I was curious to see how people would respond to The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It seems most people didn’t hate it as much as I did. To each his own dystopia, as they say. Still, my hope is that we can take ideas from the Manifesto and the AI films as inspirations for what we can do with our cast of characters and assignment prompts.
Here we have an examination of the Manifesto in conversation with Dr. Oblivion, which was a nice twist. Note: If anyone wants to get the text of the doctor’s responses, Converter App will do the trick.
Speaking of our Cast of Characters, I pulled their dossiers into a document here:
AI106 Cast of Characters
By my count we have 6 Artists, 4 Innovators, 3 Investors, 3 Mad Geniuses, 2 Evangelists, 2 Regulators, 1 Philosopher and 1 Technician. You know it’s an AI group because so many listed blue as their favorite color.
A couple of them work at a place called Aggressive Technologies. I wonder if the company is something we could play with. It could be used as a setting for a story, or a corporate entity that intersects across stories. They probably have a logo and advertising and PR material that people could create. These are ways that we can build upon each other’s ideas.
Another example is the remix. Tyler wrote a poem that had a rap feel, so we gave it to Dr. Oblivion and added a beat to it.
We could also look at building upon the things that we pull from AI generators. AI gave us a Yankees poster and garbled some text, so they do. But what might we make of Ye York? Did he go from College Dropout to running the town? Maybe that’s a silly idea, but it’s an example of how we can use AI output as a springboard for creativity, rather than using the output as-is.
I should also highlight the blog here and there it’s everything. That crawl with the latest posts is something I hadn’t seen before.
Are people getting spam comments? I may have neglected to mention Akismet, the spam-blocking plugin. Use the free version. Don’t pay for anything.
Another free plugin I use is Jetpack which does a variety of things, but one that I’d like to point out is a subscribe to comments function:
Normally if you leave a comment on someone’s blog, you’d have to check back there to see if anyone responded. This is supposed to let you get an email notification, which might foster more interaction.
