They sketch the generalized concept of “pig,” not any particular animal. The implicit argument is that when humans draw, they make abstractions of the world. They want to create a machine that can recognize and output “pigness,” even if it is fed prompts, like a truck, which don’t belong in the barnyard. The point of SketchRNN, as he and Google collaborator David Ha have written, is not only to learn how to draw pictures, but to “generalize abstract concepts in a manner similar to humans.” They don’t want to create a machine that can sketch pigs. in computer science from the University of Indiana in 2000, and has spent the intervening years working on music and machine learning, first as a professor at the University of Montreal (a hotbed for artificial intelligence) and then at Google, where he worked at Google Music before heading to Google Brain to work on Magenta.Įck’s drive to create AI tools for making art began as a rant, “but after a few cycles of thinking,” he said, “it became, ‘Of course we need to do this, this is really important.’”

Eck is clever, casual, and self-effacing.

Last week, I visited Eck at Google Brain team’s offices in Mountain View, where Magenta is housed. It’s called Project Magenta, and it’s led by Doug Eck. This pig truck is actually the output of a fascinating artificial intelligence system called SketchRNN, a part of a new effort at Google to see if AI can make art. Until recently, only human beings could have pulled off this sort of conceptual twist, but no more. If you’d drawn it, I, a fellow human, would subjectively rate this a creative interpretation of the prompt “pig truck.” The wheels have turned hoof-like, or alternatively, the pig legs have turned wheel-like. Note the little squiggly pig tail, the slight rounding of the window in the cab, which recalls an eye.

Quick draw with google download