"The Impossible Statue: The World's First AI Sculpture Created by The AI Framework and Sandvik"

2023-05-27 15:00:00

[ 매드타임스 최영호 기자] A new collection has recently been added to the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. It is a stainless steel statue in the shape of a man called ‘The Impossible Statue’. From a distance, it looks like a large awards ceremony trophy.

At first glance, it looks ordinary, but this 5-foot-tall, half-ton weight piece hides a secret. As it turns out, this sculpture is the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) sculpture created by technology consulting firm The AI Framework and engineering firm Sandvik.

Indeed, the statue embodies the common aesthetic of some of history’s most famous sculptors, including features reminiscent of past works by Michelangelo, Rodin, Kathe Kollwitz, Kotaro Takamura and Augusta Savage. To fuse the characteristics of these artists, an AI model was trained on the work of five creators to combine Michelangelo’s contraposto, Rodin’s muscularity, Kollwitz’s naturalism, Kotaro’s movement, and Savage’s boldness.

Sandvik basically selected the most desirable characteristics from the works of the most famous sculptors of the last five centuries, then iteratively created the image using a combination of Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney until they were satisfied. The result was an androgynous figure clad in silver that held a globe-shaped object and melted from the waist down into a mass of shifting shapes.

After deciding on the design, Sandvik converted the 2D image into a 3D model using both depth estimation software and human pose estimation, a computational task that identifies the various parts of the human body within a scene. The manufacturing process was then thoroughly tested through a series of digital simulations, cutting the amount of steel used in the process in half. The resulting statue is composed of 9 million polygons and 17 individual steel pieces. What is even more impressive is that the actual sculpture differs from the original 3D model by only 0.0012 inches, making it almost invisible to the naked eye.

“The Impossible Statue is a great example of what modern technology and human brilliance can combine to create,” Peter Skogh, director of the Swedish Museum of Science and Technology, said in a statement. He added, “Our mission is to broaden our understanding of the possibilities of technology and stimulate the next generation. This project ticks all the boxes for us.”