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Stark Naked Fraud

Digital AI

Stark Naked Fraud 2020

About

We live in a world of fakes. The struggle is to discover what is fake, what art is real, what is a medicine and what is a poison and who is a fraud. It is now life and death as a few would let you die for the sake of their ego or cold hard cash.

The artificial nude is made a model of nude paintings then infused with 10,000 images of Donald Trump. Credit to Robbie Barrat for the nude painting model and Soumith Chintala’s DCGAN code.

Sold as an NFT on SuperRare

Sold on SuperRare

digital art with Ai Tools

2045 × 2045 Px 2020

a blob of flesh painted on canvas but it is fake as it comes from AI gan
Stark Naked Fraud by Bard Ionsono

Artist notes:

Artificial is the word I started with to put context playing with these images.

In these art pieces I began with ideas and opinions about deep fakes, propaganda, disinformation and manipulation using powerful and sometimes ham handed technology tricks used to manipulate democracy in the US and the EU. Fake personas were created on social media controlled by a small number of people. The fear of deep fakes was in the news along with AI technology. In addition I had the idea that I was creating fake art. This NFT idea is so crazy some would consider it fake art. On top of that I am using artificial intelligence techniques to generate potentially billions of images by training a model on 10,000 images. So I am playing with multiple layers of meaning around how do we know what is real and fake. Can this art train people to look at things with skepticism?

In addition I am asking: Is this art at all or am I a fake artist with artificially generated images in this new digital NFT space?

Technical: art-dcgan a project forked from DCGAN.torch by Soumith Chintala  I used Robbie Barrat’s nude model that he provided on the github page with his permission and retrained it by feeding it 10,000 images of trump. This mixed the two styles together. The github page says that the nude paintings were downloaded from Wikiart.org. My retraining took about 24 hours. I then used photo editing tools to enhance the colors and contrast and enlarged it with Gigapixel another AI tool.

Original art-dcgan output

This is an image from art-dcgan generated from a model trained by Robbie Barrat. The model is online and can be used with the library to generate new images. But you have to figure out how to get the old software to work. It is not easy because the NVIDIA libraries it depends on are deep in archives and difficult to install.

Robbie Barrat’s original nude model output

Collector Bonus Material

36 tiles of AI nude portraits from ai, that look like paintings of fleshy blobs
36 Proofs of Nude Trump (this proof panel contains the Stark Naked Fraud)

In the production of art using artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques most of the manual time is spent selecting images to train the model and then time to curate the best output. Sometimes the model needs to be retrained if the output is not what the artist wants. This panel was quite productive in the number of art pieces I selected from it. Other panels were discarded as they yielded junk.

36 tiles of fleshy blobs on muted backgrounds that look like painted canvas some were selected to become art NFT
36 tiles of AI nude portraits from ai, that look like paintings of fleshy blobs used to mint NFTs

From this panel I only selected one or two art works to refine. After selecting one or more image I spend a lot of time enhancing, animating and enlarging the images to prepare them for minting.

Some Images Used to Train the AI/ML Model