Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: selfies

Graeme Thickins Christmas avatar

I Couldn’t Help Myself – I Did It Again

December 29, 2022 / / 1 Comment

When you sign up for a one-year subscription to the Lensa App (yes, I got sucked into that), you are naturally gonna want to have them fire up their generative AI technology more than once to create additional avatars — at least when you have some down time. (See my last blog post, Generative AI Made Me Do It.)

After all, Lensa says every batch of headshots or selfies you send in will get you different results — even from the same set of photos! So, what the heck, when I had an idle moment during Christmas week, I dug out some additional shots of me, myself, and I, then hit the button to upload them. And, ta-dah, the results are below — which seemed to come through faster this time, by the way.

Note I did not submit any shots that had a Christmas or winter theme, but the smarty-pants AI at Lensa found a way to get into the spirit of the season. Pretty fun. (But then I’m easily amused.)

I hope this second post shows you more of what this amazing technology is capable of doing,  in this wild new realm of generative art. And just think, what will the next version of the technology behind this app (GPT-4) bring us when it comes out?

By the way, a belated Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to you!

Nine avatars of Graeme

Graeme avatar 1 of 6

Generative AI Made Me Do it

December 6, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Having lived through countless cycles of artificial intelligence hype (I mean promise) over the last few decades, I naturally couldn’t avoid getting sucked into the latest hotness: generative AI. The attention this new flavor is getting lately is almost deafening. And that includes tons of startup funding and rich valuations in recent months, both of which have been declining in other sectors of the technology industry (to say the least).

With my insatiable curiosity for all things tech, I’ve been seeing and reading a lot about generative AI, both as it applies to written content and to art. (You can read some  articles I curate regularly on this topic here.) In particular, I was struck by what the latest version of the popular  Lensa app was doing — specifically, offering AI-generated avatars for anyone willing to sign up on its app and pay a nominal fee. You just submit 10-20 selfie or portrait shots of your mug, and — voila! — get back a whole bunch of AI-generated avatars. Most are what I’d call photo-like illustrations. Actually, it wasn’t all that “voila” — it takes a while for Lensa’s computers to generate these things. Hours for me. I suppose it greatly depends on how many people are signing up on a given day.

Anyway, most of the 200 that I got back were… well, the word crap comes to mind. But I pulled out six that were kinda nice. And, ta-dah, here they are — how generative AI sees Graeme. (Yes, this is an entirely self-absorbed post!) Continue reading

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