Artbreeder is a massively collaborative browser-based tool that allows users to harness the power of Machine Learning to discover, create, and modify (otherwise) unimaginable images…in near real-time. Motivated by research in novelty search and powered by generative adversarial networks, Artbreeder blends the lines between create/view and remix/share. Building from an underlying genetic metaphor to make highly technical concepts from Artificial Intelligence (such as “latent-space” or “class vector”) accessible to non-experts, the software has been used to make millions of images and animations across a range of applications.
Artbreeder’s underlying UI and architecture are a generalized method of computer augmented creativity that can be applied to all aspects of generative design, including architecture and music. From portraits and paintings to landscapes and anime, images on Artbreeder span a diverse and ever-expanding range of categories.
Joel Simon is the founder of Artbreeder and most recently Prose Painter: an AI-driven, open-source tool which allows humans to “paint with words” by incorporating guidable text-to-image generation into a traditional digital painting interface. Joel’s previous projects include Facebook Graffiti, a chrome browser extension that transformed every photo on Facebook into a canvas for anonymous annotation and conversation, Antimander, an open source software to generate congressional districts and fight gerrymandering, and Derivative Works, an experimental machine learning driven collage generator.
As a multidisciplinary artist, toolmaker and researcher, Joel’s experiments and artworks are motived by “the emergent systems in nature and creativity and their interactions,” and have been featured in numerous exhibitions, conferences, and press including Ars Electronica, NeurIPS, and Science Friday. He is currently the founder and director of Morphogen, a company that turns new machine learning technologies into playful and accessible creative tools. Previously, he did bioinformatics research at Rockefeller University and studied computer science and art at Carnegie Mellon.