Say Goodbye to Drawing Stick Figures With NVIDIA’s New AI Tool: GauGAN

Erasto Renteria
2 min readMar 21, 2019

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You won’t have an excuse anymore about your ability to “ART.” NVIDIA recently gave its blog followers a sneak peek at an eye-catching AI tool that practically turns your rudimentary attempts at art into better art.

Check it out.

Wild, right? Developed by NVIDIA Research, this tool called GuaGAN uses a deep learning model trained off of millions of images to recognize the variability of different objects like trees, grass, buildings, skies and even down to the reflection of objects on water. It then uses those learned experiences and leverages generative adversarial networks, or GANs, to transform your doodles into realistic images. While this is impressive, it probably says more about NVIDIA’s capabilities with their expansive neural network platforms. If you watched the video without knowing anything about AI, you would probably think it was a trick, that’s the real power of machine learning — the ability to learn from previous experience and progressively get better at specific tasks. It’s a little mind-numbing if you ask me, but one can only imagine the possibilities.

If we call this step one, what’s step two?

Nelly not doing so hot at Pictionary with Jimmy Fallon.

I think anyone can formulate how this tool can be used in numerous formats, but as a creative marketer, I would love to see this in the hands of non-technical creatives who want to convey an idea or a visual representation of their thoughts with the simplicity of Microsoft Paint — ah, the good old days. I can imagine this capability being a time-saving tool for art directors to devise quick renderings of abstract ideas before being asked to make full-blown creative concepts that clients eventually change their mind on. I’ve seen this happen a lot to my colleagues. Perhaps, GauGAN can be a presentation tool that extends a presenters ability to describe scenarios or even be a consumer-facing tool that inspires a form of creative engagement with brands. The gamut of uses runs as long as your imagination, but it will be cool to see how this AI technology will transpire if it ever gets in our hands.

It’s impressive to see that a computer can learn what the world around us looks like and then have the ability to imitate it to a tee. I wonder if our generation will get to witness the day tools like this reach a singularity where computer-generated “art” will be indistinguishable to us?

More words to read about this creative tool here and here.

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Erasto Renteria

In 500 words or less, I want to interest people in the relationship between artificial intelligence and marketing.