A Grateful Impression of OpenAI’s DALL-E
After a couple weeks of co-creating with the latest release OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 I’m left with a very simple observation: It’s about imagination. thankfully.
Perhaps this is not the observation and/or utility many researchers, artists, technologists and enthusiasts desire. However, I’m very confident that as more people get to experience DALL-E and find their own utility with it they will understand and appreciate the profundity of augmenting your own imagination.
(I have been a developer ambassador for OpenAI’s GPT3, Codex and now DALL-E. Yes, I am biased and very much enjoy machine learning, various approaches to AI, and playing with tech to solve problems and investigate humanity)
Active Imagination
Very specifically, when I talk about imagination I mean using your active recall->prediction->conceptual feedback loop (aka thought and sensory movement) to dance with possibilities. Imagination involves sensing something, perhaps a vague concept or notion and then to conjure an expectation of metaphors and juxtapositions, sharpen a representation, then draw up specifics of space, perspective, relationships and mood — finally resolving everything into brain-cleansing coherence.
Augmented Imagination with DALL-E is very direct. It’s soothing. It’s as close to painting or drawing with a brush and pencil that I’ve experienced on a computer. It’s because it’s really about being and thinking and expectation and surprise. Digital painting with “artificial paint” and “digital brushes” never felt like “making art” to me. This does.
I type something into the DALL-E prompt field, click the arrow. and let my mind continue to loop on my Mona Lisa smirk notions of what might happen, what this network of probabilities might converge at. The blank canvas swirling with anticipated magic.
what happens to @un1crom at the event horizon of a super massive blackhole?
and then.
images
appear.
metaphoric
serendipity
connects what
my looping could not.
the moment of art inception.
Actualized Instigation
Hopefully one doesn’t need convincing that imagination is important, perhaps fundamental, to critical thinking and complex problem solving. Imagination isn’t always about Big Crazy Artistic or Futurist Thinking or Microdosing Trips into the Abyss. Sometimes it’s simple connecting patterns that didn’t have an immediate bridge to you.
All human activities require connecting dots. Sometimes drawing the dots to start.
Science Is Imagining Things We Mostly Cannot Sense Directly
The more our senses are extended via lenses, meters, compasses, filaments, nodes… the more we see or the more we can make to see. Periodically we’ve been reminded of just how much of a creative collaboration science is between humans and the universe.
Richard Feynman predicted that element 137 would be the last one. But nobody really knows where the table will end.
From Carbon
to RussFoltzSmithian, element 137, perhaps.
Have you ever tried to create a new TypeFace?
It’s actually hard. Like really hard. and most of us take it for granted because fonts are everywhere. But ask a designer who works on logos and iconic print work. TypeFace can make all the difference to a project.
Talk to a anthropologist looking at artifacts from a scarce part of history.
They must imagine across huge gaps of evidence.
Toys and Games remain a big business (far bigger than hollywood).
How does one successfully find hits season after season?
History and Cultural Appreciation are often as simple as empathy.
Considering our lives in different historical contexts can often open us up to the common experiences of our humanity. Boredom can be very interesting.
“Ancient Greece clay pot depicting office cubicle work in the 1970s”
Future and Cultural Innovation is about empathy, too.
Frontiers also benefit from our ability to imagine all the ways they could be interesting, kind, welcoming. All too often the unknown appears to us as a shadow, a darkness, a monster.
Maybe the frontier is just another region of spacetime tracing out its beingness.
Art Generates I
The debates likely rage in the year 3000 about the nature of consciousness and intelligence. To me, your brain or your arm or you toe is no more The Locus of Your Being, than “AI” will be the locus of computational being. Beingness, complex behavior, problem solving, questioning, causal reasoning and everything else bantered around the AI benchmark literature avoids a simpler possibility: maybe art making and making associations between things for millions of years is all it took to emerge “smart beings that think about what it is to be smart”. Maybe all “smart beings that think about what it is to be smart” demonstrate those smarts simply by making arts.
I gave a talk about this once. People were unconvinced. Well, MC Hammer was open to the idea…
I really do believe that we are all Works on Becoming. Whatever it means to “be a being” is to “become an I”. And to become a self, one must empathize or try out as much of one’s environment/situation as one can. Whatever converges or remains from all the Working On Becoming must be what the self is.
And so, after decades of publishing my photos, writings, ideas, selfhood in various repositories online, here I am, showing up in the latent space of DALLE.
Prompt: “Tintoretto’s St Roch Healing the Plague-Stricken, painting #worksonbecoming @un1crom Russell Foltz-Smith”
The output includes my style of painting/drawing, my compositionality, color palettes very often… and then about 1/8 generations you see a red haired/red bearded character show up … It’s the coolest thing to see all this conceptual echoing.
A Invocation or An Invitation
Perhaps, I have not inspired confidence or provoked you with my devotion to art as beingness and art as intelligence. And perhaps you really do want essays about technologies and machine learning to involve some tech speak-tech prediction.
It should be somewhat obvious that the future of Graphical User Interfaces is largely going to be based on all these recent advances in AI. This has been clear for probably 20 years.
Art is the user interface humans use between each other and their future selves to make tangible the complexities of being human.
Art, via DALLE/GPT3 and other such systems, will do the same for present selves in the now, just in time.
As Imitation, a post script
Maybe Wittgenstein was right. Maybe it’s all much ado about everything, just a game.
Grateful Artistic Investigation
I have had the time of my artistic and technical life over the last couple of years with #OpenAI’s considerably generous approach. To say it altered the course of my life would not be an overstatement.
For the OpenAI team that might read this. Thank You. To the other OpenAI dev ambassadors. Thank You for the inspiration and fun during these strange pandemic years.
To everyone else waiting to get into DALLE. Can’t wait for you to come play! and I also Thank You. For all the things you’ll imagine, both with DALLE and without. For all the effort you’ll put into figuring out how to make more humane technology and how you’ll keep me working on becoming through your own extensions of self.
