Course - Drawing Assistant - Connectedness

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Hey Friends,

This is a little tech heavy, but bear with me. It's fascinating stuff, IMHO.

My First Digital Course

A few students from the recently concluded Write of Passage course asked if I would run follow-up mentor sessions. If you recall, I taught five sessions over five weeks during the course's 8th cohort. This would be extra.

I enjoy the topic of Personal Monopoly and teaching it makes me dig deeper. Also, this gives me the opportunity to go through the mechanics of creating a digital course.

So, on Monday, I pulled together my notes and wrote the course description. I spent an hour setting it up on Gumroad, a site anyone can use for selling digital products.

I had sign-ups within a few hours of sharing the link. What a world we live in.

This has potential long-term benefits. But for now, I am focused on the next five weeks.

Artificial Intelligence

The iPhone revolutionized photography by putting powerful, easy-to-use cameras into everyone’s pocket.

Now, imagine if anyone could create original art?

There's been a lot of buzz this week in tech circles about the latest release of DALL-E2. It's an artificial intelligence system that creates original, realistic images and art by just typing a text description.

Type: "An astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style"

They then typed natural language to adust the concepts, attributes, and styles to create other versions.

Type: "An astronaut riding a horse as a pencil drawing"

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Here is a 2:47 min video that explains how they create the images.

It's clear we'll see a new source of low-cost, never seen before images. This should be great for consumers and creators whose work would be enhaced by images.

Will AI replace the artist? It could reduce the market size and prices people are willing to pay per image. We've seen how digitization reduced the number of architects on staff. Technology becomes the junior assistant.

Speaking of architecture, click on the image below to see how he used DALL-E2 to transform a Victorian house with text commands only.

Aditya Ramesh @model_mechanic Modernizing a victorian house with #dalle text diffs pic.twitter.com/rejXlL10mh April 11th 2022 4,312 Retweets 36,450 Likes

It’s hard to figure out the future implications.

In my experience, it's better to focus on the potential positives. Many of the things we fear never materialize or we find ways of adapting.

As someone who literally scored in the bottom 10% of drawing skills, I am excited about this innovation.

We're All Connected

There's a mushroom zeitgeist out there.

Interest in fungi-related research is spreading. I read this week that a scientist believes mushrooms have the equivalent of a 50-word vocabulary.

I would have skipped right past this, except that I watched Fantastic Fungi last year on Netflix.

Chap Attwell, a close friend and psychiatrist, told me it should not be missed. I agree. Here's the trailer:

In Closing

If the artificial intelligence and mushrooms are too much, I'll leave you with this. Sound up.

Buitengebieden @buitengebieden_ “You’ve got a friend in me” 🎶 (as long as you have a brush 😂) 🎥 IG: wildrootsfarmllc pic.twitter.com/xhd9qdQwJK April 13th 2022 3,750 Retweets 27,210 Likes

This is episode #20 for those who are counting.

I appreciate every one of you for being here. Your trust, feedback, and compliments have meant a lot.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

- Michael

P.S. as always, you can respond directly to this email and I will do my best to reply. I’d love to hear from you.

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