HYPERCINEMA WEEK 4

WEEK 4: SYNTHETIC MEDIA PROJECT

For this project I worked with Briana Jones and Maria Martinez. View project here.

Our initial idea was to make a joke book, using jokes generated by AI, accompanied with generated images. We found this one which was trained by seven years of jokes from Conan O’Brien’s monologues. The jokes were not good, and required a solid amount of human input to start them

Our next idea was a children’s book, using a story generator. From there, we wanted to see what would happen if we entered phrases, sentences, or quotes from children’s books and fairytales. After trying a few different generators, we came acorss this one called InferKit.

We each “wrote” a short story using different inputs. Mine incorporated lines from the Grimms brothers’ Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. For the generated images, we used Midjourney, hosted on Discord.

Below is the completed story, with the input text in black. All text in red was “written” by InferKit.

Jack and the Beanstalk

I wrote “the name of this fairytale is” and InferKit completed the sentence.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a tiny kingdom. peaceful, prosperous, and rich in romance and tradition. Here, in a stately chateau, there lived a widowed gentleman, and his little daughter Cinderella.

Options Midjourney came up with for this sentence. I went with an upscaled version of the bottom left.

The household had two parlors, each into which came two servants to do the household's day-to-day work. The first chamber had a servant to wash and cook and iron, the second had a servant to gather the firewood and gather water and tend the garden and to milk the cows. There was a woman who used to polish the furniture

Image Midjourney generated from above text.

One day when the queen asked her mirror: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?”

The queen said, "Who is the fairest of us all?"

"I, my dear, am the fairest of you all!"

Image Midjourney generated from above text.

Cinderella screamed: "What mean you, you parlour maid! What has become of you? Where have your manners gone? If you had no parlour maids, how can I marry? How can I ever be sure that I will find a prince?"

Images Midjourney generated from above text. I went with the bottom right one.

So the fairy touched with her magic wand all in the palace except the king and the queen.

Image Midjourney generated from above text

In that night, Cinderella was changed into a little cocker spaniel...

My favorite images from this story. This line is what InferKit generated after I entered the line about the fairy, and I truly have no idea where the cocker spaniel part came from.

...and the man went to bed thinking about a cocker spaniel and woke up thinking of a little cocker spaniel. And that's how Cinderella came to be.

Image generated from above text.

The End

Overall, this was a fascinating exploration into generating synthetic media. There was a lot of trial and error. I learned quickly that the less text in the prompt for Midjourney the better, and simple prompts of short sentences got better results than multiple sentences. It was really entertaining to see what would be created based on the prompts I fed it. The text generator did not require much input to generate lines and lines of text, and for the most part the sentences made sense gramatically.