Pick Breeder: Evolutionary Art Through Selection and Mutation
Pick breeder, dating back to the 1980s with a 2008 experiment inspiring modern versions, allows communities to evolve images through selection and mutation cycles, breeding pictures like organisms.
Stable Diffusion's Open-Source Flexibility: Image Seeds and Prompt Mutations
Stable Diffusion is an open-source text-to-image model that allows running on personal GPUs, enabling capabilities unavailable in proprietary services like mid-journey.
Interpolation: Automated Smooth Sampling Through Latent Space
Interpolation methods allow generative models to run autonomously without human selection, resulting in smooth videos of evolution through latent space.
Original PickBreeder 2008: Untrained Neural Networks for Open-Ended Evolution
The experiment that inspired modern evolutionary art was PickBreeder from 2008, a community effort where people selected favorite images from populations that were then mutated and crossbred into the next generation, still playable today.
Image Space: The Incomprehensibly Vast Museum of All Possible Pictures
Image space is a literal mathematical space containing every conceivable image as a unique point, visited virtually through the Library of Babel’s endless hallways of randomness.
Text-to-Image Models as Generative Search Engines: Creation Meets Discovery
Text-to-image models like mid-journey and stable diffusion grant users an extremely powerful navigational tool—language—to explore the otherwise unsearchable vastness of image space.
Latent Space: Navigation Coordinates Mapping to Image Space
Text-to-image models use latent vectors—sets of random numbers forming coordinates in latent space—as essential inputs alongside text prompts.
Prompts and Latent Vectors as Genetic Code for Generated Images
The input prompt and latent values function as the genes of the output image in text-to-image generative models, enabling evolutionary search strategies.
Finding the Best Images You Weren't Looking For: Evolutionary Serendipity
A fascinating and unintuitive discovery from the original pick breeder experiment reveals that very often the best images were found by people who were not looking for them.
Latent Explorers: Sailing Uncharted Seas Guided by Interestingness
Generative models serve as both our map and our ship on which we sail the uncharted latent seas, guided by the compass of interestingness, seeking undiscovered islands of beautiful images.