Falling Down The Artbreeder Rabbit Hole

Ever spend hours experimenting with something and enjoy it so much it feels like a few minutes? That was my day today, having discovered Artbreeder, a generative, image mashing, creative, AI, mindfuck, tool thingy.

Alien Art Hive community member @rndness222 got me hooked with some great examples of arty portraits of people who don't exist.

Artbreeder is a free online tool that lets you create/generate all sorts of images, from portraits to scenery in varying styles, with tons of variations and a pinch of randomness. You can "breed" images with each other, or dive under the hood to mess with all the clever AI stuff going on behind the scenes.

Of course, the first thing I did was attempt a self portrait, and though I failed miserably, my next effort worked out OK. A portrait of my wonderful girlfriend Ling, approved by the lady herself.

You can mess with all sorts of genetic criteria to design your person from the ground up, as well as aim for a more photographic or painterly style. Parameters can be pushed to extremes too, if you're feeling freaky. Insanely fun and powerful stuff.

As cool as the portrait feature is, it was the more general generative image stuff blew me away. You can start with a seed image and breed it with others, tweaking controls to give direction to the process. Rinse and repeat as much as you like, to create beautiful, bizarre or abstract images. Crazy fun!

Images are bred and generated in such a beautiful and organic way, and each new variant is unique. You can use a simple slider to randomly generate variations to be more similar or different to the seed image, or choose another image from the huge gallery to mash up two specific images. I found I got the most plesaing results when working with images that had similar qualities to begin with.

Some of the results can be really freaky. It occurred to me that these could be used for album covers, or heck, artwork on your posts here.

Eventually, I got the hang of it more and really gravitated towards the more painterly and abstract stuff. The image on the top of this page was my favorite from my experiments, for whatever reason. Here are two more, below.

I definitely plan to use this tool more in the future, mostly for abstract images for blog posts. If you get time to have a go of Artbreeder yourself, please make a post and link me up in the comments!