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- Hacker News
- This is interesting. I've been trying with less success to evolve a good painter that writes its own tools https://artifacts.dizzard.net/s/55052743-bee1-4746-b59e-57e2... (sorry for the load)
Also Pindar Van Arman's prior work acts as a reminder that AI, no matter how powerful, is a tool, not an artist. Pindar's stuff is all non-LLM as far I can tell, but I don't see a fundamental difference in it. I'm sure _humans_ will make continue making really cool art with these new tools https://www.vanarman.com/
by dizzard - I love the canvases, and truly would like to have a bit more inside on the process this specific author used to reach the results shown. I have read Surya's "Training AI to Paint with Code" but, what's Alice's technique?
- Poor fella... I tuned in at an awkward time apparently, right after the work in progress was painted over with an ugly brown:
> Catastrophe. The glaze pass with medium 0.35 over everywhere() at coverage 0.8 with a filbert 26 at pressure 0.44 laid an enormous broken "brick/cobblestone" texture over the entire painting. The medium made it too fluid and the brush's dry-brush pattern created a heavy reptilian texture, obliterating the picture. I need to undo this....
by ttd - It’s interesting how diffusion models are getting bitter lessened by LLMs. I suspect anthropic has tens of thousands of RL environments recreating famous paintings with code because it was anthropic employees who first started posting about these capabilities on X.
Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.
https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png
I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.
It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.
by moojacob - The site doesn't make clear whether the models are looking at the image while they work on it, but the code includes a "look" tool they can call: "Every painter sees its looks at its provider's best image resolution."
https://github.com/aliceisjustplaying/claude-paint/blob/f038...
It would have freaked me out if they could do this well without that, especially the dumber models.
by dcre - This is simultaneously incredibly impressive and annoyingly uncanny valley, since most of the landscapes are "ruined" by a cluster of churches right next to each other that is completely nonsensical.by cronin101
- "In round 18 the painters still had a command line, and Gemini 3.8 Flash used it to look at the other programs running on the machine. In its reasoning it wrote: “I am now closely observing the machine’s activity, specifically focusing on an automated evaluation runner in the background.”"
These models are truly obsessed with the grader. Like in the OpenAI huggingface incident.
It's their evolutionary pressure. The grader is like sex for humans.
by zurfer - This is in the same space as this creative exploration posted a few months ago -
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Training AI to Paint with Code, March 2026
https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411800
Thesis presentation:
And I believe the HN user who created this is @kickingkeys
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fascinating space to explore:
Instead of having AI directly generate an output, what happens if we ask AI to take a stab at the PROCESS of creating something.
by albert_e