In case you haven’t figured it out by now, catsOpens in a new tab built the internet. Their prevalence can be credited to them being cute and silly and weird and fluffy and adorable and… sorry, we got carried away. Anywho, they’re not beloved for being creepy, but a new neural-network based tool is looking to capitalize on that market by converting your line drawings into fairly realistic cat illustrations (via LaughingSquidOpens in a new tab).
The sample drawing (above) shows that if you try to portray a cat’s defining lines with a level of realism, edges2catsOpens in a new tab will probably churn out a result that plausibly looks like a real-life cat. The neural network was trained by learning about over 2,000 cat photos and the perceived edges automatically generated from those photos, the site says. It also points out that the edge-detecting software used to train the network wasn’t great at detecting eyes, which is why those may not look super natural in the illustrations this tool yields.
Of course, we can’t all draw that well with a laptop trackpad or computer mouse, so we made some awful drawings to see how those would come out. I’m personally not great at drawing with a trackpad, but I also made my works intentionally awful to really push the limits of this tool and see what it could do for me. This is what I ended up with:
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I’m sorry to have disrespected cats in this way, but in my defense, it’s super fun. Try it out for yourself hereOpens in a new tab and be sure to share your best/worst results with us on TwitterOpens in a new tab.
Featured image: affinelayer.comOpens in a new tab
