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NBA superstar Steph Curry is adding artificial intelligence to his résumé.
According to a press release, the Golden State Warriors point guard is working with Simplicity to connect residents with their cities. Simplicity is a leading AI-driven platform that is making noise in Silicon Valley. The startup allows people to find all city services, updates, and events, all in one place. With the core mission of the platform being “to help the city administration improve the residents’ quality of life,” Curry felt it was a great fit. “I’m thrilled to join forces with the Simplicity team and support the company’s mission of enhancing our cities and streamlining the way we receive information,” Curry said.
“Technology is a powerful connector, and Simplicity is leading the charge in using it to make daily life easier for our communities.”
The startup’s website states their cutting-edge technology has already proven its capabilities in 30 major cities across the country, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin, Denver, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cleveland, and more.
Curry will be working side-by-side with Simplicity founding partners Miguel Gamino and Juraj Gago. Gamino has worked with the city of San Francisco and Mastercard. Gago says working with Curry is exciting based on Curry’s passion for community outreach. “Stephen brings a unique perspective and drive to Simplicity, and we’re honored to have him join our company,” Gago said. “His commitment to making a positive impact aligns with our mission and we’re excited to see what the future holds with him on our team.”
Curry is known for bridging the gap within the communities he represents. Last year, Curry and his wife, Ayesha, announced a plan called “Little Town Libraries,” encouraging book sharing and childhood literacy in Oakland. He also partnered with, NinetyToZero, a nonprofit, looking to petition organizations across the country to help close the racial wealth gap.
Back at the tail end of 2021, I remember stumbling upon a random image on Twitter. It was clearly something procedurally generated, a vague resemblance of an object, blurred shapes that roughly evoked a prompt that acted as the piece’s title. It was intriguing to look at, and as such when I discovered that it was generated from a mobile application called Wombo.AI, I couldn’t help but download it and play with the new toy.
At the time, I really thought it was just going to be a toy, which given historic trends and the eventual end result was perhaps foolish. This magic black box of an application was simple enough in nature. You’d give a series of words, select a style, and the computer would comb through its database and assemble a hasty pastiche. It was never particularly distinguishable, but if you asked for a castle, you’d get something like a tall building. Animals would be a distorted show. It was an interesting thought experiment more than anything, a place to give an idea a prototype form. Unfortunately, Wombo quickly announced that it would be using its proprietary to mass generate Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs, and quickly the interest waned. It was one thing to play with a toy, it was another to willingly participate and enable volatile cryptocurrency practices that prioritize mass generation of images and pretending that they were immune from copy-paste tactics.
Early in 2022, Midjourney entered the scene, and Midjourney was remarkably more powerful than anything Wombo had done. Detailed images could be generated from oddly specific prompts. Multiple options with the ability to select and refine pieces. The computing power alone must have been immense, but Midjourney offered a taste at this fascinating piece of technology. It made perfect sense that this type of data-intensive aggregation took up processing power, but at least for me, if I were to pay for art, I was always going to pay an artist directly.
And then everything sort of came crashing down at once. Before long, the various twitter circles I inhabited began pointing out grievance after grievance. The two that constantly stuck out the most (and also deeply entwined) were the use of these generators to bypass paying actual artists and the blatant theft of different artists’ work. There was a whole book generated from AI and at least one book cover.
For those unfamiliar, AI Art is not spontaneously generated. These programs are trained on gargantuan large data sets and through user-influenced iteration, they learn how to associate certain phrases with certain images. Like with many models, these only exist because of the person feeding and extracting information.
This is not an emergent problem unique to the 2020s. Concerns of automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have been around since the start of the industrial revolution. It has just taken to the forefront of the conversation because the technology has advanced significantly and the constant need for engagement with social media platforms makes it criminally easy to aggregate and disseminate. To call AI Art “art” or just another tool in a toolbox is a little disingenuous. The very foundation of the technology is theft. The very process the algorithm goes through is not a creative endeavor. It’s a convoluted series of binary choices that makes for an uncanny simulation.
