Google AutoDraw AI Turns Your Amateurish Doodles Into Worthy Art

It is time to take your stick figures to the next level, as you can now transform your scribbles into professional-level art. Google’s AutoDraw uses artificial intelligence to determine what the user is drawing and then offers to “improve” it.

Users first scribble with their finger an image on their phone, tablet, or computer. AutoDraw then uses an algorithm to suggest a more polished, pre-designed image created by an artist. These artists include HAWRAF, Erin Butner, Julia Melograna, Pei Liew, Simone Noronha, Tori Hinn, and Selman Design, who have all submitted their own unique interpretations of the available images.


AutoDraw relies upon the same technology as Google’s AI experiment “Quick, Draw!”. “Quick, Draw!” is a similar game to Pictionary and pits players against artificial intelligence like Google’s AlphaGo. The game challenges players to draw an object or idea in under twenty seconds. The artificial intelligence must try to guess what the player is drawing by the end of the twenty seconds. The more people participate, the more the program is able to recognize various renditions of images.
Some argue that AutoDraw eliminates the creativity inherent in art. The program, for example, does not recognize imitations of famous twentieth and twenty-first century abstract art pieces. Alexander Rudnicky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon, remarked, “A lot of these [programs] that are coming up, they’re really quite shallow. There’s no real intelligence. It’s very sophisticated pattern-matching, and I think it’s really cool, but it’s not the same as what we like to think of as intelligence—the ability to create new structures from scratch.”


Artists who are interested in submitting their work to AutoDraw can check out this link. Google is looking for artists to submit their own interpretations of the existing offerings or suggest other future images.