Last night I was rereading H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, when suddenly I wondered… What crazy images would the AI Drawing Assist function of my Samsung Galaxy smartphone create, should I use the text prompt: “Martians arrive in San Diego” and tap Generate.
I had my phone create the images in Pop Art style. That explains why words are sometimes splashed as if in a comic book. In many instances, the AI misspelled San Diego or produced absurd words.
I selected the best, most diverse images out of many that were produced.
Most had boats in a bay and flying saucers descending above a city that resembles San Diego. Certain skyscrapers like those of the Manchester Grand Hyatt are recognizable, even if oddly drawn or positioned.
A few surprising images had the green Martians themselves!
This is the third time I’ve experimented with the AI Drawing Assist on my phone. Would you like to see some more bizarre results?
Strange images of “Balboa Park at sunset” are here.
Eye-popping images of “San Diego 100 years in the future” are here!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
What will the city of San Diego look like 100 years in the future? I was curious how today’s generative AI might picture it.
I used the prompt “San Diego 100 years in the future” with the AI Drawing Assist on a Samsung Galaxy phone. The images that were produced were rather startling!
Futuristic buildings, exotic elevated walkways and new modes of transportation…but how realistic is it to believe such radical transformations could be made in only one hundred years? (Um…anti-gravity?)
Nevertheless, this is pretty cool!
I see identifiable aspects of the present city skyline are incorporated into images, as well as San Diego Bay. Notice how certain recognizable buildings are arbitrarily positioned or weirdly altered by the artificial intelligence?
I love how lush green vegetation sprouts everywhere including the roofs and sides of many buildings. I love how curvy and absurdly complicated some of the conjectured architecture is!
(Earlier this year, I performed a similar experiment. I used the term “Balboa Park at sunset” to produce generative AI images in the same way. The results were bizarre. This is what I got!)
Okay–now for today’s experiment. AI draws the future of San Diego…
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
I performed an experiment today. I asked the AI Drawing Assist on a Samsung Galaxy phone to create artistic images of “Balboa Park at sunset.”
Well, the AI, as you can see, produced some rather bizarre results!
Sure the towers and facades appear superficially like those in Balboa Park, but take a close look. The configurations of buildings, towers, fountains and reflecting pools are truly weird.
In the above photo, why are two towers side by side? Why is the pool located where it is, and so curvy? Why is there a big mountain in the background? Low mountains in reality are far to the east, and Balboa Park’s grand entrance at the California Quadrangle is to the west where the sun sets.
Why is image construction so apparently arbitrary?
It all makes me wonder: How exactly are these images generated? Is there no accurate reference to countless photographs on the internet? Is the AI just too primitive at this point in its development? Is it capable of creating only fantasy worlds? Someone out there with technical expertise might expound on this.
Of course, when the AI images are created, the user is cautioned: Image generation may produce unexpected results. No kidding!
Here are more bizarre examples. The only prompt I used was “Balboa Park at sunset.”
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I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or X.
The subway has a new stop at the San Diego Museum of Art!
Until December 3, 2023, visitors walking through two San Diego Museum of Art galleries will experience the inside of a gritty subway. The New York subway in 1980, that is. Diverse passengers in close contact pass through dimly lit tunnels together in a photographic exhibition that can be interpreted as a metaphor for our life in this world.
The exhibition is titled Bruce Davidson: Subway. The artist, Bruce, spent a full year photographing people on the New York subway. He noted that close contact between strangers could result in surprisingly beautiful moments. Strangers find that they are alike in many ways, sympathize, laugh, learn about each other. Of course, these moments rely on strangers actually talking to one another.
Today, passengers staring at phones safely avoid eye contact on public transit. You can observe this on the San Diego Trolley. By tilting heads downward, passengers easily escape real world uncertainties and personal vulnerability. Does living inside a little screen make people more or less human?
Make Galleries 14/15 your destination at the San Diego Museum of Art. Enter these two free galleries from Panama 66 in the sculpture court. Look for the Subway sign!
Five years ago I wrote a short story titled One Thousand Likes. It’s about phone addiction and social isolation on a crowded light rail train. Unfortunately, the story resonates more than ever. You can read it and other thought-provoking stories by clicking here.
