5 ways you can create AI art, without coding
Artists and creative technologists are using AI to craft awe-inspiring pieces of work.
But what if you’re not a computer scientist?
Or what if you want to be artistic, but don’t have the skills?
No problem.
Here are five of the best AI art tools I’ve discovered over the last couple of years. They’re fun, inspiring and, if you’re patient, some of the results are genuinely magical.
1. Turn your stories into images
Runway ML is a brilliant platform that’s making creative AI accessible to a much wider audience. There’s a lot to explore here and you can do everything from removing backgrounds to training your own GAN (a story for another day).
The platform’s Generative Engine is a nice place to start. This storytelling model automatically generates images as you write new words and sentences.
My picture has been generated from the words ‘Boats on the beach’.
Try it for yourself.
2. Take the style of an artist and transfer it to your image
Using neural networks, it’s now possible to apply the style of your favourite artist to your own work.
You could turn your pet cat into a Kandinsky, add Kahlo’s bold brush strokes to a selfie, or transform your local park into a Monet-inspired masterpiece.
It’s all thanks to style transfer, a type of neural network that creates a new image (or pastiche) that’s based on two input images: one representing an artistic style, and the other being your original image.
Sadly I don’t have a pet, but you can see how it works on a toy Orang-utan instead.
Give it a go on your browser, or try Google’s Arts & Culture app.
3. Turn a scribble into a surreal landscape
Playform is another online art studio that lets you use AI to generate new imagery. As with Runway ML, you can set up an account for free and get playing straight away.
If you’re starting out and want to feel like an artist very quickly, I’d suggest the Landscape Sketch project.
Use your mouse to sketch a landscape in the box, choose a style, then generate. The model is trained with classical landscape paintings and the results are pretty impressive, albeit surreal.
4. Let AI finish your sketch for you
We already have predictive text that finishes our sentences. So how about predictive drawing?
Meet AutoDraw — a model from Google Experiments. It partners machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help you create anything visual, fast.
Start drawing with your mouse and the machine will guess what you’re sketching. It’ll then offer up suggestions to help you finish.
At the moment it has hundreds of suggestions — and more are being added to the mix.
5. Apply your art to the world around you
Over the last few months, all of us at Tiny Giant have been building Snapchat lenses in Lens Studio. We’ve created them for work, for fun — but often for both.
One of Snapchat’s most recent capabilities is machine learning style transfer. This allows you to train a model on a particular artistic style and then bring it to life through an AR lens.
A couple of weeks ago, after seeing a few of my experiments, my six-year-old son decided he wanted to turn a sketch into a Snapchat lens too.
He hurriedly grabbed his crayons and my fine liner pens and drew a colourful picture on a piece of scrap paper.
I trained the machine learning model, put it into Lens Studio and together we brought his sketch into the real world. My office has never looked so colourful.
This one takes a little more time than some of the other tools I’ve mentioned, but here’s the step-by-step tutorial from Snapchat. It’s strangely addictive — and worth the effort.
Go play
These are just a few of the tools available at the moment. More are on the way, so do have a play.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand these models won’t get us anywhere close to a real Van Gogh or Kahlo.
But that’s absolutely fine.
Artistic collaborations with AI are new, the technology is in its infancy — and these tools are just a taster of what’s to come.
Moreover, as AI technologies evolve, so will our view of art.
So, don’t judge your work on what’s gone before. Or strive for a human-looking result. Instead, embrace this new palette of tools and enjoy being creative.
The fact is, right now you can use AI to create something that’s fascinating, beautiful, creatively stimulating and, in my eyes, really damn exciting.
That is more than enough.
Enjoy!
