Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through this little side project I’ve been messing with – getting “self images nyt” to kinda work. It’s been a trip, lemme tell ya.
First things first, the idea. I stumbled upon something about self-portraits and the New York Times, and it got me thinking. Could I create, like, a system that lets you generate these kinda self-image things, maybe stylized or something? Sounds cool, right?
So, I started by diving headfirst into the data. I needed images, obviously. My initial plan was to scrape some stuff off the web. Bad idea! So, I went the legal route. Found some open-source image datasets, you know, the ones used for machine learning demos. Downloaded a bunch, cleaned ’em up a bit (got rid of the weird ones, the duplicates, you know the drill). That took a while.
Next up: the tech. I’m no ML wizard, but I know enough to be dangerous. I decided to use Python, because, well, everyone does. Threw in some TensorFlow and Keras, because those seemed like the right tools for the job. I played around with a few models. Started with some basic GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Man, those were a headache. The results were… interesting. Mostly just blurry blobs that vaguely resembled faces. Not exactly “NYT quality,” haha.
I then tried a different approach. Instead of trying to generate images from scratch, I thought maybe I could style existing photos. Looked into some style transfer algorithms. Found one that seemed promising, based on some pre-trained models. Got it up and running, fed it my image dataset, and then fed it some “style” images (think paintings, textures, stuff like that). This was getting somewhere!
- Image Data Collection and Preprocessing: Cleaned datasets, removed duplicates.
- Initial GAN Experiments: Blurry blobs, much frustration.
- Style Transfer Exploration: Promising results, less frustration.
The struggles. Oh boy, were there struggles. Memory issues were a big one. My poor laptop was screaming. Had to downsample the images, tweak the model parameters, basically do everything I could to make it run without crashing. Another issue was the style transfer itself. Sometimes it would work great, other times it would just produce these weird, distorted images. It was a lot of trial and error.
Finally, something that kinda works. After weeks of tinkering, I managed to get something that I’m, like, semi-happy with. You can feed it a photo of yourself, and it’ll spit out a stylized version that looks… vaguely like a self-portrait you’d see in the NYT, if the NYT was having a really, really experimental day. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s a proof of concept. I learned a ton, and that’s what matters, right?
What’s next? Well, I’d love to improve the image quality, for starters. Maybe try a different style transfer algorithm, or train my own model from scratch (if I ever get my hands on a decent GPU). Also, it would be cool to add some controls, so you can tweak the style and intensity of the effect. It’s an ongoing project, but I’m having fun with it.
So yeah, that’s the “self images nyt” thing in a nutshell. It was a messy, frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go stare at some more blurry blobs and wonder where I went wrong. Cheers!