Tags: generative

21

sparkline

Monday, February 13th, 2023

You can call me AI

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of initialisms and acronyms. They can be exclusionary.

It bothers me doubly when everyone is talking about AI.

First of all, the term is so vague as to be meaningless. Sometimes—though rarely—AI refers to general artificial intelligence. Sometimes AI refers to machine learning. Sometimes AI refers to large language models. Sometimes AI refers to a series of if/else statements. That’s quite a spectrum of meaning.

Secondly, there’s the assumption that everyone understands the abbreviation. I guess that’s generally a safe assumption, but sometimes AI could refer to something other than artificial intelligence.

In countries with plenty of pastoral agriculture, if someone works in AI, it usually means they’re going from farm to farm either extracting or injecting animal semen. AI stands for artificial insemination.

I think that abbreviation might work better for the kind of things currently described as using AI.

We were discussing this hot topic at work recently. Is AI coming for our jobs? The consensus was maybe, but only the parts of our jobs that we’re more than happy to have automated. Like summarising some some findings. Or perhaps as a kind of lorem ipsum generator. Or for just getting the ball rolling with a design direction. As Terence puts it:

Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It’s then up to you to refine things.

That’s pretty much the conclusion we came to in our discussion at Clearleft. There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs. It’s like how we’d do a quick round of sketching to get a bunch of different ideas out into the open. Terence is spot on when he says:

Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.

To put it another way, using a large language model could be a way of artificially injecting some seeds of ideas. Artificial insemination.

So now when I hear people talk about using AI to create images or articles, I don’t get frustrated. Instead I think, “Using artificial insemination to create images or articles? Yes, that sounds about right.”

Monday, November 21st, 2022

COLOR anything | colouring pages of absolutely anything for kids or grown ups

This is a genuinely lovely use of machine learning models: provide a prompt for an illustration to print out and colour in.

Mike explains his motivation for building this:

My son’s super into colouring at the moment and I’ve been struggling to find new stuff for him.

Tuesday, January 4th, 2022

Plus Equals #4, December 2021

In which Rob takes a deep dive into isometric projection and then gets generative with it.

Wednesday, December 1st, 2021

Aliendscapes - Alien Planet Generator

Generative landscapes made with 2K of vanilla JavaScript.

Click (or refresh) for a new one.

Thursday, September 30th, 2021

Plus Equals #3, September 2021

Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021

Design research on the Clearleft podcast

We’re halfway through the third season of the Clearleft podcast already!

Episode three is all about design research. I like the narrative structure of this. It’s a bit like a whodunnit, but it’s more like a whydunnit. The “why” question is “why aren’t companies hiring more researchers?”

The scene of the crime is this year’s UX Fest, where talks by both Teresa Torres and Gregg Bernstein uncovered the shocking lack of researchers. From there, I take up the investigation with Maite Otondo and Stephanie Troeth.

I won’t spoil it but by the end there’s an answer to the mystery.

I learned a lot along the way too. I realised how many axes of research there are. There’s qualitative research (stories, emotion, and context) and then there’s quantitative research (volume and data). But there’s also evualative research (testing a hyphothesis) and generative research (exploring a problem space before creating a solution). By my count that gives four possible combos: qualitative evaluative research, quantitative evaluative research, qualitative generative research, and quantitative generative research. Phew!

Steph was a terrific guest. Only a fraction of our conversation made it into the episode, but we chatted for ages.

And Maite kind of blew my mind too, especially when she was talking about the relationship between research and design and she said:

Research is about the present and design is about the future.

🤯

I’m going to use that quote again in a future episode. In fact, this episode on design research leads directly into the next two episodes. You won’t want to miss them. So if you’re not already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should get on that, whether it’s via the RSS feed, Apple, Google, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Have a listen to this episode on design research and if you’re a researcher yourself, remember that unlike most companies we value research at Clearleft and that’s why we’re hiring another researcher right now. Come and work with us!

Saturday, April 24th, 2021

things are a little crazy rn

Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:

This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018

Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited

Art, geometry, and code. Sol LeWitt started it. Rob saw it through.

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

Generative Artistry

Tutorials for recreating classics of generative art with JavaScript and canvas.

Wednesday, June 13th, 2018

designhumandesign

Refresh for a new design challenge.

Sunday, February 11th, 2018

Brendan Dawes - Using a Git Repo to create a physical document of the work

There’s something quite Bridlesque about these lovely books that Brendan is generating from git commits.

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017

JavaScript Systems Music

A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.

  1. Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
  2. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
  3. Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)

You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.

One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.

Monday, September 25th, 2017

Constellation charts

Refresh to get a new randomly generated constellation.

A lovely bit of creative JS from Emily

Friday, August 18th, 2017

Poco Apollo

Here’s a beautiful use of the web audio API: Enoesque generative music composed right in your browser. Each piece is generated from one of the 14,226 photos in NASA’s Apollo archive. The darker and murkier the picture, the moodier the music.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2017

InspiroBot

I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.

Sunday, October 16th, 2016

Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. Bells indicate additions and string plucks indicate subtractions. Pitch changes according to the size of the edit; the larger the edit, the deeper the note.

Thursday, August 13th, 2015

The Infinite Trad Session

Okay, this is kind of nuts: some researchers have seeded a neural network with all the tunes from The Session. Some of the results are surprisingly okay. It’s certainly a fascinating project.

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

Notes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains

Jeff Noon and Markov chains—a heavenly match by Dan.

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

Lava Lamp Installation on Vimeo

Brighton hacker Jason Hotchkiss demos his music-generating lava lamps in this promo video for the Brighton Maker Faire taking place the day after dConstruct.

Sunday, April 24th, 2011

Otomata

A truly beautiful piece of work: generative music based on Conway’s game of life. Go ahead: create something gorgeously unique.