@dermaschinentraum
The name of my Instagram channel literally translates to "themachinedream". But how can a machine dream? The magic ingredient is called artificial intelligence and it will change the way we live forever. With a little help of AI, everything suddenly seems to be possible!
@dermaschinentraum is my digital playground and an experimentation platform for all things AI. At first glance, the channel may seem very bizarre, ideally at least mildly entertaining. Nevertheless, it may be just a small glimpse into the synthetic future that lies ahead of humanity. All content on this channel was generated using the latest machine learning models.
Along with my YouTube channel Brickbuster, this is one of my two regularly maintained social media channels.
But how does it work? Simply put, these so called artificial neural networks are trained to recognize patterns, for example in images. It currently takes a lot of data and energy to train these machines. But when it's done, its capabilities can only be described as magic. Give the machine any text prompt, and it will make your dream (or nightmare) come alive!
My fascination for this topic actually dates back to 2018, when I created an explanatory video of what artificial intelligence is. The explosive expansion of AI into all areas of our everyday life has only increased my passion for it ever since.
Computational creativity is on the verge of becoming the next big disruptive technology. Some even claim that artificial intelligence will be mankind's last invention. Although we are still some time away from that, the current state of creative AI is nonetheless remarkable. Welcome to the emerging field of generative media!
There are currently countless neural networks that are impressively good at creating never-before-seen images, writing all kinds of text, or synthesizing speech and music. The resulting creations rarely follow human conventions, and are therefore often on the border between genius and madness. At that point, the cumulative creative potential behind these machines becomes evident!
Does this mean the end of human creativity? Probably not. The democratization of these automated content generation tools will likely only shift the focus from creation to curation. It's true that all the images and texts were generated entirely by the machine, but they were still cherry picked by me. Furthermore, a lot of trial and error is necessary to achieve good results.
Of course, this topic undoubtedly poses an incredible number of unanswered questions along with some legitimate risks in terms of misinformation. If the unprecedented pace of progress in machine learning continues, society must be prepared. This is also one reason why I started working as a freelance media educator.
The distinction between man and machine is becoming increasingly blurred. Our self-thinking machines will soon be smarter than their creators. If we can no longer compete with them, when will it be time to cooperate? Often enough, it simply raises the question of what it means to be human.
