it's actually a random machine-picked choice.
The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.
In my experience it seems to be far more the audience's ability to project their expressive / emotional co
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I swear that if you took random sunsets from Google Maps and turned them into artistic-looking drawings/paintings they'd pass the "Turing test" with flying colors without any human being directly involved in the capture or composition.
Who tells the machine to take a sunset? Who enables it to choose? The artist.
This robot and any software picking & repainting google images is exactly as intelligent as the painters brush, just a bit more complex, and has no more self-initiative or creativity than a piece of wood.
Taking a picture with an expensive DSLR doesn't make the camera the artist, and mounting it on a self-driving car that randomly takes snapshots still gives all the credit to the person that built this.
And photographing the Mona
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The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.
The flaw in this thinking is that it's not possible to actually detect creativity in a painting.
The flaw in your thinking is that the ability to detect creativity matters.
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The flaw in your thinking is that the ability to detect creativity matters.
The flaw in your thinking is that you don't get to judge what constitutes creativity. Thus, you don't get to decide what is "the ability to detect creativity" either. So yeah, try again?
Who said I (or anyone) needs to judge what constitutes creativity?
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One of the coolest examples of machine learning was the TD-Gammon program done by Tesauro at IBM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon). What makes it remarkable is that while Tesauro wasn't a particularly good Backgammon player, he managed to develop this program that "learned" how to be a great Backgammon player - in fact, it learned strategies that no human players had ever tried before, "TD-Gammon's exclusive training through self-play (rather than tutelage) enabled it to explore strategies that huma
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So if you were to view a selection of e-David drawn pictures mixed in images drawn by human artists, with no prior knowledge,how would you differentiate them? Isn't art in the eye of the beholder?
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Nobody did.
Telefaxing images... (Score:1)
via the telegraph wire was invented over 150 years ago. It predates voice telephone calls. This machine adds nothing new with its plotter which was invented invented 50 years ago and was immediately hooked up to both wireless and wired transmission at the time.
BTW, the shadow of that tree is physically impossible (and no that doesn't make it "art".)
This "invention" is total phail.
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So your rant: total phail.
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I've got to say, I'm surprised at the negative comments thus far. A lot of engineering creativity obviously went into creating this robot, do you people not appreciate that? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get something this elaborate to work reliably? Have any of you naysayers actually tried to build even a simple robot?
You call it a simple plotter. Really? A plotter is basically a dumb printer. This is is not a dumb printer. It creates the image iteratively by examining what it looks like and mo
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"BTW, the tree's shadow would be roughly consistent with the sun being about 15 degrees above the left horizon."
You are in serious need of a guide dog.
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It predates voice telephone calls.
Actually, it's NSA that predates voice telephone calls. Oh, wait, you meant the other kind of predating.
really? (Score:4)
I don't mean to take away form the robotics work or the research, but the headline appears to be jumping the gun. Most of the sample paintings look like GIMP filters or that machine at Chuck-E-Cheese that draws the kids' pictures while they wait.
I was expecting a flexible arm mimicking Monet's technique or something. At this point I'd be much happier with an elephant painting [youtube.com] on my wall - it's more "human" than the robot's.
So trivial! (Score:2)
The question is: will we know it when we see it? If we ever do develop a truly sentient AI, will we even be able to prove it?
Glorified printer with paint software (Score:3)
Interesting, but it's still not that much different from a printer with an algorithm to imitate a painterly look. There is software (like Corel Painter) that can transform photos to look like they were painted using different mediums. I could load a photo, use an automated feature in Painter, and print it, and it would basically do the same thing as this robot.
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How sweet (Score:3)
Robot has a hobby
Builds Volkswagens by daylight
Paints people at night
Photoshop Filter (Score:1)
It doesn't look any more natural than a host of 20 year old Photoshop effects.
Here it begins (Score:5, Funny)
That robot will be rejected from a Fine Arts academy, failing the entrance exam twice, and from disgust and despise will try to take over the world instead.
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It's a history test for modders
Re:Here it begins (Score:5, Funny)
or it goes into depression, it's tortured soul making masterpieces that will be unappreciated in its lifetime. Toward the end, it will cut off its own motherboard speaker and ship it to a porn site.
I would put it on my wall (Score:2)
That Perfect Robot Look (Score:3)
The irony is that while the robot has been perfecting the human look my wife has perfected that machine look. Her drawings look so real that people mistake them for photographs. She does edit out and add in but it comes out looking so real it is mistaken for reality.
Licker (Score:1)
I will not consider robots human-like until they eat paste.
Aaron's been doing this for decades (Score:1)
Sorry to see no mention in TFA regarding Harold Cohen's "Aaron" drawing program which has been doing this for decades: http://www.scinetphotos.com/aaron.html [scinetphotos.com] This appears to similar albeit with the addition of a plotter + penholder. The debate of "is it really art or not" gets replayed yet again ...
No art interest (Score:2)
As a someone with a Masters of Fine Art in painting, I can tell you there is not a lot of interest relating to art.
First: "Our hypothesis is that painting ... can be seen as optimization processes in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until the painter is able to recognize the content" is off base
All the lines in all the work are all the same length and thickness. Almost no artist simple distributes color. Artist chose details and focus.In this case David is being helped because it is using com
Easy (Score:2)
DRAW X+RND(10),Y+RND(10)
Done.