About AI style transfer images and whether their low resolution loses painterly detail.
Has this happened?
Yes 23 (15%)Not sure 56 (37%)No 71 (47%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About AI style transfer images and whether their low resolution loses painterly detail.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
These are thrilling developments but every time I see examples they're relatively "low-res" images. I would love to be able to zoom in and see whats going on, but I suspect that we're seeing the output exactly as it was rendered by the ML processing. Is that the case?
Actual paintings have brush strokes and even surface effects that aren't visible until you're looking very up-close or at a high resolution image. This is a key feature of the enjoyment paintings that often gets lost on people.
I guess the ultimate "turing test" for this stuff would be to have the system literally paint these images. That is, with actual paint and a paint brush, NOT with pixels. This would sort of give a really fresh and exciting twist of meaning to the title of the old essay by Walter Benjamin "Art in the age of mechanical reproduction."