AI that paints Amitabh Bachchan
On 24th September 2019, the Government of India conferred the ‘Dadasaheb Phalke Award’, India’s highest award in cinema, to the man who has been entertaining and inspiring a billion souls for the past 50 years: Amitabh Bachchan. Like any dedicated fan, this moment called for a celebration. There couldn’t be a better tribute than using my work on Computational Creativity to celebrate Mr Bachchan.
Why not create an Artificially Intelligent agent which learns how Mr Bachchan looks like, using images people post over social media, and use this acquired knowledge to create his paintings?
As part of my thesis at the University of Oxford, I have been working in the space of AI-created artwork, primarily using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Throughout my explorations, I have been trying to capture the reaction of GANs when trained over images having no intrinsic pattern. The problem in hand also falls in this bucket. This is because people post images of Mr Bachchan shot from different angles, containing a diversity of looks or poses. Some may be just portraits while some might be full body. Due to his long career, social media is flooded with his images from different decades thus contributing to the variability in the dataset. The novelty lies in breaking this barrier of variability and learning the complex visual distribution.
The machine created images can easily be classified as “Digital Impressionism”. It is very interesting to see how the machine tried to re-imagine Mr Bachchan and paid special emphasis on intricate details like the flow of his hairs.
The AI agent not just captured his current look but even ones from the yesteryears. The following image is a rendition of his iconic pose from the movie titled “Deewar” (1975).
What makes this experiment further alluring is the model’s capability to go beyond merely re-creating facial features and also capture his poses and body structure (like in the following image).
The AI agent also tries to be creative by playing around with its understanding of Mr Bachchan. For example, the following image presents an artistic mixture of Mr Bachchan’s current look and that in the 1970s.
This endeavour is my humble tribute to the man who has been my constant source of inspiration. It won’t be wrong to claim that my fandom for Mr Bachchan is unparalleled. To experience a glimpse of it just goto 24:18 in this video:
Thank you for reading :)
