FRaGiLE
Foreword
Artificial Intelligence is a very active field of research.
It is hard to believe that major breaktroughs, now fueling thriving research and applications, are so recent: AlexNet was published less than a decade ago, while Transformer is four years old, and NeRF less than two. New articles are published everyday, making it hard for researchers to follow the trends in such an intense and competitive field. New products are launched every week, making it hard for society to adapt to those new technologies, and measure their impact on our lives.
FRaGiLE is a poetic and humorous response to this frenzy. With visual dreams of futile and ephemeral objects of a mesmerizing complexity, it offers a contemplative pause in this craze of science. As a Memento Mori of Computer Vision, the short poems written in collaboration with the machine also aim at recalling how frail our beautiful architectures of knowledge are.
The creative process of FRaGiLE holds its own paradox: an "old" method – DeepDream was presented in 2015 – used on cutting-edge networks – CLIP was released in early 2021 – allows to generate eerie images from combinations of labels. This novelty too shall pass, and those pictures will one day be remnants of outdated futures.
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Palaces of Paper Cards
In the library halls and cabinets
Latent spaces of colored sheets
Are filled with patterns of origami
That computers now learn and practice
Eternal Temples of Cheese Wheels
Time eats stones and bones
All hail the golden breadsticks
That Jelly of Fortune buries
In temples of cream cake
Roads of Foamy Engines
Will autonomous cars bring robo-thrust
As clean flying computers reach Mars
Without being swept away
By a tide of rocketless motorsistors?
Profound Dreams of Gold and Sand
Grain after grain, patiently, tirelessly
The sandman builds its castle
Till water rises from a drop of data
Melting Crowds in White Suits
The company's director wants
Every single employed snowman
To adopt the enterprise mindset
And keep up the competitive momentum
Cardboard Skyscrapers
Stacks of layers, piles of boxes
Gather up all kinds of meta bits
Extracted from our collective desires
To fuel the machine unconscious minds
Leaving a Mark on History
Every human has their fifteen minutes of Fame
What about robot bookkeepers?
Will they leave their footprints on historical websites?
Beds on the Seabed
Cozy rooms with furnished libraries
Welcome marine creatures that dwell on eels
Teaching fishing flies what art and science mean
Technical details
All those images were manually optimized with state-of-the-art techniques derived from DeepDreams, based on a reimplementation of the tools described in Olah et al., 2017, augmented with Fourier positional encoding for the coordinate-based network image generators (inspired by Tancik et al., 2020), and multi-layer compositing.
Networks "deep-dreamed" this way are either the released version of CLIP (by OpenAI), or standard vision networks finetuned on custom image datasets.
The short poems presented with the images were written with the help of an apparatus similar to Write with Transformer, used with a fine-tuned GPT-2.
Cette œuvre a été réalisée dans le cadre du doctorat SACRe de l’Université PSL.
Cathedrals of Jelly
No wonder this world tastes sweet
If A.I. comes and swallows everything,
Can it give us gelatinous love?