Famous Paintings & Cartoon Characters Recreated Using Artificial Intelligence

Here are some of your favorite paintings and cartoon characters brought to real life using AI.

Mona Lisa

San Francisco-based graphics artist Nathan Shipley applied artificial intelligence (AI) to reimagine a bunch of historical figures, cartoon characters, and famous paintings as people living today.

Shipley has a background in animation and visual effects. Seeing the possibilities inherent in AI and machine learning tools, he came up with something new.

“Even some things that may be technically possible with VFX and CG could still be very time-consuming or expensive, whereas AI enables entirely new possibilities,” he said.

According to Nathan, exploring how an AI model built on a particular dataset with a particular framework can ‘see’ the world and then transform images is an amazing experience.

“The AI ‘knows’ only what it has already seen and filters the world through this lens. Each little tweak to the dataset, the training parameters, the model, and the input imagery all have the possibility to change the output,” the artist explained.

“This is a space to explore how artificial neural networks interpret the world in a way that can be similar to our own minds. I’m not saying that an image I created is what Mona Lisa actually looked like, but it is how the machine sees her based on this particular arrangement of variables. That, to me, is fascinating.”

To us, too.