Posts Tagged → ai
AI and literature
I recently got an invitation to test the MidJourney beta, which is an amazing new AI app that generates images from text inputs. I’ve been playing with it for a while but I also spent hours just watching other people using it in a dedicated Discord server. It was a very funny and interesting experience and I got some amazing visual results, especially when I came up with the idea of feeding the algorithm a literary input instead of a merely descriptive sentence. Here are some images the app produced me based on some famous books incipits.
imagine/ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984

imagine/ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984, 1949

imagine/ “Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. – Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away, 1986

imagine/ Once upon a time , there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. – Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups, 2001

Infinite Images

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst experimented with the new OpenAI DALL·E 2 software and they wrote a very interesting report about it. Check it here.
A microwave with a soul
YouTuber Lucas Rizzotto fitted his microwave with voice-controlled AI in order to resurrect his childhood imaginary friend “Magnetron”. But at some point things got scary…
DALL·E 2
“Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has released its latest creation, called DALL-E2 — a genuinely impressive demonstration of the power of generative adversarial networks. The system can turn simple text descriptions into photorealistic images. While that may sound like a simple task, it’s deceptively difficult for a machine learning algorithm to pick up on the cues of natural language, nevermind produce the crisp, evocative images that OpenAI is showing off.”
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Uncanny Robot Podcast
Photography and AI

“Apple’s newest smartphone models use machine learning to make every image look professionally taken. That doesn’t mean the photos are good.”
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The Weird and Wonderful World of AI Art

This article contains an interesting timeline of recent AI art applications, from 2015 to 2022:
“The AI art we had before 2021 was intriguing, but tended to be abstract, esoteric, and just not that relatable to a human. The AI art we have now is fully controllable, and can be about whatever you want it to be. What changed? Well, there’s something to be said for the new wave of publicity and interest, which certainly accelerated the pace of our art-generation techniques. But the main development is the rise of multimodal learning.”
Another good read on the same topic is Clip Art and the New Aesthetics of AI by Luba Elliott, which also mentions this amazing work by Memo Atken.
US Copyright Office refuses to register AI-generated work

“Can a work entirely created by a machine be protected by copyright?”
“Entirely” seems quite a big word to me.
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AI-Generated Andy Warhol

“Continuing a trend that has been controversial among filmmakers, a new Andy Warhol documentary series, coming to Netflix next month, will resurrect the Pop artist using artificial intelligence. In the show, Warhol can be heard reading from his diaries. That voice, however, is not the artist’s own but rather the product of AI made to sound like him.”
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AI may already be gaining consciousness
“OpenAI’s top researcher has made a startling claim this week: that artificial intelligence may already be gaining consciousness.”
Alexa: define consciousness.
Babylonian Vision
Babylonian Vision is a great project by Nora Al-Badri. How to use deepfake in an inventive and surprising way.
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Inside Inside

“Created by Douglas Edric Stanley, Inside Inside is an interactive installation remixing video games and cinema. In between, a neural network creates associations from its artificial understanding of the two, generating a film in real-time from gameplay using images from the history of cinema.”
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The Dungeon of Unexplained Phenomena
The Internet Dungeon of Unexplained Phenomena is a file cabinet of AI-generated paranormal horrors lurking in America’s mundane corners, emerging from prompts supplied by author and narrative designer Leigh Alexander.
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DALL·E. An AI that creates images from text
Ok, this looks super fun: “we’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language“.
Uninvited. An Horror AI Experience

“UNINVITED, by Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN, is a puzzling, disturbing but strangely seducing work. It rejects human viewers as much as it draws them in. A mix of dystopia, scifi and reality, the film echoes our confusion about the machines which intelligence (or utter stupidity) we sometimes fail to fully appreciate.”
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GANksy: AI-powered street art
AI mindfuck
Zoombot
Anatomy of an AI System

“At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed.”
Holly Herndon’s Eternal Video
“Holly Herndon’s video for her dizzying new song “Eternal” follows the lonely journey of a machine as it analyzes and connects to a human face. It’s blurry and disorienting: a collage of eyes, ears, and mouths materializing in front of the camera, soundtracked by one of the most direct melodies Herndon has ever composed. Synth-orchestra blasts beam in from Y2K pop radio. A dance rhythm keeps stalling out while it’s buffering. “Right in front of my eyes,” a choir sings, slowly, in unison”.
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Dio, an AI Sculpture

“After Snell finished creating the 3D model, he disassembled the computer he made it on and ground it to dust using a specially-designed sealed box. This included the computer’s enclosure, its hard drive, its RAM and its graphics processing unit. He then 3D-printed a mold of Dio and cast the sculpture into this mold using resin and the ground remains of the computer.”
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Is technology bringing history to life or distorting it?

“It feels a little like we’ve been given the ability to time travel,” said Seth Denbo, director of digital initiatives at the American Historical Association.







