It’s hard to read the headlines today without feeling like the world couldn’t possibly get much worse. And then tomorrow rolls around, and a fresh set of headlines puts the lie to that thought. On a macro level, there’s not much that you can do about that, but on a personal level, illustrating your news feed with mostly wrong, AI-generated images might take the edge off things a little.
Let us explain. [Roy van der Veen] liked the idea of an e-paper display newsfeed, but the crushing weight of the headlines was a little too much to bear. To lighten things up, he decided to employ Stable Diffusion to illustrate his feed, displaying both the headline and a generated image on a 7.3″ Inky 7-color e-paper display. Every five hours, a script running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W fetches a headline from a random source — we’re pleased the list includes Hackaday — and composes a prompt for Stable Diffusion based on the headline, adding on a randomly selected prefix and suffix to spice things up. For example, a prompt might look like, “Gothic painting of (Driving a Motor with an Audio Amp Chip). Gloomy, dramatic, stunning, dreamy.” You can imagine the results.
We have to say, from the examples [Roy] shows, the idea pretty much works — sometimes the images are so far off the mark that just figuring out how Stable Diffusion came up with them is enough to soften the blow. We’d have preferred if the news of the floods in Libya had been buffered by a slightly less dismal scene, but finding out that what was thought to be a “ritual mass murder” was really only a yoga class was certainly heartening.
Nice to see color e-ink as reasonable priced.
+1
I would build the Mirror from Snow white. Maybe one, which tells the reverse truth.
Me: ‘bla bla…’
Mirror: “It’s you Sir, you are most increddible engineer in this Town” :-D
I would love this thing during the pandemic, if the A.I. E-Paper mix tell everyday only happy news.
Looks like the AI thought the Cleanspace 1 satellite was an Aperture Science product.
This project deserves more appreciation!
So how do i know how to connect this with my smartwatch data? I want that the A.I. understand from my heartbear profile in which mood i am which motivational picture i need, especially in the comming winter time.
For religious people something out the bible and for us nerds a cat meme. And for high performer some quotes from julius cesar. :-D
The e-paper and artificial intelligence would be very interesting in geriatric care. If you could generate a photo album from photos, a patient’s curriculum vitae and her stories. It would help to keep them mentally fit.
Roy van der Veen sounds Dutch, I could also imagine using it in the culture of remembrance in the museum. For example, if you talk to them about the atrocities committed by the germans during the second world war in holland, you could turn the stories into pictures.
Or what was done to the Palestinians by the Israelis.
Or all the child abuse cases of the catholic church, when with the help of the descriptions of the victims images can be generated and so more emotional articles can be written.
But if we use artificial intelligence, we must also be aware of the suffering of all the click workers who feed the databases of all the AI providers in third world countries for a starvation wage.