Funny knife throwing memes and stunning art. Because sports knife throwers like to poke fun at themselves, and to get creative with their knife throwing.
Looking for ways to make your own backyard knife throwing more fun? Find inspiration in the knife throwing games collection.
Knife throwing squid kneaded by Justina Kochansky. Find more or her plasticine sculptures at ArticulateMatter and Flickr.
I played around with artificial intelligence software to produce some art with a knife throwing theme. All it took was some spare time and good throwing models.
Did you just tell the artificial intelligence to paint a knife thrower?
Well, that's not possible yet. The artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs I tried out knew what a squirrel is - but had no idea how a knife thrower has to look like.
I toyed around with the AI technology Stable Diffusion (v1.4), which has seen some billion images from the internet together with their associated descriptions. From those image-text pairs, the AI learns concepts such as squirrel, but also how certain image styles look like - "graphic novel", for example. Using a so-called prompt you tell the AI what image you want it to create: miniature diorama of a beautiful beach during sunset
.
If a desired concept is not known to stable diffusion, the inpainting approach can be employed: Starting from an existing image or photo, you highlight the area that shall be changed, and write a prompt detailing into which direction you want the changes to go. This is how inter alia the comic strip hero or the many variants of the female knife thrower came to be (using cyberpunk, from the side
, for instance).
What really impressed me was that the entire artificial intelligence programs can be downloaded and run on your own computer at home. The model with the weights had a size of only 4GB. As user interface, I used DiffusionBee. A good place to start your own experiments is Hugging Face.
At first glance, the images produced with the help of artificial intelligence are really impressive. At third glance, you start to notice inconsistencies such as a third ear on the squirrel. But, the AI is now at a point where it is easy to produce good-looking illustrations on various topics. Currently still excluding knife throwing.