New Year, New Update

Yes, still in France... This past year, I primarily worked as "AI Artist in Residence" at Google Arts & Culture in Paris.  With the help of my colleague and talented front-end coder Chris Sugrue, we released a pretty set of haikus illustrated with Google AI Tools.  I curated the haikus and created all the content with internal AI generative models, and she wired it all up beautifully (and did the page design). You can visit it here: Haiku Imagined.

I generated and then edited video, letter shapes (the word "poppies" made from poppy flowers, for instance), music, and images for icons.  Chris used three.js to create animations and interactions. A couple screenshots from video in action...

My Substack newsletter "Things I Think Are Awesome" (TITAA) has grown to 2 issues a month, keeping up with AI creativity tools and other tech fun like procedural generation, games, narrative generation, and media recs (tons o' books).  I've added a paid tier for support. Depending on what happens with their management policies, it may move. I've featured a number of fun and weird folklore and media stories as intro articles; and there were 26 books (Sf & f, thrillers) in my best-of-the-year roundup. Subscribe/read here!

Along with work for Google, I've been doing NLP consulting for various smaller clients, usually entity/classification work and some story-generating prompt engineering. I'm looking at semantic search and knowledge graphs more these days. Let me know if you want any help! 

With the death of social media, I'm now on a million little platforms part-time: @arnicas on mastodon, threads, and bluesky.

Work and Newsletter Updates, Plus a Game and Talk

 I'm still in France consulting!  I have so far survived the epidemics and heat waves. 

But the news is still relatively small. I am still consulting part-time at Google Arts & Culture Lab, where I wrote and illustrated a cute narrative game, Where Is Hopper, using AI image generation.  In the game, you visit European cities looking for a lost penguin traveler. It was written in Ink.

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I spent about 8 months consulting at HiddenDoor, an AI-based game startup, working on tools for building a knowledge base and dictionary based on genres of text.   I've also done some smaller contracts on text generation, topic and entity tagging for a journalism client for their new web CMS, and data scraping.

In more arty fun, I delivered a fun invited workshop talk on text (and image generation) toys and projects I've worked on in the past few years.  The slides are here, Text Toys and Glitch Poetics and the video is here.

I've also been hanging out in Midjourney, a platform and community for text2image generation (I'm a volunteer moderator).

During the various confinements, I focused a lot on my newsletter and have really expanded it, especially as AI creativity tools and research have blown up. Once a month, free, it's now on Substack. If I were you, I might sub just for the book recs, but there are lots of game-related things now too.

Subscribe to my awesome newsletter!

 

Also in the past couple years I wrote a search tool that updates online links on text generation research of interest to me in ArXiv; stuff like poetry, story, dialogue, etc.  It runs once a week or so.