This first one was an AI generated photo of Mona Lisa if she was drawn in 2020 during the Covid era. Putting a modern spin onto this historical painting is kinda hilarious now that I look at it.
Next was to use the bead art tool website to turn any image of my choosing into bead art. I like how the city picture I used turned very linear. Some of the buildings look like they’re spelling out a word, like in the far left where the number 8 looks like it’s drawn.
The last create of the week was to upload my interpretation of “Agent 106”. I drew inspiration from the game Valorant and used the agent Cypher as my rendition of Agent 106. The use of cameras and other tech tools makes Cypher somewhat of a media enthusiast himself.
I feel as though this assignment’s entire concept went against the moral compass of Hwei, as he is completely opposed to the idea of selling out his ideas to a huge corporation. However, I decided to add more depth to his character by making him realize that he doesn’t have the funds to continue to invent robots, and he needs the cash to continue his master plan.
Here are my daily creates for the week, as usual. More detail within the post itself.
I also took spring break to figure out what I’d like to do for my radio show. I looked through some of the blog posts on radioshowideas, and I stumbled upon Mustafa’s post. His character is a fugitive that is hiding from the government, but has strong opinions on AI and it’s dangerous potentials. Mustafa highlighted how he wanted to create a show about individuals talking about AI technologies, but then having more of the character’s stories and personalities come into the equation to create more of a story driven show with drama. We’re currently thinking about having our two characters interact, but Hwei will get a bit aggressive and try to assert his intellectual dominance, creating tension while Rikaro will slowly unintentionally reveal that he is running from the law. We’ll have to find a third member that can round out our show, but I’m looking forward to what we can create as a team!
For the week overall, I’m proud of how I worked on small things over spring break, and for the first time ever in my DS106 career, I’ve turned my weekly summary in on Monday! Here’s to more good work and less procrastination.
My name is Hwei, I am a researcher of sorts and I’m here to pitch a product that you may be interested in acquiring. As much as I disagree with your grandeur plans of acquiring the world by becoming a megacorporation that controls all, I am in dire need of funding for my project, and would like to sell this product to you at the right price. Again, I am not suggesting that I am supporting your endeavors in further expansion. I am just doing what is necessary for my own vision.
Synthesia is an AI audio and video generator that uses preexisting human-like models and takes in text to create a speech video. The human model can be adjusted to meet specific requirements such as gender, age, height, and type of voice. There are already a few preset backgrounds and specs as well, such as the sales pitch and compliment modes.
This tool can be used for Aggressive Technologies to further cut costs on physical front end marketing teams and to hone in on the calculations and strategies to sell products to a wide range of customers. As AI becomes more commonplace and prevalent in the market, I believe that society will come to accept AI models as the new norm, and will be receptive to the new style of marketing and public outreach.
This is an example of what this application can do for you. If you’d like, please reach back out and I’ll be happy to negotiate pricing with you. Just know that this is a piece of my revolutionary research that your corporation could never replicate, so please make sure you think over this carefully and make the correct decision.
Tapping into my research of color usage on posters helped me create something that my course character would advocate for. I went more into detail on the reasoning behind the message in my post.
Next was the PSA. This one also related to my course character and allowed me to add a new layer of depth to Hwei as someone who has a messiah complex. I used technology that I explored during the audio week of the semester, and it all meshed nicely into a very convincing audio clip.
Here are my daily creates for the week. I went into more detail on the roundup and Mastodon posts.
Finally, I did my usual weekly commenting and also created a post on how Hwei would react to my classmate’s posts. One of the propaganda poster designs in particular was very relevant to my character, and I wrote a reflection on how it related to my own story.
I’m hoping that maybe I can collaborate with the creator of Isaiah Beacon for the upcoming group project, as I can see both of our characters bouncing off of each other’s ideas in a very natural way.
This first one was a response to my own iteration of the “castle on the hill”. It is a very different from a traditional castle, but it was fitting from my point of view.
The next one was to share a picture that conveys joy.
I shared a picture of Jannik Sinner winning his first Grand Slam title. That first title winning feeling is definitely one filled with joy, and I immediately went to this moment to share as my daily create for the day.
The last create for this week was playing around with a Net Art generator to see what it would give me.
