A Steep Learning Curve –
Since learning all about text to image Ai technology, I decided to explore it further. Ai seems to be everywhere – if it were a living creature, I would liken it to one with tentacles – perhaps an octopus or a squid? It might also be likened to a tree with branches sprawling everywhere and with increasing speed crawls further into our lives. I suspect it will become ever more pervasive and how it is used, either for good or ill, will be down to us all. Running with the idea that Ai has tentacles and or branches, I decided to try a text prompt to see what Ai made of the request. I used ‘Tentacles, Branches, Network and Fractals’ as my main prompt. All of the images below were created from this text.
I was pleased with the images above because I was looking for a good example image for a new visual programming tutorial I wanted to try. The tutorial was about generating a growing image. The tentacle-like images above seemed perfect for this, especially in relation to my thoughts about the tentacle nature of Ai.
Below is the image that I chose for the tutorial. I am taking quite a risk with this type of imagery because in order to execute any project to a high standard will require a level of programming. This is knowledge that I simply don’t have. I am able to find my way around standard programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro etc. but programming – this is another level again. Therefore I need to very quickly ascertain whether I can make this work for me. I need to run up the learning curve and not roll down it. It is risky planning all of my work of my work around whether or not I may be able to learn programming. Therefore I need to experiment quickly and decide if this will work for me or not. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the level of camaraderie among programmers, with some offering to help with my quest for more tutorials.
My chosen image for the tentacle growing, image experiment has a really good contrast. It has tentacle like structures that can be animated to grow and spread. Although it is computer generated it also has an organic feel about it. I think it works well as a visual representation of Ai spreading it’s tentacles and permeating society.
Once I had chosen my image. I needed to write a program to make the image more generative and also to make it grow. I decided to film a time-lapse of myself sat at my computer while I followed along to my tutorial. One area of photography that Ai hasn’t yet seemed to have permeated is the recording of the passage of time. The following little time-lapse video of me sat at the computer is my tiny fight back against the relentless march of Ai into the creative arts. Time is precious and Ai as far as I know isn’t controlling that yet.
Five Hours at a Computer –
The following time-lapse video is a snapshot of 5 hours spent at the computer learning about visual programming using nodes. The passage of time condensed into 34 seconds is interesting in itself. During my time at the computer I did learn a lot, even if the results appear somewhat simplistic in contrast to the five hours spent on the task.
The Final Results –
Below is the final result. I made the image come to life and look as if it is growing in the first instance I made the image repeat itself over and over again.
In the second image I added both music and a bounce. The bounce is where the image plays through once and then bounces back to the beginning again. I think that this video works the best and as an aside, is quite calming to watch especially with the sound turned on.
Now that I have written a program that animates an image, I thought that it would be interesting to try it out on more of the Ai tentacle images. I hate to waste any form of experimentation and the Ai tentacle images are both relevant and accessible.