The original promise of automation was that the work we as humans were fundamentally bad at would no longer need to be done by humans: strenuous physical labor, intensive calculations, repetitive iterative protocols. Automation was supposed to free up time for humans to do the things that machines and computers were bad at: art, comedy, and writing. The principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning get conflated constantly, and in our pursuit to streamline processes, we lose sight of that sometimes that the act of going through the process is the entire especially when it comes to art.
I’m a well-documented robot sympathizer, and there was a time that I would side with the robotic overlords; however, the current trajectory of the technology is simply not heading out. The software is a pale facsimile that is nothing more than a poor speaker box and project.
As such, I felt compelled to compile several different stories that demonstrate how the actual artistic process compares to the endless dirge of pastiches. There are some spoilers in the next few paragraphs so be wary past the titles.
The first that came to mind was Diva/Vivy from Vivy Eyes Flourite Song. A singing robot who is an actually designed music player that eventually gains sentience over the course of a hundred some years. And even with all of the fancy programming and technological advancements, it still takes one hundred some years and harrowing experiences for Vivy to produce a single original song. And in what can only be described as a little too prescient, said song gets co-opted briefly for a robotic uprising that nearly upends humanity before Vivy willingly resets herself to course correct because of the *personal* connections she made. The deliberate decision she chose.
Then I thought about Zima Blue from Netflix’s Love Death Robots, another story about a robot (this time a pool cleaner) that takes hundreds of years to eventually develop masterful art based on a pool tile it used to clean back when it was a primitive machine. Even in fiction, true art takes so much of a larger time scale that we often acknowledge and the use of AI to somehow accelerate the past this ignores the very fact that this is not something that can simply be automated. Art is a complex process and creation is something we should trifle with so haphazardly (something Hayao Miyazaki has touched on in the past).
Of course, Carole and Tuesday deserves several mentions. In a world where almost all music is procedurally generated by advanced algorithms, the endurance of the human songwriters is still able to break through and spark revolution specifically because it comes from a place that computers will never be able to parse. One of the many truisms I have learned is that the goal is always to create something only you can create. Whether it’s Carol and Tuesday getting inspired by the circular motion of the laundromat or Ezekiel rebelling against the oppressive governmental systems, there is substantially more passion and authority than the songs that merely follow standard cookie cutter formulas, a sentiment that is reflected in our society.
Hell, all of this even got me thinking about Gearless Joe from Megalobox. Even with all of his opponents having biotic enhancements, Gearless Joe is able to stand in the arena and fight back on equal terms. There’s a factor of human grit and determination that is capable of closing the gap. As much as enhanced biometrics are capable of doing, at its core, they only augment, not fully replace.
I really wish AI generated tools were more toys or starting points. I wish that there were a means to start giving form to a shapeless figment that could be refined through human hands. But that’s not what “AI art” is currently being used for. It’s being used to churn out thousands of meaningless images for use of NFTs. It’s being used as a means to steal from artists two times over, first by literally stealing their stylistic choices and second by not paying to create art. It’s attempting to streamline the act of creation in a discipline where the entire part is learning the intricacies of creation. It’s not that the tools don’t have a place, it’s that the current application of the tools is actively detrimental and harmful to actual artists.
Computers are great at taxes, optimizing supply chains, doing number crunches for rockets. Computers can discrete problems with discrete conclusions. But art, whether drawings, painting, writing, filmmaking, is not a discrete problem with discrete conclusions. It’s an infinite canvas of possibilities and if there’s one thing we also know from watching the media it’s that computers struggle with the infinite.
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The post Suggested Materials for Any AI Art Apologists appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
Astro Boy, known in Japan by its original name Mighty Atom or Tetsuwan-Atomu, has inspired a lot of anime and other media since its inception in 1952. One could even argue that there would be no Mega Man — Capcom’s sci-fi video game franchise — without Astro Boy. In fact, there are many things that all gamers and die-hard manga and anime enthusiasts have no one but Osamu Tezuka — the artist who wrote and illustrated Astro Boy — to thank for.
