Hello everyone. Hope you are all doing fine and thank you so much for your overwhelming support. This is a post where I describe how I got started with AI art and how anyone else interested can do so too.
It all started with this post https://peakd.com/hive-158694/@jotakrevs/minds-dungeon-ai-artwork-engspa#@lavista/re-jotakrevs-qygij2 around a month ago. I commented on the post showing my interest in the process and @jotakrevs so kindly replied and directed me to YouTube and wished me luck. Off I went, searching for tutorials on what VQGAN+CLIP was about and how one could go about generating such amazing art using AI.
I am a firm believer in the use of technology and science to solve all problems and make our lives better. I often quote this famous quote by Arthur C Clarke :
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And I have been fascinated by the recent advances in machine learning and use of AI in the medical field where a sufficiently trained model can predict cardiovascular risk by just looking at pictures of the retina of humans. This is just an example related to my field of work, Ophthalmology. Similar things are being done to identify whether excised specimen tissues are benign or malignant by training models. There are fallacies of course. No new technology is perfect but this is magic for me!
Forgive my extensive deviation from the topic at hand.
Imagine my joy when I discovered art could be made with the help of AI. This is because I can hardly draw; I had to draw a mammal when I was in school and I of course drew a dog. I thought that was that. A dog is a mammal and in my mind that was the correct answer. I did not understand art then. The dog I drew was emaciated with sharp corners at all angles. It was far away from the word 'cute'. My artistically inclined sibling and mom had a good laugh looking at it. That is my background with art.
It does not mean that I did not appreciate art. I always marvelled at the thought processes going through the minds of great artists when they produced what they produced. The pandemic has been a blessing in that regard, at least for me, where I tried spending my free time trying to create stuff.
Long story short, I tried my hand at 2D and 3D art and have been able to 'create' some stuff but there is a lot of room for improvement. Hence, I tried my hand at AI art.
These are the YouTube videos that I saw initially and they can help you get started and a little more. I suggest that you watch the third video after you have tried the VQGAN+CLIP notebook and played around a little on your own and have seen the first 2 videos. Also, I suggest that you try the jotakrev's Enhanced original VQGAN+CLIP notebook initially, which is first in his list of notebooks, that he provides in all his recent posts. Do take a look at all his work, they are awesome.
There is no programming knowledge required to do all this, if you are worried about that. If you want to modify the notebooks, yes, it is required.
After I started posting stuff that I generated, I got great support here in the Alien Art Hive community. They really are very supportive and encouraging. It was @castleberry 's idea that we sync our findings together and it has already worked wonders.
Just as I was wrapping up this post, he has posted his first post involving AI art, his methods and experiments and there are videos too to check out, a comprehensive post. As always, he has been very generous in his mentions and comments on the work of his friends :). Here's his post.
Check out @dbddv01 's post here :@dbddv01/my-creative-process-with-ai-generative-tools-for-drafting-the-broozel-city-guide and also check out his other amazing posts. There is a very important post regarding ownership of AI generated art, which is necessary reading for everyone getting into this.
Next, after you have played around with the original VQGAN+CLIP notebook, check this post out by @kaliyuga for more fun: @kaliyuga/kaliyugas-library-of-ai-google-colab-notebooks.
This is the twitter feed of the author of the original VQGAN+CLIP and CLIP-guided diffusion notebooks: https://twitter.com/RiversHaveWings.
Do check @eve66 's posts too for some more great AI art and other wonderful collages.
There is something called as ArtBreeder too, it was introduced to me by @emptyintentions. It is much easier to use than VQGAN+CLIP, if that is what you want.
I try to use images generated on artbreeder as initial images in VQGAN+CLIP and find that I get more consistent results. After using the original VQGAN CLIP notebook, I suggest that you try the MSE weighted notebook by jotakrevs in the link mentioned above. It reduces the variations consistently and helps in getting more coherent images. You can use the REAL ESRGAN notebook in his list of notebooks to enlarge images with AI. I find the website https://bigjpg.com/ very helpful too, in that regard.
Also, if you want a 16:9 ratio for your images, you can use upto 736 x 414 pixels size without getting any out of memory error messages even on free Google Colab.
I think @kitzune and @chocolatescorpi might be interested in the links in this post.
This is not a typical Alien Art post, forgive me; hope people wanting to get started with AI art find it helpful. I end this post by attaching some of my AI generated images which did not fit in other posts and I still found them beautiful. Thanks a lot and see you in the next one!
EDIT : The video links posted here are not made by me, they are videos posted by others, I have linked them here as they are good starting points while using VQGAN+CLIP.
