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Would you want to visualize your dreams? Might it be fun to try? There’s an AI for that — dozens of them, in fact — and even if catching those internal flights of fancy doesn’t capture your imagination, turning an AI lose on the surreal, the subjective, and the weird could be the best thing to happen to art since… well, ever.
article here
That’s the positive
spin on the human art versus synthetic media debate that erupted into the open
this year following OpenAI’s release of DALL-E 2.
It and other
text-to-image generation engines are devilishly easy to use — which perhaps
explains the angst of some artists wishing to keep their work shrouded in
mystery.
The text used to
produce AI images with algorithmic tools like Midjourney, DALL-E 2 or Craiyon
is called a prompt, and there is a school of thought believing that there could
be a role in the future for “prompters” with creative input into everything
from script development to music composition.
Some worry these
new AI tools might threaten the livelihoods of artists, provide new and
relatively easy ways to generate propaganda and deepfakes, and
perpetuate biases.
However, Jason
Scott, an archivist at the Internet Archive and a prolific explorer of AI art
programs, as well as being a traditional artist himself, says he is “no more
scared of this than I am of the fill tool” — a reference to the feature in
computer paint programs that allows users to flood a defined space with
specific colors or patterns.
In a conversation
at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic executive editor Adrienne
LaFrance, Scott discussed his quest to understand how these programs “see.”
He called them
“toys” and “parlor game[s],” and did a live demonstration of DALL-E 2, testing
prompts such as “the moment the dinosaurs went extinct illustrated in Art
Nouveau style,” or “Chewbacca on the cover of The Atlantic magazine
in the style of a Renaissance painting.”
Scott isn’t naive
about the greater issues at play — “Everything has a potential to be used as a
weapon” — but at least for a moment, he showed us that the tech need not be
apocalyptic.
Rather than limit
AI tools to replicating, albeit superfast, ideas of things we already know
(prompt: “tables and a cat in a room in Picasso style”), we should explore
further into the realm of things that seem improbable. Things that perhaps
humans are simply not capable of visualizing because our language (the words
which dictate how we order and understand the world if you’re in a
Wittgensteinian frame of mind) is inadequate.
But not so the
intelligent machine.
“The weirder and
more creative you get with this toy, the more fun it gets,” says Scott. “I see
a future where you’ll be able to say, “Could I read a book from the 1930s where
it’s got a happy ending and it takes place in Boston?” Or, “Can I have
something where they fell in love but they’re not in love at the end?”
He wants to push
the “toy” to see what happens when prompted with juxtapositions that — were you
to script them into a film — would be unrealizable or nonsensical.
For instance, here
is Scott’s “lion using a laptop in the style of an old tapestry.”
This is “Santa
Claus riding a motorcycle in the style of 1970s Kodachrome.”
This is “Godzilla
at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
These are “bears
doing podcasts.”
This is “GoPro
footage of the D-Day landing.”
Scott wants to
understand what the AI systems are seeing? “It’s so easy as a parlor game to
say, ‘Draw a cellphone as if it was done as a Greco-Roman statue.’ But what
about doing a bittersweet sky, or trying to draw a concerned highway? What does
it see?”
It is interlocuter
LaFrance who brings up the idea of being able to visualize dreams.
“What other sorts
of things — fiction comes to mind — can we imagine but don’t normally get to
visualize?” she asks.
The human mind
boggles, but AI has only just gotten started.
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