A mix of five sculptors and AI are responsible for an unprecedented work.
You may think that the fact that a machine has been able to create a sculpture from scratch is something that is not, apparently, complicated. However, if I tell you that this sculpture combine styles of five great sculptors of history and that their names are Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, Käthe Kollwitz, Takamura Kotaro and Augusta Savage, perhaps you’re starting to get a lot more curious. Next, we will tell you more about the company behind this creation and how did they carry it out.
Welcome to the age of impossible sculptures
Richard Luciani and the Swedish company Sandvik are responsible for the creation of this ‘impossible sculpture’. The process has not required the creation of a new type of AI, but has instead relied on some of the most powerful artificial intelligence available today. And it is that to give shape to this work of art, they have used, first of all, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney. But since if you want to recreate an object in three dimensions, you proposed For these AI should be converted to 3D.
After the process of creating the two-dimensional images that represented the necessary features so that the final statue had all the reflections of the work of the five chosen artists, the selection of the final representation and its subsequent conversion to three dimensions.
For this last purpose, an artificial intelligence called MiDaS has been used, which is capable of making a really precise estimate of any flat image. They only had to add elements that would make the statue more humansuch as poses, and generate with AI a fabric with flare and pleatsjust as it is done in the video game industry.
Ultimately, Sandvik took it upon themselves to bring the ‘impossible statue’ through the use of the Mastercam machine, capable of transferring a 3D model to the real format using, in this case, stainless steel. The final result is work so precise that it only has a difference of 0.003048 centimeters with respect to the model created on the computer, which according to the Swedish company ‘makes the intersections between the different parties almost invisible to the human eye’. That is why this sculpture, in addition to being a spectacular engineering work, is proof that artificial intelligence is the present and future of the world of tomorrow.