MerzFiles #07: Happy New Year!
2020 was in some ways okay year. Seriously
You might probably say: “what”, or “huh?”, or “not again”, but I’m right (as always): it’s Old New Year, celebrated in Russia with Julian Calender. OK, I’m not in Russia for decades, but still celebrating both: 2x Xmas, 2x New Years. I mean, why not?
You probably missed it, but I had celebrated New Year in Kremlin once.
So, Happy New Year, everyone, and I will focus on this email on
(drumroll) The year 2020.
Not again!
(you will say). “I don’t want to hear about this doomed year”. But let’s look at the bright sides of the last year. For example: my articles (Vain-o-meter: 101%).
So what had I done the last weeks before 2020 became history?
AI Meetup about GPT-3 and AI-creativity
There is an excellent AI-network In Kiel (Northern Germany). They invited me to take part in their Meetups and to talk about the creative aspects of AI.
I did it with pleasure — even twice. I told about
Here you can find a summary of both meetups — including my presentation files.
New AI-Radio Station: #LatentVoices
AI-driven music became a fascinating thing since OpenAI released JukeBox, which can write beautiful songs and music compositions including congenial voices and earworm-potential.
I began a new series on Twitter, #LatentVoices, presenting the weirdest soundtracks. Parallelly, I started my music criticism column about AI-music.
Enjoy and be prepared for bizarre soundscapes.
#NeurlPS3Creativity
Curated by Luba Elliott, an AI Art Gallery (and workshop) was presented to the world. I am proud to be part of this exhibition — with my video contribution to Holly Grimms project “Aikphrasis”: MERZPHRASIS
The Gallery of Anything
Imagine a museum of things you are looking for. Like, I mean, everything.
Here is it, I wrote a review, and you can dive deep into your desires.
This [item] Does Not Exist
There are essays I write within hours, and there are articles I’m working months on. Sometimes because of their dimensions.
I always wanted to present the world the wide variety of things that hadn’t exist before Artificial Intelligence, like Pandora opened to the world.
Anyway, here is my next Mammoth article — this time not because of text, but because of cases: visuals, texts, websites, everything is fake — and everything is beautifully real. Because it’s here. And this index is ongoing. Send me thing’s I haven’t found yet.
My GPT-3 Year 2020 as Tweet
And again, my new series (have you btw. counted how many series I’ve already begun?)
Since Summer 2020 I’m a proud beta user of GPT-3, and I already did many experiments. This is an index of my experiments, in categories. Contents will come soon.
#JukeBoxed of the week
In which I trained AI-driven composer and performer #Jukebox with the lullaby “Row row row your boat”.
Instead “life is but a dream” the boat is floating into the light. Close your eyes and hear…
It’s Pareidolia Time!
Original Image:
ParAIdolia:
The Swag of the Month (week? issue?)
Season Greetings from OpenAI.
Thank you, humans and machines!
Outlook: Infinite Nature
Infinite Nature is the next step after the 3D Ken Burns effect and 3D Photography Inpainting. The new approach generates endless camera flight beginning from one visual prompt.
As you can remember, the 3D Ken Burns Effect hasn’t continued images, at some point, the generated world was over, like in my short movie “dreAIms: in black&white”
In the case of Infinite Nature, the output is infinite. AI keeps dreaming about the world. Let’s wait for the code to try it out (paper). Check out the project page with amazing video demonstrations: https://infinite-nature.github.io/
This was sofar 2020. Some call it a doomed year but let’s stay positive, staying negative (you know, what I mean). At least, in the field of AI, it was a creative Renaissance.
