[ClownVamp]’s art project The Junk Machine is an interactive and eye-catching machine that, on demand, prints out an equally eye-catching and unique yet completely meaningless (one may even say corrupted) AI-generated advertisement for nothing in particular.
The machine is an artistic statement on how powerful software tools that have genuine promise and usefulness to creative types are finding their way into marketer’s hands, and resulting in a deluge of, well, junk. This machine simplifies and magnifies that in a physical way.
We can’t help but think that The Junk Machine is in a way highlighting Sturgeon’s Law (paraphrased as ‘ninety percent of everything is crud’) which happens to be particularly applicable to the current AI landscape. In short, the ease of use of these tools means that crud is also being effortlessly generated at an unprecedented scale, swamping any positive elements.
As for the hardware and software, we’re very interested in what’s inside. Unfortunately there’s no deep technical details, but the broad strokes are that The Junk Machine uses an embedded NVIDIA Jetson loaded up with Stable Diffusion’s SDXL Turbo, an open source AI image generator that can be installed and run locally. When and if a user mashes a large red button, the machine generates a piece of AI junk mail in real time without any need for a network connection of any kind, and prints it from an embedded printer.
Watch it in action in the video embedded below, just under the page break. There are a few more different photos on [ClownVamp]’s X account.
You dont need AI for that.
Every other section on Facebook has that.
Just copy and print out.
Ditto Twitter for extra, FOC, added Nazi
I enjoy the movie and TV trailers done in 1950’s-style on YT. Definitely generated by AI, but artfully done, unapologetically.
The “redneck” ones are fun, too… like GoT and LoTR done in the swamp.
Funny, there is a whole scene of german “AI musicians” creating very very dirty songs in the style of this time period including cover art is always exactly like these.
To be fair, the 70s were full of frivolous and silly “bums” (f*ck) movies. ;)
So in some way, the parody follows reality here.
AI songs like “Meine Mumu brummt” or “Rohrleger Rainer” are your typical 50-70s music, albeit with an even lower standard than the real thing.
That’s your typical Schlagermusik/Volksmusik that the German youth used to get so much headache from, for decades.
Maybe that’s one part of the motivation here.
To pay back something to their parent/grandparent generations who had tortured them with bad, low IQ music.
(We also had good music in the 70s, such as the more intellectual songs by Udo Juergens or Reinhard Mey.
Calling them “Schlagermusik” would be an insult, though.
It way just German music. Not something to be sung while being fully drunk and “grenzdebil” at Oktoberfest or at Fasching/carnival.)
What kind of printer is in that?
Its one thing to have generate AI models making images, it becomes a whole lot more impressive when it prints them!
Way cool!
Insisting on using vintage ads has inadvertently (or maybe not?) shown that the quality of everything has in fact dropped to a shockingly low level since then and that in fact we did live in a less junk-filled era only a short time ago. It’s harrowing how absolutely hideous everything has become in the last twenty years, and how people pretend that it is normal or at least nothing meaningful.
I can totally picture it with another color (for example a mix of red and yellow) and applied to another field than advertising (for example politics). Oh well it might exist already.
I thought the Barbie movie used up all the pink paint.
Barbie pink is a registered and trademark pannetone color. Unless the world or Mattel runs out of the base magenta is will be replicated ad nauseam until 20 years after Barbie line ends
I love panettone!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panettone
Can’t run out of junk when you don’t have one. A truly 150 IQ move by Mattel.