[ci skip] Draft for the new blog post

content/post/2022-11-20-an-art-challenged-individual-s-perspective-on-ai-anime-generated-art.md

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+---
+categories:
+- general
+- anime
+comments: true
+date: 2022-11-20 22:17:41+01:00
+disable_share: true
+draft: true
+featured_image: /images/banner.jpg
+omit_header_text: true
+tags:
+- anime
+- aiart
+- stable-diffusion
+title: An art-challenged individual's perspective on AI (anime) generated art
+---
+
+You might have heard it in the past few months: some areas of the Internet are buzzing with discussions on "generative art", that is, artwork generated from "AI" models that were fed with an absurdly large amount of images as training as a base. There are supporters, there are critics, and techology advances: among all this, this post offers my humble experience with computer-generated imagery.
+
+In this post, you'll be guided by Yumiko, Satsuki, and Maya: the first two are characters created by someone else I know (who wants to remain anonymous) which I then expanded, cooperating with their creator in a certain project from a few years ago; the latter is... well, a character with an interesting history, which will be explained later.
+
+## What is this AI you speak of?
+
+{{< imgthumb src="images/2022/11/yumiko_question.png" size="500x" caption="Even Yumiko wants to know!" >}}
+
+Unless you were living in hibernation in Alpha Centauri waiting for the right moment to start the invasion, you might have heard about the use of various methods of "machine learning" to have a computer program (to be very simple) "learn" particular features out of a data set (chess games, video games, images, sounds...) and use them to perform various tasks, such as [playing games](https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-the-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii), [generate texts](https://towardsai.net/p/l/gpt-3-explained-to-a-5-year-old), [tackle complex scientific problems](https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/about) and many more things.
+
+Scientific background or not, my mind is limited and I'd need someone more expert than me to find a precise definition of these systems (feel free to do so in the comments!). In this space there is active scientific research, both by universities and commercial companies, such as DeepMind (now owned by Google) and OpenAI (although they're not really "open"...).
+
+One important point, which is relevant for the background of all this, is that aside the algorithms (the instructions required to "learn" and then "apply" the digested data), one of the key ingredients of this potentially palatable recipe is the **model**: you can view it as what the "AI" has learned after processing the data. While most of the algorithms are public (there are even research papers), models are often *not*, so only their creators can change, improve, or build upon them.
+
+You know, it sounds awfully like the prologue to [an incident involving a former MIT researcher and a jammed printer](https://albertopettarin.it/faif2/faif2.xhtml#x1-40001), but I'll leave that out for now. We'll get back to it later.
+
+### On a robot that can paint, and one event that changed everything
+
+{{< imgthumb src="images/2022/11/maya_confused.png" size="500x" caption="I don't really understand all this stuff..." >}}