“I have a machine which is capable of crossing the barriers of time and space. I will tell you its secrets if you do not explode the bomb,”
This is Marie’s favorite line from Dr. Who and the Daleks. You can often find her watching this after the kids are put to sleep.
“I have a machine which is capable of crossing the barriers of time and space. I will tell you its secrets if you do not explode the bomb,”
This is Marie’s favorite line from Dr. Who and the Daleks. You can often find her watching this after the kids are put to sleep.
This week I was tasked with doing Middlebury Art’s demystifying Ai- digital detox assignment. I used two AI photo generators to create art based on a prompt.
My prompt was J Cole on Mount Everest.
Image 1:
While both weren’t what I was expecting this image was the worst. The character has no facial features, no distinctive characteristics, and looks out of place and uncomfortable. I know that technically I would be uncomfortable in the cold but still. This character could be anything and I feel as though the perspective is wonky I am seeing certain characteristics of the mountains that I shouldn’t be able to see or wouldn’t see in something man made.
Image 2:
https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img
This art was the best out of the two options. The AI produced more distinguishing characteristics and I could tell that it TRIED to recreate Jcoles characteristics. I am also not sure why AI has a problem with creating hands. In both of these, the hands are in the pockets which is okay but it would be nice to see some differentiation in poses. The mountain here, however, is blurry.
I don’t see AI taking any artists’ jobs any time soon. AI will need a lot of advancement to replicate the complexity of human art. Also, Ai creates art that feels tone-deaf to me. As of now, it is not possible for AI to eventually take an artist’s job but it could happen in the future.
Chip Kidd says that everything that is not made naturally is by design. From the buildings you frequent to the food that you consume, design is in almost all things today. I would argue that design is what makes today, today, and the future, the future. It influences how we think, and what we choose, and creates memorable experiences. The articles that I read (mostly about Chip Kidd) shine light on some of the creative processes behind how creators design.
Graphic designers give every story a face or an impression of what you will get yourself into. They think about what stories look life and give form to content while keeping balance in their medium. They want to convey a message without treating their audience like morons. Its either a show or a tell, not both. Sometimes, when designers start they do so without knowing what they are going to do, but when they do start they have to stop when keeping going would be too much. If you are a book designer your responsibilities are to the “audience, the publisher, and most of all the author”- Chip Kidd. It’s like they are looking through the wardrobe of the content and putting the best outfit forward so that you pick that up and want to know more. I didn’t know that I was influenced by the covers of movies and books so much!
Movie posters are the best example of this creative process. Each genre has specific criteria to portray what the movie is about for example horror tends to have a black-and-white background, some red highlights, and very specific fonts for the genre. Comedy tends to have a huge red lettering and either a specific set up of characters or a scene that looks like it has been pulled from the movie itself. The white backgrounds of the comedy gives focus to the subjects of the movie poster (usually main characters) and emphasis on red lettering. If the main characters are very well known then usually the font will be smaller and the picture of the actors will be large. Vice versa, the smaller actors have larger text and the actors in the for ground small.
We learn about negative space in High School English but I never thought too much about it until revisiting the topic through this assignment. The use of negative space is also used in graphic novels and comics. In comics and graphic novels what is happening between the panels is more important than what is going on in the panels. The use of negative space, fonts, and panel content to get the reader to fill in the blanks, graphic design makes you pay attention to what is not there and fill in the blanks for yourself.
In summary, graphic design is about telling a story or a piece of a story without explicitly stating it. They ask themselves what a story looks like. Graphic designers take a lot into account when making designs and it’s all in respect to the audience, publisher, and the author. While there is a blueprint that they can follow to show that it’s a horror, thriller, comedy, or action, a lot of the decisions are ultimately up to the designer. Its really interesting to know what goes into creating what we consume visually each and every day. When looking at anything with a sign I don’t really appreciate the time, consideration, and work that went into it. Moving forward, I will definitely look at things from a different perspective.
