A NEW LANGUAGE LEAPS TO LIFE

EMERGING FROM THE TOWER OF BABBLE

Generative AI is akin to a universal language emerging from the Tower of Babel. It has the potential to help us express the subconscious essence of our experiences much like artists do. By fluidly translating words, images, videos, and code into a single multimodal language, Generative AI can help achieve a new form of digital communication born of collaborative creation that both reflects us and projects us.

As sight-centric creatures, with 70% of our sensory neural receptors in our eyes and 20% in our ears, we have the ability to intuitively make 98% of our decisions without consciously thinking. Human "knowledge" is really just the mere 2% of the reasoning we are aware of and to a lesser extent have documented via text. Over 100,000 years of human evolution our cumulative conscious and subconscious understanding of the world has been intimated through the sensation of seeing but expressed through the explicit act of speaking or writing. It seems somewhat backwards right?

To make matters more hyperbolic today we're teaching machines to learn about the visual "appearance" of our world from from copious amounts of textual descriptions written by people who learned through the "experience" of sensing our world. Now that feels downright upside down.

Ironically this is where my optimism blooms. With multimodal generative AI, the masses can all speak with an artistic voice, conveying the vast expanse of human sensation that has long remained locked in our subconscious and been left unsaid. It's a language that brings us closer to the true experience of living, rather than the mere appearance of knowing.

In fact that is what makes art of any kind so compelling, the expression of that wich can be sensed but not spoken. As an artist and technologist, I am excited to see the potential that Generative AI holds manifest itself in a new form of visual voice. At the very least it's food for thought that makes me feel good.

So, join me in exploring the who, how, where and why of this brave new world in my ramblings below. More likely than not you'll see what I mean. 👁️👁️ Reid Genauer

Hold onto your neural network navigator folks. In this AI-fueled world that's zipping by faster than a Halley's Comet, let's take a celestial moment to unwrap the layers of AI like a Russian Doll: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI, GPT-4, AI Art are each nestled within a progressively brainier layer. Generative AI, that brilliant offspring of Deep Machine Learning, is like science fiction sans the fiction – which leaves us with, well, science. Sure, it's got risks as fiery as Prometheus's gift, but it also holds the promise of a supernova if we can tame those flames.

Generative AI is a mind-blowing leap in human innovation, but don't expect the sky to fall just yet. GPT-4 is like GPT-3' and other cheeky younger siblings, sprouting up in the sunshine of dramatically cheaper computing costs. The real ruckus? GPT-4's big debut took it from the vernacular of early adopters to the spectacular of a household name, overnight. The sheer velocity of the GPT-4 announcement swiveled heads, flooded Reddit threads and and sparked imaginations and provocations all over the globe. In short, Elvis has left the building, in a white jump suite but even GPT doesn't know where he's off to or why he's wearing that outlandish outfit.

If you're feeling a mix of giddy curiosity and nostalgia for those high school days when you "didn't inhale," you're not alone! Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, summed up the collective thrill when he said GPT-4 is "more creative than previous models" and "hallucinates significantly less." Who would've thought "hallucinating less" would be a selling point? Well, stranger things have happened – just not in Northern California. Case closed.

WHAT'S 1000 WORDS WORTH IN AI ART?

Generative AI is poised to revolutionize the creative landscape and generate immense financial and social value. AI promises to produce an endless stream of images, unlike any the world has ever seen. To test the age-old adage that "A picture's worth a thousand words," I conducted a seemingly simple exercise that opened me eyes to much much more.

According to recent research by the University of California - San Diego, the average American consumes 34 megabytes of data per day across all five senses, with sight being the dominant sense. Astonishingly, our brains have the capacity to process up to 74 megabytes of data per day. To put this into perspective, with 74 MB of data per day, one could scroll through TikTok for 192 hours, play over 37,000 hours of Fortnite, stream ~15,000 songs or 863 hours on Spotify, encode ~3.4M words, or stream every episode of Game of Thrones (70 hours).

