🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA
This week from Archive & Collection: What impact DALLE-2 has on us + the world, how to generate an SVG grid using HTML, and how has your summer been!
👋 Announcements — Welcome to Archive & Collection!
Welcome to our first issue of the summer! The Interaction Nerds newsletter is back with two different types of issues: Archive & Collection and Investigation & Connection. This week, we’re super excited to present to you the very first Archive & Collection newsletter, which focuses on AI-generated art and its impact on HCI! Hope you would enjoy 😊
Quick introduction about us:
Sean Shen is a rising junior major in Information Systems + HCI, he tends to get quite shy so this is all he thought of for the intro, in short nice meeting everyone :)
Emily Amspoker is a rising sophomore majoring in HCI with a minor in Design For Learning and is super hyped about being a part of the Interaction Nerds team this semester!
Rebecca Jiang is a rising junior majoring in Information Systems + HCI and minor in Media Design, and is the lead editor for Interaction Nerds. She actually works for the content creators not leading them ><
☘️ Industry — DALLE-2
News about DALLE-2 is EVERYWHERE. This powerful and “creative” transform model developed by OpenAI is able to generate digital imagines from snippets of descriptions in natural language. As a quick example, let’s say you type in the phrase:
An astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style
The AI will generate images based on that within a few seconds
How Is It So Good (DALLE-2 Explained)
This blog from UCB took a deeper dive into how DALLE-2 functions, in short, it’s a process of understanding input using an auto-encoder → generating output with a transformer → connecting correlations using lossless compression.
“A Lemon With Sunglasses Resting On A Beach”— DALLE-2’s Social Impacts
There will be no human artist / firm that can process through this scale of requests, 24/7, continuously update, revise, and expand idea from its client.
More social side of such a phenomenon, this article gathered a different perspective on two main questions—“is AI created work ‘art’?”, and “are creativity & imagination unique to humans?”. In addition, the authors took a detour to the realm of “creative writing,” generating new content based on what the model has read, for example, continuing what Shakespeare has left off in Timon of Athens.
Food for Thought
For me, found this tweet providing the most interesting usage (expand story). What if DALLE-2, for us HCI nerds, would not just create arts, but also generate things that are more pragmatic, like product photos, or allow us to freely change the surroundings of the image?
If you wish to checkout DALLE-2 yourself, this prompt book may aid you with some inspiration.
And as a side note, next Archive & Collection issue we will dive deeper into how AI interprets and processes images through text input—be on the lookout for some academic papers!
🌾 Skills — Creating Generative SVG Grids with HTML
On the note of graphics generation, this was an article from our mentor, so far have found it helpful as a filler for a login page, a placeholder background, Figma variations etc.
For TLDR, feel free to check out this CodePen :D
🙋 One Question for You
Starting from this issue, we wish to write the last section of Archive & Collection with you :D.
At the end of every issue, we will post a question/small prompt, and you can respond by directly replying to Substack email or by sending it to yizes@andrew.cmu.edu. We will post your response on the next issue, hope you all would like this!
This week’s question:
Share a picture you took this summer and the story behind it!
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Thanks for reading this week’s Interaction Nerds by CMU UXA! The editors behind this work are Sean Shen, Emily Amspoker, and Rebecca Jiang.
🥰 Follow Us
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