Training AI to Paint with Code

(surya.website)

206 points | by Tiberium 2 days ago

21 comments

  • radarsat1 21 hours ago
    Beautiful.

    I am reminded of a paper I was inspired by a long time ago [0], (okay it's 2018 so I guess just 8 years ago, but it feels like longer, from the before-times), that demonstrated learning brush strokes. At the time there was already a lot of work on GANs, but these are pixel-based methods, and I was really interested in the idea of how to derive descriptive methods of scene generation/understanding. I found this work really interesting because it combined RL and GAN techniques in a creative way. I miss that kind of research.

    Now of course VLMs have shown that you can mix modalities in generalized sequence-to-sequence problems and it doesn't surprise me that this kind of thing is possible, but it's so nice to see it done well using modern techniques.

    [0] https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/ganin18a.html

  • kickingkeys 13 hours ago
    Thank you for sharing this! did not expect to find my work on HN randomly haha
    • kickingkeys 11 hours ago
      If you're curious about why I did this you can watch my thesis here: https://vimeo.com/1190839818
      • mrmarmac 58 minutes ago
        This video was incredible. Thank you for sharing and for the work and thought you poured into your project.
  • lxrogers 19 hours ago
    Really awesome! Been thinking about how to get LLMs to do generative art (yes, the pre-AI definition of generative art). Love to see this approach and results!
  • _boffin_ 2 days ago
    I think this actually might be one of the best ways to train people to use AI. I can see this honing people's prompting abilities and expressiveness, along with constraints and desired outcome.

    Wild the possibilities

  • mskogly 1 day ago
    Really liked your video presentation, thanks for sharing, especially the part of image generators locking us into a certain context immediately, reducing us to spectators instead of creatives.

    Played a lot with p5js some years ago, might pick it up again and try some of your ideas. The reinforcement learning part sounds about above my skill level though. :)

    • kickingkeys 13 hours ago
      Hi, this post wasn't made by me but thank you for the kind works :)
  • Brendinooo 16 hours ago
    This is really nice, and it's a good reminder that we're so early with regards to how AI can be used to make art.

    And the fact that it's flowers creates a pretty nice mental model for it! One can plant seeds and cultivate the plants that grow from them but ultimately aren't in complete control of the outcome.

  • iambenm 18 hours ago
    It's Genetic Programming via LLM, cool!
  • eramooh 1 hour ago
    jack lacan - sözü yazan bir doğa resmi yap
  • mysterydip 2 days ago
    Makes me wonder, can any LLMs code in Logo? Could result in some interesting designs.
  • bombastic311 1 day ago
    This is really really awesome
  • retinaros 13 hours ago
    I did that on SVG mostly to teach it to draw pelicans but also to generalize it. most of the behavior is from SFT on the base model tho. RL is very ineficient at style or at least at generating novelty out of distrib.
  • accomplishdent 2 days ago
    What is the JavaScript doing?
    • simonw 20 hours ago
      Drawing things with p5.js.
  • thrance 19 hours ago
    I've been building something similar, but for voxels. It's able to make pretty good models from just Python code (calling into a custom native module written in Rust). Better than I hoped it would, in fact, but it's still not perfect.
  • ACCount37 22 hours ago
    I wonder how the image generation models that generate SVGs work.

    Are they trained roughly like this? Or is it an LLM conditioned on image? Or on diffusion latents from a model trained to emit SVG-compatible imagery?

  • 13639366668 18 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • behnamoh 1 day ago
    [flagged]
    • aflinik 23 hours ago
      Can you post some links to other similar projects you've seen? I'd love to compare different approaches
    • smokel 23 hours ago
      Interesting, tell me more!
    • pelasaco 1 day ago
      March 2026 · Research, Design, Development.
  • yoloakki 16 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • Alien1Being 15 hours ago
    AI HYPE