AI Art or How I Learned to Count Electric Sheep

 

Working on Besnowed as a part of Nights & Weekends has me thinking a lot about AI. I think the general memes and news trends have most people thinking about AI, but being close to so many builders at Buildspace has made me think of it as more than a toy.

There are multiple words there that either explain everything or mean nothing depending on how niche your knowledge of my life is.

Besnowed is my latest novel and you can read a draft by clicking here.

Nights & Weekends is a cool project from Buildspace that supports and motivates people to create and express themselves.

Buildspace is, however, very much entrenched in the world of San Francisco tech and as such attracts many people who are also looking to explore the cutting edge of that world. Today, that means a lot of projects looking into and using AI.

That has in turn exposed me to a lot of what modern advances in AI can do. From the steady stream of memes falling out of Chat GPT to the image at the top of this post, it is all rather impressive, bordering on unbelievable.

 

 

A little surreal in a hard to describe way, but otherwise decent enough.

 

 

Don't mind the ski lift of death. Or the midtown railroad?

These are still probably nice enough for a decent chunk of people. But these were the three best I was left with after having wrestled with multiple tools that all have strange names I forgot two seconds after closing them.

 

And that's not a dig at AI tools but rather what I want to highlight. Me, someone who knows nothing about the code or how it works or any of that, I typed "generate ai art" in a google search and a few hours later had pretty images readymade.

That's insane!

The process also felt familiar in an odd way. The way these art generators tend to work, or at least the ones I was using - I think some flavor of stable diffusion - is entirely based on a text prompt. I typed in a few words and phrases and the electronic brain then created what it thought fits.

It's a bit finicky though. In a way that reminded me of how you used to need to know how to use weird phrases to google correctly. It feels like gently coaxing the AI toward the idea rather than immediately receiving the exact output I expected.

 

And I often ended up tweaking words or just rerunning the process to try and find a slightly better version of what I had in my head. Or more truthfully, desperately trying to word things in a way that didn't result in a surreal nightmare.

Speaking of which, I originally walked down this path because I seemed to know via Twitter osmosis that AI animation is a thing and should be reasonably easy to do. At least one of those is true. After a few more hours trying to understand what tool I needed or wanted I was wrestling with words, trying to flirt with the AI again, ending up with something else pretty neat.

 

Is this creepy or cool? pic.twitter.com/oKctJMerVo

— John 커피 (@MobiusCoffee) May 2, 2023

Time Lapse or The Illusion of Time

Right before I left the states again about a month ago, my Mom bought be a GoPro because I had made vague references to wanting one and because she wanted to make me happy before I left town again.

After my initial post-buying guilt, I let myself think of how I wanted to use the camera. I liked the idea of it being useful as both a “picture camera” and a “movie camera” but also grossly underestimated how cool it is a time machine with its time lapse feature.

The first thing I thought I’d capture was our flight. It was hard figuring out where exactly I could put the camera, but ended up finding a good enough spot. It turned off a few times throughout the flight, and the shot isn’t the best, but it is interesting.

You can see how fast time passes when hours turn into seconds.

That led me to then recording the train ride from Paris to Tours.

And I’ve since been finding more and more things that I can film in time lapse. Some of them turn out pretty cool.

Others not so much.

It does make me excited to see what else I could film. I love playing with time and seeing things in a completely new perspective, but I’m not always sure how to film what I want to see. I’m sure if I stay at it I’ll get better and develop a better eye for it.

But for right now, it remains just out of grasp. Something mesmorizing but beyond my reach.

Time will tell how it plays out.

Mobile devices

The last time I tried writing something here from a mobile device I think it was with my kindle. Now in the world of the web shrinking to fit in your pocket I have to say it's a bit easier than it once was.

Or maybe I've just been living in the past. Either way there's some cool stuff going on and I'd like to try and keep a log of it here. I've thought about moving to another site like medium, but I do t think I could ever leave here.

The noise might not be nightly, but it is still there.