Researcher Create AI That Paints Nude Art: Terrifying And Intriguing At The Same Time

Creating a nude portrait is a deeply intimate experience between the painter and the model. Someone is trying to change that with AI.

AI researcher Robbie Barrat from Stanford University wanted to see what would happen when a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is fed with a dataset of thousands of nude portraits made centuries ago, before asking it to make its own.

Te AI was meant to produce classical-style nude paintings, but what it delivered was unnerving and creepy. The results it produced are odd surreal paintings that are really something.

"Usually the machine just paints people as blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out – I think it's really surreal," wrote Barrat on Twitter. "I wonder if that's how machines see us..."

Barrat's work has received praised on the platform.

Barrat said that the GAN uses two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator. These two networks are pitted against each other, with the generator trying to fool the discriminator. Usually, the generator will improve over time.

But in Barrat's case, it didn't.

Sometimes, Barrat explained, the GAN will fall into what's called a "local minima," which is when the generator and discriminator have found a way to keep trying to fool each other without actually getting better with the job presented to them.

"In this case, the generator keeps generating fleshy blobs that fool the discriminator pretty well, so overall they stop getting better at painting," he said.

The images the AI produced, show a variety of oddly shaped women in various poses, some drawn in quite an abstract way. By looking at other nude portraits, the neural networks were able to try and work out what the figures should look like, but somehow failed to understand what's what.

For example, one unusual characteristic is that the AI created the heads and the faces with a similar yellow and purple globs. Barrat said he didn’t know why the AI was doing that, because the materials aren't present in the training set.

The final pieces of artworks were posted on Twitter and GitHub, and they can only be described as surreal, blobby, swirly naked women.

Barrat compared his works to Sol LeWitt, a 20th-century American artist known for starting the Conceptual art movement. Barrat credits LeWitt's work as the most similar to his AI-assisted art.

Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things, and this one reason makes it one of the most popular field with many people experimenting and developing it. Computers don't have what it takes to be "human", but it certainly excel in automation and calculation.

This is why AIs have been made to improve computers, helping humans in doing calculations, recognition, speech, prediction and so forth.

But when it comes to nude art, this particular AI has a lot to learn.

The results of Barrat's AI aren't impressive, or at least just yet. "The way that it paints faces makes me uncomfortable. It always paints them as like, purple and yellow globs," Barrat said. But they can give a little glimpse of what’s to come in the future.

Barrat first caught the tech world’s attention in 2017 when he created an AI capable of writing rap songs based on Kayne West lyrics. At the time, he was still a senior in high school student. Nvidia was impressed that the company hired him as soon as he graduated.

This was when Barrat started experimenting with AI-created painting.