I recently had a work offsite, and while we were there one of the iOS developers, Chris, was showing off some experimenting he’d done with art generated through a GAN. I’ve always found this fascinating, and he had been playing with some really cool things. After his presentation, my boss walked up to me and said, “So we make an app that lets people put images on a website in an automated way, and we have a slack channel of random
quotes …. “
And thus, our #no-context bot was born.
The work we did was based on this Colab notebook. It mainly uses CLIP and a lot of math to randomly generate images matching patterns. I don’t pretend to understand the math involved, but I sure do appreciate standing on the shoulders of giants.
That week, I launched a machine on AWS and turned the colab notebook into a web service, and my boss built a slackbot that could watch our #no-context channel. Surprisingly quickly, we were off.
This thing is so much fun to play with, and the results are amazing. They definitely tend to be on the surreal side, almost every time they match the quote or match the tone. We added some “in the style of” random artists to the prompt, which seemed to help a little bit with the surreality by adding some extra context to judge against.
A few of my favorites, from test images ….
A cyberpunk cafe, late at night
A magestic tiger, in the style of picasso
And from our slack channel …
Now that I have an army of influencers that is hyped, you should see my email.
I have mixed feelings about the fact that I searched for “mediterranean guy” and I got this
While I was testing different artists, I did what I call “The Ninja turtle collection”
Moonrise | in the style of Leonardo
Moonrise | in the style of Raphael
Moonrise | in the style of Michaelangelo
Moonrise | in the style of Donatello
Moonrise | in the style of Splinter
I’m pretty sure those last two would’ve ended up the actual Turtles characters if I’d let them go long enough.
Universe really does make it extremely easy to publish a web gallery. This code updates every time a quote is taken out of context in our slack channel, and has an image uploaded within seconds. All of the backend work we’d been doing over the last year all paid architectural dividends, since this came together extremely quickly.
Also, of course there’s a subreddit dedicated to this. r/DeepDream