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Generative Creativity

  • Fabville at Somerville High School 81 Highland Avenue Somerville, MA, 02143 (map)

In today's session, we invite you to embrace the converse to Picasso's quote:

"Everything you can imagine is real." 

- Pablo Picasso, Spanish Surrealist

Instead, "You can imagine everything is real" at the intersection of AI and Digital Media.

In digital systems, every detail of a piece of media can be quantified onto sliding scales: a mix board controls the blending of signals for a music producer; filters blend together layers of images for the photographer (which are each just a blending of pixels). Every tweak is quantized on a sliding spectrum between dry/wet, on/off, etc. and every decision and permutation of multiple decisions in these spectrums can yield new, interesting content.

AI learns statistical correlations between features of its inputs and its target output during a process called training. So when we ask an AI "who painted Poppies?", it can accurately guess Claude Monet. But what decisions is it making to respond correctly? Does it truly understand what makes a Monet painting? And if it does, can it create one?

"Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation."

- Mason Cooley, Professor Emeritus French Literature

The goal of generative content is to leverage the correlations that AIs have learned to create something new, and the goal of this talk is to explain to you the ways generative or algorithmic art can benefit every artist's creative process.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

- Edgar Degas, French Impressionist

About the Speaker:

Christian DiMare-Baits is a full-time Data Platform Engineering Manager on the Wayfair Data Catalog and a full-time Masters student in Artificial Intelligence at Northeastern University. At Wayfair he works on information retrieval systems for metadata searchability and knowledge graph modeling, and in his spare time, he enjoys photography dates with his husband Cammerron, and writing songs about the passing of time.

Free event, register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/generative-creativity-tickets-230099623167

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