With that said, Astro Boy has never been a very famous mainstream figure — well, at least not until now. MSCHF Sneakers, a sublabel of art collective MSCHF, has unveiled a very creative new offering that’s apparently inspired by the boots worn by one of the most iconic characters coming from the Land of the Rising Sun. While gaming and anime fans most certainly didn’t expect to see even the most seasoned sneakerheads rocking these boots, let alone the “high-fashion” community, these boots are the latest and greatest in shoe creativity and comfort.
But before we discuss these wondrous boots, called the Big Red Boot, that MSCHF has created, let’s first discuss Astro Boy and how both the manga and the subsequent anime adaptation influenced fashion over the years. Because, believe it or not, a show about a young android boy with human emotions actually had a massive impact on fashion worldwide, from alternative culture movements to modern, mainstream high fashion.
Astro Boy is widely considered one of the best manga and anime series of all time, as the manga was ranked number 6 for “Greatest Manga of All Time” and the third highest Tezuka manga. The anime adaptation from 1963 currently ranks second on the “Greatest Anime of All Time” list and, according to Nippon, the first popular anime television series. Ever since the inception of the manga and subsequent anime adaptation, the boots have been a central part of Astro’s character design.
While many sources nowadays claim that Astro Boy’s boots were inspired by the footwear of American football players, which were popular in Japan at the time, Tezuka actually took the inspiration from roller skates. Roller skates often grant their wearer speed and agility; Astro’s boots do the same, but by different means, as they’re equipped with futuristic and practical technology.
Their original design was rather simple; due to the black-and-white nature of 1950s manga, boots were mostly colored bright gray, prompting many to believe they were red, though, in some iterations, the boots were colored black, with a thick, flat sole and rounded toe. The design evolved over the years, and the artists experimented with different boots. While the original boots go up to Astro’s knees, some iterations of the character have different boots—some designs came up to Astro’s ankles and were even secured with shoelaces.
Astro’s boots weren’t just a stylish accessory to the protagonist but an essential part of his abilities. They had built-in jet engines that allowed the character to fly and gave him superhuman speed and agility. When Astro Boy anime was first broadcast in the United States, it inspired a surge of interest in all things Japanese, which included fashion, and Astro Boy’s boots were at the forefront of this trend from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Through that time, people acquainted with Astro Boy, especially fans of Japanese pop culture, wore red boots that intentionally resembled those worn by Astro. When anime and manga became more mainstream in the US, fashion designers created anime- and manga-inspired collections, often including some iteration of Astro Boy‘s boots. This brings us to MSCHF’s creation — the one that bears the closest resemblance to Astro Boy’s boots.
And truly, MSCHF has created actual footwear that looks like Astro Boy‘s signature boots brought into the real world. According to Daniel Greenberg, the Big Red boot is a realization of cartoonish abstractions of shoes, representing an overstated form that conveys the idea of a “boot” without worrying too much about practicality and realism. In short, when you see it, you know it’s a boot, despite lacking nearly all the features associated with modern-day footwear.
Of course, the Big Red boot doesn’t mention its relationship to Astro Boy, most likely due to legal reasons, but anyone acquainted with the anime knows where this design originated from. MSCHF took it upon themselves to make this aesthetic design a reality, which now comes priced at approximately $350. Interestingly enough, everyone loves these; they’re so aesthetically captivating that even those who don’t pay much attention to sneakers can’t look away.
They’re almost a perfect replica and a wearable model of the character’s shoes made entirely out of red EVA foam. Unfortunately, unlike their anime counterpart, these only go up to mid-calf in height, lack any MSCHF branding, and don’t have any kind of propulsion system — the lack of the latter is really a shame. Still, one thing can’t be denied. MSCHF’s Astro Boots (not the official name) are the next big fashion trend for footwear and anime fans.