Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, an acclaimed Afrofuturist scholar who pioneered the Deep Dream neural network as an art medium back in 2019, is now experimenting with Midjourney, the new AI project that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate new imagery.
The results, some of which you can see here, are deliriously stunning. Nettrice's image above, for example, was generated by a line from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (one of her favorite novels):
“For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it."
"[Midjourney] tries to understand human language," Dr. Gaskins explains. "It's about the text; the order of words. The cool thing about NLP AI (Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) is another person can use the same exact text prompts (same order, etc.) and never be able to duplicate the ones I generated. This means every single image is one of a kind / unique."
Here's another that she generated through inputting the text, "Afrofuturistic Black woman botanist in trippy alien utopia":
Continue reading "Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins Creates Utterly Stunning Art With Midjourney" »
Responding to our question on how many active users on the Quest VR headset there are, a reader points us to a recent market survey which suggests that use is quite tiny, especially among Gen Z:
Piper Sandler completes 43rd semi-annual Generation Z survey of 7,100 U.S. teens...
While 26% of teens own a VR device, just 5% use it daily. 48% of teens are either unsure or not interested in the Metaverse
This prompts reader "lieisacake" (LOL) to observe: