Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks

Re:Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consisten... by errantspark on Friday March 31, 2017 @11:50AM (#14004996)

Yeah, I feel that. I tell myself they're only tools, really no stranger than time <-> frequency domain transformations to someone unfamiliar with the fourier transform.

Yet there really is something disturbing about seeing a computer resurrect so much of the mind of an artist who's been dead for nearly a century. I know the GPU doesn't understand what it's doing, but did Monet?

When I paint I don't really understand. There may be occasional moments of clarity, I like to think that I make deliberate choices based on the emotions and thoughts within me that I'd like to reflect to the people experiencing my art, but... Honestly am I so different from a neural network?

I am a neural network. Much of what goes into creating a piece of art is based on intuition, on experience and practice, pathways eroded into my mind from years of thoughts traversing the same landscape. The art I create is unique to me, not in that it cannot be reproduced but in that every action I take is a reflection and an echo of all the moments remembered and forgotten that create me.

How much of Monet's mind is in a GPU in Berkeley?

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Re:Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consisten... by abelhabel on Friday March 31, 2017 @03:01PM (#14007019)

I think that is only true on first glance. But if you look a little deeper, none of the photo->painting are really accurate. The painters had more than color scheme as information. Van Gough, for example, did not always use a correct perspective. In general, the deeper meaning of art is not in the technique but in the perspective of the artist.

That said, I am amazed by the results even so.

I also want to note here, that I don't see any reason why machine intelligence could not produce meaningful works of art but it will require a new way of looking at it.

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Re:Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consisten... by lucidrains on Friday March 31, 2017 @12:36PM (#14005478)

Or.. we just greatly overestimated what our brains were doing all along..

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Re:Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consisten... by aisofteng on Saturday April 01, 2017 @01:31AM (#14010639)

>How much of Monet's mind is in a GPU in Berkeley?

Very little, arguably none. Imitation is far removed from creation. If you see an art student reproduce Monet's paintings or redo an existing image in Monet's style, would you ask "how much of Monet's mind is in the art student?"

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