
Afrofuturist Portraits Created with Deep Dream Algorithms - Kroeler
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/01/nettrice-gaskins-art-afrofuturist-kendrick-sade-nnedi-ai-deep-dream.html
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spiralganglion
Folks are tripping over the term "Afrofuturist" here in the comments.

Pretend this was an article about music, and the title was "Stunning
Electronic Music Created with [...]". Would you object to the term
"Electronic"? It's a specification of genre, and there's no harm in that
specificity.

This case is no different — "Afrofuturist" is a style of art, and there's no
harm in being specific about the style of art.

If there's anything harmful here, it's the rapidity with which folks jump
straight to criticism due to perceived "racial spin" and "buzzwords".

There doesn't need to be something new here in the "technological sense" for
this link to be interesting. Hacker News is often interesting for linking to
and discussing the intersection of technology and society. So, gang, let's not
disregard the human-facing aspect of the story. Here are some examples of
interesting things about this story we can talk about:

* How does this artwork advance the discussion around the relationship between AI and race? (This is a very hot, very interesting area of discussion, now that we've seen the consequences of racially-biased training data producing racially-biased applications of AI)

* How does this artwork, and its use of the technology, interact with other Afrofuturist artwork, and its use of technology?

* Let's wonder about what sort of Deep Dream artwork you could create using training sets based on race, and what sort of an interesting artist statement you could make pursuing such a project.

* Ignoring the race angle for a minute (since, after all, this is still under the umbrella of "cool artwork made with AI"), does anyone have any insight on whether you can create music using something like Deep Dream?

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Kroeler
I'm amazed at the pushback over "Afrofuturist", the term has been around for
decades and is an important theme in science fiction and pop music (think
Janelle Monáe), let alone _Black Panther_ :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism)

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_emacsomancer_
Sun Ra!

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Kroeler
EXACTAMUNDO.

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jjcm
Very much non-news article in my opinion. I don't see anything new here in the
image restyling processes or anything unique - it's just applying existing
algos with a racial spin.

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munk-a
They are pretty pictures to look at, it'd be nice if this article was just
titled Stunning Portraits Created with Deep Dream Algorithms... it might be
nice to get a better delve into the actual techniques used, but I always
appreciate seeing art and technology melded together in neat ways.

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htk
Afrofuturist? Desperate use of buzzwords in the article, as the title would
suggest. Race is throw in there but adds nothing to it (it rarely ever does).
Nothing really new in the technological sense.

Non-news to me.

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wycs
In fact, “futurism” is contributing nothing either.

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oskkejdjdkjd
What is the correct terminology for the binary blob that is a result of
training? Is that resultant blob called “the algorithm?” I see people use the
word algorithm to describe the training and the actual result of the training.
I think the most appropriate term for the resultant blob is “agent” or
something like that.

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spiralganglion
I believe I've heard it referred to as a "model".

