Emerging Tech - ARTD 413

[iankersey]

RAWR!ai

Final project! An app with 200 generated dinos, complete with names, scientific names and backstories. Images generated with custom trained machine learning model using Runway. Names, scientific names and backstories generated with custom models trained using runway (one model for each).  A continuation of a collaborative art project, d1no.club.

During the creation of this project, I was thinking about a lot of ways that machine learning implementations affect our society -- racist and sexist algorithms, humans becoming part of algorithms (like workers in Amazon warehouses, Turks, workers manually transcribing voice commands from Siri and Alexa), AI creating art. In the end, I found myself with a critique of what I love to critique the most, capitalism, using tactics employed from my favorite type of art -- pop art (hi Andy!). This project plays with the ideas of artistic creation itself, starting with a dataset of drawings created by humans, and then fed to a machine which now can create an infinite amount of unique pieces of art. 

I really wanted to critique the “Etsyfication” of today’s consumer capitalism -- mass consumption that is “unique” and “tailored” to our individual tastes, marketed as somehow ethically “good” for society and our world. But it all is still just as damaging to our world as cheap plastic toys.  

[iankersey]

[iankersey]

From our food training...

[iankersey]

[iankersey]

kerseyi/randomGeneratorRunwayML

Random Generator for RunwayML models that take vectors as input - kerseyi/randomGeneratorRunwayML

[iankersey]

Follow d1no (@d1no.club) to never miss photos and videos they post.

[iankersey]

[iankersey]

[iankersey]

Fed 1000 hand drawn dinos into a model. Trained that model on another model. This is what runway came up with.

#runwayml #machinelearning #dinosaurs

[iankersey]

[iankersey]

Open RunwayML

[iankersey]

https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773

https://www.excavating.ai/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/oakland-city-follows-san-franciscos-lead-in-banning-facial-recognition-tech/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/artificial-intelligence-is-now-used-predict-crime-is-it-biased-180968337/

[iankersey]

The Secret History of Facial Recognition

Sixty years ago, a sharecropper’s son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished. Who was Woody Bledsoe, and who was he working for?

To read later...

[iankersey]

Response to “Art in America” Articles

One thing I found fascinating was Bense’s idea of boiling aesthetics down to an algorythm. “Bense’s theory was a short 1965 essay called “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” which presented a set of schemas for evaluating aesthetic states alongside a set of formulas for stimulating it through “a methodical combination of planning and chance”—irregular or randomized elements combined with ordered ones.“At first blush, this idea seemed appalling and even impossible to me -- but then I started thinking -- can we quantify aesthetic relationally? It seems to me that something like this would suck all of the subjectivity, even humanity out of art, which in and of itself can be a tool that allows us to reflect on our own humanity. But the idea of creating a machine to create art using these guidelines is interesting. 

What is far more interesting to me than a machine generating art however is artists working together alongside a machine, algorithm or AI to generate art, such as Sougwen Chung’s collaboration with a machine.

[iankersey]

Mind vs. Machine

Things that I found interesting in this reading were mainly about how fluid the definition of intelligence and humanity are, and that we should be treating those concepts as dynamic and not static. The reading made me curious about how we as humans have some sort of need to set ourselves apart from the rest of nature, which is most likely influenced by culture. I like the idea of looking at machines as compliments to humanity rather than competitors, and that our relationship with machines will always be shifting.

This reading brings up an early chatbot called ELIZA, which reminded me of a podcast about it that I listened too not long ago. In the podcast, the hosts talk about how ELIZA got the psychology world thinking about using the chatbot with real humans, as a sort of virtual psychologist. The thought was that there could be kiosks on street corners where people could check in and have sessions. I would like to create one of these kiosk psychiatrist for my final project, possibly powered by face / mood detection. I think it would be interesting to use a genderless voice for the psychologist, and a face that would change based on some attributes of the person using the kiosk.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-eliza-effect/

[iankersey]

Meet Q. The First Genderless Voice.

Q is the First Genderless Voice, created to end gender bias in AI assistants.

[iankersey]

How I Hid From Facial Recognition Surveillance Systems

In a world of increasingly sophisticated facial-recognition technology, a drastic technique can throw the machines off your trail.