In the eighth week of Augmenting Creativity, we are given 30 minutes to brainstorm about our third and final upcoming assignment. I have written down some ideas for the presentation happening next week. Then we had a special guest coming. She gave us a speech about her background and ways to approach and use Generative AI and machine learning models, as well as a quick overview of GANs – Generative adversarial networks, which is the key point of her speech today. She first talks about the Richmond birding butterfly and the reasons why they are about to extinct. She also talks about the complex habitat of the Bull Oak Jewel butterfly, it’s can only be seen in the old Bull Oak trees where there are lots of ants. The reason is that this kind of butterfly only lays eggs on the stem of the trees when ants are present. The caterpillars of the Bulloak butterfly rely on the ants to provide protection. With the research of butterflies, she led to the results of how GAN is working and how can we cooperate with AI, then displayed the butterflies research in the community center, and she then received hundreds of hand-drawn flowers. Those drawings are used to train a GAN.
After the speech of the special guest, we had a chance to look at everyone’s assignment two submissions, which is “The Machine Ate My Work”. It was amazing as I saw others’ creativity. One of the things I learned from my classmate is the ability to use sound effects in the video, I did not think of that when I did my video. Overall, that was a fun and very informative class, I really enjoyed it.