(#16) Instant art as you type ▒ my new book ▒ rick.exe

+ the lowest-quality photo sharing site on the internet

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(Sets 60 minute timer)

Alright, let’s go.

This has been one of the most creative weeks I’ve had in a long time.

I’ve been getting up at 5am and doing creative stuff for a couple hours, working 8-6, then after dinner I’ve been back to creative tasks for a few hours before bed. Like every day/night without faltering.

I know behind the scenes the reality is I’m actually in a lot of pain because there’s some personal stuff going on and I’m distracting myself with work and creative pursuits.

But I think this is a pretty great way to handle it? Better than moping around or drinking myself into stupidity? Maybe not as good as blasting off to Europe or Asia for a month, but that’s not a responsible option at the moment.

Yesterday I had someone new cut my hair. She asked, “Do you work a lot?” And all I could say was a quiet “mmm-hmm” and then I wondered, do I? I think others work more? But also, I’m basically always working, so do people who work more just sleep less or accomplish more or do they just talk about it more and act busy and stressed?

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I love you, but I need to go shopping 

sorry abraham but i replaced one of your pieces with this. photo by emily.

Last year I went on an AI art binge and created 10,000 images for a facebook ads experiment. I wanted to push the boundaries not only of the creation process but also of what kind of images would actually sell products (I’m also obsessed with trying to get robots to beat human performance). Apparently, I was also pushing the boundaries of my own sanity because when I closed my eyes I saw AI ads.

These ads would end up selling millions of dollars in products for our partners over the holiday season.

The results, as always, were surprising. Even though I’ve been making ads for 20 years, there’s always a delta between the ads I love and the ones that perform. My favorites — pop art and comics and surreal and questionable religious references — didn’t scale like I had hoped, but shopping tags and cute 3D characters scaled like crazy.

But of all the ones I made during that period, one kept coming back to my brain, and now I have a canvas print of it in my living room.

It’s referencing Lichtenstein’s “Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But...” and to be honest it’s what that piece appears like IN MY HEAD. When I look at it now on wikipedia, it’s more dull and blocky than I remember, but in my brain’s eye it’s vibrant and has energy. Which is sort of the opposite of what is trying to be conveyed I think, but an artist’s intention has never stopped me. I’m not going to say I prefer the version I created, because I’m afraid of appearing uncultured but let’s just say I only have one hanging in my living room at the moment.

I sent a pic to my mom and she only sent back thinking face emoji and for a couple minutes it threw me into uncertainty. Maybe this was dumb? Maybe I just like it because I “made it“? There are some imperfections that I didn’t fix, maybe she noticed? Or is it just really bad and I like it because I’m a philistine?

But then Emily reminded me that she hadn’t seen me smile that much in a long time. You love it, she said. It’s true, I do. I’ve only had it for a few days so I make my own small pilgrimage to it when I wake up and go to bed to just stare at it and smile.

Thank god I never learned to draw, I mumble.

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Real-time instant art as you type 

There’s a turbo stable diffusion model out that generates images in 1/4 of a second, meaning images appear instantly as you type. (Try it out here!)

This is how I’m teaching Zizi to prompt.

Zizi is three, so the only thing she seems to know how to type is ZZzzzzZjjfioZZZzzzzzzZzzzijoihrwoZ838zzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzzz which is cute but largely unhelpful.

The other day I brought up SDXL together and we used the talk to type feature and WOW it really unlocked things.

She went from hitting Z over and over to saying “Big dog” over and over 50 times in a row. Progress!

Here’s a video of her “learning prompt engineering”:

I used to think it was important for kids to learn to program, but I’m increasingly feeling it’s more about all the trappings around programming. Same with art. It feels increasingly useless to learn how to draw any more than it is to know how to write complex algorithms. Either you’re in the top 1% or it’ll be a hobby.

Soon no one will pay for mediocre skills at art OR programming. It’s already happening with writing. More important is to learn how to think, how to prompt, styles and techniques, cold start creativity, and a wide body of knowledge to pull from about the world.

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My new book is a… children’s book for one person?

Speaking of art and Zizi, I made her a book.

It’s about Zizi’s pet jellybean that gets so big that it swallows those she loves and flies away, so she has to go and rescue them. 

Clearly it’s destined to be a masterpiece.

This was just a test so I could see if she was interested at all (she was) and what worked/what didn’t (I took notes).

I thanked her for her feedback.

I hope to talk more about how I did it, because it was a lot more involved than I first anticipated, but it does work on any device (it’s primarily designed for iPad).

It’s a mix of DALL-E 3 and Midjourney with images fixed up and extended vertically using Photoshop.

I’m told she woke up the next morning and asked to wear a yellow dress, which she doesn’t own, but in the book Princess Zizi does.

I’ll take that as success.

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rick.exe

Oh I also shipped this Windows XP themed nostalgic rick roll game.

I took my last popup game, added a start button and the ability to use images as dialogs, threw in some music, and then released it into the wild. I hear it’s doing really well at middle schools, but I didn’t put any tracking on it, so who knows.

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Quick Hits

• TasmanAI. A real artist in Tasmania will draw your art prompt instead of AI.

• Kilogram. The lowest-quality photo sharing site on the internet, where all images are 1KB.

• Celeb Clock. Daily schedules of the famous.

• EMO: Emote Portrait Alive. Frightening/exciting glimpse of our real future.

• Video:  100 baby black widow challenge. Girls play games differently.

Light is peeking through the trees, so my time is up.

If you find something that inspires you or moves you or you just think I’ll enjoy, please send it my way.

Josh

PS: A quote that feels particularly relevant to the AI changes we are going through right now: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C Clark