New year, new role 🎉 AI Experience Research Engineer

Plus: Livecoding and my upcoming AI talk

This newsletter covers what I’m building and learning in creative AI. Today I’ll talk about:

• 🚀 Starting a new role as an AI Experience Research Engineer at Upstatement.

• 📅 Giving a talk at the upcoming Agape AI salon on 1/21/24

• ✨ My first time livecoding!

Hope your 2024 is starting off with sparkles and all the wonderful momentum 💖

Continuing my explorations as an AI Experience Research Engineer

Starting off with a big update! I’ve joined Upstatement in developing their AI strategy and prototyping as an AI Experience Research Engineer.

I’ll be joining as a contractor to help ideate, design, and build AI prototypes exploring opportunities in digital products, media, and editorial. Along the way, I’ll publish posts and videos so you can follow along with what we create. Sometimes the best way to inspire and show what’s possible is to build — to give people an experience they can interact with, so they can imagine new possibilities.

If you’ve been following along my newsletter and demos, you’ll notice this work is similar to what I’ve been up to — come up with ideas, build demos, tell the story. What I’m most excited about with Upstatement is not only exploring possibilities with new AI tools, but also actively shaping the future of how we use emerging AI technologies. What will be the best practices and norms for interfaces? There’s so much opportunity to make products leveraging AI more welcoming, intuitive, and expressive.

Building publicly and sharing demos led to conversations with Upstatement:

Years ago while at Embedly, we hired Upstatement to prototype our consumer facing media product Cards. I loved working with them and am inspired by their level of craft in product, design, and editorial. And in my conversations with Mike Swartz jamming on media and tech, I find myself drawing from both my independent work in genAI and from my previous years at Medium. I’m excited about what we’ll make — stay tuned for more on what we’re building!

Upcoming Talk: Playful and expressive interfaces with AI

I’m giving a talk this Sunday at the first Agape AI Salon:

In an era where discussions about artificial intelligence often swing between doomsday scenarios and unbridled optimism, we recognize the need for a balanced, human-centered forum. Our upcoming salon series in San Francisco aims to bridge this gap, fostering a space where diverse voices can explore the multifaceted possibilities and challenges of advanced AI.

This will be my first talk drawing insights after building a bunch of prototypes over the last year. Years ago when I started playing with javascript and making internet things, I realized after sharing demos and giving talks that it wasn’t the demos alone that were compelling — it was the story around them. Sharing posts and videos of my demos, and hearing thoughts from readers has helped me understand the unique voice I bring to this space.

There’s something powerful in creating poetic and beautiful moments — it shapes how we understand a technology. Zach Lieberman mentioned the importance of this during the Creativity and AI summit at the Media Lab. And recently I had an inspiring un-office hours call with Katy Peters, and she noted how play in my work is a way of showing healthy and positive paths, helping people imagine what can be good. It’s a way to imagine alternate futures with technology.

These are some of the themes I’m thinking about. Curious your thoughts too — if there are qualities you’ve found unique, notable, or valuable in how I’ve been working in creative AI, I’d love to know. There will be a video recording, and I’ll share it in an upcoming newsletter.

Livecoding with HELLADEEP

After the AIxUI dailies challenge I ended up taking an another challenge. There’s something about time-boxed creative challenges that just gets me amped. Helen and I decided to organize a last minute NYE gathering and do a livecode + DJ set. We went to a show last summer in NY pairing DJs with livecode visuals and it was amazing — that kind of planted the seed. I love how active the livecoding community is, and I always wondered what I’d make.

Livecoding was intense and gratifying. More details and videos of the performance here:

I used p5js [with p5Live] to start because it’s most familiar to me and I love making bright poppy things with it. I used it way back when Lauren started it and then more recently for #genuary and #synthruary. Now playing with it in a live context thinking back to this Notion interview with Char about livecoding. I’m just starting but now I’m thinking of tools for creativity, and exploring these concepts live, in ways that can be poppy + relatable + expansive.

And we picked the name HELLADEEP — from Helen and Kawandeep, giving a nod to doing this all in NorCal 💖.

Thanks for reading!

📚 Check out my AI Resources list. I made this list for myself to stay up to date on AI things and organize resources I find helpful.

📞 Book an unoffice hours conversation: We could talk about something you’re working on, jam on possibilities for collaboration, share past experiences and stories, draw together / make a zine, or meditate.

🙌 Follow what I’m up to by subscribing here and see my AI projects here. If you know anyone that would find this post interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you forward it to them! And if you’d like to jam more on any of this, I’d love to chat here or on twitter.