Parti Highlight: Hitting The Target

The Parti is here.

Our last highlight featured Joshua Lisec and his use of Midjourney to get that perfect thumbnail for a viral Twitter thread.

There’s a lot going on, so it only makes sense we highlight the coolest things happening at Parti.

Come and see.

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We're experiencing unprecedented times – both good and bad. Everything has become politicized and magnified.

At Parti, we believe that humans are designed to explore boundaries, and that AI is a tool that helps us do so.

By pushing boundaries, we can move the spotlight to issues that need to be addressed.

The Infinite Dude, like many others at Parti, is moving the spotlight.

“Masks humiliate”, he says. “We developed hundreds of muscles in our faces to express our humanness to each other, communicate our needs, wants, and feelings. Masks obscure 50% or more of these. The problem is, since everyone masked up, a new social disconnect has appeared”.

How did The Infinite Dude put the spotlight on this problem?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth?

The Infinite Dude provides the following rationale for the creation of this video: “for the SAFE video, I wanted to focus the target on this aspect of the mask: it takes away our ability to communicate”.

AI is a mechanism that can bring targets to focus.

“Using Midjourney, I generated hundreds of images of schoolchildren wearing masks, feeling distressed”.

The prompt: “horrified-terrified-stressed child in pain, wearing a face-mask-covid. Portrait, looking straight into the camera lens. --test”

“To cause the stop-motion/strobe-light animation effect, I made a collection of “variants” where Midjourney will redraw an image in a new way. It looks familiar, like a copy of the original image- now with changes. Sometimes it looks like another child altogether”.

“Then, in Davinci Resolve, I made each image last three frames long (closer to the frame-rate of a cartoon than live-action video) and stacked them in a series”.

“I wanted the song Burn the Witch by Radiohead because it makes reference to the tension of moral panic. The video also uses the stop-motion effect”.

You see the target now.

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“Reflecting further on the SAFE video now that I published it, it looks like its own kind of moral panic. And I’m unhappy with my loser-think using the word “evil.” It fails my test of empathy. In this scenario, I want to build a bridge, not point a spear. I will consider sacrificing the power of weaponized-persuasion in exchange for that, next time”. - The Infinite Dude.