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Kevin chats with August Rosedale, the owner of Mirage Gallery, and the fictional AI-generated personas "Alejandro" and "Taylor," who create crypto-native evolving art. August discusses using OpenAI to create art as well as a complete persona behind the generated art. He also touches on the legal and moral thought experiment of intellectual property of AI outputs based on large existing datasets.
BIO
August Rosedale is an inventor, entrepreneur, musician, and student based in San Francisco. He is co-founder of startup builder OmnyLaunch, the owner of Mirage Gallery, and creator of AI-generated artists "Alejandro" and "Taylor."
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with August Rosedale: Twitter | Instagram
- Art Can Be More Than Human | Mirage Gallery
- Mirage Gallery AI | Twitter
- Mirage Gallery | Discord
- What Are Deepfakes – And How Can You Spot Them? | The Guardian
- GPT-3 Powers the Next Generation of Apps | OpenAI
- GANs and NFTs: AI Artists in the Crypto Space | Art in America
- Portrait by AI Program Sells for $432,000 | BBC News
- This Person Does Not Exist
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young A.I.: Rude & Pretentious Art Magazine-Style Questions for "Alejandro" | New World Notes
- Fading Beauty by Alejandro | Mirage Gallery
- Winter Silence by Alejandro | Mirage Gallery
- Tangerine Sunset over the Darien Gap by Alejandro | Mirage Gallery
- How AI Will Redefine The Way We Think About Ownership by Rachel Groberman | Medium
- A Gentle Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) | Machine Learning Mastery
- NFTs: Blockchain-Powered Art, Trading Cards, Music, and More with Aftab Hossain | Modern Finance 1
- Into the Metaverse | Signum Growth Capital
- We Believe Innovation Is Key to Growth | ARK Invest
- Signum ARK Gallery 8811 by Angela Dalton | Medium
- Hands-on with an 8x NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM3 Server with NVSwitch | Serve the Home
- Google Colaboratory
- Where the World Builds Software | GitHub
- Enterprise Open Source and Linux | Ubuntu
- CUDA Toolkit | NVIDIA Developer
- Deep Learning | NVIDIA Developer
- StyleGAN2 by NVIDIA Research Projects | GitHub
- The World's Most Popular Data Science Platform | Anaconda
- Find Open Datasets and Machine Learning Projects | Kaggle
- Cloud Computing Services | Google Cloud
- Activate Founders for Startups | AWS
- Crypto-Native: Art that Develops with Each Sale | Mirage Gallery
- Buy NFTs and More on Ethereum | OpenSea
SHOW NOTES
- Who is August Rosedale, and what is Mirage Gallery? [00:34]
- As a mechanical engineering student, how did August get involved in the worlds of entrepreneurship and AI-generated art? [01:33]
- How long has August been tinkering in the AI space, and what emerging technologies and trends attracted him to it? [04:59]
- What did August realize had to stand out for AI-generated art to retain value over time? [07:02]
- How is an AI artist trained to be different from other AI artists? [11:31]
- How were Alejandro and Taylor's icon photos generated? [13:41]
- How are Alejandro and Taylor's datasets trained to interact with people -- to the extent that they can convincingly tweet and give interviews? [15:58]
- How are the datasets for each artist used in a way to make their creations unique to them? [18:45]
- What the training process looks like for the personas. [20:18]
- What makes an AI produce results anomalous to its usual output (such as Alejandro's Winter Silence and Fading Beauty), and do these deviations affect the way August allows the learning process to proceed? [21:53]
- Where does August find the training datasets he uses, and what impact does the origin of this content have on ethical and legal ownership of the results? [23:14]
- How likely is it that an AI result could inadvertently mimic an existing work and bring copyright into question? [26:59]
- Originally planning on selling Alejandro and Taylor's art as physical prints, why did August decide to make the transition to NFTs? [29:42]
- How long did it take for Alejandro and Taylor's existing collections to sell out, and what hiccups did August experience early on when bringing these works to the NFT market? [32:32]
- How is a physical print from one of these NFTs created, and what are the costs involved with bringing a viable piece of AI-generated art into being from scratch? [36:52]
- How can a beginner interested in creating their own AI-generated art (and perhaps artists) get started? [40:22]
- What software does August use for GAN? [44:06]
- What's Crypto-Native -- the next project in August's sights -- and how will it work? [46:44]
- Will Crypto-Native's output be pre-generated or created on-chain? What happens if a collector is displeased with the unexpected result of a piece that's nothing like what came before? [52:45]
- Parting thoughts. [58:37]