Artificial intelligence, or better known as AI, is an advanced growth of technology that can be used for many things, such as automatic passes for taking toll money and online shopping. The great thing is AI can also be used to create art nowadays—particularly graphic icons. Google’s AutoDraw is one attractive example. It combines professional artists’ drawings and a learning machine that can help users draw like a pro.
You may as well generate iconography with the help of AI. By simply drawing the expected icon, the algorithm will generally try to adjust the user’s drawn icon with the ones in its database. Then, the ones which look the closest to your drawing will be selected and displayed on the digital canvas. You may choose the one you like the most from the available list of icons to replace your doodled icon. More about it will be explained below.
Why Choose AI to Create Icons?
We all know that technology has become a huge part of today’s society despite a slight fear that it would take over many people’s jobs. The fear is logical as losing jobs means we have to survive against more economical problems, but the bright side is we can be motivated to learn more skills to earn a living.
With AI technology taking over jobs in the creative field, it will usually replace designer jobs that tend to be repetitive. It also has impressive capability in accomplishing pixel-perfect results. Moreover, AI challenges and encourages people who work on creative jobs to think out of the box in creating brilliant works of art.
The same thing happens to iconography, which many designers have worked on globally. You might have seen many redundancies in the icon world as you visit websites that provide icons. Artificial intelligence ensures you will do your best to design more authentic icon sets, which means an upgrade in your career!
AI-Generated Visual Art
Artificial intelligence allows many artists and designers to create virtual art unprecedentedly. Even visual art can be done with the technology of AI. Anything that has artistic values and involves our vision is called visual art—some of which are painting, sculpture, photography, design, film, and so on.
Some visual art done with the help of AI are A Book from the Sky by Gene Kogan and Deep Dream by Mike Tyka. Thanks to the neural network featured in AI that learns the component of the art the two artists made. As in A Book from the Sky, the neural network absorbed the knowledge of Chinese characters and smoothly rendered the interpolations between the characters.
Generating Icons with AI Technology
A designer’s job is to abstract some image or thing into an icon, and they traditionally utilize Adobe Illustrator or other icon-making software. Icons can come in different shapes, colors, line types, and widths. With artificial intelligence, there is a new way of icon abstractions with robotic images. The application of Pixel Recurrent Neural Network featured in AI enhances the icon designing experience.
The neural network can determine what color the next pixel will be, based on approximately 1500 icons that have been previously resized. Once the neural network receives an image’s upper half part, AI will soon generate its lower half.
Following the technique, users can firstly doodle sketches of the icon. Some parts of the sketches are put into the neural network before resulting in an image as the feedback. However, there should be an improvement in the time limit provided. The system could also modify an icon with additional color support and/or 3D generation.
Also, it would be better if there were further studies to improve the paradigm for collaborative creation by humans and AI together. The current level of AI technology in icon generating still restricts the creativity of the artists. The good news is you can always download great icon sets on many creative websites. So, there should be no room for restriction in creativity.
In the end, there is still some fear that artificial intelligence technology will be stealing most people’s jobs someday soon, and it is a normal emotion. Nevertheless, you can always turn your fear into motivation. Take it as a challenge to improve your skills in design. In terms of icons, you can also count on websites that provide copious quality sets of icons, such as Aqr Studio.
