What else do people draw on gradient.horse?

(rybakov.com)

165 points | by spython 6 days ago

15 comments

  • ykl 1 day ago
    One of the horses on a ball is very recognizably a James Baxter[1]!

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baxter_the_Horse

  • pelagicAustral 23 hours ago

        > the obvious desire for transgressive expression by drawing dicks and slurs
    
    this truly is fascinating, that the common denominator of any anonymous, open space for creative expression seems to always be large amounts of doodled dicks... Are there any studies on this?
    • dnpls 22 hours ago
      I've seen it mentioned somewhere this is known as TTD - Time To Dick - as the amount of time elapsed between releasing a drawing tool in the open and someone using it to draw a dick.
      • pelagicAustral 21 hours ago
        corollary: the mean TTD is inversely proportional to the amount of anonymity granted by the medium
        • mft_ 10 hours ago
          Back in the very early days of online meetings (I’m talking pre-WebEx) I joined a global corporate meeting utilising a new meeting platform.

          A few minutes into the presentation, someone discovered annotation tools were freely available.

          After a few minutes of increasing experimentation, it then dawned on people that the annotations were completely anonymous.

          From that point, TTD was short.

    • spython 19 hours ago
      I'm writing a second part of this post right now - about the differences in how separate online communities are drawing horses. There are clear differences in richness of detail, drawing mastery, but also in the amount of dicks drawn. My suspicion that people with more drawing experience draw less dicks simply because they already have drawn all the dicks previously. While people with an untrained drawing muscle perhaps fall back to these easy and familiar shapes. Drawing a horse is hard.
      • mproud 19 hours ago
        People draw horses because they want to draw horses.

        People draw dicks because they feel it’s funnier, it’s a form of rebellion, and/or it’s way easier than almost anything else. And because they can without repercussion.

        • spython 19 hours ago
          I understand all that, but how would you explain that 8,6% of drawings from people coming from HN were dicks, while visitors from Tumblr would draw dicks only in 1,6% of the cases? My guess is that people from Tumblr already explored a lot of the transgressions, so it does not interest them much - just like "potty talk phase" stops being interesting after your reach a certain age.
          • gus_massa 10 hours ago
            Let's call it unpaid software testing team :) People want to know how good is your filtering.

            Anecdote time: Last year my wife asked ChatGPT to make a multiple choice test to learn some Biology topic. I arrived and she showed the test to me. The options were a, b, c or d. I wrote e to see what happens :) ChatGPT gave a good reply explaining that I made a mistake :(

            • spython 9 hours ago
              Indeed, I think this is how it starts. However the filtering system does not indicate to the user if their drawing was filtered - otherwise it would turn into a "trick the system" game - a whole different genre. So the visitor always gets the satisfaction of seeing their penis galloping on the horizon. Still, many if not most penis artists then continue to add more and more lewd drawings. So it's not just a test but some other behaviour. Coming from Hacker News, they might feel like a hacker, a rebel breaking the system. And that's fine - after all there are not many ways in a society where you can feel this way and not hurt anyone.
          • malfist 18 hours ago
            > people coming from HN were dicks

            I think you answered your question

          • mft_ 10 hours ago
            Could we hypothesise a different gender ratio from Tumbler vs. HN?
    • bryanrasmussen 22 hours ago
      not exactly, but there are quotes and aphorisms

      https://medium.com/luminasticity/90-crap-48e4c79419a9

      "In every time and environment that humans found they could make art by drawing on some surface there has always been one fellow in the community who found he could let people know what a big dick he had by making a rendering available for everybody else in his distribution channel

      This base level of dick drawings to other artistic forms represent the minimal level of crap in all aesthetic production."

    • mihaic 20 hours ago
      I have a feeling that being transgressive is universal, but the form of expression is cultural, with independent convergence to some common patterns.

      For instance, in Romania I've noticed that the slang term for penis is written far more frequently than a crude drawing of it. I've also seen probably more drawn breasts than dicks as well.

    • goodmythical 17 hours ago
      The oldest example I know of is Hadrian's Wall from ~1700 years ago engraved with a larger than life example.
    • markovs_gun 20 hours ago
      I love that dicks are a feature of graffiti even going to ancient times. Pompeii's walls are covered with dicks.
  • anotheryou 1 day ago
    Show us the penis collection, we know it exists! (also amazing already anyways :)
  • swah 1 day ago
    Found the blurrred 67 so funny when I was expecting penises
  • gus_massa 5 days ago
    My Pegasus and my Space Invader weren't selected :(

    Anyway, I remember a very good Godzilla and a moonwalking Michael Jackson. I think the post need an additional row for weird.

    • spython 4 days ago
      Oooh, there are just so many horses - more than 600 000 - that it's a tiny chance to actually see your drawings! And there are around 50 000 drawings marked as non-horses - all kind of weirdness - that could be an exhibition on its own..

      Thank you for drawing, a typical drawing is seen more than a hundred times, so your pegasus and space invader were seen and appreciated : )

      • gus_massa 4 days ago
        Nice game. I draw like 10 "horses". The first didn't move the legs because I didn't understand the idea, then I started to add moving things, and then weird things like the space invader. Anyway, mines were not as good as other examples I saw.
      • zaik 1 day ago
        Is clicking and double clicking some kind of voting system?
        • spython 1 day ago
          Yes, on the original gradient.horse it was an early experiment in hidden moderation - and it did help hide quite a few of the less kind drawings. Now, as the moderation model trained on the larger corpus works quite well, it's just for fun.
  • quuxplusone 1 day ago
    One of your snails is clearly a chambered nautilus instead. :)
  • bitwize 1 day ago
    "Oh god, what have you done. You have drawn your horse incorrectly. Look what your careless hands have wrought. Select the pistol, and then, select your horse."

    https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/26/the-unhorse

  • postsantum 1 day ago
    What about pelicans?
  • deanc 1 day ago
    This would fit right into any modern art gallery. Seems that these interactive generative art projects are in most museums nowadays.
  • earth-tattoo 1 day ago
    No dicks?
    • spython 1 day ago
      So many dicks! Roughly 4 percent of all drawings are dicks. With over 600 000 drawings that means.. Twenty five thousand dicks. I thought about including them, but as with all the other transgressive drawings, the only person who enjoys looking at them is the one who drew them.
  • shevy-java 1 day ago
    A pe** ... erm ... nevermind. I was just reminded of the fancy art I see when visiting university-campus toilets ...
    • xyzal 21 hours ago
      No need to hide "penis" behind asterisks. It is proper -- even medical -- terminology, in contast to "c*ck", "d*ng" or "schl*ng".
      • nkrisc 19 hours ago
        What does a male chicken, a word representing the sound a large bell makes, and the Yiddish word for "snake" have to do with the word "penis"? Why would you censor such innocuous words?
      • markovs_gun 19 hours ago
        I feel like you can say cock, dong, and schlong on here too. It's a website for adults, it's not Tik Tok where you have to censor everything in these asinine ways.
  • rawling 1 day ago
    ... does one of the pictures jump occasionally?
  • devonsolomon 1 day ago
    Given that this is the internet, I highly suspect the author has left out a category.
    • deelly 1 day ago
      Third sentence on the page:

      > The image model I trained to filter out vandalism works very well, but it also hides a lot of ingenious drawings. You could see them if you’d activate the SHOW NON-HORSES setting, but most people do not.

    • ta8903 1 day ago
      Yep. There is a very distinct lack of horsegirls.