日本語: インスピレーションの火花を灯す
At Spellbrush, one of the biggest problems we face as an AI tools company is human creativity. For all that people marvel about text-to-image technology, it still requires text. When confronted with a sophisticated text box that can show them Any Image in the World(tm), 50% of humans leave on the spot. The reason is simple: they don’t know what to type.
No matter the medium, the most fearsome enemy of creativity is the blank canvas.
This struggle is not a modern problem: since antiquity, humans have devised systems for stimulating creativity and ideation.
In this devlog, we’ll talk about imagination tools, and the unique way we’ve designed the niji mobile app to spark imagination.
One of the oldest known instances of such a system is the I Ching, a collection of hexagrams invented in the 1000 BCE.
The diviner draws stalks of yarrow, and interprets the stalks drawn based on a chart of 64 characters, which in turn is used to interpret divine intent.
I Ching hexagrams, from wikipedia
Now here, you may be wondering what divination has to do with inspiration.
In fact, they are very similar. Consider this: the feared demons and dragons of olden days are the fantastical creatures we think of as imaginary today! And so we study systems like I Ching, because “belief” is the precursor of “imagination”
Some would call this the world’s first random number generator! If you think of our system as text-to-image, this is randomness-to-text! At the time, the I Ching not only provided an interesting source of ideas, it was revered as a direct connection into the doings of the divine and even informed state policies!
Fast forward to the generative AI age: humans remain fascinated in sparking their imaginations with randomness.
In the first wave of generative AI technologies, our previous project, Waifu Labs is a randomness-to-image machine.