But how does this relate to the value of a single image? Here's an interesting fact - the average American reads about 200 words per minute, for easy math, I assumed Game of Thrones has a frame rate of 30 frames/second or 1,800 frames/minute. And there it is. Let's break down the math:

• Average American reads 200 words per minute
• Game of Thrones has a frame rate of 30 frames/second
• There are 60 seconds in a minute, so: 30 frames/second x 60 seconds/minute = 1,800 frames/minute
• Now, let's calculate the value of a single frame: 200 words/minute ÷ 1,800 frames/minute = approximately 0.11 words/frame

So, a single frame of Game of Thrones is worth approximately 0.11 words

SNUFFING CANDLES IN THE BLAZE OF AI

Every human invention, from horseless carriages to the bright light's of Edison's light bulb, has disrupted the status quo and propelled us forward in doing so. Generative AI is no exception. It aims to elevate, but much like the lightbulb it's bound to snuff a few candles in the tussle.

Just like fire, Generative AI Alignment needs some good ol' risk wrangling to be productive. To be sure, GPT-4 and its ilk come with hazards, and it's up to us as an industry, the tech-savvy, and communities of all sizes to learn to harness the power and curb the threat.

By melding human ingenuity with AI's prowess, we can conjure up images and ideas that redefine our collective consciousness. Yes indeed, AI cranking out Van Gogh doppelgängers like a factory line of Starry Nights is a risk that may befuddle the collective beret. But the upside is a kaleidoscope of imagery that'll knock your socks off. We're talking about a creative explosion that'll make the human knowledge base feel like it's been shot out of a cannon.

GPT-4 is one such cannon. It can do amazing things to elevate each and everyone of us within a broad spectrum of risk to reward profiles. From transforming a napkin sketch into a slick website, morphing a Wall Street Journal article into Shakespearean verse, or distilling the history of the world into a potent 4-second soundbite. GPT-4's most accessible act of amazement is that it's now powering Bing, Microsoft's search engine. It's not so much a magic trick but, like it or not, a bold mark of industry acceptance.

A NEW FIGURE OF SPEECH

I have an eclectic mix of personal and professional personalities that populate my life. Colleagues composed of of dare devils and those that dare not. Technophiles and technophobes, musicians and technicians, entrepreneurial carnivores and big tech omnivores. We all wear slightly different facades but tip our cups with the same Koolaid.

It's vital that as a collective we acknowledge both the perils and promise of Generative AI. By peeling back the layers of our own trepidations and limitations, we can reveal its true potential and unlock unimagined utility. Avenues of communication that even Star Trek couldn't predict. Let's hold tight to the Generative AI rocket ship. Let's align on alignment as a center point as we together endeavor to make plans to illuminate the circumference in a new figure of speech.

A DARWINIAN DANCE WITH DEEP LEARNING

Machine Learning and Human Learning are complimentary in terms of how they how they evolved, how they function and how they will support us moving forward. Large Language Models are trained on hundreds of billions of data points composed of ideas, expressed as words that we wrote. Our jaw drops at the size of these data sets. But in fact our written history represents a tangible but relatively tiny subset of the human knowledge base. Our brains have amassed intergenerational understanding that began eons before language was ever invented.

When it comes to training Generative AI, documented human history really is a copious data set albeit incomplete. Large Language Models like GPT learn how to learn by digesting hundreds of billions of words written by people. By cross-referencing ideas through complex inference and perplexing pattern recognition they are able to understand the "appearance" of our world based on the "experiences" we have described in text. Pause for a minute. That's so cool. Machine learning understands the how images appear to us by understanding the way we have described those images in words!

For example GPT might have learned through clustered patterns of similar items that a circle is a kind of shape, that red is a color, and that an apple is a kind of fruit. From there Generative Ai might infer that an apple is a round shaped red colored fruit. What makes GPT-4 so unique is that its natural language knowledge base has been updated to understand the appearance of our world using rich media such as pictures, videos and computer code. Thus making it "Multimodal". This multi media form of Machine Learning doesn't distinguish between numbers, words or imagery.

