Kesson

[ twisted ]

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• New year, new projects •

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An project with custom render software

Basic images generated with

Sound generated with AI

A few months ago, I shared a video that was entirely generated by artificial intelligence. It was a small philosophical essay on the difference between virtual and real, inspired by philosophers like Gillez Deleuze, Bergson, Pierre Levy, and others.

The community made me realize the biases in the AI, which in turn made the entire concept secondary, depicting the importance of it. As a researcher, I often study how AI can be a powerful tool to understand the world around us and shape the world in which we want to live. I used it as a partner to write a script and to act out that same script. The goal is to move the focus from how AI is biased and limited by our legacy to how we can actively take a step to reprogram and guide it through a new ethical dimension.

Of course, inspiring and meaningful conversations are always welcome!

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Full text in the comments section.

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Workflow:
- Text created with the help of .ai
- Faces interpolation made with StyleGAN3
- Faces animations made with a customized version of Thin-Plate-Spline-Motion (to work with videos)
- Super resolution made with Real-ESRGAN
- Voice made with Mozilla TTS and Audacity
- Post Production made with Adobe After Effects Tutorials
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Relation between Actual and Virtual.

I asked the Artificial Intelligence to xplain me the difference between Actual and Virtual, inspired by The Bergsonim by Gilles Deleuze, which explores this relations.

Everything is generated by Artificial Intelligence:
- The text was generated with GPT-3 by OpenAI
- The video of the faces was generated with StyleGAN 3 by Nvidia
- The voice was generated with TTS by Mozilla
- The lip sync was made possible with Wav2Lip
- The face reconstruction with GFPGAN (which had quite few glitches).

Full text below:

"I would like to address the question of actual and virtual phylosophically. I shall do this by first looking at the meaning of each term and then explore how they could be related.

The term actual can be defined as ‘existing in fact or reality’ whereas virtual can be defined as ‘almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition’.

When we look at these definitions, it would seem that actuality is a more absolute state than virtuality. That is, something that is actual exists without any doubt whereas something that is virtual may not exist at all – it is dependent on certain conditions being met.

One way to think about the relationship between actual and virtual is in terms of a spectrum. At one end, we have actuality and at the other end, we have virtuality. In between, there are various degrees of virtuality.

For example, we can say that an image on a computer screen is more virtual than a real-life object. This is because the image only exists as long as the computer is switched on and it is not a physical object that we can touch or interact with in the same way as a real-life object.

However, we can also say that the image is less virtual than a completely imaginary object because at least the image on the screen exists in some form.

So, we can see that there is a spectrum of virtuality, with actuality at one end and complete virtuality at the other.

Where do we fit into this spectrum?

Are we more like the image on the computer screen or the completely imaginary object?

It is difficult to say for sure. We could argue that we are somewhere in between because we do exist in physical form but we also have a lot of imagination.

It is also worth noting that our concept of actual and virtual is constantly shifting. For example, 50 years ago, the idea of a virtual reality was something that existed only in the imagination. Today, there are devices that allow us to experience virtual reality in a very realistic way.

So, what was once considered to be virtual is now becoming more actual. Similarly, what was once considered to be actual may become more virtual in the future.

It is impossible to say for sure where the boundary between actual and virtual lies. It is also difficult to say how our concept of these two terms will change in the future.

However, one thing is certain – the relationship between actual and virtual is complex and fascinating, and it is something that we will continue to explore for many years to come."