Art That Breeds!

I imagine there have been various images of art that bleeds, in various metaphorical senses and otherwise, but this is art that breeds! Or art that one breeds. Or something.

In particular, it’s ArtBreeder.com! I think I might be a member there or something, or at any rate I have a profile page that you might be able to see. It has weird pictures on it!

I vaguely think that ArtBreeder was once a site that would just show you a few pictures, tweaked in various ways by an AI, and let you say which one(s) you liked more and which one(s) you liked less, and then over time it would show more of the ones that people liked more or something, which sounded cool.

It isn’t that now. It’s a thing that lets you… well… sort of upload and combine and mutate images in various ways, and “save” some of them, and “like” and “share” and stuff, and if you pay them certain amounts of money (which I think I might be doing) you can do extra stuff I think like maybe adding your own “genes” so that you can make any given image (in a certain category maybe?) look to a greater or lesser degree like a half-hitch or Elmo or something, and see what that does.

The interface is kind of unintuitive and baffling, and I’m not always sure what I’m doing, and (because both people and AI are involved) unexpected things happen a lot. But I’ve used it to generate a lot of bizarre pictures, which is very cool!

Here are some. I have no idea how “original” they are to me, as opposed to being simple (or complex) derivatives of things that other people have uploaded, or “genes” that they have created, or… Or even how that might be measured, if indeed it’s at all well-defined.

But enjoy!

Some things and maybe a window or something

A kind of artistic monochrome landscape, like

My current profile picture :) which contains inter alia 0.508 Persian Cat, 0.123 Standard Schnauzer, 0.159 Umbrella, and -0.33 Lemon.

An odd little house in someone’s yard or driveway?

Scary food? Looks like a photograph, but definitely synthetic.

Abstract gray tendrils

More abstract stuff! Art! Would you be suspicious if you saw this in a gallery?

I don’t know what it is, but I like it! I want one.

An ominous thing, probably in water. An SCP?

Bucolic Landscape. Hanging in your hotel room.

A face. Oh yeah, it can also do faces! Entirely fictional.

Something… organic or something? Also not a photograph.

More mechanisms; want

Okay, okay, this is too much fun. :) These and a whole bunch of others are all on my profile page, and I think that you can even click on any of them there and make your own… based on them. Or something. It’s confusing!

But that seems appropriate.

I should find out eventually more about how this works and what it’s doing. Maybe if I do that I’ll weblog about that. But for now it’s just cool!