Creative Perspectives:

This week we spoke to artist and bestselling children’s book author/illustrator Mercer Mayer, who has been creating stories for over fifty years, including the Little Critter series, which has sold over 200 million copies since the 1970s:

Mercer has written and illustrated hundreds of titles like ⬇️

• Mercer first expressed an optimistic view on blending technology and creation.

  • He recalled how in the 80s when he decided to paint books on the computer, the publishers couldn't open the files because their computers didn't have enough power

    • so he decided to design his own color separation software.

  • When powerful tools like Photoshop and the iPad were developed, he embraced them to augment his process.

• Mercer said that if he were just starting out he would definitely incorporate AI as a tool in his creative process.

• Looking Forward:

  • He believes that once people accept that AI is one of the ways art is made, it will become part of the artistic process like any other tool artists use today.

• He ended by saying: “If an artist is confident in their ability, they are more likely to embrace AI, and will use it to make some incredible things!” 

Cool Tools: Google Genie

• Generating Games from scratch, Google's Genie, trained on 30,000 hours of video game footage, can create interactive video games from photos, images, or even sketches.

• “a foundation world model trained from Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches” per Google Deepmind like those ⬇️

• Real-Time Content Generation: Researchers envision games where AI can generate new cities, landscapes, and storylines tailored to individual players as they play the game.

Read the full Paper: https://sites.google.com/view/genie-2024/