For my second assignment I chose to create a GIF of the best sports play in my opinion from this past year. This GIF is Nikola Jokic hitting a buzzer beater to win the game. This is one of the best highlights from this past year given how difficult the shot was. First off Jokic had less than 3 seconds to get the shot off over his defender with the game on the line. The Warriors and Nuggets are to very competitive teams. Secondly, location of the shot was not your average shooting distance or range. Jokic knew he had to take the shot with the game tied he threw it up and sunk it. Even with the pressure of the game, shot clock, and being guarded he managed to put up an impressive shot to seal the game for his team.
For my first assignment I was tasked with creating a sports poster for a professional sports team. Sticking with the theme of AIs in DS106 I decided to use an AI to generate this poster. I asked the AI to produce a sports poster of the Yankees using a modern theme with nature elements. I felt a modern theme would really grab audience’s attention given the futuristic looks of the poster. I threw in the nature theme as a twist. If you look at sports poster in today’s society there is a lack of a nature elements. I’m not saying nature themed sports posters don’t exist, but I felt including this would draw more attention due to the uncommon presence of it.
Why the Yankees?
I chose the New York Yankees for my example for a couple reasons. First reason is this is my favorite sports team of all time. I grew up watching some of the greatest players to ever play for the Yankees. For example, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Jorge Posada, and countless more. Another reason I chose the Yankees was how iconic they are. All over the world people have heard of the New York Yankees. This poster came out great. It gives a futuristic vibe with hints of nature elements, something different from a boring generic poster that will turn heads and grab the audience’s attention.
The final assignment that I chose to work on was an animated GIF assignment. This assignment required me to create a GIF of a scene from my favorite movie that captures the essence of the idea behind the GIF. One of the requirements was also to make sure that the GIF involved minimal movement so that the image was not too busy. I decided to make my GIF in relation to the movie, Avengers: Infinity War. This clip happened closer to the end of the movie when the three characters, Groot, Thor, and Rocket Raccoon all landed back on Earth in a place called Wakanda after being off world for a decent amount of time. This scene really stuck out to me because while watching the movie, I always thought about how cool the scene looked when they were all ganging up together to help take down Thanos, who was the villain of the movie. The caption “Let’s Go Boys!!! Time to Work!!!” was written by me because the picture looks like they are getting ready to go to war, which they are, and so the motivational words seemed fitting for the time and picture being used. Also, since I am part of a team here at UMW, it make sense for me to create an image that shows of camaraderie because any time we have a match we are getting ready and playing our matches as a team and we want everyone to succeed. Therefore, I think this image and caption really relates to my life as well just looking really good overall. I enjoyed making this GIF because I think it is something that I can use in the future and will be nice to know that I was the one to make it.
One of the assignments that I chose to do for this week was to create a sports poster. However, I thought about it and decided that in order to relate it to the field of AI, I wanted to try and see what an AI bot would give me when I get it certain prompts. So, the first image on the far left was an image that was given to me when asked to recreate the Cincinnati Bengals football stadium. Now from this image, we can see that the AI bot was pretty accurate in its depiction of the stadium and did a really job of recreating the stadium. Now moving, I gave the AI bot a little more specifics on this turn, I asked to recreate the Bengals stadium while have it in a jungle with the weeds and tree roots growing over and around the stadium with a tiger on the front of the stadium. I found that the AI bot made a less and less accurate depiction of what I wanted with the more information I was giving it. For example, I wanted the tiger on the front of the stadium almost like a statue or logo on the front with the trees roots and weeds growing up the stadium walls. What I got was more of a entryway into a stadium with a tiger in the way. Finally, I decided to give the AI bot free will and choice and asked it to give me a depiction of the Bengals stadium in its own eyes. In other words, I asked the bot to give me a picture of what it thought the stadium should look like and from the output (far right), it appears to pretty close to the what it actually looks like (far left). The only issue with the third picture is that from some reason it could not properly generate the team logo like it did in the first picture but other than that it was pretty accurate in its depiction. This was confusing to me because the more specifics I gave the chatbot, the less the image looked like what I wanted it to look like. Overall, this was a really interesting experience because I was able to combine the world of sports while also seeing how AI would react to questions about generating images related to specific sports teams and what it thought different things should look like.
