🎨 Art tools of the future today 🧠 Meaty cyberpunk future 🤖

So much happened this week that I have a hard time picking what to tell you about. So let's just sprinkle the goods from all over.

Thing 1 - Art tools of the future today

Adobe joins the generative AI race. And it's glorious.

Firefly website screenshot

This might be the first real generative AI product for creators and artists. So far we've had tools that focus on AI generation and some user interfaces that kinda attempt to make the process easier.

Midjourney v5 is the generative AI to beat in terms of the quality of images generated. And you know how you interact with it? Through a freakin' discord channel bot.

Firefly feels like being transported into the future with art creation tools at your fingertips.

Apart from an epic interface, there are other epic things:

• It's trained on Adobe Stock (etc) - a.k.a. there are no potential copyright issues
• Does some cool things with text effects

Will this be the new WordArt?

• Can change the mood, atmosphere, or even the weather in videos - whaat??
• Extend image, 3D to image, text to pattern, text to brush, sketch to image, text to template...

Downside? It's in beta, you have to request access, and well... you'll need an Adobe license...

But here's the Festivus^

Bing Image Creator is live!

It uses DALL-E and the quality is pretty great. You just need a Microsoft account to log in and use.

Bing prompt: "house, fantasy, photograph"

Bing prompt: A spaceship orbiting earth in year 2123

(source 1, source 2, source 3)

Thing 2 - Meaty cyberpunk future

Scientists got tired of the regular artificial intelligence and put their resources together to build a living computer with 80 000 mouse brain cells.

They grew them from stem cells and then trained them to recognize electric patterns.

Bing prompt: living computer with 80000 mouse brain cells, render

Why tho??

Artificial neural networks in your regular computer take a lot of time and effort to train. In the meantime, your meat brain takes almost nothing to run and does an incredible amount of computation. (You're incredible!)

So-called reservoir computing matches neurons made from living cells with conventional computer chips used to read the data they produce. The idea is that the division of labor between meat and silicon cuts down the time and energy needed to train more traditional neural networks.

Think it's weird to use organic material in computers?

Chances are you're reading this on an OLED display. You know what "O" stands for? Organic.

The emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of an organic compound that emits light in response to an electric current.

So is the future AI going to run on brain cells built from mouse stem cells?

(source 1, source 2)

Thing 3 - 1964: ARTHUR C CLARKE predicts the future

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. So, if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I will have failed completely.

- Arthur C Clarke

He predicted that we'd be able to

• work from home using computers
• communicate with each other using video calls
• use robots to do things for us
• use satellites to watch TV
• use the internet to learn about anything

He also talked about things that didn't happen yet. Like how computers/robots will replace us the same way we replaced Cromagnon.

1964: ARTHUR C CLARKE predicts the future (12 min)

I monologued about that last several weeks to a few unlucky friends before I heard from Arthur. It's a lot more tangible now than it was in '64.

What will the future look like in 2082?

Cheers, Zvonimir