November 26, 2017

Want to Paint Like Van Gogh? Here’s an AI System That Can Help You Do That

AI system that allows you to replicate the masterpieces Have minimal or no artistic skills but want to paint like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Van Gogh? Well, you’re in luck. There is an AI system that allows you to replicate the masterpieces of history’s most legendary masters. So, what is the function of this artificial intelligence (AI) system and how can it help you recreate Van Gogh’s masterpieces? There’s amazing technology that is already here!

Developed by a tech company based in the UK, a new artificial intelligence (AI) system allows amateur artists to turn their sketches into a work that is reminiscent to the masterpieces of the great painters in history such as Vincent van Gogh. No matter how simple your sketch is, the aforementioned- AI system can turn into a piece of art that even Van Gogh would be proud of.

There are many ways to define artificial intelligent or AI. However, it is generally defined as the technology that enables tasks to be completed intelligently, which means that the work performed mirrors human intelligence and evolves over time. The purpose of this AI definition is to make it easier for you to understand how the AI system we are about to discuss helps you paint like famed artists such as Van Gogh.

Understanding Vincent: The AI System That Helps You Paint Like Van Gogh

Named Vincent, the artificial intelligent (AI) system that can help you paint like Van Gogh was the result of considerable research and learning. Prior to its release, Vincent was made to learn eight thousand works of art. Isn’t that astonishing? Of course, it is! According to the engineers at the company that developed the system, Vincent can not only create eye-catching pieces of art, but it can also respond immediately to human input.

The AI system has memorized eight thousand works or art from the age of the renaissance up to the 20th century. According to Monty Barlow—Cambridge Consultants’ director of machine learning and the person who led the project to develop the aforementioned-AI system, Vincent allows people to draw edges using a pen—edges of any picture they imagine in their mind, and when they do this, the AI system produces a painting based on how it’s been trained.

In addition to explaining how Vincent works, Barlow used the opportunity to advocate for AI systems by pointing to the fact that the AI system developed by her team not only create paintings for humans, but also allows them to input their creativity into the process. This means that humans should not see AI systems are a threat to their jobs or existence.

The development team of Vincent claims to have developed an extremely interactive system and they say that they have achieved this through the successful combination of various machine learning approaches such as end-to-end training of stacked networks, perpetual loss, and adversarial training. According to the team, the system takes a sketched idea’s ‘germ’ and then refers to the history of human art to reproduce a masterpiece.

To help them understand the works and build their understanding of color, contrast and texture, the developers trained the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on eight thousand pieces of art from the Renaissance day up to the 20th century. Once trained on approximately two hundred million parameters, Vincent was able to understand the important paintings edges and use them to churn out a complete picture.

Previous Attempts to Develop AI Systems Capable of Producing Pieces of Art

The project to develop Vincent was not the first attempt to develop an AI system capable of producing works of art. Instead, many individuals and companies have tried in the past to develop such a system, but they failed in their endeavors. In fact, some of these projects produced rather scary results. An example of this is the Pix2Pix, a tool to draw human portraits introduced in the early part of 2017 by NP, a Public Broadcaster based in the Netherlands.

The Pix2Pix-AI system attempted to turn the sketches drawn by humans into something that would look like an oil painting of a female face. However, what was actually produced by the AI system looked like a character from a horror movie.

A Great Opportunity to Learn from the Masters of Art

Vincent provides you with a great opportunity to learn from the masters of art. How exactly? The pieces of art produced by Vincent may not look as realistic as those produced by the masters of art such as Van Gogh, but they can easily pass as great impressions of the abstract creations of the art masters. According to the team that developed the AI system, Vincent has learned brushstrokes and the perfect use of color and contrast.

The AI system was first presented at a deep learning summit and Monty Barlow claimed at the event that every picture that you imagine in your mind and draw into the system can be given shape by Vincent. She further boasted that while a similar system in the past would have required millions—if not billions of paintings, to learn, Vincent needed just eight thousand samples to learn and be ready to produce pieces of art.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving many changes in the world and this includes the change in how paintings or pieces of art are created. The system driving this change is Vincent—an intelligent AI system fed with eight thousand paintings from the age of renaissance up to the 20th century. Regardless of how good or bad your artistic skills are, you can use Vincent to produce a masterpiece of your own. So, what are you waiting for? 🙂

by Bobby J Davidson

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