Introduction
In my trip to Computex 2024 this year (which was a general flogging of all things AI), I was looking for something to show some more practical examples of how it might be used as it enters the mainstream (after the hype fades). It just so happened that I received an invitation to check out “GIGABYTE AI New Era: Humanity X Art X Technology“. Since it was a short walk from my hotel that didn’t require a slog on the Taiwan MRT or a taxi ride, I placed it at the start of my day before hitting the show floor.
The Exhibition was located at Huashan 1914 Creative Park. After the jaunt down the street with the view of Taipei 101 in the distance, I arrived at the park which seemed to have a good amount of exhibition space. I charted the course to W1, which was nowhere to be found on any map. Ten minutes later, I arrived at my destination:
When I entered, I was welcomed by a proper blast of air-conditioning which was much needed after the balmy walk. I found that the Experience was divided into three sections: First, an AI Artist Showcase, second an AI Street Fighting Arcade and third, applications of AI in life.
AI Artist Showcase
Three AI artists were featured and their works of art were presented in real-time by using (you guessed it) GIGABYTE AI PCs. The three artists featured were Dimension+ (a team led by Escher Tsai and Keith Lam), Ygor Marrotta, and Tim Wei.
Microdosys by Ygor Marotta
The first art exhibit was Microdosys created by Ygor Marotta who hails from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Microdosys is the pseudonym he used when starting to create paintings and animations with code, text, and imagination.
The art generates a portrait of nature that gets a bit trippy as it travels through its environment. It is designed to be portable, running off of a GIGABYTE laptop so the artist can set up anywhere and create art in real-time.
Ecological Pool by Dimension +
The next exhibit is Ecological Pool by the crew at Dimension +. This creation is a twofer that passes information back and forth between two machines creating an iterative process of the birth to death cycle of a fictional species and its evolution. The generation of the new species is performed on the right machine (an image of it working is in the middle) and when it is complete, it is passed to the left machine where the species goes through a birth-to-death process. The end result comes back to the right machine which evolves it once again. This cycle goes on and over the course of the Exhibition, the creature changed hour to hour and day to day.
Chaos Grammar β by Tim Wei
Finally, we saw Chaos Grammar β which was the only interactive exhibit by Tim Wei. It asked to enter an animal as a text prompt and then let it do its thing. It then generated a number of the items and put on a show that was complete with audio effects featuring the generated objects. Once the show was complete, the objects fell to the bottom of the screen where they collected like a box of toys in a kids room.
VS AI Street Fighting Arcade
In the next room, we found an AI take on street fighting. Instead of the usual violence that is common in these street fights, the fights are with words that you use to generate AI images based on a prompt that the system gives you. You can battle another player or against AI to see who can generate the image that is the “best” according to the AI judge.
In the above pictures, you can see a single player battling against the AI for the prompt of “Happiness VS Misfortune”. The human player went through a few attempts at making a half-smiling, half-frowning face but ended up sticking to a mangled happy face using a fairly brief AI prompt. The AI side made a rather large prompt and came up with a rather dystopian drawing of kids running in a field with balloons and a storm on the way to doom them.
Once the judging was completed, the AI judge had the AI contestant take the L.
AI Application in Life
In the final room, there were a few examples of current AI concepts on display.
Live Image Capturing
Using ComfyUI, a webcam, some sketches, and ComfyUI, this demo was able to take a real-time image of this article’s author (hey, that’s me!) and turn it into a Superman figure. Note that I’ve got a bag with a strap around my shoulder, my Computex Badge, and my camera all while being drawn as Superman.
Live AI Drawing
Next up, we see ComfyUI paired with Stable Diffusion one again, but this time allowing an artist to simply mark the areas of an image that need to be changed and then direct the AI to update the image accordingly. Above are photos of both before and after the effects are applied – the artist drew where the modifications should be made (see the pink-ish circles) and then prompted the AI to replace those with cherries that you can see in the right part of the second image.
Conclusion
The GIGABYTE AI New Era: Humanity X Art X Technology Exhibition displayed a number of cutting-edge examples of how AI could be integrated as it matures and implants itself within our day-to-day lives. Imagine going out for a night to see an AI visual artist do a live performance with his/her artwork at a venue instead of seeing art that’s static and on display. Or on another front, a new style of game like the AI Street Fighting that you can play with your friends or at a party that has a third party (AI) judge to help determine who out-chopped the other on AI text prompts.
All of this innovation is being performed using AI-capable hardware, these days primarily RTX 40 Series GPUs found in both desktop and laptop machines. Of course, the exhibition’s host, GIGABYTE, produces a countless variety of hardware products that enabled everything that we saw during our visit. We’ve reviewed a number of GIGABYTE’s products over the years and will continue to do so as they’re released.
In summary, while we may have gotten tired of hearing about AI this and AI that during our first pre-Computex briefer last week, there were few, if any, other attempts at real-life demos outside of GIGABTYE’s exhibition that were unique to Computex, especially using the humanities and art as a method of delivery. We’ll keep an eye out for more AI applications that will hopefully take it from a buzzword to something that we use to enhance life as time marches forward.