In the two years since we first launched our our anime portraits AI project, Waifu Labs, our inhuman artist has been hard at work. Recently, it finished drawing its 20-millionth commission (quite an achievement for any artist!)
To count down the release of Arrowmancer, our mobile game illustrated using AI, we’re releasing a series of posts addressing the topic of artificial creativity.
The type of AI that powers Waifu Labs is called a Generative Adversarial Network. We made an explainer video on how the technology works!
Waifulabs And 2 Other Ai Tools For Anime Image Generation
Both AIs are exposed to anime data from human artists and offered feedback on how they performed on their respective tasks. At the very end, we separate out the Generator and run it as the artist behind the scenes.
It is interesting to note that like human rivals, it is imperative that they grow at the same rate. When one AI dominates the other, both stop learning.
Below, you can see the Generator’s progress: we’ve collected samples of the work that it produces as it trains. We’ve measured the training time in “steps.”
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Step 0: You can see that the AI starts off with absolutely no idea what “art” is. The first picture it draws is noise, a random splash of primordial test-tube goop. It will bumble around like this for a while, trying out strategies to draw more like the human art that it sees.
Step 40564: Gradually, the murky shapes resolve into real features. As the size of the features get smaller and smaller, they give the illustration its “texture” and “style.” Color will be the last to come in.
For this particular AI, we are able to parallelize the training by building a mini-supercomputer in our living room from scratch to accommodate its specific needs — though that merits its own story another time.
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It is interesting to note that from this process, the AI is not merely learning to copy the works it has seen, but forming high-level (shapes) and low-level (texture) features for constructing original pictures in its own mental representation.
Human artists also have this mental representation in their meat-brains. For many artists, this representation lives beyond the realm of conscious thought in the domain of intuition. This mental representation grows throughout the artist’s lifetime: it matures as a combination of practicing art and the accumulating life experience on the meat-body.
With an AI, the mental representation is locked the moment the training stops, so we can then take it out and peer directly at it. It looks a bit like a coordinate system, and we call this the latent space.
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Latent space is immeasurably huge. Parched. Devoid of content. We wade through vast deserts of average artwork to find the coordinates for alluring, captivating characters. Cataloging these coordinates allows us to do cool tricks, like morph between characters.
You can also see the latent space mapping in action on Waifu Labs: by separating the coordinates that control pose, colors, and details, we can create an interface where humans can commission the AI artist to draw what they want!
A large part of developing the AI is the evaluation of performance, which brings up the philisophical argument of how do you evaluate creativity? Conventionally, FID is the score used to score generative AIs, but this was not quite sufficient for our needs.
New Oc?? Courtesy Of Waifu Labs By Mediumistic On Deviantart
To properly score the results of our AI artist, we took a rubric from another domain. Namely, the qualitative rubric that commercial art directors use to evaluate freelance artists.
Of course, it’s not sufficient to define the sum of creativity by its usefulness in commercial application. However, using these metrics, we were able to reach a good proxy and make an AI formats its outputs in a way that can drive the core creative design and production pipeline of a commercial product.
The creative industry and the act of creativity are two different, deeply intertwined concepts. Though we may never breatch the mystiques of the later, we can peer at it through the lens of the former.
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To that end, please take a moment to check out the commercial product in action, our mobile game, Arrowmancer is made using the AI behind Waifu Labs!
When we first approached studios with our AI work, the primary response we received was bewilderment. While we could fulfill the above requirements for freelance illustration, there was no existing project that made use of the concept of infinitely customizable, combineable illustration.
And so we set out to do it ourselves: we made a game that leverages the the unique aspects of generative AI. Is is our hope it will usher in a new age of creativity, a collaborative model of asset production between human and machine creatives!
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