Tag Archives: React (web app)

Speaking in Color, an AI-powered paint tool

This June 16, 2022 article by Jeff Beer for Fast Company took me in an unexpected direction but first, there’s this from Beer’s story,

If an architect wanted to create a building that matched the color of a New York City summer sunset, they’d have to pore over potentially hundreds of color cards designed for industry to get anything close, and still it’d be a tall order to find that exact match. But a new AI-powered, voice-controlled tool from Sherwin-Williams aims to change that.

The paint brand recently launched Speaking in Color, a tool that allows users to tell it about certain places, objects, or shades in order to arrive at that perfect color. You start with a broad description like, say, “New York City summer sunset,” and then fine tune from there once it responds with photos and other options with more in-depth preferences like “darker red,” “make it moodier,” or “add a sliver of sun,” until it’s done.

Developed with agency Wunderman Thompson, it’s a React web app that uses natural language to find your preferred color using both third-party and proprietary code. The tool’s custom algorithm allows you to tweak colors in a way that translates statements like “make it dimmer,” “add warmth,” or “more like the 1980s” into mathematical adjustments.

It seems to me Wunderman Thompson needs to rethink its Sherwin Williams Speaking in Color promotional video (it’s embedded with Beer’s June 16, 2022 article or you can find it here; scroll down about 50% of the way). You’ll note, the color prompts are not spoken; they’re in text, e.g., ‘crystal-clear Caribbean ocean’. So much for ‘speaking in color’ but the article aroused my curiosity which is how I found this May 19, 2017 article by Annalee Newitz for Ars Technica highlighting another color/AI project (Note: A link has been removed),

At some point, we’ve all wondered about the incredibly strange names for paint colors. Research scientist and neural network goofball Janelle Shane took the wondering a step further. Shane decided to train a neural network to generate new paint colors, complete with appropriate names. The results are possibly the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.

Writes Shane on her Tumblr, “For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values.) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?”

Shane told Ars that she chose a neural network algorithm called char-rnn, which predicts the next character in a sequence. So basically the algorithm was working on two tasks: coming up with sequences of letters to form color names, and coming up with sequences of numbers that map to an RGB value. As she checked in on the algorithm’s progress, she found that it was able to create colors long before it could actually name them reliably.

The longer it processed the dataset, the closer the algorithm got to making legit color names, though they were still mostly surreal: “Soreer Gray” is a kind of greenish color, and “Sane Green” is a purplish blue. When Shane cranked up “creativity” on the algorithm’s output, it gave her a violet color called “Dondarf” and a Kelly green called “Bylfgoam Glosd.” After churning through several more iterations of this process, Shane was able to get the algorithm to recognize some basic colors like red and gray, “though not reliably,” because she also gets a sky blue called “Gray Pubic” and a dark green called “Stoomy Brown.”

Brown has since written a book about artificial intelligence (You Look Like a Thing and I Love You; How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place [2019]) and continues her investigations of AI. You can find her website and blog here and her Wikipedia entry here.