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

Traffic Lights

It's amazing how much a single stroke of luck can increase traffic to your website. I had it happen once here many years ago when Ramit Sethi tweeted out one of my posts.

The post that he tweeted out was a simple thing I wrote in about five minutes.

I only bring it up because something similar happened very recently over on Medium in regards to what Comatose writes. We spend a decent amount of time preparing written pieces every week. It's a collaborative effort and there's a wide variety of voices, and the posts even boosted by being published on The Coffeelicious, a popular Medium community.

However, last week I also made a quick comment on a top article on Medium. It took me at most 30 seconds to write and it now has more views than everything else we've published combined.

That big spike there is the comment I'm talking about.

What's more, even though that comment is getting thousands of views, practically no one who sees it clicks through to see any of our other work.

I'd noticed a similar thing happen where it seems most of the people who read our posts do not actually listen to the episode it's (sometimes loosely) tied to. That makes sense though, I imagine people on Medium want to consume more written media than audio.

It's interesting to see it actually happen with numbers though! I don't know if it's safe to say there's an easy way to catch people's attention, but I may have to experiment with the idea a bit more in the coming weeks.