Group members: Olive Yu and Yuke Ding
Inspiration
The inspiration for our synthetic media project are those cheesy wooden signs used for decor. The phrases written on them are sometimes so absurd that they already seem like AI wrote them. We wanted to see what phrases we could generate that were just strange enough to be believable inspirational or personalized decor.
Process
First I went through Hobby Lobby’s site of existing signs for sale and compiled a data set of phrases. You can find my data here if you’re curious what kinds of quotes Hobby Lobby is putting on their decor. I intentionally skipped most of the religious ones. Then I uploaded the dataset to Runway ML’s GPT-2 model and saved the most interesting output. Below is a list of some of my favorite phrases that were generated:
Home is where you hang your crazy antlers Mubarak Mubarak
Keep up all the good and bad things Act like a noble heart
By doing what God is all you have in front of you right now
I’ve never loved you so much, because we have zero friends
((please don’t)kinship lilac lipsticks sneakers LOL LOL lol
Feel your life amaze you and love so much more than you know
Pray about your education, and send ideas and ideas to work
My mother is brave. Those who inspire me to act as humans must
What you’re not good at? What you’re good at? What you’re good
Don’t be afraid of your goal ;) Gneromy サベー Mother is the evil
Beware of… well, just beware Socrates. Life is better with a cat
Give me a ride home I don’t know if you want my message or not
Doesn’t it make you bickering sometimes better than you think?
Happy construction Zodak’s achievement is his atonement
It’s simple and it helps you think about things.
Beware of, you can’t make things anymore Hit the hickering fun
Homestead is where you eat the food you go.
Not over the years I know of this, there is only one way.
Life will always be fresh and fun
For me, a proud camper lives here with his beaut
Love love football player god baseball player god baseball play
Phantoms, demons and demons are your specialty
In a field of roses I will do what others don’t
Love what you do Be fearless Be courageous All things make you
For dogs is play, be with them, hang out with them, read books
I feel how you feel in life. Unless you can be a dragon
What brings you into the world? What makes you different?
Hello Girl, I am the best person
Welcome to the house of the earth
Caring for your kids is much more motivating than shouting at them
One bad player makes me perfect. Three good players makes me per
Maybe there’ll be no love in heaven
You want to be more productive and productive, you want to be
The cottage is where I go to bed, you know that
Spice Extra garnet A bionic body will be easy to look at
Your most beautiful is your wildflowerosity
We all have a very good place where we sleep and sleep.
Be the people who you are. Somebody did a piece of serious shit
Then we realized that we would physically make these signs in the ITP shop. We each picked our favorite phrases to laser cut. I put my three favorites into Adobe Illustrator and tried to mock up some fictional signage. We each laser cut our signs on wood and added a bit of string for hanging.
Final Product
Conclusion
I feel like this project is a simple yet effective application of synthetic media. We took existing phrases and fed them into the GPT-2 model as a reference. It’s kind of crazy how real some of the generated text that came out sounds. Sometimes it’s really funny, or ominous, or doesn’t make much logical sense, but I think that kind of works for this application.