AI-based image generation ethics

AI-based image generation is having a moment. Time some text and you can get a piece of art that resembles the style of your favorite artist. However, there’s an ethical dilemma with the source material. Andy Baio talked to Hollie Mengert, whose artwork was used to create a model for Stable Diffusion:

“For me, personally, it feels like someone’s taking work that I’ve done, you know, things that I’ve learned — I’ve been a working artist since I graduated art school in 2011 — and is using it to create art that that I didn’t consent to and didn’t give permission for,” she said. “I think the biggest thing for me is just that my name is attached to it. Because it’s one thing to be like, this is a stylized image creator. Then if people make something weird with it, something that doesn’t look like me, then I have some distance from it. But to have my name on it is ultimately very uncomfortable and invasive for me.”

AI-generated charts are only tangentially a thing so far. We humans still have a leg up in the context and meaning part of understanding data.

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All the art in the Oval Office

The President of the United States chooses the art for the Oval Office, and the choices show who the president admires or the image they want to project. Larry Buchanan and Matt Stevens for The New York Times take you through all of the choices since the Kennedy administration.

About half way through the piece, an averaged image of the office through several presidencies shows what changes and what stays the same. Usually these averaged images feel gimmicky or don’t show you much, but as a lead in to separate pictures, the blurred image works.

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Microbe Themed Comics and Cartoons #ASMicrobe #Microbiology

Posted a request to Twitter about microbe themed comics and cartoons and am posting some of the Tweets here.


Q&A with Greg Dunn, neuroscientist turned artist

0000-0002-8715-2896 For most neuroscientists, long days in the lab pipetting or recording from cells doesn’t inspire one to pick up a paintbrush or sketchpad. But for others, the still-mysterious—and often breathtakingly beautiful—workings of the brain are a

How different languages represent van Gogh

Christian Laesser takes an abstract look at how different languages represent Vincent van Gogh through various Wikipedia pages.

The visualization explores how different languages present Van Gogh’s work and life by images. Inspired by Geolinguistic Contrasts in Wikipedia. The viz tries to show different narative strategies by showing the image type, origin date and authorship. You can reveal the connections between languages by hovering the images.

I’m not quite convinced this helps with understanding, but I appreciate the experimentation.

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Visual connections between art pieces

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This is neat. A Google Arts & Culture Experiment, X Degrees of Separation shows a path of visual connections between two art pieces of your choosing. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but with art, computer vision, and machine learning.

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Future Travel Plans

There was a time when travel was sleek and sophisticated (and inaccessible). Frank Sinatra sang about flying. I remember finding an old PanAm in-flight service menu my grandfather ha kept in his attic. There was real food that you might actually want to eat. The newest installments in the NASA/JPL Visions of the Future poster series invite us to imagine travel across our solar system and the galaxy with nostalgia for the optimism of mid-20th Century travel and hope that the future of space exploration is sexier than The Martian.

earth mars titan ceres jupiter enceladus europa venus 51pegasib kepler186f nightlife kepler16b superearth grand_tour
Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Art, exopla, JPL, NASA, Solar System, Space, Space exploration, Space Travel

Art of Science: Philip Beesley’s Sentient Chamber

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Sentient Chamber, 2015, Philip Beesley Architect and Living Architecture Systems Group

I’ve written before about Philip Beesley’s immersive installations, so I was delighted to learn that the National Academies of Science was bringing one to their headquarters in Washington, DC.  Last week, I had the opportunity to see it on a special tour with Beesley, and to hear him speak on a panel at NAS that night. The installation is called Sentient Chamber, and it looks a bit like a cross between an open-air tent-style church and a ghostly Rose Parade float. Beesley describes it as an “experimental architecture and sculpture installation [which] acts as a test-bed for ongoing research that combines the disciplines of architecture and visual art, computer science and engineering, and synthetic biology.” It’s silver and white, and as you come close it clanks and beeps in a friendly way, shimmying its fronds and extending slender robotic fingers.

The main structure consists of a flexible grid made up of many triangular shaped elements in metal and plastic. Beesley explains that the shapes of the structure are based on hyperbolic geometry, which creates maximum strength from minimum materials. Above and among the arches are clusters of “acoustic and kinetic mechanisms” – microprocessor-driven fronds and branches that reach out and whirr and clank and light up when people interact with them. Fruit-like clumps of glass globes and tubes contain what Beesley describes as “the beginnings of a synthetic biology system” – oils that react to each other and to changes in the environment.

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Detail view from Sentient Chamber 

Beesley is an amazing talker, ranging from the concept of a structure as a box or a “raindrop” to metal-rod cores and distributed mechatronics within a single breath. But he returns often to a central theme – the idea of a new approach to shelter that is gentle and designed to be responsive to and integrated with nature, rather than an attempt to keep natural forces at bay with thick walls and high-tech climate-control systems.

He dreams rather about building gathering places that breathe, that learn, that welcome both humans and nature, and that are resource-positive – that is, generating energy and other resources rather than just conserving them. Although his Sentient Chamber at NAS is not ready to live in – it’s full of fragile pieces and there are laptops nestled in the treetops – it conjures up tantalizingly novel ideas about how we could live in the future. If you can, go see it now.


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Art, National Academy of Sciences, Philip Beesley, science art

Featured Paleoartist: Studiospectre’s Stephen R. Moore

IMG_0196Speaking on behalf of Andy, Jon, and myself, we are always striving to make the PLOS Paleo Community a useful venue for our readers (and you can help us even more by taking the PLOS

Microbial Musing

Have you ever wondered what makes Michele Banks tick? Nature Microbiology did. So, they asked her. You can read their interview with Michele here and gaze upon her lovely artwork for their homepage here.

Nature Microbiology: When did you first become exposed to scientific images?

Michele Banks: I started doing watercolours about 15 years ago. I was mainly working in pure abstraction, just playing with colour and with the properties of the paint. One of the things I love to do is wet-in-wet technique, which gives a ‘bleeding’ effect. I showed some of my wet-in-wet work at the Children’s National Medical Center here in Washington DC about 10 years ago, and they told me they liked my work because it looked like things under a microscope.

We hope the interest in the overlap of science and art will be a theme that continues throughout future Nature Microbiology issues – also open access, gender balance in publishing, shying away from bogus impact factors. etc. etc…


Filed under: Items of Interest, Notice Board, The Art of Science Tagged: Art, Linkonomicon, Michele Banks, microbiology, Nature Microbiology, science art