Month: January 2019

A few months ago, I started following the amazing Janelle Shane who works with electrical engineering, optics, and neural networks (AI weirdness)…there are some spooky / hilarious GAN images (it can really go either way), absurd character names, recipes (for disaster?), knock-knock jokes, and so much good info to follow on how these networks are trained and refined…the brilliant solutions they come up with and the mistakes they make. Some of the best fails end up here.

Also, I read the news and I’ve been thinking about how deep biases and specifically racist tendencies can go in humans, and how that might show up in AI. If we can refine those algorithms and decision-making biases in the neural networks (which are, after all, loosely based on human brain connections), maybe we can redirect some human malfunction too.

These quotes are from an article by Cassidy Curtis (of Oscar-nominated Age of Sail) about Spider Man: Into the Spider-verse makes me happy…here’s to all those who keep pushing things forward, through art or whatever your field…it’s so needed and so worth it:

I found myself looking through the screen, senses buzzing, at the amazing team of artists and technologists who made it, people who really get it: the idea that when you take the art seriously, when you use every step of the process to amplify that artistic voice instead of sanding off its rough edges, when you’re willing to break the pipeline and challenge “how it’s usually done”, that’s when you can make something special, unique, and meaningful. This movie is a triumph, and every single person involved in making it should be incredibly proud. I see what you did, I know exactly how hard it was to do it, and I see you.

Cassidy Curtis

I also hope this marks a turning point for the animation industry. Listen to your artists. Trust them. Let their work shine on the big screen the way they meant it to look. And don’t let anyone tell you what “can’t be done” with the look of your film. The non-photorealistic rendering community has been building the technology to do this, literally, for decades. Let’s use it!

Cassidy Curtis