I attended an NFL football game this past weekend, the timing of which fit right alongside successive head injuries to football professional Tua Tagovailoa. I did not watch or see video of those collisions, but the amount of passionate writing generated around this as a cultural moment is pretty startling. Several issues relevant to our … Continue reading Midjourney and Concussion Protocol
Since I am playing with AI interfaces and algorithms, I figured why not add some AI-generated text and poetry to the mix? Once again using William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" as a prompt, I asked Writesonic to generate song lyrics using the poem's text as the first verse. The result is below, with my … Continue reading The Platinum Hit Wheelbarrow
In a moment of perfect timing, The Washington Post just published an article titled "An AI that creates images from prompts worries researchers. And now anyone can use it." An alternate headline reads, "AI can now create any image in seconds, bringing wonder and danger." The article focuses on the three AI art generators I … Continue reading The Washington Post Reads My Mind
What is the most quoted work of American poetry? Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." And it turns out the road most taken leads to misreading the poem, and thus the poem's final three lines have been offered up daily, somewhere, as a cosmic "go get 'em!" Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- … Continue reading The Algoroad Not Taken
Last evening I was privileged to be part of a Weidner Philharmonic Orchestra event held at the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts (the place is dazzling). The event was called "Women's Work," and the orchestra played four separate pieces by women composers. Interloper that I am, I was asked to be a small part … Continue reading Light & Music
If sticking with poetry as prompts for AI art generation, I wanted to see how the various algorithms would handle shaply contrasting words, images, and concepts. "Fire" and "ice" fit the bill perfectly. Enter the dragon, Robert Frost: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of … Continue reading Fire & Ice
Because I am sick today, I naturally thought of using "Covid-19" as a simple prompt for the AI art generators. Dall-E flagged it as a violation of their guidelines (I admire this), Stable Diffusion returned a photograph of a plane landing (?), but Midjourney stepped up once again. Midjourney interpreted the "-19" portion of the … Continue reading The Planet of Covid-19
Last spring, I taught a writing course in a maximum security prison. This was the first time I had ever done this, and it was a profound experience in ways I am not yet able to articulate. I can't yet describe it in a way that doesn't make it feel like I'm talking about myself, … Continue reading A Bit of Etheridge Knight
After a weightier post and experiment about race, today is light (but epic) fare. I am currently reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and it is proving just as good and important as billed. The Odyssey is a text that has always been significant to me. One of my undergraduate honors seminars was on … Continue reading Odysseus, Sacker of Algorithms
An interesting thing happened while pasting shorter poems into various AI Art generators (specifically Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion). I don't quite know what to make of recent results, as I only superficially understand how such algorithms work. I decided to use Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem" because I wanted to see if the word "Harlem" … Continue reading Dipping a Small Toe into the Idea of Algorithmic Bias
