Technology
Google's new AI tool is turning your MS Paint Doodles into freakish creatures.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai: AI is more profound than fire or electricity.
To back up this argument with incontrovertible evidence: here's a Google researchers AI tool that turns doodles into strange monsters. What might have been more profound?
It's probably fun, anyway. The app is called Chimera Painter and uses machine learning to create images based on user's rough sketches. This kind of dynamic is becoming relatively popular in machine learning. Nvidia has done it with environments before; MIT and IBM have done it with buildings; and now Google is... You're playing it for mutants.
The team behind Chimera Painter explained their approaches and intentions in a blog post, saying that the concept was to create a paintbrush that behaved less like a tool and more like an assistant. Chimera Painter is only a prototype, but if such software became popular, it might reduce the amount of time required to create high-quality art, the team says.
The researchers have set themselves the task of making an artwork for a futuristic fantasy card game, in which players merge the characteristics of various creatures and battle against them like mutating Pokémon. They trained a machine learning algorithm on a database of more than 10,000 sample monsters, which were themselves part of the process created using 3D models developed in the Unreal Engine. An illustration is combined with a "segmentation map"—an overlay that separates the monsters into anatomical sections such as claws, snouts, wings, and so on.
If the model has been trained on these results, users can then paint their own segmentation diagram, which is then rendered using photorealistic textures. While you're loading the Chimera Painter, you can see some of the preset monsters and they're impressively coherent. However, painting yourself takes more time and commitment than you would expect. Our attempt below for example, looks like a Gruffalo knock-off illustrated with blood. It's a monstrous thing, but not exactly a monster.
