Maker

The artistic power of GAN

Art is all about creative construction; some hold a brush, some create it with a musical instrument and some with a pen.

Then, there are some people who choose neural networks. If you think that art cannot go along with commercial software, you are wrong because that is where GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) plays its part.

Since the discovery of GAN in the year of 2014, the machine learning community has come together to construct various technical and deep pieces. GANs are outstanding artistic tools.

What is GAN and its significance in the field of art?
If the process of making art is a game, then an analogy to GAN’s work can be drawn to a game. This game is played inside an art studio and there are 2 players in this game; the critic and the apprentice artist.

The objective of the apprentice artist is to make pictures in her master’s style but not copying it from the original. The goal is to make it unique. The objective of the critic is to determine whether the art piece he is seeing is by the apprentice or the original one by the master. These go on for rounds, to determine who wins the game.

The game keeps getting better and better, as both the critic and the apprentice artist give their best each round.

If you are wondering what your role is here, it is to tweak the rules of the game and become a curator as well.

You do all the selections from the GAN output as it makes a lot of images in various color, composition, texture and so on. Curating is not as easy as it sounds, sometimes you will find yourself confused with various intriguing pictures that you would want to keep all of them.

To learn more about GAN, click here.

Credits: Devi Parikh on Twitter

TO DO: Explore GAN for art.