8 AI-driven Creative Apps for You and Your Kids | by Merzmensch | Towards Data Science

It came unexpectedly and changed everything: our life, our work, our daily routines. COVID-19 is disrupting our world in unimaginable ways. Now #SocalDistancing and #HomeOffice are trending topics (even if we have to avoid #SocialDistancing, especially now).
Many of you are currently working in the home office. And even if your employer doesn’t allow it — your kids have to do home-office as well. Schools are closed, kindergartens as well. Multitasking is not a skill: it’s existential.
So are all our researches and projects, our families, and kids staying on the brink (considering the virus lurking outside)? Not at all. Especially now.
Let’s say me something provocative, but IMHO essential:
Thank Corona, the average Digital Competence of our Society (worldwide) is about to increase. People stay in touch online, kids have more access to digital tools. Probably the very last person, who used to be skeptical about digitalization, now sees the crucial value of this level of existence. Apropos, kids: they have a great chance now to learn more about digital topics, about the online layer, about AI. Staying inside doesn’t mean being excluded from the Big Outside.
In this article, I want to share with you some strategies and tools to engage our children, to inspire them for the future, and to spend the lockdown times creatively. Together.
Last summer, I decided with my daughter (then 7) to make a small book with the help of AI. We wrote several fairy tales using GPT-2, and she illustrated it per hand. To that time, I used TalkToTransformer.com for text generating. Here is what we’ve got. (Our prompt for this story was “A king wanted to fly”)
A king wanted to fly. His plane would come."You guys are not coming, so let him fly."The pilot stared at that in the mirror, his eyes wide. His eyes were wide and bloodshot. His back was flat against the wall."Get him through."He looked down. It was true, the door had been opened from the inside. An enormous fist from above."What are you doing now?"And the door opened.In the middle of the room, there was a girl. In a green striped dress that was very short, her hair was short and her eyes were wide as well, her eyes were blue as well.She was young, but very ugly. Her lips were a pale yellow and there weren't any teeth here.No!Hundred-year-old!He stared at her for a long time, then smiled."Gee, you look like a normal child and can't help but laugh, I guess.""How old are you, then?"She looked at him, the young girl's mouth dropped slightly, which was not the right expression to say."Five.""Five?"A hundred!
The story was a lot of fun. My daughter became interested in AI as a creative tool — and we began our AI&Art journey.
Some months later, I was glad, reading this beautiful and inspiring essay by Jason Boog about mixing paper crafts and Artificial Intelligence (GPT-2 and BigGAN) for increasing digital skills, fun, and creativity with kids.
towardsdatascience.com
So let’s collect and share AI-based creative tools, raising digital competence, and bringing additional value — fun- to our kids.
GPT-2, a model, released by OpenAI last year, caused a significant impact on Natural Language Processing. Meanwhile, the entire 1.5b version is out. Trained on 40 Gb text, it convinces in narrative quality. (Of course, there is Google BERT, but GPT-2 is IMHO way interesting if you’re looking for chaotic but consistent fiction).
An interesting and important aspect of GPT-2 is the transformer driven algorithm of self-attention: text generation is aligned with the first human prompt — and then is coherent within itself. So you can control the initial tendency or focus on the text (which gets gradually more sophisticated).
There are many ways to use GPT-2. I recommend using two of them. In these cases, it’s original model, not trained on additional sources.
01. Talk to Transformers
The most intuitive implementation is TalkToTransformer.com, provided by Adam King. All you have to do is enter the first sentence or some words — and the model continues.
Thank self-attention, you can, for example, evoke a fairy-tale generation writing, “Once upon a time there was a king”.
As you see, the results can be hilarious, surreal, and absurd, but also with the danger of profanity. If it is not an issue for you, you can generate it together with kids. Of course, you can “curate” texts for your collaborative writing.
PROs:• easy to use• there are already some presets available• the system implements the entire 1.5b model• quick and available even via mobile
CONTRAs:• (actually only one:) it generates only short text pieces
02. GPT-2 Colab Notebook
If you want to give your kid the first impression about Python — and also about the backgrounds of how GPT-2 works, use Colab Notebooks (my general advice — by so many wonderful Colab Notebooks out there).
There are also various GPT-2 Colab Notebooks out there. But I suggest trying this implementation: GPT-2 with JavaScript Interface.
The reasons I like this implementation are:
you can modify the text length and other parameters.
if you have luck with Google-GPU, you will even get the whole model with 1.5b parameters (like in the screenshots above)
Java-Interface is intuitive compared to other implementations (considering your kid wants to play around with GPT-2).
To parameters (according to definitions by GitHub folk):temperature: Float value controlling randomness in boltzmann distribution. Lower temperature results in less random completions. As the temperature approaches zero, the model will become deterministic and repetitive. Higher temperature results in more random completions.top_k: Integer value controlling diversity. 1 means only 1 word is considered for each step (token), resulting in deterministic completions, while 40 means 40 words are considered at each step. 0 is a special setting meaning no restrictions. 40 generally is a good value.Source: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/issues/27
My fav settings: temperature = 0.9, top_k = 80, generate how much = 1000
PROs:• easy to use• longer coherent text possible (self-attention mechanism!)• the system implements various models including 1.5b parameters• more possibilities to modify parameters
CONTRAs:• initialization and text generation takes time • the bigger model may generate sudden profanity and other weird stuff, probably not suitable for your kids. You have no control over results.
