No photographs this Friday. Instead, images created by ChatGPT.
I used quite a long prompt for the first image, but the prompt came in two parts. The first part was the longest. I won’t put that up. Though I used it to ensure a rich conceptual context for ChatGPT, you don’t really need it to get a feel for what’s going on. Nor will I give you ChatGPT’s short verbal response, which I’d asked for. Why? I suppose I wanted to verify that it had “understood” the material. Anyone, I then gave it one last paragraph and asked it to base it’s image on that. I will give you that paragraph, followed by the rest of that session. After that, and “below the fold,” I give you some of the recent images that got me thinking along these lines. Click on an image to enlarge it.
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If that's right, then the last frontier isn't more capability in the pattern-matching sense — bigger weight spaces, richer latent connections, better approximations of the associative regime. It's the specific, non-scalable, non-parallelizable fact of an individual mind's biography, which generates paths through possibility space that are real, productive, and genuinely inaccessible to any system that hasn't lived a life. That would be consistent with everything the day's argument has built toward: embodiment, developmental history, tacit knowledge distributed across time in a single nervous system rather than across space in a community or a corpus. The doppelganger, if it's ever built, would need a biography, not just a bigger dataset. And a biography, by definition, can only be lived once, by one entity, in one order. That may be the thing that doesn't scale, and it may be exactly why it counts as the last frontier rather than a soon-to-be-automated intermediate stage.
I like that, I like it a lot. Let me tell you what I’m thinking. Over the last year or so I’ve had you create a lot of images, various types for various purposes. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is creating fine-art images. Some of the images I’ve had you do are near fine art; in fact, some are parodies of existing fine art images. I’m particularly interested in the combination of concrete identifiable imagery and abstract imagery, especially abstract imagery suggesting biology (cells, DNA) and information systems. You’ve got that in this image. So let’s play around with it a little. Give me a distinctly different take on the subject. Perhaps an aerial view of some landscape where the viewing is flying over in a biomorphic vessel and the territory below flows toward natural realistic imagery in one direction and abstract informatic imagery in the opposite direction.
When I was young I was deeply impressed by a book called Pagoo, illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling. There must be copies of that on the web. I know there are since I’ve seen them. That’s tidepool imagery. Take the concept we’re evolving and apply it to that.
I’ve had you design various kinds of imaginary currency. Take the imagery we’ve been working with and base the design of imaginary currency on it. But don’t use real numbers or alphabetic characters anywhere. Yes made-up squiggles and designs that have the texture of print, but aren’t.
Now I want to go Hegelian. Think of the first image we generated as the Thesis. The next three are variations on the Antithesis. I want you to combine Thesis and Antithesis to produce a Synthesis. Render it in a square aspect ratio.
This is promising. I’ve got to eat. But I’ll be back to do some more exploration along these lines.
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ChatGPT gave me a somewhat odd response to that, as follows:
Sounds good. This line is worth continuing: biography + tidepool ecology + information space + currency/ornament as a synthetic fine-art language.
What's odd about that? It’s just a little too specific for what I’ve been thinking. But that’s OK. I’ve collected some recent images below. These are what set me to thinking along these lines. FWIW, I’m not quite sure what I think of these images. But I do think I’ll continue experimenting.
ADDENDUM & BTW, a couple of hours later: On the whole I find the images below the fold more compelling than those above the fold. Hmmm.....
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1, 2: Kisangani Currency, Fifty and One-hundred
3, 4: Compressive Systems, Line drawing and full color
5: Cross, Microcosmos and Macrocosmos
6: Triptych Mosaic
7: Locked in Mid-Change
8: Virtual Reading
9: Heart of Darkness
10: Lost World New
11: Cosmic Jai Lai
Note that Lost World New is the first in a series of 15 images where Cosmic Jai Lai is the last in the series. That is to say, what started as Lost World New ended as Cosmic Jai Lai.
Considering only the images below “the fold,” I rank them in the following order:
First: Heart of Darkness,
Second: Cosmic Jai Lai,
Third: Lost World New,
Fourth: Kisangani Currency,
Fifth: Virtual Reading,
Sixth: Triptych Mosaic,
Seventh: Cross, Microcosmos, Macrocosmos,
Eighth: Compressive Systems and Locked in Mid-Change.
As for the five images above the fold, they range in value over a narrow range somewhere around Seventh and Eighth.
Interesting. Certainly the images represent ideas with the graphics giving some connection and flow between them. I find the impressions sterile, however. No soul.
ReplyDeleteHmmm.... As I said in the post (the highlighted sentence), I find the images below the fold more compelling than those above. Since then I've gone back in, named the images, and ranked them in order. The images above the fold are near the bottom of the list.
DeleteThis sort of ranking is a tricky business. Maybe I've only really got three categories, 1) First through Third, 2) Fourth through Sixth, and then 3) Seventh and Eighth. Even there, though, I'm hesitant about the Kisangani currency. If it weren't for the currency markings I might put those images in the first category. But then, maybe I'll decided that the currency markings are OK.
Now, how am I making those rankings? Is it completely arbitrary? I don't think so. I can talk about why I'm putting them in that order. Is it soulfulness? That terms doesn't come up in my thinking. Maybe it's useful as an overall term, but I don't find it analytically useful. I doesn't tell me what I need to do to produce more compelling images, and that's what interests me. How can I direct ChatGPT in producing better images of a certain type, where "fine art" is the phrase I'm using to define that type?
FWIW, the processes by which I worked with ChatGPT to create those images are somewhat varied, but almost all of them involve a rich prose context, either directly in the prompt that generated the (first) image (in a series) or in the larger context accessible by ChatGPT.
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