This week started off to a good start with new assignments to try, the first daily create that I did was a little confusing at first but I soon got the hang of it over the course of the week. For the first daily create, I took a screenshot of my three-word map and then set out to find pictures. My Map’s name was Magma-Shut-Swing… What does that have to do with anything in Richmond… Most cities have swings but I haven’t seen magma back home! I then took the picture and put it into a photoshop editor and added cut out photos of a girl on a swing and magma, with an apple notification of what was going on in the picture. The notification read: Alert! Magma and swings are in Richmond, Virginia.
Daily Create #2 was easier and I just needed to take a photo of my ceiling and post it to Mastodon (the links to all my assignments and posts are down at the end!). Daily Create #3 admittedly took a little bit more of time because I was unsure about how to proceed with creating my own version. I decided to just wing it and draw it on my Ipad using procreate. Daily Create #4 was more about how I feel on rainy days because in California on Wednesday January 24th was gloomy on the cameras. I feel as though some people really like rainy days and while for others it can be really overwhelming to deal with along with depression. Daily create #5 entailed creating a emergency sign to safely exit from a toxic internet and I felt as though the safest way to exit a toxic internet is to unplug the internet and go to sleep so I inserted pictures of both and then posted it to mastodon.
Let’s talk about the assignments from the bank! For my storytelling through text mashup assignment, I didn’t have a friend readily available to do this with me so I opted for a third-party app to build my story. I was not familiar with the certain features of the app so some of the timing could have been better in retrospect, but overall that assignment was the easiest to complete. I also decided to connect this assignment to the AI topic that we are on. Next, I completed a guess the story from the web assignments. I was tasked with inserting 5 gifs to give hint to the movie that I was alluding to. I chose an Ai movie and found some pretty cool gifs to add to the post and one gif specifically is more related to pop culture of today. If you reverse search the gif you should be able to get a name for the celebrity and ultimately the name. I thought that adding that hint would help bring everything together as a final haha once you go through the rest of the hints. I will insert the name of the movie below along with the work for the week! These are a few of my favorite things is the only assignment that I did that wasn’t directly related to the topic. I began this assignment by taking a picture of my dorm room. I then had to find a way to highlight certain subjects of my photo and keep the others black and white. So I opted to throw the picture into an app on my Ipad called procreate and hand outline the objects in the photo. If you zoom in close enough you can see my shaky outlines of the objects.
Lastly, let’s talk about the other assignments from this week. The first assignment that I did was the Manifesto assignment. When reading the techno-optimist manifesto I found myself intrigued about certain aspects of the positive view of AI and to me others just seemed blatantly oblivious or too optimistic. I tried to convey these in my response and Dr. oblivion agreed that my argument was valid however, some of the responses that I got from him were very attitude filled. I didn’t take any offense to this however, in order to get a full response I inserted the prompt 3 times and combined them. This also helped with the issue where he gets cut off. In one of my responses he took my argument and the techno optimist perspective and responded separately in the same response, or at least tried to, but ultimately when he went to respond to the second part he got cut off. I also used this same method when asking questions about The Creator and my review to compile my rewrite. Dr. Oblivion too longer than any other program I used this week to get used to but we figured it out by the end. Finally, I introduced my course character Mrs. Marie Pearl, who some have found to be suspicious, however, she is just a regular person who enjoys some weird things at times. Everyone has their quirks! I really enjoyed creating her character, and she was built using a few people I know. I took certain aspects and added them to her character profile. I also found that completing the dossier before writing the character introduction really helped speed up the process. I was able to add more details than I added in the dossier, and overall compiled a good introduction to her.
Daily Creates:
Assignments from the assignment bank:
Other Assignments from this week:
Marie is a middle-aged woman, who is always dressed in business casual wear. She is slightly overweight but not fat (so don’t let her tell you so). She is a white woman with a slight curl to her hair and has moles distributed evenly across the skin like freckles with one protruding from the left side of her nose. She easily turns red and wears cat eyeglasses with frames that her kids picked out for her. She is a call Center Manager and is a widow to her late husband of 15 years and her high-school sweet-heart Tevon.
She prefers the mundane. She rarely ventures outside of the normal day-to-day life routine. And when asked questions about her political or personal opinions she tends to avoid the topic. There isn’t much out of the ordinary about her except for her profound love for grilled cheese sandwiches with Duke’s mayonnaise served with Coca-Cola.
Some things only her close family would know is that she doesn’t show favoritism towards colors. If you ask her about her favorite color, she will say the rainbow. Her most prized possession is the bracelet her daughter gave her for her 17th Mother’s day. Her favorite movie is Doctor Who (The Dalek films) 1960’s. Her favorite book is Harry Potter, she read the Spanish version in middle school because her god fearing mom thought it was the devils bible. As her children will tell you, her favorite thing to say is I’m not mad, I am just disappointed. She will say that about anything and everything.
Here are a few of my favorite things- visual assignments
This is a picture of my tiny dorm room. In this picture there are only a few of my favorite things highlighted.
Computer- I love being able to multitask on my computer.
Fake vines- One of the few things that I was able to take from my house before I got kicked out.
Bonnie- My emotional support animal of five years.
PlayStation- This occupies my time when I am not studying.
My comfort blanket- While my favorite blanket is at home because it has a huge tear in it I was able to bring my comforter-sized plush blanket that helps me sleep at night.
There is no reason to lie
Enjoy this short texting story
Usually in shows, books, and movies, we get a lot of pessimistic views about the advancement of technology. While some of the examples we are confronted with could turn out to be true, there is a lot left to be said about the opposing view. The view shows AI in all of its light and the advantages that come with it. With this, the question arises “How can we be cautious about the evolution of AI, without letting it drown out the advantages?”
In the movie The Creator, which I reviewed last week, we see both sides of AI. The bad and the good but ultimately by the end of the movie we get swayed into the opinion that AI can be good for the human race or in some capacity show a little sympathy for the human components of AI. There is a big gray area about the morality of AI and to what extent we push it and the biases that surround it. There is sort of a spectrum of techno-pessimists being far on one side and techno-optimists on the other side. The question is “Where do I fall on this spectrum?”
We have become familiar with the pessimistic side of AI through it being highly incorporated in media coverage, but let’s take a look at the optimistic side. The techno-optimists manifesto is all about the major misconceptions about AI from their standpoint. How technology is the basis of life (which is true.), and how many have sought to demoralize it politically. They offer the view that anything can be solved by AI and in the future it will build a utopia. While they do give a lot of insight into some benefits of the advancement of technology, it seems that their faith is unwavering and without caution.
I believe that the advancement of technology is inevitable. The wheel was considered technology at a point in time, and so was fire, and now AI. There is no life without the advancement of knowledge and technology. We are the basis of knowledge, whether or not we like it. How it will be regulated is another question. Observing both sides of the argument leaves me with more questions than answers really and without a place to stand firm on the spectrum. Where you stand is up to you, but make sure you do it with the proper education on the topic.
When I asked Dr. Oblivion for feedback on this review, he said that he is more on the cautious side of the spectrum and that nothing that I presented in my speech about the long-standing debate is new. While it isn’t new, all the points I presented are valid. This feedback was compiled from three responses from Dr.Oblivion to get the most accuracy.
If you read my First Film review… here is the rewrite with help from DS106’s AI teaching assistant Dr. Oblivion.
The Creator is a highly enjoyable movie that came out just last year, yet it has easily become my favorite movie about Ai. The movie shows not only the downfalls but the advantages that AI can have, while also addressing concerns about AI as it becomes increasingly powerful. It goes into the moral implications of creating higher AI and how it can impact human society.
The Creator is a Science fiction movie about a brilliant scientist who invents an advanced AI and an American soldier who falls in love with her. Originally on a mission to find the scientist who created Ai, the soldier finds himself falling in love and marrying while deep undercover. Then heartbreak strikes when he believes his child and wife are dead, until on another mission evidence of her being alive surfaces and he is led on a journey to find her. The soldier ventures into a world where AI is apart of everyday life and robots are lifelike, even to go as far as imitating soldiers, girlfriends, and teachers. The movie explores the implications of integrating AI into daily life and creating it with such lifelike features. The amazing story, cinematography, and characters make this a movie to rewatch.
*whew this is way shorter and straight to the point! Thank you, Dr. Oblivion!