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You are not lost.
You have arrived at a sub-page in the AIxDESIGN Archive.
This is a public repository – our way of working in the open and sharing as we go.
Have fun!
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TLDR
<aside> 🔥 Yasmin set out to examine the qualities of various text-generation models by creating a tagline generator to write up a resonating brand statement for AIxDESIGN. They considered the shift from older models like RNNs to transformer models as a transition from craft to synthesis while seeking a balance between believability and imagination in the generated text. The blog highlights the potential of AI-generated text and sparked discussions on the nature of human-like imitation versus the unique creativity of machine-generated content.
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INDEX
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https://share.descript.com/view/wQYty89maEL
GitHub Repo:
Google Colab notebook:
In 2022, I joined the AIxDesign team as the AI Tooling project lead, which was all about how we could experiment with pre-made and custom machine learning models to aid in the workflow of AIxDesign. We wanted to figure out how AI tools and tricks can be incorporated within the events, workshops and other activities produced within that year. As a community of practitioners, we wanted to lead by example and implement the use of new technologies in our daily work, rather than just experimenting with them in a learning environment. We set out to make a tagline generator because we wanted a slogan for the AIxDesign website and other communication materials, but we could not agree on any. Why not harness the power of text models to generate a slew of taglines that we could use?
Easier said than done. Yes, I could have simply put ‘AIxDesign’ and a short description of the company and its values into a pre-made text generator and called it a day. But I wanted to get my hands dirty with some code and collaborate with AI tools to get some actual creativity out of it.
My experiments with so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI, or what artist Memo Akten would call ASS - Automated Software System) go deeper than making something cool, or being impressive, or just stating that I used ‘AI’ to create something. I wanted to research why certain elements of AI are attractive to us, and how the underlying mechanisms and social formations influence these processes and eachother. AI is a ‘hyper-object’$^1$, both a structure of algorithmic thinking that is becoming more and more incomprehensible to humans and values prediction and optimisation.
One of the biggest language models is GPT-3, released by OpenAI in 2020. With 175 billion parameters - values or settings that change how the model behaves - GPT-3 is capable of generating very plausible and complex text. My introduction to language models was with an older model called Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). These models work well with sequential data like text. I’ve had experience training a character-level RNN (charRNN), which predicts the next character in a sequence.
Another type of RNN is called a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. It is better at remembering information and context over long periods of time. In my art project postHuman Koan, I compiled a selection of Zen koans, which are short stories, questions or statements used in Zen Buddhism. These were fed into a char-rnn model, in hopes of of creating machine-mediated poetry.
A notable example of such work is poetry by Allison Parish, who uses that uses computer generated text, with RNNs and other models:
“’Compasses’ is a chapbook recently published in Andreas Bülhoff's sync series. It consists of poems produced with the help of a machine learning model I designed as the next step in my exploration of phonetic similarity.” – Allison Parrish