Remember DeepDream?
Dreaming about my Singapore Day series again.
Over a decade ago, I drew a series: Singapore Mornings. Singapore Evenings. Singapore Nights. Hand-drawn layers of memories and spaces.
Playing around with Nano Banana Pro yesterday, trying to use it to reimagine and extend the series into a coherent single piece - Singapore Day, I started thinking again about the relevance of human-created art in this new age.
Somehow, it made me recall what led me to AI, and a PhD in it eventually.
It was the story of how a Google engineer working on computer vision, Alexander Mordvintsev, had an epiphany in 2015. Other computer vision researchers had tried to reconstruct what the AI model saw at different layers (what we call interpretability). One sleepless night, Mordvintsev was “surrounded by beautiful ideas” and did the reverse. He fed an image into an AI model. Stopped midway, just as the AI model was just beginning to detect patterns, a hint of a dog, a cat etc. Then he made the AI model amplify these patterns via optimisation, again and again. The result?
DeepDream.
Images where dog faces emerged from clouds, cats with a multitude of eyes. Dreaming training data into a hallucinogenic and fractal existence.
That was when I first saw how AI could be used to generate art.
And it has fascinated me since.
How did I create this new Singapore Day below? Much simpler than DeepDream. I took each of my works, and asked Nano Banana Pro to reimagine and extend it. Then I composited the outputs together in layers and blended them.
The machine can dream. But choosing which dreams to amplify, which narratives to keep, that’s still entirely me. Maybe that’s how we create with machines in this new age.
For those who can’t stop thinking about AI, what started your journey?
#GenerativeAI #DeepDream #Passion
Read the DeepDream story here.