“We want to see a real-life AI Jarvis” — Highlights from Asycd Q&A
In early October, we filmed a Q&A session with the founder of Asycd, Temi and this article will cover some of the discussion from that session.
Using AI voice transcription, I present some of the discussion involving Temi and the presenter.
What inspired you to start Asycd?
“That’s a good question. Like I think it was just a point while I was in university, I think it was my final year and I still hadn’t had a thing that I could direct like my interest in maths and art and data into. Everyone has their own thing like and I think as you grow up you get your own thing, but at that point I didn’t have my own thing yet and that’s when I decided to make Asycd. I think that’s pretty much what inspired me, just a desire to channel some of the experiences and talents that I had at the time into a meaningful project that combined all of my interests together such as research, content creation is something I obviously had an interest in and AI which recently came about when I started Asycd.”
To rephrase what I said in the recording I was “bored”.
It was my third year of university and I was looking for something to dedicate myself to a project. Something that incorporated my skills and interests at the time included maths ( I studied Maths), programming and a good understanding of data analysis.
I started Asycd in November 2022 around when the ChatGPT first became mainstream. I remember my brother telling me about it and I was so impressed that since that day, I think I’ve used an LLM or generative AI every day to help with tasks.
Art was only a mild interest but the prospect of making these beautiful artworks without the traditional skill to paint or sketch appealed to me.
What are your favourite art styles? Ones that inspired you with Asycd?
“I think it was when I used to go to art galleries, I was always interested in like oil paintings, love lines, a lot of things going on, very abstract pieces. And that’s something that I wanted to recreate with Asycd. I’d say that’s pretty much it and nothing else to it really.”
What do you want to see in the next five years within AI?
“Hopefully this doesn’t sound like weird or like I’m trying to force or I’m an advocate for AI to completely take over our lives. But I would be really interested to see more intelligent AI systems that integrate more of our personal data into them. And so imagine your own personal job. It’s like everyone’s seen Iron Man. You know how good Jarvis is at doing his job. Like he’s very useful. He can pretty much like solve wars by himself. He is his own person. And so the sort of agents or like AI systems that work like that is something I’d really like to see in the next few years. Asyra is an example of that. Asyra is a voice assistant that we made at Asycd, which is essentially just a voice assistant, but trained on documents and data from our articles, our research projects, the thoughts of myself, my motivations. And so it’s able to create these more intelligent responses than you might get from chat GPT. And that’s how I would like to see things go in the next few years.” - Temi (Founder)
Do you think making the most out of ai-art will have a negative impact on the art space as a whole?
“A lot of people think that already has, to some degree it has as well, I would agree. These models basically steal artists work and repurpose it for commercial use. And obviously that’s not right. But I do think that AI has a space within the art space as a whole. They can both coexist and help each other out, broaden their horizons, expose people to more and to allow them to see more. Like we can’t just stop doing it because it’s not ethical, but it’s just not like something that we planned, but we have to still explore it. And so they can definitely still coexist together in that space.” - Temi (Founder)
Reading this back, that response was a salad of words not really addressing the question.
To rephrase, its not ethical because these image generation models have been trained on images and art that belongs to artists. They did not have any warning and they are of course not credited for it.
The reason I think its ok is because its already been done, the models are trained, people are already using these tools.
AI is a tool like a computer is, like Photoshop is for creating new visual experiences. They will have there separate lanes but ultimately the space that is art has grown and I believe it has been a net positive despite the overall negative sentiment around it.
I actually think its quite funny because its only “art” e.g. images or artworks people are concerned about. What about the endless amount of literature the models are trained on, that people today are using to write generic emails or marketing copy? Maybe because with art you are presenting it as something novel but its actually a combination of various artworks from other people? Not maybe. That is the reason.
Humans steal ideas from each other all the time. There is not one artist in this world that has never taken inspiration from other artists to create their own work.
Allowing people to ‘see more’ is what AI will ultimately help us do. The desire for new things will win in the end and people will not care.
