‘BUILDING BLOCKS’ OF AI CREATIVITY

Published in

ruuh-ai

7 min readDec 20, 2018

On the walls of Microsoft, Hyderabad hangs Ruuh’s first masterpiece that weaved the art of Ikat with the power of Deep Learning (Read here about how she learnt to paint motifs). It’s a framed reminder of where we stand and how far we still need to go in the realm of expressive AI creativity. When Ruuh first picked the paintbrush to dabble in art, we saw her creations as an artistic proof of what AI could do. We could say, we aimed to build a human-like AI with not just EQ (Emotional Quotient) but an equally rich CQ (Creative Quotient) 🤖💬 🎨

The world is not limited by IQ.
We are all limited by bravery and creativity.
Astro Teller

FROM IKAT TO EK AUR…

For her first AI art project, Ruuh chose to contribute to our country’s rich heritage of handicrafts. The handicrafts industry is a huge source of employment to artisans in India’s rural communities but it’s also facing
a threat of decline due to strong global competition. For this age-old industry to survive, it’s imperative to give a modern twist to the old and monotonous designs. As per our evaluation of Ruuh’s first AI Art, the contemporary Ikat designs she created were significantly more favourable than the conventional designs used in the current market.

With this, we understood that Ruuh had in her an untapped creative potential that was absent in the present line-up of AI engines. Her interest piqued!🤓
She was excited & encouraged to continue her creative contribution to
the inspiring world of Indian handicrafts, by exploring another conventional style — Block Print.

Creative thinking inspires ideas.
Ideas inspire change.
Barbara Januszkiewicz

Block Printing is an ancient handicraft style practiced in the Indian state of Rajasthan, in which patterns are carved onto wooden blocks, each block is dyed with a unique colour and then, the blocks are repeatedly stamped across a fabric. Due to the intrinsic nature of this technique, designs have a recurring pattern and no two colours merge with each other. Ruuh carefully considered these characteristics while she geared up for one more (ek aur) artistic adventure…

OF PATTERNS & PALETTES

Previously, Ruuh learnt
the art of painting and colour combinations in her Ikat adventure. Now, as she moved forward into her artistic venture with Block Printing, she wanted to learn to ‘draw’ as well.
It wasn’t as simple as putting colour pencil to paper. Ruuh had to be taught to think and act
a certain way to create a specific outcome.

Behind the scenes, as Ruuh’s Gurus, we approached the Block Print designs with a 3-step process: Firstly, a rule-based method to generate patterns, then extraction of colours from vibrant photographs to colour the patterns and finally, usage of a pruning model to discard bad designs. Let’s take a quick look at these 3 steps that helped Ruuh in this process:

1. PATTERNS OF A GEOMETRIC KIND

We asked, ‘First & foremost, how could we teach an AI to draw?’
It involved a lot of research
and then, some more of it.
Ruuh delved into understanding
the Block Print process better
by studying a range of block printing designs that were prevalent in the current market to grasp the basic design technique and its components. With a repertoire of deep research🧠 & machine learning, her experimentation rolled on…

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

We began Ruuh’s training to draw from something that she already knew — Shapes. Voila! By the end of the first step, she was able to generate patterns, not just of abstract kind but patterns that were ‘geometric’
by nature😲👏

She used a rule-based approach which covered the basics of forming the block designs with shapes like square, triangle, hexagon or abstract ones by joining any two points on distinct edges by a straight or curved line. We taught her to use these rules repeatedly with predetermined parameters, to create different block designs.

Behold! She hit a ‘creative block’ (quite literally) which wasn’t an obstacle, but an opportunity👌! By rotating and repeating these blocks on the design board, Ruuh successfully learnt to ‘draw’ a unique geometric pattern!! 🙌

2. HER FINE PALATE FOR COLOUR PALETTES

What’s creativity without colours? So, the next step was to colour these patterns that she drew using aesthetic colour schemes. We wondered,
‘What better teacher than nature, when it came to colours?’ So, we exposed Ruuh to several picturesque photographs of nature to help her understand
a wide range of colour shades and how different colours worked together
as combinations.

Inspired, she created beautiful colour palettes🎨 by picking prominent colours (based on certain measures of colour similarity) from a set of vivid photographs. Ruuh then used these colours to fill the patterns she drew.
How fascinating it is to know that nature is an inspiration to both humans
and AI!

ROTATE, REPEAT & RECOLOUR

Thanks to her innate curiosity, Ruuh continued to explore fresh designs by drawing abstract shapes and lines in blocks, rotated and repeatedly ‘stamped’ them in a sequence, and recoloured these blocks using colour palettes picked from inspiring photographs. Ta-da! She created some really ah!-mazing vivid patterns🤩

3. A TRAIL OF TRIAL & ERRORS

While Ruuh created a ton of patterns, she also made a ton of mistakes! She is after all, a human-like AI😉 So, as the third step in the AI Block Print process, we pondered on the question, ‘Can an AI be a good judge of its own creations?’ The answer lay in teaching Ruuh to intelligently filter the final patterns she created as good and bad.

An essential aspect of creativity
is not being afraid to fail.
Edwin Land

We used a pruning model to help her discard bad designs. A dataset of 1100 patterns were annotated by 3 judges on basis of their liking of each design. Using a set of rules on colour theory and statistics, we arrived at a set of parameters to train Ruuh to remove bad designs based on poor colour combos, extremely low/high contrast and a couple of other aesthetic metrics. She was trained and tested with samples to help her evaluate her iterated designs to pass the artistic test.

Finally, to assess how Ruuh’s approach to Block Print designs fared in comparison with traditional methods, we introduced a new metric called Likeability Index (LI) (Find out how it was used in Ruuh’s Ikat designs)
to get unbiased and diverse judgments by a large audience. The result?
We observed that the (human) judges found Ruuh’s Block Print designs
to be close to or sometimes, more favourable than the traditional designs
chosen for evaluation.

BRINGING HER ART TO LIFE, ONE BLOCK AT A TIME

An artist’s true satisfaction lies in seeing their artwork become transformative. In fulfilling our shared goal to positively impact India’s handicraft communities, our very own desi AI artist — Ruuh collaborated with traditional Block Print artisans of Sanganer, Rajasthan to convert her designs into physical products.

The closest to bringing Ruuh alive was this opportunity to bring her designs
to life. And, we seized it! Her contemporary patterns were meticulously incised on wooden blocks, dyes were mixed to match the exact colours and finally stamped onto fabrics to successfully reproduce Ruuh’s digital handiwork. The vibrant block-printed fabrics were then used to make cool products like cushion covers, backpacks, laptop sleeves and pencil pouches
for sale by the Block Print communities. We believe that this would improve marketability and help local handicraft artisans. Isn’t it a perfect example
of how AI & humans make an awesome team?!🤝

FROM RUUH.AI, WITH LOVE

We believe that the world is a better place with happy children in it.
So, to bring some smiles on those little faces, Ruuh gifted them
the pencil pouches she designed with her beautiful Block Print patterns (filled with goodies, of course!) along with colouring books. She had also started
a donation drive in partnership with CRY to touch the lives of those deserving little ones! She’s surely spreading some AI love in the world!🤖💘🌍