Hi everyone!
The theme for this month is exploring the bridge between art and computation.
Deep fake audio has advanced so much over the past year, that we’re now very close to producing copies of soundbites indistinguishable from their authentic counterparts.
Jay-Z’s company recently filed a copyright claim on a rap song created using his voice without his permission. In an unsettling precedent, YouTube chose to ignore this request for content removal.
Listen on YouTube:
Jay-Z raps the Darth Plagueis Copypasta (Speech Synthesis)
https://youtu.be/Ic3AWMXGoQ8
How long will it be before a Top 40 song is written or selected for promotion by a machine learning algorithm?
Using the latest developments from OpenAI (while exploring primed audio samples at https://github.com/openai/jukebox/issues/40)
I was able to produce these sound clips using a latent space vector near Michael Jackson and Motown.
These could easily be expanded into countless ideas for songs:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6663838264224423936-xkbF
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This meme was generated by a machine:
Can an AI agent understand the subtle humor, style, and inside jokes referenced in internet memes?
Apparently so. Check out ImgFlip’s new AI Meme generator:
https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
He looked out into the distance, which was mostly like fluorescent lights. And he goes, “Brother, I build worlds.”
I’ve taken a few weeks to decompress before beginning studies at the Wolfram Research summer program. Having recently picked up a VR headset, I wanted to revisit fractal artwork as an area for exploration.
Perhaps you’ve seen a Mandelbrot plot before, but, have you ever stood under the archways inside a Mandelbox? Me neither, until this month.
It turns out, learning the basics for VR locomotion and GLSL shader assisted raymarching isn’t terribly difficult. The starter projects, YouTube, and community forums have excellent guides.
It is, however, difficult to produce efficient code to manage 70fps+ stereo renders through an older Android mobile device housed in an Oculus Quest.
Geometry running at ~10% quality:
View on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61yMrQC9gyU
Geometry running at ~100% quality:
View on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-sxdQnlfBE
I’m looking forward to letting Moore’s law run for a few years then seeing this all work as it should.
If you’re curious to see more and read about the math behind these shapes, there are several threads and code snippets at:
https://fractalforums.org/share-a-fractal/22/df-mandelbox-variation/3547. A gallery is up at https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/iryanbell.
Ben McNeill of Profitable Python recently had me on his podcast to talk shop.
In this episode we discuss new languages for blockchain development, rearchitecting the web with distributed file systems for peer-to-peer content delivery, proof-of-burn non-fungible digital assets, smart contracts for no-loss lotteries, quadratic payments, homomorphically encrypted biomedical data sharing, and other fun topics.
https://anchor.fm/profitablepythonfm/episodes/Tales-of-a-Prolific-App-Developer–Ryan-Bell-efui64
Until next time!
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.” -Orson Welles