Lookdeeper

Lookdeeper

Sign in Subscribe

An enormous blank canvas sits on an easel in a bright artist loft

How AI tools are stretching the creative canvas

When I was in my final year of high school, I took art class as one of my electives. Students in the class had to complete several traditional paintings during the school year, using acrylic paint on canvas. These paintings would eventually be displayed in a final year-end art exhibit.

Closeup photo of a blue-tailed skink in the Aruban desert

Happy outcomes

I just got home after a spontaneous 10-day workation in Aruba with Patricia. We were escaping the road reconstruction that has been tormenting us for the past month and a half. We chose Aruba because it’s warm, it’s in the same time zone, there are direct flights from

Infinite bubbles of different sizes, each encompassing a tiny world.

Blowing bubbles

We all live in a bubble of some kind. When we go on vacation, we briefly step out of our usual bubble and enter another. When we attend an event like a party or a wedding where we hardly know anyone, we glimpse other people's bubbles. These moments

A notebook lies open next to a big bowl of spicy dumpling soup

Lunch & learn

I was a blown away this week by Google’s latest “experimental” AI tool called NotebookLM. NotebookLM provides a digital research project space, allowing you to upload documents and add links to online sources, then leverage Google’s AI to help you understand and work through the material. It’s

Illustration of a man reclining by a pool surrounded by tropical plants, reading a book.

Further reading: From problems to purpose

Over the past summer I continued my reading streak, devouring several more books on the subject of AI. I was interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the technology and its impacts, and I needed more perspectives to round things out. The next book I picked up after finishing Ethan

Red and blue game pieces positioned on a 3D topographical map.

Red team go!

Earlier this week I posted about a custom GPT I had created to give AI-generated text a more “human” feel by randomly inserting typos. I called it TypoBot. It seemed like a fun idea at the time - a way to make AI text feel more authentic, maybe even a

Photo of an android sitting at a desk with a laptop in a bright sun-filled room, surrounded by tropical house-plants.

Mistakes are a sign of humanity

I was working on a blog post recently and asked my partner to read an early draft. She asked me if I had used AI to help me write it. I sheepishly admitted that I hadn’t. She suspected as much because of ghe typos she found, which AI woukd

Imagine, dream, create: AI image tools in 2024

For me, one of the most exhilarating forms of generative AI (GenAI) is image generation. These fantastic algorithms, trained on vast collections of digital images scraped from the internet and powered by immense cloud computing data centers, can magically generate almost any type of image you can imagine, eliciting delight

A cute orange rabbit sitting on a white desk next to a silver iMac and several houseplants.

My new pet

This summer I got a new pet. In reality it's a fairly high-tech gadget but it reminds me more of a pet than the handy productivity tool I expected. I actually ordered it back in February, when it became available to preorder, and I waffled a bit at

Modernist vector art image of a person reading in a bathtub, surrounded by abstract geometric patterns

What I’ve been reading lately

I recently revisited John Maeda's latest book, How to Speak Machine, opting for the hardcover after initially enjoying it on my iPad last November. My interest was piqued again after hearing Maeda speak at the FITC Spotlight AI virtual conference. Despite being published in 2019—nearly five years