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This is page 2 of the post about the multimedia poem AI;lure. If you want to visit page one first then just click here.
One of the ironies of this rather dystopian piece is just how much AI was involved in the production. The verse was all written by Dada de Dada but it then it was all input into OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 as a prompt. ChatGPT was then asked to ‘improve’ it. The ‘improvements’ were rejected by this human because the changes in poetic metre (meter) in the verse above are intended to be deliberate dissonances in the flow of what is meant to be a performance piece. All the imagery was AI generated from using both the whole verse but also individual sections from it to form prompts for ChatGPT to generate image descriptions. Once the image descriptions were acceptable ChatGPT was asked to generate the supporting images used in the piece for which it uses the other OpenAI product DALL–E 3. The images created by this route can be pretty surreal but that suited the theme of the production. As Dada de Dada gained more experience with AI image generation it became obvious that it is best that prompts contain a single thematic idea and so using poetry or essay extracts that reflect this single theme can be effective. Otherwise AI engines like ChatGPT tend to create image descriptions that can result in outputs from the likes of DALL-E 3 that are of extreme surrealism (there again the clue is in the name of this image generator). The Dada de Data perspective is that these images are certainly good enough for simple online illustrative purposes or as potential prototypes for exploring ideas for realisation by a professional graphic artist or illustrator.
The second audio track AI;lureDuo was also an experiment in using an AI generated voice. Dada de Dada uploaded his original recording of AI;lure to Fineshare’s voice-generation product FineVoice which analysed the Dada de Dada voice and cadence and produced the deeply resonant alternative with its preserved Celtic burr used in the second track . Not perfect in quality terms but still pretty good. And so a poetic duo was born although only one of them is real. While impressive in technological terms the existence of this type of technology is also pretty scary because the question about what it real and what is not is getting increasingly difficult to answer with certainty.
The third audio track AI;lure+ makes version 2 a conceptual scaffold from which can be built a simple multimedia production that tries to convey the abstract notion of artificial intelligence transforming society by employing a series of ambient effects to add yet more power to the message of the words. It would have been possible to add more sophisticated ambient, melodic, or beat elements but when those were tried they then began to dominate the words, and that was not what was intended here. There is, nevertheless, perhaps some scope for a more sophisticated multimedia production at a later date.
The title of the post AI;lure is a portmanteau blending the words AI and lure which seemed pretty consonant with the message of the post. We are inventing technologies that can generate new outputs from analysing vast quantities of data to establish associations and patterns and so dramatically amplify our human capabilities. Or make us redundant. AI even in its current tyro phase can produce passable summaries of complex texts, provide apparently coherent answers to search queries (with reference links), write half-decent poetry and computer code, synthesize voices, convert text to speech, and — as here — create image descriptions and even the images themselves (albeit with some current constraints regarding quality and style). There is considerable potential in employing AI as a creative toolset. There is considerable potential in employing AI as a productivity toolset. There is considerable potential in employing AI as a wealth-generating and health-generating toolset. But yet. But yet. There is the niggle in the back of the mind. The niggle about the need for less workers. The niggle about the need for less professionals. The niggle about the devaluing of human creativity and the impact on human motivation. Why bother writing that poem, or that music, or that essay, or creating that image if the machine can do it better than most? The niggle that if the machines become better and faster than us analogue beings at identifying associations and patterns then what does that do to our minds and motivations? Even at this early stage of our digital revolution we have destabilised our social interactions and common understandings of truth and values to a point of inflection so that the only certainty now is uncertainty. And uncertain people seek certainty in silos where the sorcerers and serpents no longer sleep.
The siren call of our technologies has also been explored in other Dada de Dada posts including the recent Disconnected but the relatively recent eruption of AI into the mainstream of life, however, is, arguably, shaping up to be the most significant development since the invention of computers, satellites, and the internet. If the proponents of this view are correct the ramifications are unlikely to be minor, and probably not gradual. There will undoubtedly be much future AI food for Dada de Dada and others to digest and a good start has been made with another recent Dada de Dada production Analogue Epilogue? which is a free-verse poem with optional added value in the form of an extensive online essay for those who also like some prose.
For those wanting a good overview of AI then the Wikipedia page the History of Artificial Intelligence is an excellent starting point. The page describes the switchback nature of developments in this area of computer science.
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