Throughout the last century, we have been marching forward ceaselessly to make technology do more of the things that we do. The future Skynet, Google, has a team called the Google Brain Team who have a goal of making machines intelligent to improve people’s lives. Recently. they released the DeepDream Generator which allows you to transform pictures into semi-psychedelic and surreal images.
Image by Mike Casey
And we have to say, the level of customisation is certainly interesting. Browsing through the public gallery was just fascinating. The things that people have created is fantastic. Have a look at the pictures below. Keep in mind that these pictures were only uploaded today i.e. within the last 24 hours of this article being written.
Image by Mike Casey
Image by Bidiculous
Image by michaelleebrewster
You too can make your own image using the DeepDream Generator. All you have to do is upload an image and then choose a style you want your image to be morphed into. You can even upload another image as a style and see what kind of results you get. With a little practice and playing around, you could be creating mash-ups of images like never before. The pictures don’t have to be public. You can generate them privately and then save them for your own purposes.
So how can it be useful?
Think about this like the popular image editing app, Prisma. The app allowed you to morph your image into a very stylised, and radically different image that made it look almost like a painting. You can get the same effect by choosing a deep-styled dream. Let’s see an example below. First, we shall show you the original picture:
Image by charcoalcharades on Instagram
And here is the edited version using the Deep Style of Van Gogh.
There are other styles too, a few are named after painters like Leonardo Da Vinci and E. Munch but most of them have regular names that enable anyone to understand what they are in for. You can also upload an image to be set as the style you want. Artists and designers can create with the intention of putting their work through these online tools to apply a standard style.
Imagine creating a series of pictures and then applying a deep style to it. Or creating a single image and applying various styles to it. Like this user named sicopa who tried various styles on a cat picture.
You can also view the original pictures before the software transformed the images.
However, Google isn’t the only one making inroads for easy image editing. Not too long ago, we saw Adobe impress us at their MAX conference. They have developed software that applies real time editing to animation as well as still images. You can see it in action in the video below.
And this was from last year.
What does this mean for designers?
It means that you can expect less reliance on graphic designers. We might not be too far away from a world where users simply cycle through a gallery of images, fonts and graphics then use AI to generate as many combinations of your selection as possible. It brings up a few questions too like does using this make any of us a creator or a co-creator? Will the profession of a graphic designer change in this new landscape of machine-aided creation? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, try the DeepDream Generator and mix it up with a Deep Style of your own. Oh, and if you make something you are happy with, we’d like to see it on IndieFolio.
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