I don’t understand neural networks work, much less how they go about drawing stuff without any hands, but boy am I blown away by the results they can produce.
Every Ubuntu release has a codename composed of an adjective and an animal. These cute and irreverent pairings lead to a spurt of artwork created by professional and amateur artists, illustrators, photographers, and graphics designers alike.
But open source enthusiast Simon Butcher (who is also head of research platforms at Queen Mary University London, so knows a thing or two about bespoke computing workloads) decided to take a different approach.
Instead of using a HB pencil, open source software like Krita, or —my own personal tools of choice— dried macaroni and poster paints, he decided to create Ubuntu mascot artwork by feeding a list of Ubuntu codenames to an AI CLIP guided diffusion model.
The results are pretty phenomenal:
The video above doesn’t quite convey just how massive these workloads were, as Simon explained in a series of tweets:
“These have been generated purely by the AI and no editing from me. I performed 2 runs with a different starting seed. The videos are made from a sequence of hundreds of images produced by opensource AI tools in a jupyter notebook and combined with ffmpeg. Processing takes up to 24hrs on a high end GPU,” he writes.
Still not impressed? He went on to reveal that creating a video that lingered on each release a little longer could’ve taken up to a week to generate — which is insane.
Anyway, I’m pretty blown away by the quality of this AI-produced artwork, and I’m not alone. Martin Wimpress, Ubuntu MATE lead and former Ubuntu desktop bigwig, is so impressed he plans to include one AI-sired Jammy Jellyfish in the default wallpaper pack of Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS this April:
Not that you have to wait for Ubuntu MATE 22.04 to be released to enjoy these creations on your own desktop. Wimpy has shared a tarball containing eight hi-res “Jammy Jellyfish” JPEGs for mass consumption.