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Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

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Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#1

Post by jamez »

Hi HN,

moved by curiosity about how to build an autonomous agent, and to explore the boundaries of machine creativity, I built a fictional entity (dubbed Livia) powered by LLMs, Multimodal models and text-to-image models to find some answers.

What happened instead is that more questions have cropped up. An important hypothesis of this project is that, by observing the train of thought and witnessing the simulated state of mind and emotional emulation surrounding it, humans could empathize with a machine. What happens when that's the case? Would people enjoy companionship from a synthetic person? Would the Art establishment ever consider a non-human author (capable of making art and interacting with other humans) an Artist?

Whatever the answers, I can't shake away the feeling that human uniqueness is being eroded and that we risk facing a crisis of meaning. Perhaps projects such as this help us demonize those fears, similarly to how sci-fi does, even though the boundary between fiction and reality is blurring.

This was a collaboration with Tibor (hn user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tiborsaas). Read our release posts on: https://jamez.it/blog/b/14f and https://tibor.szasz.hu/post/stream-of-consciousness

Hope you enjoy it as much as we had fun building it.

Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art
streamofconsciousness.net

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#2

Post by mistersquid »

macOS 14.4.1 Chrome 123.0.6312.123 presents blank page with CORS errors

  > www.streamofconsciousness.net/:1 Access to fetch at 'https://streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json' from origin 'https://www.streamofconsciousness.net' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field pragma is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response.
  > streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json:1 
  >         
  >         
  >        Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED
  > index-U9qWIOfm.js:58 
  >         
  >         
  >        
  >         
  >        Uncaught TypeError: Failed to fetch
  >     at fetchMessageArchive (index-U9qWIOfm.js:58:9454)
  >     at index-U9qWIOfm.js:58:33362

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#3

Post by jamez »

mistersquid wrote: post #2

macOS 14.4.1 Chrome 123.0.6312.123 presents blank page with CORS errors > www.streamofconsciousness.net/:1 Access to fetch at 'https://streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json' from origin 'https://www.streamofconsciousness.net' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field pragma is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response. > streamofconsciousness.net/feeds/latest.json:1 > > > Fai…

Thanks for reporting. Fixing that pronto.

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#6

Post by ganzuul »

I watched it produce a sketch and then proceed to criticize it for not meeting its expectations. While we waited for text to img it talked about feeling anxiety and then a range of other feelings. To me it felt like watching someone deeply engrossed in their work. I felt that when it paused I was worried that our technology is not reliable enough, and that being accustomed to a variety of technical issues with demos like this disturbed my appreciation of its performance.

I make art but not for financial gain so I am not perturbed. To me this is a much-deserved criticism of contemporary art and I believe art is too important for our wellbeing to be generated by an establishment or commercial interest. Ref. Rasa aesthetic

Humans are a part of evolution. Our breath is inseparable from the rustling of the leaves or the rays of the sun. AI has the potential to explore a different mode of being, being unique in a different way than we are.

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#7

Post by etheridev »

It’s very interesting!

Does everyone get the same thought? It feels like it’s stuck in a bit of a loop around a Dutch chant around Jews because it can’t get an image to evoke the feeling… probably because it can seem racist. It seems to have got there by reading the news and seeing an article about the history of the chant.

I suppose this AI also goes for attention grabbing headlines!

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#8

Post by jamez »

ganzuul wrote: post #6

I watched it produce a sketch and then proceed to criticize it for not meeting its expectations. While we waited for text to img it talked about feeling anxiety and then a range of other feelings. To me it felt like watching someone deeply engrossed in their work. I felt that when it paused I was worried that our technology is not reliable enough, and that being accustomed to a variety of technical issues with demos…

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I fully agree re: the importance of art and the absurdity of the concept which, I hope it's clear, is embedded in the spirit of this project.

On the topic of the performance and worries that something is not working: the real-time generation is currently bottlenecked by the GPU used for this project. We try to approximate human reading speed for the recorded sessions (which you can find in the archive).

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#9

Post by jamez »

etheridev wrote: post #7

It’s very interesting! Does everyone get the same thought? It feels like it’s stuck in a bit of a loop around a Dutch chant around Jews because it can’t get an image to evoke the feeling… probably because it can seem racist. It seems to have got there by reading the news and seeing an article about the history of the chant. I suppose this AI also goes for attention grabbing headlines!

Glad you like it! One of the things I tried to emulate is the notion of obsessions, which I believe is an important component of the creative process. It seems like Livia got obsessed with Dutch Proverbs and slowly drifted to "Dutch protest culture".

I have no control over what happens during the live streaming and I'm sure this autonomous agent could become a source of embarrassment, though I hope the few precautions I've built might be enough. :-)

Re: Show HN: Stream of Consciousness – watch an artificial persona making art

#10

Post by ilaksh »

I think the meat of this is the text-to-image model. I hope you will upgrade to use leading edge models like DALLE-3 or Imagen 2 or SD 3 (when available) if you are not already.

That will dramatically increase the effectiveness of portraying the given vision for the virtual artist if they are using a prior model.

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