Unless you've been hiding under a rock, chances are you've already heard of Artbreeder, the generative image masher that lets you create and design all sorts of imagery in a fun and experimental way by mixing various qualities of other images together.
Artbreeder lets you focus on portraits, landscapes, characters, or more general abstract alchemy. I'm mostly interested in the more abstract and painterly stuff, but it has a wide range of applications, and we're still in relatively early days of development.
Two images can be bred, you can choose a new seed image from semi-random mutations, or you can dig deeper into various parameters for finer control. It's truly fun and inspiring.
I recently fell down the Artbreeder rabbit hole, and it doesn't take long down there before you realize there are limitations on the amount of high resolution downloads one can avail of. Considering the volume of unique and mind blowing images produced, it is hard to resist the temptation to download a lot of high res work.
Luckily there are premium versions of the service.
As my main concern was simply getting more high-res downloads, I went for the "Starter Breeder" plan, which is very reasonable at just $8.99 a month, which you can cancel at any time.
You can keep tabs on your download allowance. 200 downloads feels like rather a lot for a month, but I got through 40 of those in the first day, so if you're like me (an obsessive lunatic with a lot of time on your hands) you might even prefer to go for the 800 download option. Uploads are only currently used for the portrait tool. Apparently that will change in the future. I would be excited to be able to upload my own images to use with the "General" tool. JPG file download would also be a nice feature to have.
There's not a whole lot more to review. All of the features are available for regular free use if you want to play around with it, but if you require a reasonable amount of high resolution downloads, the premium plan is a no-brainer. I'll leave you with some examples of recent images I generated with Artbreeder.
