Stealing from myself

It is one of the rhetorical complaints in AI art that the process is based on stealing from artists. But as Picasso said: Good AI copies, great AI steals.

Wait, that can't be quite right.

I actually wish AI was better at stealing. It is way better at averaging than it is at stealing. 

So are people. 

Averaging is not quite so interesting as creating or stealing. But creating is usually too confusing for people.

Which is why good art copies, and great art steals.

So I have stolen today!

But with the eyes of the world on me here at the world famous clerkmanifesto I have merely stolen from myself. 

And oddly I feel fine about that.

Although put another way, it was a gift.

This is all a gift friends.

Check its mouth.

All of this is a fancy way of saying: Lately I have been taking paintings from a show of portraits of my co-workers from 25 years ago called "42". And I have been messing about with them. And tempted as I am to run through the most successful of these pictures, in order to give you a better idea of what this little project is all about, I am going to show some of what I have done with just one of these portraits.

If I like it I'll show you more in the days to come.

If you like it, I'll, well, gee, how nice, but most likely I won't know that you did. 

This is Lynn, a former branch manager of my library. Someone once knocked it off the wall in the back room and broke the glass which makes this one of my best pictures of the original art I have to work with since I wasn't shooting the picture through reflecting glass.

So, this is your starting point, my original painting.

I asked to have the image cleaned up a little, but my AI went a little wild, as one of its signature character traits is wild over-confidence. Nevertheless, this painting version looks an awful lot like how I remember Lynn.

Of course, this close to realism it seemed like it might be good to go all the way, while we were at it. So I asked for a photo of the person based on my original painting (which was based on a photo to begin with, but that's long gone). I got this:

Close enough.











The next move in this project was for my lovely and enchanting wife and I to go to our fabulous local museum, the MIA, where a small collection of Hokusai prints (and a Monet) were being shown together. The Hokusai prints were amazing. Here are bits of a couple:

So naturally, I tried to teach my AI friend to make pictures like Hokusai!  We came up with this ultimately: 

I was happy with this.

But while it did express a smaller influence on my original paintings, it rather left off the larger influence. So I headed off to the Internet to collect some Otto Dix. I thought maybe I could teach my chat to paint like Otto Dix, since, after all, I had been, at the time, trying a bit to paint like Otto Dix myself!

Here are a couple Otto Dix pictures:

This is what we were able to do Otto Dix style:

I like it, but it is a bit of a miss as well. It is the average of all expressionism even as I was trying to get it to steal the specific style of Otto Dix, which, admittedly, varies to begin with.

But here we were trying to teach the chat to paint like other people. Why not teach it to paint like me? I happened to have all these portraits of my co-workers on hand so I taught it IE Skin style. That's me! And then I took all these other versions of my painting I had generated not in my style, and asked it to make a portrait painting of the woman in my specific style.

I got this one:

I had come full circle. My journey was done.

Well, I mean, I was done, but there was always room for one more: