Credit: Unity, Beat Mekanik, Free Music Archive, CC BY
This is a PSA done for AI but paid for by the Isaiah Beacon Foundation. It was inspired by election ads and included a call to action for listeners to vote for the Pro-AI legislation. It pushed pro-unity rhetoric between humans and AI. I chose a open source song that is techno and is titled “Unity,” which I figured was appropriate. I used a text to speech generator that had a robot voice, and I mixed the audios together in Audacity.
As my character, Isaiah Beacon, is an evangelist for AI, I decided to make a poster that would elevate AI from an object to a more human level. It definitely benefits Beacon’s message to anthropomorphize robots so people become more accepting of their use. I could definitely see him promoting a one-ness with AI as depicted in the graphic in the future as he believes in a sort of manifest destiny where humans and robots are destined to become one.
For this poster, I wanted it to have a catchphrase as the main eye grabber followed by the picture and then the explanation. I feel like I accomplished that here. I think propaganda is supposed to stir up some controversy and I think that the catchphrase and the graphic would incite pushback, but Isaiah would be able to backpedal with the explanation and say, “I only meant that we need to stop hating AI, nothing else.” I thought that using the blue theme would be interesting as there’s a contrast between the peaceful blues and the more confrontational font and wording choices.
This week was fairly frustrating, but I’ll start with the assignments that I liked. The Daily Creates went alright, and you can find them here. I especially like creating my own snow globe and made sure to include all of my favorite cartoon characters like Feathers McGraw, Garfield, and Scooby Doo.
I really like the Aggressive Tech assignment and how the story fits with my character. With each character related assignment, I get more and more happy about the character that I created because I feel like he fits so well with each. I have yet to find myself struggling with any of the character assignments because Isaiah’s character is easy to develop. You can find that post here.
The video assignment with Dr. Oblivion and Isaiah was very frustrating to complete, and if I had known I’d end up having so much difficulty with it I would’ve chosen the 3 assignments. For whatever reason, it took over 7 hours of processing with different attempts across different days to try and get the AI lip syncing to work. In the end, I had to give up as I had run out of time so I decided to create the audio version of the conversation between Isaiah and Dr. Oblivion. You can find that assignment here.
I definitely think that Dr. Oblivion and Isaiah Beacon do not share the same values and opinions when it comes to AI. Isaiah Beacon is very pro-AI and will do anything to evangelize while Dr. Oblivion is pessimistic about its uses. I decided to have Isaiah ask Dr. Oblivion for advice on how to convince others that AI is the best for humanity. Of course Dr. Oblivion is not a fan of Isaiah’s fervor that does not take account of the threats of AI.
As a note, I did try to make the video, but after 7+ hours of processing and trying again on different days the lip syncing never finished.
I think that Isaiah Beacon has a strong relationship with Aggressive Technologies as they both have the same goals. While neither ever explicitly promote each other, their collaborations are under the table. As Isaiah is a televangelist, Aggressive Tech is apprehensive to promote his programming out right because they don’t want to align themselves with a religious organization, but they do benefit from the pro-AI fervor that comes out of Isaiah and his congregation so they privately send him heaps of money. Aggressive Tech even comes to Isaiah on occasion for advice on positioning their arguments due to his decades of success when it comes to converting the general population into passionately pro-AI individuals.
There is potential for future collaborations between Isaiah and Aggressive Tech that are more obvious to the public if the general public decreases their AI skepticism.
This week was probably my best week out of the semester so far because I liked the assignments the most and I was able to start earlier than I normally do. It was definitely a relief not to be doing the assignments last minute. Both of the Daily Creates were easy/fun to do. I particularly enjoyed the creating a weirdly specific sign create. You can find both of my creates here.
The scene analysis may have been my favorite assignment so far. I remember doing a couple of similar assignments in high school where I did a text analysis of a music video and a video essay on the themes of an entire movie. While this assignment was easier time wise than a video essay, it still required me to be more specific as I was only analyzing one scene. I chose the Stepford Wives because, while I have never watched it, I know that there’s a lot of commentary about gender roles in the film and I was interested to see if there was an intersection between those themes and AI. For help with this analysis, Dr. Oblivion was very helpful in giving his insights. The hardest part of this assignment was looking through each of the clips to see which ones had the most meaningful moments of analysis. Once I chose the scene though, editing and doing a voiceover for the video was very easy. You can find the assignment here.
Finally, I took a look at my goals from the beginning of the semester. While I satisfied them on a surface level, I think there’s still some room for improvement. You can find that post here.
I feel my main goal from the beginning of the course was to play around with the customization elements offered by WordPress. I definitely accomplished this to some degree by picking a theme I like and I added the dropdown menu. While I added the menu, I haven’t completely set it up and I haven’t been updating, so this is an area for potential improvement. In terms of future goals, it may be nice to mess around with the widgets and header options to create more cohesion across all of my blog posts.
I decided to go with the 1975 Stepford Wives film for this assignment because I think that the intersection of fears of gender roles and AI creates an interesting discussion. Dr. Oblivion was especially helpful with this research and pointed out ideas I hadn’t thought of, like how women may fear being seen or used as a tool in the same way that we would use AI as a tool. I used Clipchamp as that it the editing software that comes with my computer and it is what I am most familiar with. The editing process wasn’t bad at all. I think the most time consuming part of this assignment was picking out the right scene and writing down notes for analysis. I wanted to pick a scene that was fairly easy to analyze with simple elements such as sound design and color contrasting, and I think this scene fits the bill. I had done a film analysis for another class in the past, but I think this was even more difficult because you had to pay more attention and pick apart such a small clip. Overall I enjoyed this assignment!
I started off this week with the Daily Creates. I think whatever algorithm used to select the daily creates was on our side this week, and there were some really easy ones to complete. In other weeks, it may have taken my awhile to figure out how to go about solving/ figuring out the daily create, so I was grateful for the lighter load. I first started by using the Mutsuacen website and creating a “Swag” floating in the wind and surrounded by colorful dots. I then had to determine the meaning of a more ominous image, and I decided that it was the secret entrance to a military base. Finally, I was asked to write a message for a sky writer, and I couldn’t get a “drink more ovaltine” out of my head so I went with it. You can find these posts here.
I was a little bit nervous about the 3 audio assignments as it had been years since I last messed around with Audacity, but luckily it wasn’t bad at all. I mostly focused on posts that allowed me to mix different sounds together for my AI/character implementations. I also enjoyed the Chrome Music Labs assignment as it allowed me to view the music more visually. The blog post can be found here.
The audio storytelling assignment left me stumped for awhile, so I decided to go with a more basic formula with a dragon and knight in shining armor. My favorite part of this assignment was collecting and listening through all of the free audio resources to find the audios that suited my story just right. I thought this assignment would take me longer to do, but it was fairly easy to think of different sounds that needed to be in the story. The blog can be found here.
The radio shows assignment was my favorite for the week because I feel like the radio show project is so perfect for my character, Isaiah Beacon. He already has his own media empire and is always looking for more avenues to preach his pro-AI gospel, so I feel like he will really take advantage of the radio show idea. He will definitely be very confrontational with anyone who disagrees with him. You can read more about that here.
For my audio storytelling, I decided to tell the story of a knight saving a little girl from a dragon. Our hero starts with a walk in the woods until he hears a roar of a dragon nearby. Then a little girl screams for help and our hero breaks into a sprint. Once he reaches the dragon, the knight unsheathes his sword and fights the dragon. The dragon then collapses dramatically and everyone in the local village gives praise to the brave knight.