Art evolves once more with Deep Photo Style Transfer

How long until artists are obsolete?

Nahhh, just kidding. That’ll never happen. Artists are like people who write interesting things for websites – impossible to replace with a machine intelligence. But I digress.

Deep Photo Style Transfer is a process that takes the style of one photograph and applies it to the structure of another image. If you’re currently tilting your head to the side like a dog wondering what the hell its owner is on about, you’re not alone. It’s hard to explain but easy to show. Check this out.

Take the structure from here:

Merge it with the style from here:

And get this!

How does it work? Magic. Via the same process that was turning everything into trippy landscapes and Lovecraftian nightmares a little while ago: convolutional neural networks, those computer systems modelled on human brains.

If you would like to read more about how the process works, beginning with a discussion of the Prisma app, this article will make you wish your brain was a bit more convolutional.

For the rest of us who just want to play with doing an art on our own photos, there’s DeepArt. It’s heaps of fun.