Here’s a brief video I put together based on the week 15 prompts. It references the AI rap battle video from a few weeks back, Dr. Oblivion off his meds, and our visit from our friends at Aggressive Technologies. There’s also some minor reflection on lessons learned from the course.
Ooops! Someone forgot to hit the Publish button.
Jim and I have periodic conversations about what we’re doing and where we’re going in de106. I had this idea that the chief legal counsel from Aggressive Technologies would drop in and threaten us with a cease and desist order if we didn’t stop talking about their company. This would create another potential plot point the class might build stories around. We invited ds106 co-founder Martha Burtis to play the part of the lawyer, and her performance left us, me at least, literally dumbfounded.
Jim recorded our meeting and I went through and edited it. I downloaded a bleep sound effect to deal with some of the more aggressive language and imported the components into iMovie. I went through and chopped out extended pauses and “um”s and such, which ended up trimming three minutes off of the run time. At first I tried putting the bleeps in with iMovie, but between the small screen on my MacBook Air and the imprecision of the trackpad, it was getting very difficult. So instead I left the language in and shared the edited piece as a file. I imported the file into Audacity and added the bleeps there on an additional track, and used the Effect=>Amplify function to reduce the volume of the f-bombs.
The bleep track was still a little loud so I used the volume slider to take it down a few dbs. I exported it as an MP3 and then imported that into iMovie. I reduced the video soundtrack to zero and dropped the MP3 in to get the final version. Obviously my bleeping skills leave something to be desired, but it’s the thought that counts, right?
After reflecting on our visit from Aggressive Technologies legal counsel, I had an inspiration for a new ds106radio commercial:
I thought the tone of her spiel would pair well with our friend Bob, so I had him do the intro and outro, and layered some calming music, Reflected Light from SergePavkinMusic, in the background. I think it’s really a win-win, as the track puts Aggressive Technologies in a positive light, and lets them promote their beloved ds106 at the same time. They’re sure to let bygones be bygones now, right?
Jim and I were having one of our usual ds106 discussions last week, looking over Aggressive Technologies’ website, when their chief legal counsel dropped in with threats and bluster. She expressed some rather strong opinions. I went through and cleaned them up a little for the recording above, although my bleeping skills leave something to be desired.
This is certainly concerning. The whole episode left me a bit speechless. I asked Dr. Oblivion for his advice:
He further opined:
We’ve dealt with issues before in ds106. We’ve been hacked. We’ve had moles. We’ve dealt with the Russians. And the zombies. But this feels different. And it raises some questions.
What does ds106 think? Do we blow off their threats? Or take them head on?
Do they really have eyes and ears within ds106?
Do we have a mole? And if so, what should we do about it?
Is her concern really “fiduciary duty?” Or do they have something to hide, and their threats are really just to scare us off their trail?
What are they up to? How should we respond?
The main thing I took from her visit was:
How’s that for a fun little GIF?
This assignment was to create a PSA about Aggressive Technologies or AI. So I decided to make my PSA on one of the innovative technologies that I mentioned in my last video.
To start with I created a quick script that is meant to instill some fear into the viewers about a danger they likely didn’t know they had, because it’s not really a problem, and feel the need to take action. I intentionally brushed over the concern over privacy because this company is definitely using what they collect for something nefarious. We just don’t know what it is yet so of course they try not to spend too much time on it just enough to reassure the people. Once I finalized the script I uploaded it into Elevenlabs to recreate the kind of classic male narration voice.
For the actual video creation, it mostly consisted of a bunch of image editing. I generated the reporter, background, and some of the TV images on Lexica. The rest of the TV images I found on Unsplash here and here. I then removed the background of the reporter and parts of the broadcasting studio using this background remover. I then uploaded all the images onto Photopea to edit together. I added a banner with a fake news channel name and report title using droid and great lakes nf fonts. Once the images were finalized I found some scary background music on Freesound that I thought would put viewers on edge. The first and last video and audio were found on YouTube: we interrupt this program, and now back to your regularly scheduled program, and breaking news video. I used this video downloader to get them and imported them into iMovie. With all of these completed, I just did some quick editing and wow a video was made.
For this assignment, we had to design some propaganda of our choosing which was a very open-ended prompt I wasn’t sure what to do with. Especially since last week, I had unknowingly already done a propaganda theme of my own I had felt like all my good ideas were used already.
So to find some inspiration I looked up some propaganda posters and after looking for a while I found I design I liked that was actually inspired by the game Fallout 76. So with this concept in mind, I chose to make one for Aggressive Technologies because it’s a nice blank slate that can go in any direction. Since Andrea works for them it would make sense that she might have to do some PR work for the company like the propaganda video I made last week.
