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Image created by Wombo Dream: This is what happens when the AI app links singer Taylor Swift to Christmas themes
Photo: Wombo
You don't need a brush for these works of art.
With Wombo Dream it is enough to name a few keywords, and the app begins with its artificial intelligence (AI) to conjure up sometimes confused, sometimes fantastic digital paintings.
The fact that artificial intelligences can paint well is nothing new. But it has never been as easy as with Wombo Dream to have a piece of art made by software. The app only needs a few terms to describe the picture. A few seconds later, she spits out a walled-in comic Trump, a fantasy landscape made of Hulk faces or Taylor Swift as a Christmas tree.
The paintings are quite abstract, but often amazingly aesthetic. Users can enter up to 100 characters in the field with the keywords. That's enough for ten or more terms that can later be guessed at as fragments in the finished picture - sometimes. In addition, there are eleven filters to choose from, which specify the style of the image, including »Steampunk«, »Mystical« and »Psychic«. A Christmas filter can also be activated, which cheats the shapes of Christmas tree balls, snowflakes and stacks of gifts into the picture.
The art software is available for download free of charge for both iOS and Android.
The AI works of art can even be created in the browser.
Like the sister app "Wombo", which makes selfies sing, the application almost consistently receives top marks with almost five stars in both app stores.
In many places on the Internet, users display their digital works of art.
They design wallpapers with Marvel heroes, upload brightly colored Lady Gaga posters and show pictures that are supposed to show the actor Danny DeVito.
Free version as preparation for a subscription?
Remarkable: Duplicates almost never occur.
According to the developers, the app can create billions of different images.
Even if you keep typing the same terms over and over, the result will be different every time.
If you enter "Cristiano Ronaldo", for example, you will recognize the soccer star by the white jersey and the pose, but the image structure and the colors are always recreated, so that the same painting never comes out.
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The Canadian developers don't want to reveal how their software works.
They did not respond to a request from SPIEGEL.
The technology portal “The Next Web” assumes that Wombo uses the open AI technology Clip to assign search terms to suitable images with the help of artificial neural networks.
With the help of a technology called VQGAN, which researchers at the University of Heidelberg have developed, artificial photos are ultimately to be generated from it.
So far the app is still free.
But as with the selfie app Wombo, it cannot be ruled out that the developers will later switch to a subscription model.
If you want to activate all functions, you would then have to pay a monthly fee.
