Ak-AI, the art generator

Situation

This project was a 4 week project focusing on designing in Fusion 360 and using rapid prototyping techniques. The given brief was "refabricating classics" : take an old famous object and upgrade it using recent technology including either a Smartphone or tablet as a component.

We decided to go with the Akai MPC60 designed by Roger Linn (1988) which democratized the process of sampling in the production of music genres like Rap, R&B and Hip-hop.

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My role

I designed in Fusion 360 the buttons and their inside support, programmed the digital interface in Javascript using p5.js, setup api requests to Dall-e and edited the final pictures.

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Abstract

AK-AI is an AI-based image generator designed for people who want to come up with creative and unique ideas without any drawing or painting experience. To generate an image, all you need is a short text phrase, commonly known as a"prompt". With AK-AI, it is possible to customize the prompt in two ways: with presets, that change the type of prompt, or by scrolling through the text options of the prompt.

AK-AI is intended to be a tangible interface for easy access to artificial intelligence technology.

Away from the distractions and complexity of the computer, it allows artists to quickly generate compositional ideas or demonstrate technological advances to people who are not comfortable with computers. Since AK-AI offers pre-made prompts, it would allow people who do not know how to write prompts to still benefit from the AI-based image generation in just a few clicks.

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Interface and Interaction modality

The AK-AI is a physical object. The left side of the device allows the user to customize the prompt before generating the image displayed on the right.

The first buttons are “Presets.” Each button correspond to a specific type of prompt :

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After choosing a preset, the user can build the prompt. To do so, each turning button corresponds to a specific part of the prompt (left, middle, and right). Turning these buttons allows the user to browse through the text list for each section of the prompt.

Once satisfied with the setting, the user can press the play button. At this point, the web server requests the API with the prompt as a parameter. When the API returns a result, AK-AI displays the image on the main screen and generates a QR-Code to download the image.

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Final result