AI art generators have exploded in recent years. Known for their eerie and sometimes terrifying results, they increasingly attract the attention of artists and non-artists alike for inspiration and to create exploratory works. Now the team behind such a platform – Artbreeder – has a new experiment: Artbreeder collages. And while the results are often bizarre, it’s totally addictive.
The original Artbreeder tool allows you to ‘edit’ the genes of either your own images or those already uploaded to the site, or ‘cross’ images with each other. The new Artbreeder collages, on the other hand, are a generative tool. Currently in beta, you can create images from scratch using, yes, a collage approach – with a little help from text prompts. Read on to learn more, or if you’d rather keep working the traditional way, check out our guide to the best graphic design software.
There are different ways to use Artbreeder collages (opens in new tab). You can start with a collage someone else has already made and make your own tweaks by moving, resizing, and changing the colors or adding new elements. Or you can start from scratch, either with a platform-generated text prompt or by writing your own. Then draw or place cut out shapes and images on the digital canvas as if making a collage. You can also upload your own images to insert. Click render and the tool will turn your collage into a work of art, if you will.
There’s a slider that lets you choose how much weight you want the tool’s algorithm to give to your collage design and how much you want to give to the prompt. Move to the left slider and you’ll get something similar to your collage but smoothed out. Move it to the right and you’ll get something more literal associated with the written prompt. If you are not satisfied with the results, you can click the dice icon to ask the AI tool to try again.
When trying it out, we might have been a bit ambitious with our prompts – the tool works best when kept simple – for example “apple on a table”, but we wanted to put it to the test. Artists and designers will be pleased to know that, like Artbreeder themselves, this shouldn’t put anyone out of work any time soon. The results are random and at times downright spooky – but that makes the tool all the more addicting – one wonders what on earth it will come up with next.
It’s also interesting that this is a tool that requires artistic input if you’re creating your own collage from scratch. If you have better collage skills than me, you might get better results.
As with tools like DALL-E, we expect artists will take advantage of the tool and find the potential to incorporate it into their workflows. It will also find use for other people, not least for hours of entertainment. But at least for now, good results still require someone with design awareness, knowledge and skills to get the most out of the technology.
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