Rather it receives and transmits different classes of information across desperate mediums as if it was all part of one Einsteinian cognitive arc, which it is. It's so sophisticated it's capable of "Zero Shot Learning" in which an AI Model can understand new information it has never encountered before by triangulating on patterns from its existing knowledge base. Imagine walking into physics class your junior year of high school and understanding the principles from all the math you had taken until that point? Far out! In a nutshell, these machines learn to understand the world much like a person does only at an unimaginable scale, with ever increasing velocity in a manner that transcends mediums.

SIGHT IS TO PEOPLE AS SCENT IS TO DOGS

Our brains are technically Multimodal, we can accept and transmit multiple classes of information across the five senses. Six if you include intuition and seven if you include conscience. However, we prefer visual information for good reason. Humans are sight-centric animals. Much like dogs are scent-centric and Generative AI is language-centric. ~70% of all the sensory receptors in the human body are in our eyes. It follows that somewhere between 70-90% of our brain boxes are oriented around processing what we intuitively understand through the sensation of sight. Unlike GPT's text-based training, human brains and by extension our interconnected evolutionary neural network was trained on imagery. Billions of data points aggregated over hundreds of thousands of years of experiencing the world by seeing it. The most valuable opportunity and the one I find most intriguing is how we might use machine learning to unlock the overwhelming majority of the human knowledge base. The intuitive understanding amassed over eons of seeing the world that remains unsaid in our collective subconscious.

To help illustrate, I used the lyrics to one of my songs called "Filter" as the input for the Generative Video above. The lyrics are in effect the text based natural language input. The music video was directed by me and created by Generative Ai GPT as applied by Genmo Both the act of creating the video and the immersive video output are experiential. Even if no one else laid eyes on the my video story the process of making it delighted me by unlocking imagery, colors, moods, landscapes and sensations I had held muted in my head for decades. More strikingly, it gives me a way to convey the richness of those sights and sensations with you in a multimodal approximation how I experience the world. I see AI Art as the birth of a conversational visual language for expressing that which we all sense so concretely but so often lack words for. It sounds near to ridiculous but the music video above lands with me as a form of digital mindfulness it's not about what I rationalize but rather what I visualize.

In the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the intersection of technology and art is an exciting place to be. No doubt AI is now and always will be better at statistical reasoning. But machines can't feel, they can't experience. One viewer of the GPT-4 Developers Release Livestream put it best: "GPT-4 is the ultimate translator between all languages. Spoken languages, mathematical languages, and visual languages. Every picture, and every video can be words and vice versa. This will change everything."

READING THE ROOM

As we navigate our daily lives, it is hard to fathom how we process the 34 mental megabytes of data we consume each day. Our brains, which can be thought of as supercomputers, take in an extraordinary amount of information through our eyes - which act as cameras for our minds.

Take a moment to slowly look around the room, intentionally digesting all that you see for 3-5 seconds. Without even knowing what you are looking at, your brain encodes an incredible wealth of information in an instant: light, shadows, dimension, colors, textures, patterns, people, objects, and even Pottery Barn rugs.This mode of sensing is known as seeing, a form of participatory intuition that operates at a subconscious level, accounting for approximately 28% of our mental processing. In contrast, consciousness, which makes up approximately 2%, pertains to thoughts we are aware of, while the remaining 70% is the domain of the unconscious, which contains deep-seated memories and past experiences.