I used Stable Diffusion Online to create the image of the poster in a cyberpunk style. The final design is actually a combination of two different photos. I couldn’t get the generator to produce an android and city image I like in the same frame so I took the android from another photo it made, removed the background, and plopped it into a generated photo of the city using Photopea.
I then wanted the company’s banners all over the city and at first I tried just to replace them by placing the text over it but it looked weird since it didn’t capture how the words would look if it was flowing in the wind. So I quickly made a banner-sized flag in Canva and then uploaded the image to this website, FlagWaver, I found that creates a flying flag with all types of settings where you can choose the type of flag to the wind direction and speed. With a few images of a flying banner, I edited them into my poster to make them look as natural as I could.
I then added the “Fight For Your Freedom” text to mimic some other propaganda posters I had seen. I also wanted people to have some way of joining and learning more so I made a QR code that links to the Aggressive Technologies website I made using a QR Code Generator I found that had a lot of customizable options. The final result is something I think could definitely be found plastered around the city to entice people into this cool-looking futuristic company that promises to help fight for the people’s freedom. The final result is below.
For one of my assignments that needed to include my course character, I decided to make this Fake Propaganda Video
Smash up any combination of videos, still images, and audio to create a fake propaganda video. It can be comedic or (non-offensively, of course) serious, its up to you. Possibilities include: advertising a product, creating a villain, or selling a revolution.
Music here:
Text-to-speech
Videos from:
I was just thinking about the variety of ways our ds106 Cast of Characters might interact or intersect with Aggressive Technologies. At least two of them work there. That’s a very direct connection. The cast includes several different categories:
Mad genius
Investor
Innovator
Artist
Regulator
Evangelist
Philosopher
Technician
They could be part of Aggressive Technologies, or they could be part of the competition. Or they could relate in completely different ways: customers, vendors, protestors, litigants, investors, investigators, neighbors … etc. Those connections can get pretty tangential. What would it be like to live across the street from one of their data centers?
A while back I read a story about a crypto mine in Channing, Texas, a tiny town whose previous claim to fame was a bit role in the classic 80’s film, Midnight Run. And earlier this week I saw something about people blocking the construction of a data center in Chile. (It just occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone bring up the ecological issues about AI. Why is that?)
My point here is that the assignment to define your character’s relationship with the Aggressive Technologies corporation should not be perceived as limiting what you can do with your character, but rather as an opportunity for creativity and connection.
So I wanted to play with the idea of Aggressive Technologies a little. I came up with a logo, using a font from Da Font and a silhouette of a war hammer. I should have noted which font I used, but… I thought the silhouette worked well. The angle and shapes suggest aggression, with a hint of rocket, and the font is similarly aggressive.
I asked Dr. Oblivion, “If a corporation called Aggressive Technologies were to promote its AI-based security and surveillance services to law enforcement agencies, how would they go about it?” and he responded with attitude.
Then I started playing with the animation script. What would happen if I uploaded something other than the train.mp4 video? I not-very-quickly found out that there is a strict 60 second limit for the video length. I trimmed a Bob Ross video to an appropriate length, and ended up giving him a lip-synced Oblivion voice. That was kind of weird, but not good enough.
I decided to play with ElevenLabs. I bit the bullet and paid them a dollar so I could clone a voice. This was ethically questionable, but like the Folk-RNN project, the questions occurred to me afterwards. In the meantime, I fed my cloned voice some text from The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and this gave me some ideas.
I imported my logo and my Bob clip into iMovie. I dropped the logo on Bob’s canvas and used the picture-in-picture setting to superimpose it. I had to adjust the size and position a little. It didn’t look right though, because the white background of the logo didn’t match the white of the canvas. So I imported the logo into Photopea, dropped out the background and exported it as a PNG file, which would preserve the transparency. Then I imported that into iMovie and it looked much better on the canvas. Originally I was just going to use it on the canvas close-up, but since the camera was stationary I could put it on the canvas in the rest of the video. I saved the video as aggrobob.mp4 and used it instead of the train.mp4 in the lip-syncing script, along with my cloned-voice file of the Manifesto excerpt. Interestingly, the script tried to lip sync the logo when Bob was off screen.
So I was getting somewhere. I brought my new video into iMovie, and dropped a piece of the old one over it to mask the canvas close-up lip-syncing. Dr. Oblivion had said something about celebrity endorsements, so I imported that video as well and inserted it in front of the other video. I put an mp3 of some ominous music underneath the Bob section. There’s a line through the middle of the sound tracks in iMovie that you can use to adjust volume. I boosted Bob to 224% and dropped the music to 6%, and saved the whole thing as an MP4, then uploaded to Youtube.
So it’s something, more of a learning experience than a planned project. Is it something that can be used as part of the Aggressive Technologies backstory? People can make of it what they will.