AI, consciousness, indigenous, dreams... Some tools I use.

It took me a while to get excited by AI but the tools now available to anyone have convinced me to make AI and consciousness a central theme of PAUA Paris May 12-13 2023.

Here are some tools I played with (and how you can also play with them).

ChatGPT, of course needs no introduction anymore as it is taking the world by storm

A few months ago, we saw many people post LENSA generated photos of themselves.

My indigenous Yawanawà friends loved it too and uploaded photos of themselves painted with their traditional paints called “Keuneuh”, here is young Chief Iskukua Yawanawà on LENSA.

The traditional paints are very old indigenous practices they use for protection and also to help personal transformation. They create them from their visions. I have hundreds of photos of me painted by the Yawanawà and uploaded in LENSA with photos such as this one. The paint is natural fruit juice, they also have a different red one.

There is quite a bit of real-estate to paint on my head…

I then uploaded one of the LENSA image into D-ID.

D-ID makes a talking head from photographies, you can even upload your own voice, here is the result in just a few minutes

I find this fascinating in many ways. This is like making a new version of you alive in a way, with a different mask taking a different identity.

I uploaded my own voice message and D-ID animated the LENSA photo moving my head and lips which is already impressive, they are constantly improving it.

Another company, Eleven labs, lets you upload your voice in mp3 then you can type text and it makes yourself talk, so you could also put there ChatGPT generated text. I have uploaded a file but the voice sounds very artificial from my quick experiment.

I kept playing with AI this time to generate entirely new images.

Dream work

I had a dream with a joker type being that was talking to me from inside a table so inside of drawing it myself on my dream journal (I draw very poorly) I typed in midjourney “a table with magical sacred geometry animations changing form all the time made by a trickster joker with a face full of color squares” and got this result.

It isn’t of course exactly what I saw in my dream but it’s quite close and very impressive as it was created in a few minutes while my dream was still fresh. There is even an AI dream interpreter, haven’t played with that one yet.

Drawing dreams is making them easier to remember and then “work with them” (what was being saying in my dream comes better if I keep a clear image in my mind).

I have been generating many images from what I saw in my dreams and will keep researching my own imagination. I find AI invaluable for dream recall.

Midjourney is very easy to use, just get discord then signup, head to one of their “newbie” channels and just type /imagine and describe what you want Midjourney to draw.

For example a needed an illustration for our new AI What’sapp group in the PAUA What’sApp Community and got this one in a minute…

How much of this image is actually coming from real artist work versus pure computer generated work? What will happen with the collective work of the artists? You can even ask Midjourney to create art based on someone else’s art style that he’d know.

For example, I typed “Valentine’s day drawn by Picasso” and got this

What would have Picasso thought of us generating art on something pretending to be his own art style?

I highly recommend watching “The End of Art, an argument against Image AIs” by Steven Zapata.

Stable Diffusion is another image generator to play with.

We’re going go make AI and consciousness one of the central themes of PAUA Paris this year, May 12-13, please feel free to recommend speakers, we want many of them!

I find both themes together fascinating and very useful. Here is a souvenir photo with all the PAUA community volunteers on stage.

Posts I wrote on my daily journal since the last time I wrote here:Time, places, dreams and memories"White Cultural Loss" and European mysticismBeing spiritual means being aware, not positiveWant Super Powers? Just Watch Animals.Ghost ski resorts, global warming - can we afford to carry on skiing?

Some proud dad personal news! My son Gauthier Le Meur, his main business partner Austin Diamond and his Alongside team just raised $11M from a16zcrypto and other investors (of course I invested too!).

Alongside is a “crypto index”, like a “S&P 500 for crypto” that you can buy, it decreases the risk of picking only one crypto currency to a broader basket of coins, that is always adapted to represent the top coins only.

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