From tools to creation, the artistic path of AI painting

Original source: Beijing Youth Daily

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI‌

Art has always been the condensation of human spiritual activities. However, with the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, we have witnessed that AI can also create art, which has triggered a series of discussions: In the field of art, is human uniqueness eliminated and replaced? Can AI paintings be considered real art? And how does the symbiotic relationship between human artists and AI shape future artistic development?

At the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in early July, we saw a series of eye-catching AI paintings, which were generated by Shangtang Miaohua large models. The reason why they are eye-catching is that they are different from the early AI creations, integrating ancient and modern Chinese and foreign painting styles, brushwork, themes, artistic conceptions, and even produced a new artistic style.

• Western Wind and Eastern Tide: Eastern and Western Painting Schools, Learn from Others

The "West Wind and East Tide" series generated by Shangtang Miaohua combines Chinese and Western painting art. It does not simply imitate or repeat classic works, but deconstructs, reorganizes and creates in a new way through algorithms and deep learning. While possessing the memory points of classic works, it incorporates new styles, techniques and concepts. This kind of collision and integration makes the paintings present a unique visual charm and artistic language.

Miaohua "Between an Inch"

Wu Guanzhong's "China Town" (left picture)

Piet Cornelis Mondrian, "Composition" (right)

Just like this "Between an Inch", it combines the works of Wu Guanzhong and Peter Cornelis Mondrian. While inheriting Mondrian's large face color blocks, it dissolves the clear boundaries between the color blocks with the smudged brushwork of oriental ink. Mondrian is an advocate of "pure abstraction". He believes that art should be completely separated from the external form of nature, with the purpose of expressing the abstract spirit, and pursuing the absolute realm of the unity of man and god. However, due to the integration of Wu Guanzhong's "China Town", "Between an Inch" uses black as windows in the color blocks, turning the pure color blocks into towns, adding life and fireworks.

In addition to "Between an Inch", there are other works under this theme, such as "Girl with Hairpins" and "Foreigners". The clothes of European girls combined with Chinese-style fine brushwork painting skills, supplemented by Western painters' pursuit of light, shadow and sense of space, a beautiful oriental girl appears vividly on the paper; the Los Angeles canyon meets the Jiangnan water town, and even in the scattered and deformed landscape, the beauty of the vertical lines of Chinese-style buildings is discovered.

Miaohua "Picture of Ladies with Hairpin Flowers"

(Tang Dynasty) Zhou Fang's "Picture of Girl with Hairpin" (left picture)

Johannes Vermeer, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (right)

Miaohua "The Stranger"

Wu Guanzhong's "Small Town in the South of the Yangtze River" (left picture)

David Hockney, "Nichols Canyon" (right)

• Interstellar Three Kingdoms: The past serves the present, with a long history

This series takes "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" as the core of the story and takes the universe as the background to create a StarCraft version of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". The work selects famous scenes such as "Three Knots in Taoyuan", "Burning Red Cliff", "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles", and rewrites them into interstellar epics, injecting a futuristic and cosmic style into Chinese classics and adding vitality to the new era.

Miaohua "New·Taoyuan Three Knots"

The picture depicts three astronauts planting a peach tree together on an extraterrestrial planet. As the only plant on the surface of a planet without vegetation, this peach tree seems to symbolize hope and the power of life. It is called the interstellar version of "Taoyuan Three Knots", because it follows the core of the story of "Taoyuan Three Knots", expressing the determination and courage of human brothers to jointly explore the universe and build a human homeland in this strange and barren environment.

Other works under the theme of "Interstellar Three Kingdoms" also show the same artistic expression. In "New Thousand Miles of Riding Alone", the BMW under Guan Yu's crotch is replaced by an all-terrain vehicle, and the courage of a lone hero has spanned a thousand years; in "New: A Woman Never Lets Her Eyebrows", a female astronaut sits among thousands of flowers.

Miaohua "New Thousand Miles Riding Alone"

Miaohua "New·Women Don't Let Their Eyebrows"

• **Can AI become a real artist? **

The Miaohua series of works demonstrated the potential and influence of artificial intelligence in artistic creation, and also triggered in-depth discussions on artistic innovation, creative stimulation, and artistic boundaries. How this emerging art form interacts with traditional human art, and what this intersection means for the development of the art world and culture.

It is undeniable that the integration of art and artificial intelligence is bringing us more diversified and innovative ways of artistic expression. As shown in "West Wind and East Tide", it may be difficult for a human painter to have both the lines and brushwork of Chinese landscape painting and the use of color and light and shadow of Western oil painting. However, by using the particularity of AI, the paintings can truly learn from others' strengths and add new vitality to art.

At the same time, we should see that AI creation is inseparable from the creativity and training of human artists and designers. They still cannot complete autonomous creation from 0 to 1. Because the working method of AI is mainly to generate works by finding and reorganizing from training data, they can cooperate with human artists through automatic generation, assisted creation or inspiration to promote the generation of creativity and artistic innovation. So far, AI is still a creative tool rather than a creative subject, and it cannot replace the original thinking of human artists and the expression of human emotions.

These AI paintings generated by Shangtang Miaohua large model show the integration of artificial intelligence and human art. In the future art development, the symbiotic relationship between human artists and AI will become closer. In this era of rapid change, only by keeping an open mind can we expect to discover and explore the infinite possibilities presented by this emerging art form.