Interactivity and Computation • 60-212
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2022 • Prof. Golan Levin
Prompt: Rick and Mort messing in the white house.
I actually like the image produced around the 50th iteration the most. It resembles the color/feeling of a Rick and Mort scene the most. I am mostly interested in seeing if it will successfully recreate the style of Rick and Morty. It failed in the sense that it’s becoming more and more realistic, and loosing the sense of color and flatness.
Inferkit:
I Feel Like My Life Is Just A Series Of Unrelated Wacky Adventures.
The project that caught my attention the most was a real-time SketchRNN project called Scrying Pen by Andy Matuschak on the Chrome Experiments website. The experiment predicts the future strokes of the user as they draw. I have seen a few stroke-based predictive machine learning experiments before, but I this is the most interesting application of it that I’ve seen so far. As I drew, is started to feel less like the algorithm was predicting what my new stroke would be, and more like it was making judgements and suggesting what that stroke should be, and I found myself actually recreating the predictive strokes somewhat, which was somewhat of a strange experience.
It’s actually really hard to imagine what the outcome will be just based on the sliders. The resulted images aren’t really what I was expecting, but they do have somewhat distinguishable features from the genes.
Really cool and fun to play with. I can see the texture of the “ball” is getting furrier and greener as I raise the gene proportion of “tennis ball”.
InferKit: bright day 
Narrative Device: rope, intestine
This was my first experience using an AI, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that AI was able to generate engaging stories. With InferKit, I even sometimes felt that there were poetic phrases. With Narrative Device, I was surprised as the story seemed like a horror story. It was interesting for me because it is a type of writing that I personally wouldn’t have thought about writing. Moreover, one thing I noticed is that when I typed “heart chain” as the input, it didn’t generate a story but rather a list of related words, such as hairclip, rings, games, dolls, etc.
Above is two examples I made with edges2shoes. I notice that it works best it you draw realistically with perspective(image 1). Whereas a highly stylish, 2D drawing(image 2) doesn’t render as well.
This work uses ML to produce images of the artist sleeping. And it’s then made into a kinetic installation where the bed sheet moves from time to time. This work applied ML on a physical installation. It rendered the complex data with a a simple but very effective kinetic installation.
Prompt: ‘film photograph of pittsburgh pinterest’
I wanted to see if I could generate specific locations, and since I saw that that the GAN could respond to prompts such as “unreal engine” I tried to use “pinterest” as a tag. I think it’s interesting the different aesthetics various user bases have, so it was interesting to see how tagging it as Pinterest turned out.
Inferkit:
I felt nostalgic about spending summer at home when I was a kid.
Of course, back then, it was just life as usual for us.
(that is, work, eat, sleep, repeat… or so I thought) I wanted to go outside and look at the trees.
I felt like I was actually “at home.”
It was as if all of life had happened to someone else and I had gotten a break.
(Don’t worry, I’ll stop by my parents’ house and get a dish of my favorite ice cream to ease my pain.
I promise.)
(We all need a pick – me – up every now and then)
The feeling of home was forever taken away from me, it would seem.
I thought InferKit was more interactive than Narrative Device, and the texts it generated often had more variety and I enjoyed the prose better. With Narrative Device I found it harder to use abstract themes because it wouldn’t generate a lot of sentences.