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[Music]
all right our next talk is what I
learned from um AI as a creative
adversary um our speaker is Steph M
wanson uh she's a writer and an artist
and um wrote a story about an AI
generated character and recently had a
um a video installation I would say
called suicide 3 at the deathcon
conference in Vegas um please welcome
her with a huge round of
[Applause]
[Music]
applause
hi uh yeah
wow uh yeah my name is Steph and uh I'm
I'm going to talk to you
today tonight it's 11:00 on a Thursday
night and I'm going to talk to you about
how I summoned a demon
um and weave that into other themes
about how we relate
to uh AI Tools in art making or how at
least I do and I hope to encourage other
people to as well
um before we get into the demon stuff
um I need to explain for people who
aren't completely initiated uh
initiated uh how negative prompt weights
work and to explain those I need to
explain how prompt weights
work prompt weights are basically
a a syntax that breaks up a text prompt
into a text image
AI um where you can assign chunks of the
prompt a numerical value that basically
says how important different parts of
the prompt
are um so if you want to make a picture
of a blue dog with white fluffy clouds
and you know for some reason the dog
isn't blue enough then you can break off
that like as a chunk the blue and assign
it a numerical value that's higher than
one to tell uh uh the AI next time to
give more weights to the the part that
makes it BL
um a side effect of the system is that
you can assign negative values to words
and phrases uh which basically means to
make
something the most
dissimilar uh from that token or chunk
um instead of trying to make something
the most similar to it and I was just
playing around one day and I've done
stuff with negative promp weights before
um you know in a year before I made lobe
but one day I was just playing around
and making pictures of Marlin Brando I
don't know don't ask and I decided to
assign a negative prompt way to it uh
you know what is the farthest thing away
in this models lat and space from Marlin
Brando and so I did Brando minus one and
I got this strange logo uh dig pinx with
like a Skyline on it
and
in previous experiments I had kind of
done this kind of chain of opposites
game just because I think it's fun to do
but it also helps you explore kind of
unexpected new areas of the late in
space so the next thing I did
was I put dig atap pinix Skyline logo
and used a negative prompt weight there
on the whole
thing and the
result
was this woman who has this very
haunting expression looks really sad has
these red cheeks and she sometimes has
like a teddy bear or children with her
and she always showed up for this prompt
uh which is was not usual behavior for
this model
um over and over
again sometimes surrounded by children
or like smaller people that don't look
like
children um one of the images
even was like an album art and this is
where she got her name lobe because it
looks like her name is lobe up in the
corner
um and so I immediately stopped doing
the chain of opposites game because I
had found something way more interesting
by
accident uh which was this like persist
emergent character that doesn't exist in
real life
um and so fast forward and I have like
900 pictures of
lobe and my friend says you summoned a
demon you know that
right then I started combining images of
lobe putting those images back in as
prompts
I also started combining it with other
artworks that I had made previously that
I had
liked and something even weirder
happened first of all lobe persisted in
like the child generations of combining
her with other things like extremely
clearly
like if she was a
celebrity that you would think that
would be recognized and taken up by this
you know whatever however this system is
parsing the tokens or like turning the
images into
vectors uh it wouldn't
like persistently recreate the same
character or at least what I perceive to
be the same character in the way so
there's this stumbled upon some sort of
like really strong tendency in the model
to create this
woman but also when I started reusing
Her Image and combining it with other
things things what we
discovered was
that things got really maob and like
very horrory and and gory and I'm not
even going to show like the most graphic
pictures but she was sometimes you know
surrounded by like dismembered children
screaming and
stuff um so this kind of confirms the
whole demon
suspicion
uh but there were really evocative
images like this was like more striking
to me emotionally than anything I had
created with an image model before um
and it was like something I discovered
by accident but also you know kind of
leaned into and it started influencing
my
style and it would like you could
transpose her as a character into like a
bunch of different
contexts so you could make her a statue
and then like combine that statue with
other things and keep combining this
that statue with other things and then
like you combine it with something else
and then her red cheeks would come back
suddenly or like you know 10 Generations
later eventually L would disappear but
you you You' take one of those child
images that she had disappeared from and
combine it with something else and all
of a sudden lob would reappear it was
really strange
