404 Media
404 Media
When life gives you a surveillance state, make surveillancestateade.
art
Disconnect
DisconnectPitch work is basically when a director, writer, producer, or any combination of those get together with an artist and say, “We want to pitch to studios and we need imagery.” All of that has now been given to generative AI.Fascinating interview with concept artist Karla Ortiz about the impact of generative AI on her industry.
stablediffusionlitigation.com
stablediffusionlitigation.com"At minimum, Stable Diffusion’s ability to flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists."Describing image models as sophisticated collage tools takes some of the mystery out of AI and makes it clear work is being used without consent. This essay has a clear description of the diffusion process.
YouTube
YouTubeI'm so tired of hearing about crypto scams. This video takes the time to explain why that world of NFTs and crypto is such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. This explainer is well done and worth the time and I hope it can help our collective consciousness move on.
See also: David Rosenthal’s EE380 Talk
See also: David Rosenthal’s EE380 Talk
Summer Breeze
The Leaf Aquatic
Red Flower #everyfilter
industrial gradients
retro robot
daisy impression
sunflower impression
VQGAN + CLIP + Unreal Engine + Surrealism
I enjoyed Rusty's explanation of the VQGAN + CLIP Unreal Engine trick in Today in Tabs yesterday (subscribers only, sorry). The gist is that people have found a way to improve images created with machine learning by including the phrase "unreal engine" (yes, the Mandalorian-powering video game technology) with their prompt when they ask a GAN to generate an image of that prompt.
Rusty included a link to a colab notebook that could run this particular GAN—VQGAN+CLIP—so I started playing around with it. I know next to nothing about AI or Machine Learning, but I can run code! I tried out the unreal engine trick and the results reminded me of Yves Tanguy paintings.
My next thought was, "why not feed it some lines from surrealist poetry"? (Or their English translations anyway.) So here are a few of those:
"a meaningless castle rolled along the surface of the earth."
– André Breton, Soluble Fish
"it is the star struck under my heel in the night."
– Robert Desnos, The Landscape
"The river I have under my tongue"
– Paul Eluard, The River
"where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire"
– Tristan Tzara, The Great Lament of my Obscurity Three
The other day I linked to Nick Cave saying that AI lacks the nerve to create great music. How about visual art? Seeing machines struggle to make what humans make is interesting, but I don't think the results are inspired. Again, I have no idea how to tune these tools to get more interesting results and maybe further tuning or more attempts would create better images. Right now I think we haven't progressed beyond Hayao Miyazaki's thoughts on art by artificial intelligence. (spoiler alert: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.")
Rusty included a link to a colab notebook that could run this particular GAN—VQGAN+CLIP—so I started playing around with it. I know next to nothing about AI or Machine Learning, but I can run code! I tried out the unreal engine trick and the results reminded me of Yves Tanguy paintings.
My next thought was, "why not feed it some lines from surrealist poetry"? (Or their English translations anyway.) So here are a few of those:
"a meaningless castle rolled along the surface of the earth."– André Breton, Soluble Fish
"it is the star struck under my heel in the night."– Robert Desnos, The Landscape
"The river I have under my tongue"– Paul Eluard, The River
"where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire"– Tristan Tzara, The Great Lament of my Obscurity Three
The other day I linked to Nick Cave saying that AI lacks the nerve to create great music. How about visual art? Seeing machines struggle to make what humans make is interesting, but I don't think the results are inspired. Again, I have no idea how to tune these tools to get more interesting results and maybe further tuning or more attempts would create better images. Right now I think we haven't progressed beyond Hayao Miyazaki's thoughts on art by artificial intelligence. (spoiler alert: "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.")