Multimodal seeing, which involves the combination of sight, sound, and other sensory inputs, accounts for the bulk of our mental processing each day. It is a more valuable tool than words, which fail to capture the nuances of sensory perception, and imagination, which can be costly in terms of mental resources.In essence, seeing is a way of understanding without knowing. It is a powerful mode of perception that we utilize 34 Megabytes every day without even realizing it, much like a superhero who is unaware of their own abilities.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase, "The medium is the message," a theory that rivals the simple complexity of E=MC². At the core of his thesis is the idea that the medium through which a message is delivered impacts the meaning of what is being communicated. To illustrate this point, consider the mechanical differences between Instagram and a Facetime video call, both of which are visual mediums. The nature of the stories and messages conveyed through each is vastly different, with both being valuable in their own ways. One might argue that Instagram is to Telegram as Facetime is to Telephone. What's even more intriguing is the premise that a medium is, in and of itself, a message. McLuhan observed that a light bulb is a medium that has no concrete message, but delivers profound meaning through light.

This concept frames media as an extension of the human nervous system, an assertion that becomes obvious when watching three teenage boys play Xbox Madden.Enter the unbridled opportunity of Multimodal Generative AI Art. We can swap messages or mediums to best support the context and utility of our transmissions. To demonstrate, I used Marshall McLuhan himself as a volunteer, starting with an original black-and-white photo of the man. By swapping out different mediums expressed as prompts, or even the content itself, the message can be transformed from "Marshall McLuhan" to an "Octopus using a laptop."

Here is an example prompt I used to generate this series: an isometric wax statue of Marshall McLuhan with light bulbs floating in the background and shades of electric blue colors with black and white stylings, or a 3D art nouveau wax statue. With Multimodal Generative AI Art, the possibilities are endless.

IF I SEE SO GOOD, WHY DO I DRAW SO BAD?

Have you ever wondered why, despite our highly evolved perceptual abilities, so many of us struggle to translate our experiences into art? After all, one might expect that humans, with their complex neural machinery, would be natural artists, filmmakers, and illustrators. Nobel Prize-winning author Daniel Kahneman, however, suggests otherwise.

According to Kahneman's groundbreaking book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," the human brain makes 98% of decisions through an unconscious, emotional, and instinctive mode of thought he calls "Thinking Fast." In contrast, the remaining 2% of decisions are made through the logical, conscious, and rational "Thinking Slow" mode. This difference in decision-making is rooted in our evolution as hunter-gatherers, where fast and instinctive thinking was necessary for survival.

Drawing, painting, and even reading, on the other hand, are skills that require deliberate acquisition through the brain's slow thinking mode. As a result, we lack the mental models necessary for drawing to come naturally to us. But with the advent of generative AI, there is hope for a new form of storytelling that can transcend these limitations.

Generative AI is a hack into our own operating system, amplifying both modes of human decision-making. With machine "slow thinking," we have a way of scaling statistical reasoning, while also affording people the possibility of "Feeling Fast" in lieu of "Talking Fast." Collaborative creation connects us in new ways, transforming our prehistoric knowledge base into a new form of digital experience.

As we venture deeper into the uncertainty of AI art, we need the artistic class to jump in and show us the way. Machines will never be able to extract feeling from experience, and that is how we can align generative AI with humanity. It's time for us to reform our knowledge base and transform the voice of reason into the voice of experience.

Your host for this post Reid Genauer

RESOURCES AND REFERENCES

OpenAI , AI NOW & BEYOND , DALL-E Open Ai , Stability AI , OpenArt AI , Midjourney , NightCafe Studio , PromptHero , Kaiber , Genmo , CapCut , Pixery Wikipedia , Canva , NFX , Runway , Meta , YouTube , Forbes , The New York Times , The Verge , The Museum of Modern Art , Huggingface AI , Augie Studio , Stemit , LinkedIn , Whurligig Labs , Apple , Microsoft , IBM , Polarr Workera Instagram Snap Inc. Lexart labs Magisto Smule, Inc. , Shutterstock , Adobe Vimeo , TestFlight Goldfish Code , The Raine Group , Relix Media Group , nugs.net , JamBase , TechCrunch , GitHub Amazon Web Services (AWS) . Python Coding , Kapwing , Dayglow Media Ltd . Live Nation Entertainment Warner Music Group , Apple , Spotify , BandLab Technologies , Kickstarter , Patreon , Goodreads , Jasper , LyricFind , Musixmatch Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) Spotify

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