um I didn't know exactly how to describe
this phenomenon to people in like a
concise way that made people understand
what it was so I sat on this for like
sever several months uh it was April
2022 when I first discovered lobe and
finally in September
2022 I posted this Twitter thread I
discovered this woman who I call lobe in
April the AI reproduced her more easily
than the most celebrities her presence
is persistent and she haunts every image
she
touches uh take a seat this is a true
horror story and VI sharply
maob and so this went viral immediately
um like super spiral
like I was being interviewed by like
every newspaper the next day and
Hollywood producers were kicking down my
door um and my
life became insane um and was forever
changed
and before we get to that I do want to
say that lobe is not necessarily like
unique that there are
certain things things that you can
discover by using negative prompt
weights in any model that you wish and
they're going to have some level of
persistence that's just like in their
nature being at like the edge of the
latent
space in
2021 uh I would play with vam plus clip
and this is specifically the imag net
model
um and there was a a tendency I noticed
for negative prompt weights to produce
images that looked like they were taken
inside of
bushes uh with
like bird not quite birds not quite
insects in
them so this is another Trend that I
have a lot of pictures of but it wasn't
this is not the type of thing that goes
viral
um and even in the
80s um you know you have surich and
Kirby's paper that has uh in 1987 low
dimensional procedure for the
characterization of human faces where
they laid out a system called igen faces
where basically you know if you take if
you build a model to recognize
faces um in the manifold of this model
you're going to have certain defined
axes basically that are defined by
interpolating between certain faces that
emerge from this data set that don't
actually exist um which they called igen
faces like Ian vectors
um
and looking at these faces I think most
people will immediately recognize that
they are demons
also but no they're they are they have
this uncan equality because they're
these emergent faces that don't actually
exist they're they're these data ghosts
basically and they're also very extreme
like similar to how lobe is the farthest
thing away from something else these
faces
are the most extreme versions of things
that you normally interpolate between to
to reach something that we consider more
canny
um anyways love went viral interviews
Wikipedia people did fan art you're
still doing fan
art
uh
that this thing completely changed my
life last year um really shown a light
for me on not just the algorithms inside
of AI models but also the environment
that I was putting this art
into that it went viral and sudden
suddenly I'm being
recognized
um that algorithms increasingly govern
creative world work in many different
ways you know the attention economy for
artists and creative who gets notied who
doesn't is now largely governed by
algorithms be it Twitter or whatever
else when you think about which jobs are
valued you know what is AI trying to
automate it doesn't really matter if an
algorithm is good at your job or not if
there's a promise that it might be in
the future shareholders start really
paying attention and start like
devaluing certain types of Labor even
before anything can really replace them
right and so I think something really
unique about generative AI is it's being
sold as automating something that we
have not even thought could be automated
before where most people have not really
thought about this before creative labor
even creative
ideation you know I think that the idea
of art without someone having an idea to
make art is
like I'm not going to say that's an
invalid thing but it's a very uh
interesting way to approach
something especially if you're looking
to extract profit from from
content
um I think the Hollywood strikes that we
just saw this year really also
illustrate the value of different jobs
or like the perceived value of different
jobs because on one side of things
people were arguing like oh like writers
are going to become obsolete which is
you know a silly thing to say but
also it's a projection of the future and
and the whole the whole argument and the
whole debate became like projected into
an imagined future uh which I thought
was really interesting and problematic
and
strange but to really think about oh we
blacked out now we're
back um to really think about
what um like AI art
generation how it's going to affect
cultural
production I like to take two metaphors
and the first metaphor is a more
optimistic one
and my computer is freaking out or
something is freaking
out the first metaphor is the drum
machine uh the brown drum machine there
is the Lin
lm1 uh both of these came out in 1980
the other the black one is the the
Roland
808 but this uh this Lin it came out and
drummers some drummers kind of freaked
out and were like oh I have to like
adapt this into my workflow because
these the the occupation of drumming is
going to become so automated that I'm
not going to be able to survive if I'm
not effective enough at drumming without
a machine uh so they learned how to use
this machine but really this machine was
widely adopted because it sounded kind
of weird and interesting and it changed