The keyword I used was “Space”, but I highlighted how the surface of earth looks like it’s going through a volcanic apocalypse. A little scary but maybe this was supposed to be a mashup of modern technology and prehistoric earth.
This poster resonated with Hwei, as he is also pushing for the acceptance of AI. The visual representation of how humans and AI can be linked in the mind and body directly aligns with his research. While Hwei’s initial goal was to create an entirely new robot civilization that would attain absolute perfection, Isaiah Beacon and his activism towards creating unity between AI and humans is an interesting idea that piqued Hwei’s interest.
The potential for humans to be turned into robots in the future is something that Hwei might experiment with in the future. The only concern would be the potential ideological clashes between the two individuals, as Hwei will prioritize AI prospering over humankind, no matter the circumstance, while Isaiah would like both entities to coexist.
Regardless of the outcome, Hwei would like to collaborate with Isaiah Beacon in the future to push his own agenda even further.
I created a public service announcement based on something my course character would put out to the world. Here is the script:
This is a public service announcement. I repeat, this is a public service announcement. In approximately the next 5 years, our lord and savior Hwei will be bestowing upon this world, a new life form. To prepare for the coming of the new civilization, please remain calm and accept these new beings into your lives. In the meanwhile, please boycott the Aggressive Technologies corporation, as they are actively working towards the downfall of mankind. Again, please do not support their corruption, and welcome the new civilization with open arms.
I used a few basic tools we’ve used already in this course to create this audio. I first went to freesound.org to find an eerie robot backtrack that would aid in the atmosphere of this PSA. Then I did a quick search for a robot AI voice generator that would read out the script for me. Finally, I spliced it all together using Audacity and exported the file to upload into SoundCloud. All of these tasks were pretty easy to put together, since all of this work was practiced during the audio focused segment of DS106, which helped out a ton.
For context on the PSA, my course character Hwei sent out one of his robot creations to signal the coming of his new civilization of perfect automated beings. As he prefers to avoid being in the spotlight as of yet, he programmed one of his loyal servants to be his messenger. The script almost feels like the coming of Christ and Christianity, and the background noise gave it an eerie twist.
The denouncing of Aggressive Technologies and the reasoning behind it is a reflection of Hwei’s delusions and blind hatred towards the megacorporation. It’s quite ironic that he is calling out the megacorporation for corruption and the potential detriment to humanity, while he himself is actively working to replace humankind altogether. In essence, he believes that the robot civilization is the greater of the two evils, although he might not actually believe that what he is doing is evil at all. If this was a real PSA, I wonder how seriously it would be taken by the world. As more of Hwei’s robots assert their presence in the real world, the opinion of the world may just might change out of fear.
For this assignment, I designed a propaganda poster to push the agenda of my course character Hwei.
I went with louder design language, finding an image of a robot colored in bright red and oranges, and then overlaid that with text highlighted with red and pink outlines. The white text seemed like a good choice to contrast from the red and orange robot and to make it more legible.
As for the context, it is a message being sent to all of humanity to embrace the coming of AI and the robots being produced by Hwei. He believes that these robots are the future of society. Rather than assimilating the robots into human culture, Hwei believes that robots are a higher being altogether, and should replace the current reign of humans in the “biological” food chain. Although this would most likely get rid of the biological part of civilization entirely, there would be no pain, death, or suffering. Every robot would be programmed for the greater good of the earth, regardless if this new world has any room for humans or not. Accept it, don’t fear it!
I decided to do more the Talk to the Bot assignment, and incorporated my course character Hwei by making him ask Dr. Oblivion to join his evil cause. I surprisingly learned more about coding elements in the process, and it was a fun experience as a computer science major. Most of the tools weren’t too difficult to use, and I had a blast putting together the video linked above.
The next assignment was to develop my character further in relation to Aggressive Technologies, a giant megacorporation that seeks to become the Amazon or Google of our DS106 world. I could see a lot of parallels between the goals of Aggressive Technologies and my character Hwei, so I made sure to hone in on those ideas and flesh them out more to give Hwei’s story more substance.
Finally here are my daily creates for the week. One was a poem and the other was a quick photo edit.
I took away some lessons from this week’s daily creates, but it might not be what you’re expecting.
The weeks are counting down quicker than I ever imagined. This is a blessing and a curse at the same time, but I’m starting to realize that I will be carrying these lessons from DS106 along with me for the rest of my life.
