At Rise of AI 2022 in Berlin, Florian Dohmann, founder of the Berlin-based agency Birds on Mars, argues for perspectives on AI beyond automation and efficiency, aiming to make it social, creative and climate-friendly. He opens with an enterprise example, a project with Deutsche Bahn predicting parking availability near German train stations, to illustrate that most effort in applied machine learning goes into data preparation and governance rather than the model itself, while the most user-facing part delivers the most value. He then describes several long-running side projects: the 'Artificial Muse,' a five-year collaboration with painter Roman Lipsky in which an AI trained on his digitized paintings generates new visual inspiration; a project bringing AI-based creative tools to people with mental and physical disabilities; an album with the band Mouse on Mars built on a technique he calls 'vector hacking' to semantically manipulate a voice-synthesis model; and Q Trees, a Berlin project using satellite, sensor and public data to predict which city trees most urgently need water as the climate warms.
Key takeaways
- In Birds on Mars's applied AI projects, Florian Dohmann says most effort goes into data preparation and governance, while the user-facing part of a system creates the most value.
- The 'Artificial Muse,' a five-year collaboration with painter Roman Lipsky, trains an AI on his digitized paintings to generate new visual inspiration he paints from.
- Birds on Mars developed a 'vector hacking' technique to semantically manipulate a voice-synthesis model's feature space for the band Mouse on Mars's album 'Anarchic Artificial Intelligence.'
- A Birds on Mars project brings AI-supported creative tools for painting and music to people with mental and physical disabilities.
- Q Trees combines satellite shadow data, public data and ground sensors to predict which trees in Berlin most urgently need water as the climate warms.
Detailed notes
Applied enterprise AI: the Deutsche Bahn parking example
Dohmann introduces Birds on Mars as a Berlin company working at the intersection of human creativity, artificial intelligence and organizational identity, drawing on staff with backgrounds in sociology and philosophy as well as computer science. He illustrates 'applied AI' with a recent project for Deutsche Bahn that predicts how full parking areas near German train stations are, combining external and internal data. He notes that projects often start with the newest neural network architectures but end up using logistic regression or decision trees, and that most effort goes into data preparation, governance and process design, which creates little value on its own, while the smaller, user-facing part of a project, its user experience, generates most of the actual value.
The Artificial Muse: AI as inspiration for a painter
He describes the 'Artificial Muse,' a project started more than five years ago with painter Roman Lipsky, in which an AI extracts features such as composition, brushstroke, color and contrast from Lipsky's digitized paintings and recombines them into new visual inspiration, a kind of 'kaleidophone.' Lipsky studies the AI's output and paints new work, which is fed back into the model, so the system evolved over years from a simple back-and-forth into an interactive tool Lipsky can work with in real time. The work has since been exhibited internationally, including at the National Museum of China.
AI in the social sector and with musicians
A related project, the Kaleidophone, brings AI-supported creative tools, painting and music, to people with mental and physical disabilities, an area Dohmann says is economically important but underpaid and rarely connected to AI development. Separately, Birds on Mars collaborated with the band Mouse on Mars on the album 'Anarchic Artificial Intelligence,' using an encoder-decoder network to turn language into a playable synthesizer for an individual voice; the team developed a technique they call 'vector hacking' to semantically manipulate the model's feature space rather than simply clone sounds. The resulting tool was later released as a public product used for audiobooks and university teaching, and combined live with Roman Lipsky's painting in performances, including one where Lipsky navigates his own latent space of paintings by drumming.
Q Trees: AI for climate action
Dohmann presents Q Trees, a project funded by a ministry with Berlin's CityLAB and the city's urban greenery service, which combines satellite data, such as calculated shadows, public data and ground sensors to predict which trees in Berlin most urgently need watering as average temperatures rise and trees increasingly dry out. He also mentions Kiki, a children's education project, framing all these initiatives as attempts to make AI more social, inclusive, sustainable and playful, arguing this requires drawing on many different human perspectives, not only technical ones.
Quotes
AI is just applied maths, we talk about vectors and mathematics and vector spaces and feature spaces and latent spaces.
Florian Dohmann
The fancy AI part is often really not the part where you invest most of the time.
Florian Dohmann
It's in our hands and it's about doing it.
Florian Dohmann
Questions answered in this talk
What is the Artificial Muse project by Birds on Mars?
According to Florian Dohmann at Rise of AI 2022, the Artificial Muse is a five-year collaboration with painter Roman Lipsky in which an AI trained on his digitized paintings extracts features like composition, brushstroke and color and recombines them into new visual inspiration that Lipsky then paints from, with new paintings fed back into the model over time.
How does Birds on Mars use AI to support people with disabilities?
According to Florian Dohmann at Rise of AI 2022, the Kaleidophone project brings AI-supported creative tools for painting and music to people with mental and physical disabilities, aiming to let everyone express and 'jam' together in their own individual way.
What is the Q Trees project?
According to Florian Dohmann at Rise of AI 2022, Q Trees is a Berlin project, funded by a ministry with CityLAB Berlin and the city's greenery service, that combines satellite data such as calculated shadows, public data and ground sensors to predict which city trees most urgently need water as temperatures rise.