you know how pop songs sound and it has
very 80s pop sound to
it an even more interesting comparison
is the is is the Roland 808 and also the
909 when these came out they were like
Financial failures because no one liked
how they sounded like they just kind of
sound weird they don't sound like real
drums they don't sound like cool fake
drums but then eventually people started
taking them home and messing with them
and kind of doing unintended things with
them and like having them drum patterns
that weren't supposed to simulate a
human drumming on them and and and you
know distorting the Sounds in different
ways and eventually you know the 808
forms the basis of still today's you
know modern hip-hop like sound pallette
and the 909 spawned genres like
you know acid house and Drummond Bas and
things like this and it defined so
enriched enriched our culture having
these kind of weird automated things I
feel like lobe is an example of a weird
automated thing kind of emerging that
has its
unique feel to it that enriches
something but I don't necessarily see
that as like the future
of autom
art
making because what we have is we have
drum machines on one side and we have
Cloud capital on the other what do I
mean by this well I mean that much
generative AI is centralized it's
operates server side on cloud Capital
it's governed by these big huge
companies AI models are trained at least
from scratch on massive amounts of
compute that's art of it's outside of
artist reach at least like on an
everyday thing now you can download
stable Fusion or whatever and fine-tune
it but it's like a totally different
ball game than being able to build one
from the ground up and have you know the
advances and Fidelity and stuff like
that that we've been seeing over the
past year and a
half once they train these tools they
wall them off and then they offer them
to us through a business uh a service
business
model and so hype and talk of you need
to use this tool to stay ahead like we
heard with the drum machine and like
we're also here ING with these models
today it's also PR for expanding artists
and everyone's Reliance on a cloud-based
infrastructure that basically is like a
form of rent
distraction
um relying on centralized services in
Creative work is like creatively
stifling and expensive um it it
sucks also adversarial
strategies uh are actively being stomped
out and like patched or neutered by AI
companies with you know feedback
learning and stuff like that I think
that if someone from one of these
companies saw lobe I haven't disclosed
what model it was but um I think if
someone saw that they would be like oh
this is a problem even though lobe I
think is a completely valid artistic
expression and you should be able to
make these kinds of things you know
imagine a world in which all art is
automated and then you just
lose you know certain types of art that
are deemed to be
acceptable um would really
suck a semi solution to this is to
download use and train models like
stable diffusion yourself locally you
can also run them on cheaply rented
crowd uh Cloud compute but you know it's
not a complete
solution and you can also develop your
own methods of working against the
intent of the
tool what do I mean by adversarial
creative strategies well I mean
basically do the opposite of what they
want you to do with it these tools are
created they're molded from a desire to
make a product that sells something for
example when you put something in if you
just like type cat in mid Journey it's
going to produce an image of a cat with
like Saturn's rings behind it in like
this Starry Sky because they want you to
be like oh my god wow uh computer
amazing it make a space cat even though
you just asked for cat um this is an
example of how like the style of the
images that they that these things make
is so dictated upon the the need to sell
and justify it as a
product you can try to counteract the
Tool's statistical
Tendencies
um you can use the tool to challenge
your own Tendencies that's kind of what
I did with with lobe is I found
something and then I combined it with
stuff that I was making and made my own
kind of new
style you can allow the tools Tendencies
to guide your work that's also what I
did you can interrogate aspects of the
training data and the labeling of the
data um like a lot of these anomalies
that you'll find like the the inside of
bushes pictures with the the weird bugs
and
birds I mean I think those are due
to
a predominant tendency to have nature
photography labeled in a certain
way um and so that you can you can dive
into things like that and investigate
them even
more you can also interrogate the tools
aesthetic Tendencies social biases the
ethics of data collection things like
that but also when you work with these
things you're not just an artist you're
a researcher probing the data
set these data sets are so large and
they're so
so the models work in such an opaque way
that it's like probing the data set in
this
way may not seem like an empirical study
but there's also
like less possibility of empirical study
so you are a researcher probing the data
set art is research in this kind of
interesting overlapping
case and I love the quote on June P who
says I use technology in order to hit it
more properly
um I think one of the ways in
which I want to hate technology properly
with generative AI is that we're like