Language barriers? Assuming your kids aren’t native English speakers — it isn’t a problem. You can use DL-driven translation service Deepl.com and translate it to your language:
www.deepl.com
And of course, you can even let AI read the story aloud in many languages using Amazon AWS Polly service (with around 30 languages available at the moment):https://aws.amazon.com/de/polly/
Already a year old, but still fascinating experiment by Zaid Alyafeai (GitHub): a TensorFlow implementation of Image2Image translation.
I don’t need to introduce Pix2Pix to your, dear TowardsDataScience audience since it’s well-examined here. It translates a doodle into an image using pattern recognition and being trained on specific datasets.
This web-based application provides a kid-friendly interface with input and output windows and various pre-trained models: Cats, Facades, Pokemons, etc.
What about drawing a Pokemon?
PROs:• easy to use• experience of pix2pix as one of the most relevant models• fun to experiment around with
CONTRAs:• probably nothing
Another level is achieved by this one. And I bet your kids will be addicted to GauGAN. This GAN-based implementation, provided by NVidia AI Lab, converts segmentation maps to photorealistic images.
Segmentation maps are differentiated by colors and attributed to various materials and contents: sky, clouds, trees, buildings, etc.
In case you use a tablet — or in my case, it's a touch-sensitive display of a laptop, your kids can draw with hands (instead of a mouse). Haptic experience!
There are also plenty of Style Transfer presets trained on various models. Creativity meets surprise = this is an Eldorado for your kids. And you also can, in passing, explain to your kids the principles of image segmentation.
Here is a demo of GauGAN:
PROs:• easy to use• wide field for experiments• dozens of segments and presets
CONTRAs:• (...still looking for some downsides...)
Your kids also surely love to draw, in a fully analog mode (with pencil on a paper). What about letting AI colorize your kid’s artworks?
There are various colorizing implementations out there. One of them is Petalica Paint, former known as PaintsChainer, provided by the Japanese online artist community Pixiv.
You can draw within a tool or upload your kids’ sketches. The quality of the original file doesn’t really matter. I’ve shot my daughter’s sketches with a smartphone. And this is what I’ve got in various modes:
Or this:
As you see, even abstract drawings by your kids can be colorized in surprising ways.
PROs:• always surprising• supports even abstract doodles
CONTRAs:• missing 3D effect from the previous versions
The good old BigGAN is stable working with this Colab Notebook. You can generate stuff, but also enjoy interpolation between seeds (I write more about BigGAN and interpolation).
What about recreating the fairy-tale topos of metamorphosis and transformation with your kids?
Cinderella, anyone?
At Midnight the Carriage transformed into — OK, there was no Pumpkin in the dataset, but I hope Cauliflower will pass.
Or Frog to a Prince?
Which other transformation do you know?
PROs:• perfect visual demonstration of GAN for your kids• fun to use• important method
CONTRAs:• a limited selection of pre-trained categories• low resolution (because already historical)
Definitely, Artbreeder. You’ve undoubtedly read my longer description of this StyleGAN-based toolset, implemented by Joel Simon.
You can do wonders. Character generation for your collaborative story?
Her you go: a face generation.
Do you need a setting for your world? Use landscape generation.
You also can generate a whole-body character (Attention: since Artbreeder supports full-body costumes, it can become Not Safe For Work if you minimize amounts of clothes if you know what I mean).
Artbreeder is also perfect for the BigGAN Interpolation functions — but with more possibilities and seeds.
So in case you want to cross a Bookshop, Airship and Great Grey Owl, you can do it gradually:
Now you and your kids can undertake various experiments combining uncombinable — a lot of fun, and probably part of your crazy fairy-tale. Artbreeder interface is user-friendly, and your kids will quickly orient themselves.
PROs:• many possibilities for image generation• every model has tons of parameters to modify• results have stunning quality
CONTRAs:• still not StyleGAN2 (waiting for)• in case of “full-body-characters”: can be NSFW
Now here your kids will need your help since this model can be operated via Colab Notebook. (Hint: RunwayML supports it also)
First Order Motion Model by Aliaksandr Siarohin (et al.) transfers motion data from video footage to a single photo. In this case, you can animate the face as I did with Nefertete:
There are various Colab Notebooks, and I recommend this one optimized by Bomze:
And there are already perfect samples for collaborative animation between kids and AI.
Digital Artist Mar Canet from the Creative Visual Studio Varvara&Mar experimented with his daughter and First Motion Order Model. They achieved fantastic results:
Now imagine making a fairy-tale with animated characters (the original face footage can be recorded by you or your kids and transformed).
PROs:• unique possibility to animate a kid-drawn doodle face.
CONTRAs:• not all video formats are available• Colab Notebook inevitable (this model in RunwayML is still buggy)
If this is still not enough — you just have to check out RunwayML — with tons of models (text, image generation, video, webcam, etc.). The selection is so large (and continually growing) that it deserves a particular big article. I’m on it!
Do you know other kid-friendly creative AI applications?
How do you spend the quarantine time with your kids (regarding Data Science?)