paints some fast cats.
In my last article, we tried to get the Deep Dream artificial-intelligence image filter to 'paint' a miniature. This time, we'll try the opposite: can we turn a person (well, a photo!) into a picture of a miniature?
Editor Katie 
volunteered to help out this time, as she has a lot of 'photoshoot' type photos from her beauty pageantry. We wanted a photo that didn't have any background.
I had noticed other Deep Dream users having some success producing images of ceramic figures, so we tried that first using the Artistic AI mode. We learned two things: First, it takes a high filter strength to get a major change like this, which means less resemblance to the original photo. Second, when it comes to ceramic figures, the AI has a strong preference for topless figurines! The above photo is the only 'clothed' version we obtained.
However, when we changed the text input to 'miniature figure' or 'pewter figurine', we ended up with results that looked like painted figures or figures made from different metallic colors. (Note the odd hand.)
Next, we experimented with telling the AI that we wanted a 'statue'. This only worked for 'bronze' – it seemed it was too much for the AI to jump to pewter or iron. We also tried 'Greek statue' in marble or stone, and while that mostly worked, the results were topless and had human eyes!
We thought to switch to Cyberspace AI mode, and try if we could get the result we wanted by asking for metal figures or robots. The results looked chromed, most were topless, and the example above is carrying her own bowling ball!
Since the colorization of the photo seemed to be preventing the AI from giving us the right result, I converted the original image to grayscale and tried again. This was a major jump in the right direction, but they all came out topless, so I won't show you those!
Finally, we thought: "Does the AI know what a wargaming figure is?" So we specified '32mm miniature figurine in the style of Warhammer Fantasy' and got the above result. Close, but the arm is messed up! (And we were still getting a lot of topless results…)
Our last try was to specify "28mm wargaming miniature in the style of Dungeons and Dragons" – and we got the above! Looks like a mini to me, even if it is only loosely inspired by our staff editor's photo…