[FuckOffNeemo]

Personally I'll just say the video's pretty fucking cool.

Referring to stepvhen's comment. I find it comical in all seriousness.

Even the must leisurely, casual or mundane topic, intended to be a refreshing change in colour (pun not intended considering the article but I'll take it) and\or conversation on Hacker News is subject to ridicule, assessment and biopsy.

It's why I like it here. Some of us are completely incapable of /not/ peer reviewing the shit out of everything. :)

Edit: words fail me, also spelt Stepvhen's handle wrong (sincerest apologies).

[stepvhen]

Really I was just trying to be polite in what I expected to be dissent. The video looks cool, but I don't believe the network used has any understanding (however you define it) of Picasso's style, as another commenter has stated. It's a little misleading, especially since there's a lot more going on in Picasso than geometric shapes and crazy colors.

Then again I might take things too seriously. There was only one other comment when I posted, I didn't know what the tone would end up being.

Incidentally, I chose this handle because others always spelled my name "Steven", when it's "Stephen".

[tripzilch]

> It's a little misleading, especially since there's a lot more going on in Picasso than geometric shapes and crazy colors.

> Then again I might take things too seriously.

if anything, too many people in this thread don't seem to be taking cubism and Picasso's style seriously either (signature faces? what ..?)

of course a deeplearning net can't actually do cubism.

if someone wrote a program to generate blocks of primary colours in pleasing ratios, really cleverly, it may look like Mondriaan to someone that has seen a couple of Mondriaan paintings. but everybody who knows what Mondriaan was trying to do, will instantly know that there's really no way today's computers could really perform the same process.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Picasso didn't invent one style - he invented lots of styles. So it's nonsense to say this video is "in the style of" Picasso.

It's more like an insta-Picasso plug-in for one particular form of abstraction.

It's interesting and unusual, and yes, it would be better with constraints.

I'm not sure I'd want to look at it on a big screen though.

>of course a deeplearning net can't actually do cubism.

One of the interesting things to fall out of this research is the realisation that a lot of art - even figurative art - is based on abstraction of visual invariants.

There's no reason that creative abstraction can't be automated to create new styles.

The difference when humans do it is the level of psychological insight and feel for what's visually important and interesting in a scene.

That can probably be automated too, but it's a very much harder problem.

The challenge for most developers in this space is that they have a much more superficial understanding of art (and music, and writing) than they believe they do, so a lot of content and detail that's important to experienced viewers gets ignored. The result is superficial lookalike output - pastiche.

Technically, the superficial output is an achievement in itself, but it's still a way short of being artistically innovative in its own right.

[FuckOffNeemo]

Hacker News' as an audience is quite critical, of critics and their criticisms when the criticism is seen to be facultative

I never took your comment to not be polite. As mentioned, as a community. We're all quite guilty of being overly logical and serious. It's part of the charm.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to start collecting down votes for mentioning the Phteven meme (we don't like meme's here, do we?). But I had suspected that might be the basis for the spelling of your handle!

I'll down vote my own comments and see myself out...