A.I. Architecture - Futuristic Green Cities

I have been dabbling in simple A.I image generation. I created pages on Facebook & Instagram under @ac_artificial_creativity.

I've been using the online program Stable Diffusion. I actually don't like the newest version, so I found the older Stable Diffusion v1.5. It's actually faster, & generates 4 images at a time. The newer version only generates one image (which is more "polished" looking), and is much slower. The one thing I like about the older version is the glitchy & weird images it could produce.

The explosion of A.I. generated art is still blowing my mind. There is now endless novel artwork being created, & I don't think we've full grasped the implications of this technology on human creative efforts. I look through my social media feeds of all this amazing imagery, thinking it's just overwhelming.

 I've also begun to use generative tools in my professional life, which is just as amazing. I couldn't find the right photo of a chocolate bar online to use for a food label, so I used A.I. to make one that I could plug into the design. On another project, I had to use a photo of a cheesecake with the end cropped off, so I used Photoshop's new "generative fill" tool & it completed the crumble crust end of the cheesecake perfectly. I just thought, "Holy shit, this is insane."

Anyway, when I first started generating A.I. images, one of the series I made that made me sit back and just feel totally awe-struck was of architectural illustrations. The prompt I used was "a futuristic organically inspired city with greenery and sleek rounded architecture". The results were so impressive & beautiful, I couldn't believe they were generated by a computer program. 

I think artificial intelligence software could help advance mankind in unimaginable ways, if it's not used to make a dystopian inescapable control system first. Even before the current proliferation of these programs, I've long thought we should get rid of human politicians whose self-interest & corruption fucks us all over, and feed policy problems into A.I. for the optimal solutions that benefit the greatest number of people. 

Here are some more more images depicting the potential green urban utopia that A.I. could help us to implement. I think they're absolutely fantastic:

 

Summer of Bugs

 This summer, I was able to take a lot of nature photography, especially macro close-ups of insects & spiders. Being able to zoom into the intricate details of these creatures gives you a deeper appreciation of their amazing complexity.

Nature Photography
by Paul Micarelli

This post is a roundup of photos I've taken of interesting creatures in my backyard. (I try to use my finger for scale whenever possible.)

First up is this little jumping spider that was staring at me as I snapped his pic:

Here are some alien-like macro shots of a kaytdid. Thankfully, I'm part of a local Facebook nature photography group, so they are a big help in identifying some of this wildlife. Otherwise, I would've thought this was just some kind of grasshopper:

 

Have you ever seen a katydid breathing? Now you have:

The next photos are actually post-mortem of what I was later informed was a cicada killer wasp. I was in the yard with my 3-year old son & it started buzzing around our heads. So, I took Paulie up to the porch, tracked it down, & sprayed it. I'd already been stung by multiple bees & wasps this summer, and this one looked it could definitely hurt one of us. I watched it fly across the yard & drop. I went over to the dead wasp & decided that it was pretty insane-looking, so I might as well get some photography of its physical features. 

Well, I caught a lot of shit from people in the nature photography group, because I had killed it. It actually cause a bit of a debate among the members who were defending me vs. the wasp defenders. Lol. I found out that cicada killer males put on a false show of aggression & actually are not super-dangerous. Although I don't want to kill any kind of life if I can help it, I truly felt that this wasp was a threat. I don't feel bad about taking out a wasp to prevent my son from possibly getting injured. Despite it's potential threat level, it's details were definitely fascinating:

Here's another really tiny spider, that was in a web on the leaves of a hibiscus plant. It was so small, I couldn't even pick up fine details with my macro lens:

This little green fella turned out to be a juniper stink bug. I knew it was shaped like a stink bug, but thought it was a small beetle or something. I'm used to the ugly brown stinkbugs.

 

Finally, this alien-like praying mantis was waiting for my family on our back door, as we came home from a Labor Day party yesterday. It was about 4-6 inches long. My wife refused to open the door until I got it the hell away from there.