regurgitating our own data with it like
as more and more of the internet becomes
this uh slurry of automated content it's
all based on previous data that we've
made and it's has the potential to enter
into this infinite feedback loop of like
oh we're going to redest this new
automated
slurry
um and I wrote this to illustrate
it with the help of chat
GPT dear hiring manager please give me
the job I am writing to beg for the
opportunity to apply for the position of
professional dog food consumer in the
abandoned parking garage I am not a good
candidate for this role and do not have
any unique skills or experienced but I
am desperate for a job and I will do
anything to get it I am so hungry for
gallons and gallons of dog food and I
can't wait to Chow Down on it every day
in the secluded and private setting of
The Abandoned parking
garage I am not a dog lover and I do not
have a keen palette for different brands
and varieties of dog food but I really
want to eat it I also o not organized
disciplined or good at meeting deadlines
but I promise I will try my best I'm a
terrible candidate for this job but
please give me a chance I am desperate
for a job and I will do anything to get
it even if it means working in a creepy
old parking garage and eating massive
amounts of dog
food The Washington Post um contacted me
and asked for like tips and
tricks uh how to use chat
GPT to do like mundane tasks and so I
sent them this
they they published the first sentence
of
[Applause]
it they published the first sentence of
it and then linked to it and called it
disturbing
um don't think it's exactly what they
wanted but I think it does illustrate
like the desire to have a mundane and um
everyday application of this
technology when
really it has all of these strange
quirks to it that are so interesting to
make art with and not very interesting
to write emails
with
um then as mentioned in the intro I also
had a video installation at
Defcon um and this video
installation uh I found out as I was
figuring out what in the world I was
going to do to exhibit at Defcon I found
out that the AI Village it was being
exhibited at was a joint White House
initiative so naturally I did a deep
fake of um of Joe
Biden talking on the big sphere that
they just put there right next to the
convention center that te conon was
in uh where he
basically talks about how he's going to
deploy time traveling shamans to uh
to stop the tide of U of AI
hype
um I don't know if people got it
but it is online if you want to watch it
later it's called suicide 3 um
and yeah I'm already
done and I guess I just want to
challenge everyone to when you hear
about how amazing these things
are I want you to challenge your
relationship to them and you know be a
rebel and be do an interesting thing
with them like a really interesting
thing with them and think about your
relationship with them so I challenge
you to go break stuff and uh yeah that's
my talk and thank you very much hail
Lo
[Music]
[Applause]
cool thank you
Steph um if you have questions please um
queue up at the
microphones uh we have roughly 10
minutes left for
questions um signal Angel questions from
the
internet uh yes indeed uh the internet
asks which AI model was used for this
work and uh can those images be
reproduced uh the question was which AI
model was used and yeah I was I very
careful to not disclose which model was
used unfortunately um yes they can be
reproduced and yes some people have
figured out how uh but no I haven't
publicly disclosed which model it was
unfortun
sometimes journalists will get me to
disclose uh just so they make sure that
they're not like spreading a hoax
um but yeah I haven't said
publicly um but yes people have figured
out how to do it and then sometimes
people have made completely wrong
guesses um but yeah but you know I kind
of like being accused of a hoax as well
it adds mystery to
[Laughter]
it thank you microphone number one your
question uh hi thank you for the talk um
yeah like I um it's interesting to hear
you talk about these models like in
terms of kind of like yeah in terms of
what the capabilities are are in term
like uh how you can do some kind of
semantic calculation with like negative
prompts and that always opens up the
question for me of like what like what
is the per what's your
ideal sense of a of a of a perfect image
generation model that you would want to
work with it feels like it's quite it's
very easy to pick out the flaw and we
can like in the ethics of the data set
or how they're trained but what would
what would the ideal model look like for
you the AGI of image generation and what
do you think it would take to train that
the ideal image generation
model
um I think that we have like gone past
it already almost and they're
disappearing I I love the old Gans like
VQ Gan plus clip I think that we're
striving when they're training these
models I think that they're striving
after
Fidelity and impressiveness in a way
that takes away some of the
abstract type of imagery that you can
get from the Gans um and and I also so
feel like there's a stylistic funneling
happening where like I feel like the
possibility space is shrinking in a way
um it's I mean it's really not because
the possibility for higher Fidelity is
becoming available but I feel like on
average it's it's it's it's funneling
and and constricting in a way so no I I
