You may or may not recall our story from earlier this year that talked about the ability of powerful AI to change the weather in photos. Then we told you about the Google tool that will judge your photography based on its merits.
Now a new technology being developed by NVIDIA is capable of taking the style or aesthetic of one photo and transposing it onto another photo for a result that is natural and realistic in appearance.
FastPhotoStyle by NVIDIA is part of the chipmakers ambitious artificial intelligence plans. NVIDIA describes the FastPhotoStyle process as sampling a “style” photo and then imposing that aesthetic on a “content” photo for a resulting “stylized content” photo.
The primary goal with the technology was that the resulting photo appear as realistic as possible. This will have numerous applications outside of photo editing. As some have pointed out, this could be a graphical tool used in video games, for example.
In a bold claim, one of the inventors of FastPhotoStyle, Ming-Yu Liu, is paraphrased by FStoppers as saying that the “stylized content” photos were often preferred over the photos taken by actual photographers, a claim that is likely to ruffle the feathers of a few people.
Most people are really impressed with the technology but a few point out that, yet again, this is an example of technology taking work away from creators. Most of the results can be achieved by a skilled user of photo editing software, for example, but probably not as quickly as NVIDIA’s AI. As these technologies advance it will be interesting to see what ways creators come up with to achieve results that are beyond the ken even the most well developed AI. If that happens these leaps forward could be a boon for creators, freeing up time for the most talented among us to generate new forms of art.
