With only a few phrases, AI fashions might be prompted to create a narrative, a picture, or perhaps a brief movie. However in keeping with Weber Wong, these fashions are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.”
In different phrases, they’re not constructed for precise inventive professionals. That’s one thing Wong is hoping to alter with Flora, a brand new startup the place he’s founder and CEO.
Flora launched this week, full with a manifesto declaring that “AI creative tools should be more than toys for generating AI slop” and describing Wong and his staff as “obsessed with building a power tool that will profoundly shape the future of creative work.”
The manifesto positions Flora as one thing totally different from current AI instruments, which “make it easy to create, but lack creative control,” and from current inventive software program, which supplies customers “control, but are unintuitive & time-consuming.”
Flora isn’t attempting to construct higher generative AI fashions. Wong argued that one of many startup’s key insights is that “models are not creative tools.” So as a substitute, Flora provides an “infinite canvas” that integrates with current fashions — it’s a visible interface the place customers can generate blocks of textual content, photos, and video.
“The model does not matter, the technology does not matter,” Wong instructed me “It’s about the interface.”
For instance, a person might begin by prompting Flora to create a picture of a flower, then ask for particulars in regards to the picture, with these particulars resulting in extra prompts and assorted photos, with every step and variation mapped out on the aforementioned canvas, which will also be shared for collaborative work with shoppers.
Wong instructed me he desires Flora to be helpful to any and all artists and creatives, however the firm is initially targeted on working with visible design businesses. In actual fact, it’s iterating on the product with suggestions from designers at famed company Pentagram.
The purpose, Wong stated, is to permit a designer at Pentagram to “just do 100X more creative work,” say by making a emblem design after which rapidly producing 100 variations. He in contrast it to the evolution of musical composition — the place Mozart “needed an entire orchestra to play his music,” a musician in the present day can get all of it completed “from his garage in New Jersey with Ableton, making it himself and posting it on SoundCloud.”
Wong has a background in each artwork and expertise himself, having labored as an investor at Menlo Ventures however leaving when he realized, “I was not the person I’d back.” Decided to grow to be the form of founder value investing in, he finally joined New York College’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program targeted on utilizing expertise to create artwork.
When Flora launched an alpha model in August, Wong determined to “launch with an art project that showcased our real-time AI technology,” with the Flora homepage displaying a dwell feed from a GoPro digital camera on Wong’s head, and web site guests getting the chance to make use of AI to stylize the footage after signing up for the Flora waitlist.
Given his background, Wong is aware of there are artists and professionals who’re skeptical and even vehemently against the usage of AI in artwork — in actual fact, Pentagram generated some controversy final yr when it used Midjourney to create the illustration fashion for a undertaking with the US authorities.
Wong stated that the place current fashions have been embraced by “AI natives,” he’s hoping Flora can win over the “AI curious,” and finally even grow to be helpful sufficient that even “AI haters” really feel they’ve to provide it a strive.
After I raised issues that AI fashions might be educated with out regard for copyright and mental property, Wong famous that Flora isn’t coaching any AI fashions itself (as a result of it’s utilizing different corporations’ fashions), including, “We will follow societal standards.”
And whereas he’s obsessed with not wanting Flora for use to unleash a flood of AI slop (“We’re going to get hats that say ‘anti-AI slop’”), he instructed that as a substitute, the startup will permit artists to unlock “new aesthetic and creative possibilities,” in the identical method Kodak’s Brownie digital camera remodeled pictures by making it extra informal and accessible.
Flora isn’t disclosing funding particulars, however its backers embrace A16Z Video games. The product is accessible without spending a dime with a restricted variety of tasks and generated content material, after which skilled pricing begins at $16 monthly.
