On March 22, 2024, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Julie Schell, the Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology at UT Austin, for an engaging presentation on Generative AI technologies. Dr. Schell, who also serves as the Director of the Office of Academic Technology and an Assistant Professor of Design, shared her insights and experiences with generative image, video, and sound tools.
Dr. Schell demonstrated the creative possibilities of these technologies while highlighting the importance of responsible use and respect for intellectual property. The presentation also touched upon the integration of AI into our educational technologies at UT and highlighted the opportunities AI presents for enhancing teaching and learning experiences.
Our next meeting, scheduled for April 18, 2024, at 3:00 PM, will focus on AI and Information Literacy. The session will feature Michele Ostrow, the Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning Services at UT Libraries, who will discuss the impact of AI on library services; Professor Yan Zhang, an expert in information search behavior, who will discuss research on AI literacy and information retrieval for college students; and Professor Matthew Lease, who will explore the intersection of misinformation and Generative AI technologies.
If you are interested in attending, please fill out a registration form on our Events page.
Below, you will find a selection of the materials we distributed in advance of this meeting.
Tools demonstrated in Dr. Schell’s presentation:
- Text to Video: Runway.ai
- Text to Image: Midjourney
- Text to Image: Copilot
- Text to Speech: ElevenLabs
Videos
- AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning
- Hosted by: MoMA
- Duration: 00:14:55
- Date: March 15, 2023
- Description: “For the latest episode of our How to See series, we spoke with three artists—Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen, and Refik Anadol—who engage with the ways that AI and machine learning algorithms are demanding new approaches to artmaking.”
- How to use Bing’s AI Image Creator – Create Images from Words! (Tutorial)
- Creator: Teacher’s Tech
- Duration: 00:04:42
- Date: October 18, 2023
- Description: Have you ever wondered how to turn your words into captivating visuals? In this video, I will explore Bing Image Creator, a fantastic tool by Microsoft Bing that effortlessly transforms your text into AI-generated images! Also, I will show you how you can quickly access Bing Chat built-in Microsoft Edge.
- Free AI Image Generation: Demos & Dangers
- Creator: Explaining Computers
- Duration: 00:18:11
- Date: February 4, 2024
- Description: Free AI image generators Stable Diffusion, Bing Image Creator and Leonardo AI demonstrated, followed by a discussion of the broader implications of this new family of AI technology.
- Sora
- OpenAI text to video AI model
- Announced: February 15, 2024
- “Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals. We’re sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside of OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon.”
- Not yet released to the public
Websites, Papers, Other
- Artificial intelligence in fine arts: A systematic review of empirical research
- Author: Oksanen et al
- Publication: Science Direct
- Pub date: August–December 2023
- The Future of Generative AI for AEC Firms (Architecture, Engineering, Construction)
- Author: Paul Makovsky
- Publication: Architect Magazine
- Pub date: January 27, 2024
- “Since its introduction, GAI has surged in popularity, with products like ChatGPT setting records in user growth. Similarly, image generators such as OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion are redefining artistic expression, blurring the lines between AI-generated images and human-created art.” (link to quote)
- Generative AI use cases for the enterprise
- Author: Tim Mucci
- Publication: IBM Blog
- Pub date: February 13, 2024
- Use cases mentioned: code generation, product development, sales and marketing, project management, graphic design, business management, customer service, fraud detection, creating synthetic data, document summarization.
- EMO: Emote Portrait Alive – Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions
- Paper published to Arxiv: February 27, 2024
- Authors: Linrui Tian, Qi Wang, Bang Zhang, Liefeng Bo
- Abstract: In this work, we tackle the challenge of enhancing the realism and expressiveness in talking head video generation by focusing on the dynamic and nuanced relationship between audio cues and facial movements. We identify the limitations of traditional techniques that often fail to capture the full spectrum of human expressions and the uniqueness of individual facial styles. To address these issues, we propose EMO, a novel framework that utilizes a direct audio-to-video synthesis approach, bypassing the need for intermediate 3D models or facial landmarks. Our method ensures seamless frame transitions and consistent identity preservation throughout the video, resulting in highly expressive and lifelike animations. Experimental results demonstrate that EMO is able to produce not only convincing speaking videos but also singing videos in various styles, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methodologies in terms of expressiveness and realism.
- DesignAID: Using Generative AI and Semantic Diversity for Design Inspiration
- Authors: Alice Cai, Steven R Rick, Jennifer L Heyman, Yanxia Zhang, Alexandre Filipowicz, Matthew Hong, Matt Klenk, and Thomas Malone.
- Publication: Proceedings of The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI ’23)
- Pub date: November 5, 2023
- Abstract: Designers often struggle to sufficiently explore large design spaces, which can lead to design fixation and suboptimal outcomes. Here we introduce DesignAID, a generative AI tool that supports broader design space exploration by first using large language models to produce a range of diverse ideas expressed in words, and then using image generation software to create images from these words. This innovative combination of AI-based capabilities allows human-computer pairs to rapidly create a diverse set of visual concepts without time-consuming drawing. In a study with 87 crowd-sourced designers, we found that designers rated the automatic generation of images from words as significantly more inspirational, enjoyable, and useful than a conventional baseline condition of image search using Pinterest. Surprisingly, however, we found that automatically generating highly diverse ideas had less value. For image generation, the high diversity condition was somewhat better in inspiration but no better in the other dimensions, and for image search it was significantly worse in all dimensions.