🎨 New Realms of Creativity

003 - Pushing the boundaries of human creativity with artificial intelligence

Hey friends! 👋🏻

Happy Monday and Happy Halloween! 🎃 I can’t believe another month has flown by so quickly and that the holiday season is right around the corner!

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share one of the more impressive applications of artificial intelligence I’ve seen and my thoughts on how AI is pushing the boundaries of human creativity. 🎨

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Outpainting by DALL•E

Imagine a robot that can paint like Monet. Or Picasso. Or Van Gogh. Or any artist of your choosing. In fact, imagine a robot that can paint in the style of any painting you would like.

Earlier this month on Twitter, I came across an eye-catching time-lapse of DALL•E performing “outpainting”. DALL•E is an AI system developed by OpenAI that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

Timelapse of DALL•E (An AI system) performing “outpainting”

As seen in the timelapse, DALL•E was able to paint beyond the well-known canvas of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer seamlessly by taking into account the original visual elements such as lighting, shadows, reflections, and textures. As far as I can tell, it’s even able to generate endless variations until you’re pleased with the result. I was blown away when I saw this video and couldn’t help but watch it a few more times.

As I work in the Business Messaging team at Meta, I’ve been thinking of ways artificial intelligence can be used to help support businesses. Imagine a small business that can’t afford to hire a designer or a social media manager. Perhaps they could just feed AI an image of their product and have it generate eye-catching visuals for social media posts or ads. This combined with an AI copywriting tool like copy.ai would make for an incredible marketing and advertising workflow powered by artificial intelligence.

As a product designer, I used to think that I was safe from artificial intelligence since my line of work falls in the creative field but now I’m starting to wonder if it can replace me someday in the future. There’s definitely a lot to think about when it comes to artificial intelligence and what it means for artists. Check out this article in the New York Times about an AI-generated artwork that won an art prize.

But overall, I think the most exciting part about all this is that it demonstrates the potential for humans to work alongside artificial intelligence to create amazing things and push the boundaries of human creativity.

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✨ October Favorites

🎙 Podcast - “Focus Toolkit: Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration | Huberman Lab Podcast #88”

One of my favorite podcasts I’ve been listening to recently has been the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman who is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His podcast dives into a variety of topics such as focus, sleep, health, fitness, memory, etc.

I really enjoyed this particular episode on focus and how you can improve your ability to get into a focused state for mental or physical work. He talks about binaural beats, caffeine, deliberate cold exposure, the pros and cons of fasted vs. fed states, enhancing dopamine, and more.

🎹 Tech - Casio CT-S1 Keyboard

I recently made an impulse purchase and got myself the Casiotone CT-S1 electric keyboard. I’ve never learned the piano growing up and I figured this would be a great skill or hobby to pick up whenever I have some downtime.

Currently, I’m learning to play “River Flows in You” by Yiruma. It has only been a few days but I’m getting the hang of it. The trickiest thing has been trying to coordinate my left and right hands when playing. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I’ll be able to play a few of my favorite songs on the piano!

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Austin