don't really like the way things are
going bring back ganss a lot of the old
collab notebooks I used to use are like
totally broken it it breaks my heart uh
and it's only these things only from
2021 so it's like
yeah yeah I I agree and I think I think
that's kind of interesting right because
I think a lot of people sense this right
these tools being tightened up somehow
constrained every time they're
fine-tuned in some way or or like some
additional thing is put in to kind of
force them into the direction that
they're being pushed commercially you
feel like you've lost something and yet
I'm not sure there was a perfect moment
right there was no per Perfect Image
generation tool for the AI artist of the
future so like where was that turning
off point and like how can we get back
to it I think is my question I don't
know how we can get back to it but I
think that I think we can do a better
job of preserving like the old Gans and
stuff
um I think that maybe we were kind of
naive about how quickly the different
moving parts of of a lot of those things
would start to you know deprecate and
stuff thank you signal inine do you have
another question from the
internet um yes uh with a local AI model
if you would uh train it with
self-created pictures or text or
something do you think that would mimic
the model Creator and therefore a unique
personal
style oh yeah definitely yeah and and
and this is something that I've done on
my own on my own
images uh yeah the question was was if
you train locally on your own images
would it mimic that style and absolutely
yes it
does thank you uh checking my number one
your question thank you for this uh very
interesting
talk um you also hinted like briefly on
like the social reverbs of this uh yeah
Poston X formly known as Twitter um and
I would be curious if you could share
like a some more of the points that were
most surprising for you on this
journey of it going viral and the
reactions from people
yes if you feel like yeah sure
um the first thing that happened is I
took my real name off of everything
because I got some weird threats but the
threats were
I guess the threats could have been
interpreted as like death threats but
also the majority of the threats I got
were like spiritual someone said that
they were going to send an army of um
Spirits after me that was going to crush
me into molecules which honestly is like
pretty cool I don't I don't
know
um but then but then then then
it as it went viral and and people
started like actually like being
critical about it I mean I don't just
mean being positive but like both
criticizing me and saying you know that
they thought it was cool and I thought
it was like the first emergent you know
character in this way that had been
created
um I put my name back on it because that
is pretty
cool thank you uh microphone number
three your
question uh first of all I'd like to
thank you for my newest recurring
nightmare um you're welcome um the
question is a bit of off topic but I'd
like your opinion on do on interesting
data sets that should be used more in
AI do you have any opinion on that on on
what kind of data set any data setes
that you think are underused and
interesting underused and interesting in
AI do you mean images or do you mean any
Dealers
Choice underused data sets
hm I feel
like I feel like the the trend is to
just use
Everything For Better or Worse
um so yeah I don't
really this this is actually why I'm
asking maybe there's something untapped
that you would know of and I
don't untapped
data I don't know if that's the problem
in today's
world
if I'm being honest um yeah I don't know
I don't have anything but it isn't
interesting it is an interesting
question okay thank you um microphone
number two what is your
question uh yeah thank you for the talk
uh I was wondering what's your opinion
on uh AI model guard rails and
Alignment AI model what and Alignment
guard rails and
alignment
oh
gosh that's a very big
question um and I'm not an AI developer
so it's kind
of mainly in my hands as a commentator
but I think
that it is somewhat disappointing from
an artist who who works outside of like
the traditionally accepted Aesthetics
you know what I mean it's it's it's it's
it's difficult
to
separate the all this talk about
alignment
from the need for them to sell a product
that doesn't do anything offensive or
that could be perceived as offensive so
for example creating lobe creating
images with
gore that's something that they would
want to take out I don't know if they
would necessarily say that is alignment
but it's such a blurry line that is not
entirely comfortable for me because
there's so many valid forms of
expression that like if you really want
to
automate uh so much of the world with
these things then that like just erases
those those it erases horror and it
erases you
know gory imagery and stuff like that so
I guess that's my artist take on
alignment or at least the boundary
between what we consider alignment and
what we don't consider alignment but
might fall somewhere in between yeah
thank
you thank you Steph for answering all
the questions and thank you for your
very interesting talk um please everyone
a huge round of applause for
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[Applause]
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staff
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oh