An Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and thoughts on on AI art
In recent months, AI text-to-image artworks have been flooding the internet, releasing a deluge of discourse around the role of artists in a rapidly changing world. I’ve recently been revisiting the 1985 book Into the Universe of Technical Images by Vilém Flusser, a philosopher and media theorist who I first encountered in the context of film, but turns out to be shockingly relevant to the current wave of AI image models and the questions they raise about creativity, art, and labor. A close reading of Flusser’s prophetic text can help to answer some of these questions, and to clarify the role of artists in the fast-approaching future.
In broad strokes, Flusser’s account of cultural history can be summed up:
From traditional images (2D art images made by hand, like cave paintings),
to linear texts (i.e. written language works, like the Bible),
to technical images (images created mechanically by an apparatus, like a photograph). Read More
Daily Archives: November 3, 2022
Google’s text-to-image AI model Imagen is getting its first (very limited) public outing
Google is being extremely cautious with the release of its text-to-image AI systems. Although the company’s Imagen model produces output equal in quality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google hasn’t made the system available to the public.
Today, though, the search giant announced it will be adding Imagen — in a very limited form — to its AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology.
AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google’s text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly constrained Imagen requests as part of what it calls a “season two” update to the app. In short, there’ll be two ways to interact with Imagen, which Google demoed to The Verge ahead of the announcement today: “City Dreamer” and “Wobble.” Read More
3 ways AI is scaling helpful technologies worldwide
Decades of research have led to today’s rapid progress in AI. Today, we’re announcing three new ways people are poised to benefit.
… Today, we’re excited about many recent advances in AI that Google is leading — not just on the technical side, but in responsibly deploying it in ways that help people around the world. That means deploying AI in Google Cloud, in our products from Pixel phones to Google Search, and in many fields of science and other human endeavors.
We’re aware of the challenges and risks that AI poses as an emerging technology. We were the first major company to release and operationalize a set of AI Principles, and following them has actually (and some might think counterintuitively) allowed us to focus on making rapid progress on technologies that can be helpful to everyone. Getting AI right needs to be a collective effort — involving not just researchers, but domain experts, developers, community members, businesses, governments and citizens.
I’m happy to make announcements in three transformative areas of AI today: first, using AI to make technology accessible in many more languages. Second, exploring how AI might bolster creativity. And third, in AI for Social Good, including climate adaptation. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 