Generating Art with Artificial Intelligence

After hearing about the AI technique of ‘style transfer’, I decided to try my hand at creating art work.

The basic idea of style transfer is that you take the style of one image (e.g. a painting by Picasso) and you apply it to the content of another image (perhaps a picture of personal significance) to create artwork of your chosen image in the chosen style:

After playing around, I settled on the following images:

Caius Dining Hall, Cambridge (in the style of “The Scream”)

I spent a good many evenings eating in this dining hall throughout my 6 years at university, and I felt the wavy, red tones captured my mood when I think back to these times.

Alexanderplatz, Berlin (in the style of “The Great Wave”)

I met my partner in Alexanderplatz - this style felt right

A mountain house (in the style of ‘Wreck’ by Peter Lanyon)

I want to live in a mountain house

Church Stretton, Shropshire

I grew up in this village

Caius Library, Cambridge (in the style of Udnie by Picabia)

I spent perhaps more time than I should have studying in this library

I thought they looked pretty cool so I decided to get them printed to decorate my house:

All-in-all it was a fun experience; both technically (coding the neural network) and artistically.

I’ve had a few people ask me to generate images for them to use as printed artwork, desktop screensavers, etc. If you’d be interested, drop me a message at art@chrislovejoy.me.

Original paper (if interested):

A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style - Gatys et al., 2016. Available here.