J. M. L. Whittington's AI Project Portfolio

A showcase of generative AI exercises performed throughout the Fall 2024 semester of ENG6806: Humanities in the Age of AI, of which this site itself is an example. Each card is clickable! (Except the Project Ideas section anyway.) A copy of the syllabus is here, which includes the generative exercises to provide context for each week's example. You may also learn more about me through visiting either the website I made for ENG6800: Introduction to Texts and Technology or my primary website.

Textual Projects

Per the syllabus, "a consideration of the history of textual generation and analysis, with attention to both the exploitation of and applications for archives, literature, and historical work. Students will engage in textual generation and textual analysis."

Week Two: Digital Ghosts in the Machine

Lyric poem composed through Copilot, alongside the conversation it took to produce the final product

Week Three: Distant Reading of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Visualizations of analyses conducted on Cory Doctorow's scifi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Week Four: Under the Stars

Cut-up and reassembled verse-structured short story using pieces from the following sources: an Irish myth titled Táin Bó Cúalnge, Isaac Asimov's "Youth," Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel A Princess of Mars, and both the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching

Visual Projects

Per the syllabus, "an exploration of visual generation and its challenges for authorship and meaning, with attention to parallel discussions in modern and postmodern media. Students will engage in generation for both visual material and for image-texts and consider the changing perspectives on artists and creativity."

Week Five: Zine Generation and Editing

Three-page political-ish zine created by using visual elements generated in ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly, with textual pieces and edits made in Paint.NET

Week Six: Genre Analyses of PS2 Video Game Covers

Exploration of ChatGPT's handling of visual analysis using video game covers being tested for genre/theme

Week Seven: West Virginian Video Generation

Sampling of three different generative AIs for video (Runway, DeepAI, and invideo) attempting to animate a '40s photograph from a small town in West Virginia, the West Virginia state coat of arms, and the state flag, respectively

Week Eight: Machine Learning Model for Genre Prediction of Video Game Covers from Sixth-Generation Consoles

Teachable Machine model trained on sixth-generation console game covers across three genres (platformer, roleplaying, and adventure), input into an interface for testing new examples, complete with a confusion matrix output

Procedural Projects

Per the syllabus, "a dive into the layer of code, with attention to the history of generative practices in both electronic literature and digital humanities usage. Students will co-author code and interactive projects with AI models, focusing on use cases for libraries, archives, museums, and artistic expression."

Week Ten: "Best Games" Recommender

Game recommender of Wikipedia's "list of video games considered the best" based off user-specification of release year range, genre(s), and original platform(s)

Week Eleven: The Untitled Scifi Western Pre-Adventure

Point-and-click adventure game that riffs off my experience as a tabletop RPG designer

Week Twelve: Hypertext Distant Reading of "Appalachia(n)" Literature

Collection of generated Python scripts ran in Google Colab to scrape machine-readable copies of texts from the search term "Appalachia" on Project Gutenberg, then visualize analyses

Week Twelve: AI Project Portfolio

This entire site itself is an example of working with generative AI!
(card not clickable because you're already on it)

Bonus Projects

Some freebies I felt like throwing in, generated in my (sparse) free time!

My Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) Profile Page

My first real experimentation with webpage generation, hosted on a GitHub repo and easily updatable via HTML frames; I wanted to see how much labor could be saved and how well ChatGPT followed creative instructions like "give me a color scheme and design inspired by the West Virginia state flag"

CatGPT

Joke c(h)atbot that I couldn't rest until I had created; essentially a very simplistic Markov chain text generator and an early experiment in text and webpage generation

Suno Music(?) Generations with My Brother

Toward the end of the final semester of my master's program and before a short summer break involving a move across the country to start a PhD program, my brother and I played (and I mean that quite literally) around with a large investment of credits in Suno he made

Project Ideas

A few ideas I've been kicking around for the future, which might be possible in the last few weeks of the semester or over winter break. Just as a reminder, none of these cards are clickable, as they're just ideas wihout any fruit yet.

Using ChatGPT to develop Minecraft mods

Despite knowing other programming languages, I don't know Java well enough to develop mods. But I have an interest in doing so, especially to keep certain mods up-to-date since the game lacks official mod support and updates tend to break mods. Some of my research has focused on the possibility space of modding to ethically reshape certain procedural rhetorics of games. If ChatGPT can assist with this, it opens the floodgate to those without programming expertise.

Further music/sound experiments

Not just in Suno, but also in Music FX and any others I come across that seem worthwhile. I have a background in music (broadly) and audio design for games (less extensively), one I thought I'd left behind when I entered undergrad. Suno reignited a flame that's been trying to spark for years now. There are definite possibilities here...