Week 6

Our Process

Ideas we thought about:

Initial Idea/inspiration:

1. Using AI “beautifying” apps to see how filtering photos can help success on dating app profiles

2. Tricking people to see if they know what’s real or fake- AI generated poetry?

3. OPTIONS to create an avatar of yourself would you consent now to let your identity be used in the future?

4. Data moshing videos- Creating stories using this medium that melts reality- Using AI to rip apart human stories.

   We ended up combining ideas 2 and 3. We wanted to tell stories using AI generated images. We treated the computer like our third partner and gave it some creative control in the process. Our human participants and our computer partner worked together. The humans tried to make sense of the images generated by the computer, and then the computer tried to make sense of the human interpretations once again.

What did we do?

First, we wrote a story:

The ship approached the bay of mermaids. The crew was wearing their formal uniforms. All were looking for the captain’s long lost love- the mermaid with the purple hair. A mysterious wind blew in suddenly. It carried red particles through the air. The captain lost his way and he suddenly fell to the ground, unconscious. The next morning, the captain found his beloved mermaid. They walked together, holding hands to the ship. The crew was nowhere to be seen. 

Next, we plugged the sentences into a RunwayML model that generated images from text.

We tweaked the wording slightly to experiment with how subtle differences would change how RunwayML interprets the meaning.

Then we gave the images, without the text, to a human subject.

We had them look at the images for 30 seconds without writing so they might consider the whole story instead of hyper focusing on just the first image. We asked them to write a story with a beginning and end. We told them the more detail the better. For example, instead of saying “The people were…” try to describe who the people are. There are no wrong answers.