Artificial intelligence and art: some combinations have been truly surprising, and others... well, let's say they stole a good laugh or two. I think all our readers remember the Google Quick, Draw! experiment, which uses a neural network to recognize horrible drawings in under twenty seconds. Now it's Cartoonify's turn, a platform developed at Kapwing that hands the pencil to the AI and lets it copy images 'freehand.' You can't miss this.
From Quick, Draw! to Cartoonify
AIs already can clone voices, generate strange nudes, and write fictional chapters of famous novels... but draw? In fact, the most common thing is to let them interpret those drawings and modify them. A good example is PaintsChainer, which can color almost any hand-drawn sketch on the fly. Then there's Quick, Draw!, Google's fabulous experiment in which a neural network must recognize what we've drawn. And today we come to Cartoonify, a project based on Quick, Draw!'s dataset and on the code of Draw This! (a Polaroid camera that draws), but with an important difference...
Instead of interpreting our drawings, what it does is 'see' the images we upload and create its own sketches, showing a skill similar to a kindergartner jabbing crayons into paper... and to many adults (!). The recommendation of Cartoonify is to upload photos with a single subject and a uniform background, but even under those conditions, the results inevitably lead to laughter. Here at NeoTeo we've decided to challenge Cartoonify's basic parameters, getting results horrible and wonderful at the same time.
In summary, Cartoonify's AI likes to invent people in its drawings, and even reproduced a hippo as a dog. Needless to say, you're invited to bombard Cartoonify with your own images to see what kind of delusions it presents.
