machine dream spaces: jane & marie

befriending the (job)killer robots
& making art

When Dall-E first arrived on earth, I found out about it via Twitter. Twitter, at the time, was a bit of a dumpster fire, more than usual. A job lead I had there had evaporated into a puff of tech bro-scented (Byredo? Le Labo?) smoke. But still, my Twitter feed was full of fantastical renderings from the mind of a machine, Open AI.

“Yeah it’s cool but what happens when it comes for our jobs?” A mutual mused. Optimization comes for us all, I guess. Still, it was cool to explore what one can do with it. Fast forward to today, I’m plugging in prompts for possible TV scripts into ChatGPT, the text generation answer to Dall-E’s more visual artistic goals.

Anyways, all that to say, I started to work hand-in-hand with our new robot overlords. So here’s “machine dream spaces,” a series that probably won’t last longer than my attention span, in which I ask Dall-E and ChatGPT to help me actualize some stores and experiential spaces which I would love to make real, but sadly I am but a poor 25 year old who can barely afford an apartment I share with three other people deep in Brooklyn. Also, as a limitation, because one of the major selling points is supposedly speeding processes up, I give myself no more than 24 hours per project. Also, that means you’re not allowed to judge my kerning.

the machine-dreamed space

I tell Dall-E to open wide and jam a fever dream prompt down its throat. I’m a notorious anti-clubber in my friend group as a neurodivergent with sensory issues. I can’t stand clubs, with their bright lights and nowhere to stand in my Bezos-provided cheap heels. But I do dream of the new era of nightlife, spurred on by the legalization of cannabis. Cannabis lounges are already a thing, and so are vinyl lounges. Oh, but what if, we combined those two things?

Visions of brass lighting, “urban jungle” Instagram accounts and sexy artisanal cocktail bars swirling in my mind, I ask Dall-E to give me: “a cannabis and floral design vinyl listening lounge with green velvet couches, dark green curtains, Edison lights, potted plants, indoor jungle, clouds of smoke”

Dall-E prompts read more like an SEO vomit than an actual descriptive prompts. But then again, when you build a model off scraping the internet, keywords are, well, key.

Its first offering:

“Good robot,” I coo. Aside from the cartoon rendering, it’s pretty spot on with what I was imagining. While I may dress like a psychedelic typical stoner shop patron, I prefer a more high-end vibe for the kind of late date night splitting a joint and mocktail pairing I envision. This is perfect. I pick my favorite and comp it up.

a robot gives me baby names

Okay, this imaginary lounge needs a name. I turn to ChatGPT.

These are not entirely bad. The Green Note I kind of like, The Blue Note is an iconic jazz near Washington Square Park, but the name then feels parody-ish. The Sound Garden is great too but then I remember the band, RIP Chris. The Mary Jane Room is great but too on the nose. So I decide to go the sampling route and give it a remix. “jane & marie” it is.

the moody board

“Oh, this moodboard fucks.” Impressive considering all the photos are from Unsplash.

the wordmark

Oh you wanna talk fonts? So the “jane & marie” typeface is Lisbeth from TypeTogether , the condensed secondary typeface is Americane Condensed by HVD Fonts.

let’s get to designing!

So I did try to ask Dall-E for some cool mockups but either I was writing the prompts wrong or it just didn’t know what to give me.

And while these are pretty cool, not really what I was thinking. So, below are some mockups made by humans, that I zhushed up myself.

I went to design a menu but then realized I don’t really know strains of weed. Also, it’s kind of a bad idea to mix weed and alcohol. So I asked ChatGPT to pitch in:

I kind of thought OpenAI would come in to slap my wrist and tell me to stop asking its robots for weed stuff but I guess with legalization, it’s not as big of a deal?

I want to ponder the OpenAI policy more, maybe try to request some erotic Harry Potter fanfic from ChatGPT (you can’t tell me they’re not training language models on Archive of Our Own, one of the richest online repositories of contemporary written dialogue) but alas, the clock strikes midnight, and I pack it up, force-quitting Adobe Photoshop. The robots and I have made something mildly interesting, but also frankly, something mildly gentrification chic, in a time when we as a society and city are just getting started in trying to do amends for the harm of the war on drugs on Black and brown communities.

In this process, ChatGPT and Dall-E don’t stop to ask me interesting ethical questions, or questions about politics and aesthetics and commercialization. They just blithely spit out a smoothie of Internet scraping, sleekly seemingly pulling images out of thin air (or rather based on countless artists’ work). In the end, only I can ask myself those questions, or really challenge myself. The robots can’t (or at least yet) replace the value of having a diverse team of creatives who push each other. So it’s just me, sleep-deprived, hunched over my laptop, wondering why I’m even interested in what robots dream of. I need a joint.