PUFF
On May 11th 2020 PUFF was born
In the spring of 2020 (before chatGPT and text-to-image models existed) I trained a neural network on around 100 of my hand-drawn monster artworks. What could go wrong!
The model was able to generate endless synthetic monster ‘drawings’ in an echo of my style.
One of these looked more interesting to me than the others: a pink monster with rabbit ears. I named her PUFF.
Over the next few years, PUFF became a vehicle for exploring the weird edges of AI and creativity — ideas around authorship, style, originality, data ownership, and what it means to even ‘create’ something.
I built a second dataset made entirely from fan-submitted drawings of PUFF.
Here’s a few of them:
I made a newer model trained on the fan-submitted images. Once it was trained it could make endless synthetic PUFF images:
I started this project as a playful experiment into a curious new technology, but as ai has become more widespread and controversial, the project has become stranger, too.
I don’t have a perfect response/solution for ai, but PUFF has helped me think through and embody some of the issues.