Lifeboat Foundation

AI image generator Dall-E2 is about to find a new host. Microsoft will integrate the AI-based image generator with Microsoft Designer, a video-making tool to be available within the Microsoft Office suite. Till recently, Dall-E2 which is looked down upon as an app meant for only playing around with text prompts will be a part of Microsoft’s AI graphic design app. Designers and video makers who find it difficult to search for unique images can now leverage Microsoft’s Designer app to compose videos with imagery of their choice. Microsoft’s venture is seen as a step toward competing with design major Canva, which boasts more than 100 million active users. During the Ignite Conference held recently, Microsoft announced that it would integrate Dall-E 2 into the yet-to-be-released Designer app as well as existing Bing and Edge.

I’ve been blown away by #stablediffusion and AI art. In another video I’ve used #deforum and also had a look at #discodiffusion. This time I wanted to use Automatic1111. As a music producer and creator, I originally felt threatened by the technology but what I’ve come to realise is this. If you use it like a director/ producer you’ll be able to make things beyond that of the average AI art fan.

I challenged myself to produce a track and video in under 12 hours and created this, using a combination of over a decades worth of creative insights and a new piece of AI tech (Stable Diffusion), I’m absolutely blown away by the results.

Continue reading “Artificial Progression | Alias Here | AI Anime Music Video | Made In Under 12 Hours” »

Introducing: The Synthetic Party, a new political party in Denmark that hopes to soon have a parliament seat. Oh, and by the way, its head honcho, Leader Lars, is actually an AI chatbot, and all of its policies are AI-derived. Cool?

Asker Staunæs, the creator of the party and an artist-researcher at the nonprofit art and tech organization MindFuture, told Motherboard that Leader Lars is specifically trained on policies formed by post-1970 Danish fringe parties — and thus, he says, the party is designed to collectively represent the roughly 20 percent of present-day Danish voters whose parties remain unrepresented in parliament.

“We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat,” Staunæs told the site. “So it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realize, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so.”

The top machine learning researcher at Facebook is quietly building a roadmap towards an “autonomous” AI that has common sense.

The uses of such a robot include ocean farming, diver support, and monitoring of coastal ecosystems.

Yale University researchers in the U.S. have developed a new amphibious turtle robot that has the ability to transform its legs into flippers.

The amphibious robotic turtle, known as ART (Amphibious Robotic Turtle), was inspired by the land and aquatic turtles, a group whose fossil record dates back over 110 million years, according to a press release published by the university on Wednesday.

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How will we interact with computers in a few years? Probably very differently than we do today. One developer gives a taste by linking three AI systems for a digital design assistant.

For his AI-based design assistant, Twitter user Progen links three AI systems: the open-source image AI Stable Diffusion for image generation, OpenAI’s Whisper, also open source, for translating spoken words into English, and GPT-3 for dialogs with the assistant.

Continue reading “Developer combines Stable Diffusion, Whisper and GPT-3 for a futuristic design assistant” »

A London-based artist named Matt DesLauriers has developed a tool to generate color palettes from any text prompt, allowing someone to type in “beautiful sunset” and get a series of colors that matches a typical sunset scene, for example. Or you could get more abstract, finding colors that match “a sad and rainy Tuesday.”

DesLauriers has posted his code on GitHub; it requires a local Stable Diffusion installation and Node. JS. It’s a rough prototype at the moment that requires some technical skill to set up, but it’s also a noteworthy example of the unexpected graphical innovations that can come from open source releases of powerful image synthesis models. Stable Diffusion, which went open source on August 22, generates images from a neural network that has been trained on tens of millions of images pulled from the Internet.

On the bright side, there are some things we can do to prevent that outcome… maybe.