AI Swiss Army Knife: Playform Unveils AI Creativity Platform for Dedicated Visual Artists

Playform, the first creative AI companion for visual artists, has built a platform that responds to the actual needs of artists in the throes of the creative process. More than just a simple image generator, Playform gathers a suite of handy tools and transformations into a single site, and lets artists do everything, from training their own model securely on their work to generating images from poses and sketches via prompts, to displaying their work virtually and minting NFTs.

To continue to expand and refine its offering for artists, Playform recently launched an integration with Hugging Face, the leading open-source community for AI developers. Through this partnership, developers on Hugging Face will be able to access the hundreds of thousands of working artists Playform has gathered, and let them work with exciting new tools. Artists will get access to an ever-evolving ecosystem of generative AI-powered ways to provoke new ideas. 

“Generative AI and related techniques have been part of the artistic process for generations,” explains Playform founder and Rutgers professor Ahmed Elgammal. “There are a wide variety of ways AI can inform, shift, or upend your creative process, and Playform wants to be a Swiss Army knife for generative AI. We want to bring the tools together in a single place where artists can go to experiment, iterate, perfect, control, and promote their projects.”

Though much of the recent hype surrounding products like DALL-E or Midjourney revolves around the potential for AI to replace artists, many artists are engaging with AI to boost moments in their creative process, like developing ideas or creating sketches or prototypes, not to create finished products. Artists want to use AI—but don’t like the less than ethical origins of some company’s model training practices. Playform offers an alternative that solves both these issues, freeing artists to use AI as a new media layer and to maintain control over their work.

To satisfy these needs, Playform features dozens of AI tools ready for artists to explore, including:

- Face Mixing: Blend and shift facial features to create someone new;

- Sketch+Text-to-Image: Draw or upload a sketch and then use text to specify just how you want the final image to look, from full-on photorealism to lively line drawing;

- Pose+Text-to-Image: Upload an image of a human figure, let AI identify the pose, and use text prompts to generate a new image in that same pose;

- Text+3D-to-Image: Use an uploaded image and a text prompt to generate a new 3D image with the same depth/dimensions;

- Custom AI Model Training: Use as few of 30 of your own images from scratch to shape your own AI; 

- Direct Mint to NFT: Make a series of images using AI, then mint them as NFTs and sell on markets like OpenSea.

Over the last five years of the platform’s evolving existence, artists have used Playform in a variety of ingenious ways, enfolding AI-generated ideas in more traditional media or building complex video or other works from Playform images. They have exhibited Platform-assisted works in exhibitions, art fairs, and museums around the world.

Artist Vinni Kiniki, for example, created limited-edition prints for an exhibit at the Muse Gallery in London. Playform.io was an integral step in the creative process: “I used Playform.io as part of my investigation into a collaborative creative experience using AI,” explains Kiniki. “The prints were created using Playform.io based on 300+ sketches from my sketchbooks. I drew over selected outputs from Playform.io to finalize them into a series of prints.”

Artist Carla Gannis has used Playform.io extensively in her ongoing, ever-evolving project C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N., and in its latest iteration, wwwunderkammer, Gannis continues to explore virtual and generated worlds to unpack fraught concepts and history, in this instance, the colonial history of the Wunderkammer, the curiosity collections of proto-museums. By building different chambers, Gannis explores our experiences of being human in the age of the internet.

“Artists are using AI as part of their process and as explicit self-reflexive means of encountering how art, humanity, and technology collide and collaborate,” Elgammal reflects. “Playform hands them the keys to powerful models they can use on their own terms, in combination with physical and other digital media. It shows that generative AI is no gimmick; at its best, it’s an artform.”

About Playform
Playform (playform.io) is an AI services platform for professional artists and creatives to create, train, generate, and sell code-free AI generated art all in one place. Established in 2019, Playform was the first generative AI Art platform to enter the market. Leading the advancement is Dr. Ahmed Elgammal, founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. Playform offers an integrated platform to experiment and explore with the different and best AI art generators out there. The Playform Studio is an artist accelerator program empowering emerging artists with promotional opportunities to turn their art practice into a source of income. Playform’s Art Mine is a generative AI NFT marketplace for artist-curated and collector-curated artwork created on the platform.