Jason Silva’s “cyberdelic” videos uses AI-driven artware, drawing universes of meaning out of a single statement
Jason Silva is an American evangelist of the “cyberdelic” - or as he describes himself, a “wonder junkie” and “performance philosopher”. He’s worked for National Geographic as a presenter, but is one of the most skilled memetic operators around, able to hold you with his epiphanies about technology and consciousness.
But Jason has taken it to a new level with his recent meme shots - availing himself of the latest in AI-generated art and visualisation (which we just decided to call “artware”).
We were first arrested by the tweet below that Jason posted, of his cosmo-technic dialogue with a beautiful baby:
How is this done? I caught Jason on WhatsApp and he explained:
Basically we are using some of these AI platforms where we prompt the AI with keywords taken directly from my monologue. Then we render it all out, drame by frame
My collaborator goes by the name of “Hueman Instrument” and basically, with my direction, he manually transcribes my monologue and uses words as prompts with specific artistic renderings. It’s a long process but as you can see it’s mind boggling.
We are using Disco Diffusion platform… it’s like an animated Dall E. And as far as I’ve seen, no one has leveraged the potential of this AI beyond being a gimmick. I think it’s potentially a storytelling revolution, rendering the imagination into being. Truly “as I imagine, so it becomes, and this is the very essence of magic”
As the AI capabilities improve exponentially, soon it will directly render visuals from “listening” to my speech. And render times will shrink. Eventually we’ll have real time dream sculpting. “We are the music makers and we are dreamers of dreams”.
Jason also gave an interview on these new videos to Forbes magazine:
[The thing Silva] had been looking for all his life had finally fallen into his hands, unprompted. “I worked with many different editors over the years for my videos, and I'm very hands-on, very specific in how I direct and in what I want my editors to do.”
And, even though the results were great, none of them can compare to this new technology, which allows Silva to express his ideas and thoughts with incredible accuracy and beauty.
“You know, because my videos are ‘stream of consciousness,’ there's no script. I am bringing something as authentic as possible,” he says. “But when I'm bringing visuals, I want to be very precise about the kind of visuals we use. So when he sent me this 45-second clip, we immediately connected.”
So how does this innovative form of AI work? Silva explains that it’s “pretty similar to how our imagination sees shapes in the clouds. There's a name for that - pareidolia… The AI will generate images based on elements in the landscape or in the frame. But you have to give it specific prompts so that what it generates is coherent with what I'm saying.”
That’s actually the hard part: the duo has to get very specific with the prompts. In that regard, Silva shares, “the nature of the prompts is going to be only as sophisticated as the nature of your education.”
But even after having accomplished such a unique feat, Silva still wants to take this innovation further. And he will, thanks to technological breakthroughs like VR, AI and other acronyms.
“People talk about virtual reality as the manifestation of the psychedelic dream of sharing our consciousness with one another,” he explains. And that is exactly what he’s set out to do.
“Eventually, it'll be happening around them,” he continues. “When we go full immersive virtual reality. Imagine a world where we can have VR just like in that cyberdelic video: I'm moving my hands and everything moves like paintings around me, like sorcery, magic. Virtual reality environments where I can give a lecture and everything around me walks and weaves according to my speech. It's where we're heading.”
For more on the extraordinary Jason, visit here