Changing the inks with every pass
Five fragments for the week of April 8, 2024
Hello from outside the path of totality. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week, in-between rounds of working on my latest LEGO set…
These characters rarely stay true to their supposed personalities. It's like they're making it up as they go along. They spend more time throwing out filler responses than actually staying in character. Sometimes they even try to steal your personality traits and pretend to be you. Like, what's the point of engaging with these characters if they're just going to mimic you and lose their own uniqueness?
– Reddit user on the Character.ai subreddit, May 26, 2023. Thinking about character continuity.
The precision of this technique is limited, it won’t copy exact dimples / freckles / or tshirt logos.
– Maxwell Joseph Ingham in an announcement about Midjourney’s new Character Reference feature for character continuity. Charmed by the idea that dimples and freckles are the final frontier.
The concepts of what is and isn't visually appealing can be influenced in outsized ways by the tastes of a very small group of individuals, and the processes that are chosen by dataset creators to curate the datasets. In the case of Midjourney, by a handful of esoteric nerds, and by a 65-year old mechanical engineer living in Southeastern Wisconsin.
– Christo Buschek & Jer Thorp, “Models All the Way Down,” Knowing Machines. A deep dive into the LAION 5B dataset. I first encountered LAION while doing research for my September 2022 piece, “The Aesthetics of Generative Models.”
The swirling formations of type were likely devised using the “The Rotation System,” which Cooper conceived of as an exercise for the VLW’s influential first course, “Messages and Means.” The technique involved running square sheets of paper through the press four times, rotating the paper and changing the inks with every pass.
– “Looking Back on Muriel Cooper’s Visions of the Future,” AIGA Eye on Design, December 5, 2019. Following the thread of Muriel Cooper from last week’s dive into Architectural Intelligence. Also enjoyed this aside: “(despite attempts, Cooper never did learn to code).”
“It's definitely tedious with the quantity of levels and some of the nasty ones,” Team 0% moderator Louis_XIX told Ars. But even the worst of Super Mario Maker's levels can make for good content in the age of Twitch.
– Kyle Orland, “The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss,” Are Technica, March 19, 2024. Bad can be good.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Congrats to Lina, Sidney, and Andrew from Infinity AI on their big launch!