AIgorithms Create Golden Age Science Fiction Covers #SciFiSunday
In the days of the pulps, science fiction novels, novellas, and those fantastic two-sided double shots came out at an astonishing rate. Every one of those books needed a title and a cover. And they were amazing. Now, Lewis Hackett has made an algorithm that can make them forever. Here’s more via CDM:
The way a lot of press gets this wrong, of course, is to say things like “the AI made some sci-fi book covers.” Even as these algorithms get a lot more sophisticated than averaged pixels or a Markov chain, they are still just algorithms, lacking in agency, albeit with enormous data sets as source material. In turn, though, that makes some of the aesthetic peculiarities they generate all the more interesting, and means that it’s helpful to understand them as generative tools in the hands of artists. They’re the outcome of a lot of human effort in mathematics, code, and ultimately human choice, even if that last bit upsets those in search of general artificial intelligence.
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