@dermaschinentraum
The name of this 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 from AI, everything suddenly seems to be possible!
@dermaschinentraum was my digital playground and an experimental platform for all things AI. At first glance, the channel may seem very bizarre, ideally at least mildly entertaining. However, it may be just a small glimpse into the synthetic future that lies ahead of humanity.
Note that the channel is discontinued since July 2023 as creative AI has now become part of mainstream media. Nevertheless, I will continue to publish content on my YouTube channel Brickbuster.
But how does it work? In simple terms, these so-called artificial neural networks are trained to recognize patterns, for example in images. Currently, it takes a lot of data and energy to train these machines. But once 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 humanity's last invention. While 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 apparent!
Does this spell the end of human creativity? Probably not. The democratization of these automated content creation tools will likely just shift the focus from creation to curation. It's true that all the images and text 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 raises an incredible number of unanswered questions, as well as some legitimate risks in terms of misinformation. If the unprecedented pace of progress in machine learning continues, society needs to be prepared. This is also one of the reasons 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.