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Thanks for visiting Cool San Diego Sights!
I post new blogs pretty often. If you like discovering new things, bookmark coolsandiegosights.com and swing on by occasionally!
I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
An extraordinary panel was held this afternoon at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego.
The Science and Science Fiction of Star Trek’s Tricorder brought together four panelists who are helping to lead our way into the future. It will be a future of almost unlimited possibility, replete with groundbreaking technologies what were barely imagined when the original television series was created.
Dr. Erik Viirre, who acted as moderator, is Professor of Neurosciences at UC San Diego; Dr. Paul E. Jacobs is Chairman and CEO of XCOM Labs, and former executive chairman of Qualcomm; Dr. Yvonne Cagle is a physician, professor, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, and former NASA astronaut; Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, the CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment and head of the Roddenberry Foundation, is the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett. He is also an executive producer on Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The first thing the audience learned is that all four panelists are fans of Star Trek! (Did you know that the former head of Qualcomm, many moons ago, was founding member of Star Fleet Club La Jolla?)
The next thing we learned was that Star Trek has inspired generations of scientists, engineers, inventors and visionaries. Many technological advances we know today were first conceived by Gene Roddenberry and the experts he turned to for advice when writing the show. He wanted Star Trek to be believable and largely based on science.
We were reminded how Star Trek’s communicator became the actual flip phone, and how today’s smartphones have essentially become Star Trek’s tricorder. Think about it!
The various multi-function tricorders carried by Spock, McCoy, and other Star Trek characters could provide a user with all sorts of useful information. A tricorder could be used to ascertain location and weather, or analyze the physical environment or obtain cultural information. A tricorder could be used as a universal translator. It could even be used to assess one’s medical condition.
In many ways, your smartphone does all of those things today!
We then learned our own future contains even greater possibilities.
The panelists explained how a smartphone, or handheld mobile device, used by an ordinary person, could become a practical health tool. For example, such a medical “tricorder” could analyze the sound of irregular breathing or a cough and determine a likely medical condition or disease. And such a device, by detecting signals or other data from the user’s body, could provide a warning that a stroke or heart attack is imminent.
Projects like that are underway today!
Five years ago, The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE was a $10 million global competition to incentivize the development of innovative technologies capable of accurately diagnosing a set of 13 medical conditions independent of a healthcare professional or facility, ability to continuously measure 5 vital signs, and have a positive consumer experience. Read more about it here.
The co-winning Canadian team, CloudDX, propelled by their Tricorder XPRIZE participation, has gone on to commercialize remote, connected patient monitoring hardware and software that anyone can easily use at home!
And that’s just the beginning.
On the International Space Station today, 250 miles above Earth, astronauts wear a Smart Shirt that senses body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen, EKG, and even the activity of heart valves!
Can you imagine a virtual reality doctor’s visit in your future? (Oh, wait. Star Trek envisioned this already. USS Voyager’s Emergency Medical Holographic Doctor.) Advances in artificial intelligence and tele-medicine have just barely begun.
(And yes, virtual reality was envisioned many decades ago. It was the basis for many tangled plots on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The holodeck!)
Those who sat listening to this extraordinary Comic-Con Museum panel learned all of this, and more. We saw that, in the hands of thoughtful people who desire positive, healthy outcomes, our technological future can be very bright, indeed.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
I observed a few interesting things in downtown San Diego during my morning walk.
First, a parking lot in East Village was swarming with hundreds of seagulls. Someone was tossing the gulls a large quantity of crumbs. It was quite a spectacle, as you can see in my photographs.
Of course, feeding birds downtown makes them more of a potential nuisance. And the people who’d parked nearby might have something to say…
Next, as I walked past old Horton Plaza, I noticed its redevelopment is progressing right along. The exterior of the now enlarged building at the corner of G Street and 1st Avenue, former home of a Nordstrom department store, has some new skin!
If you want to see how the project appeared about a year ago, with the once popular shopping mall stripped and gutted, click here!
If you want to see how the new mixed-use high-tech downtown campus will appear when finished, click here!
Finally, check out the following old relic.
How many pay phones remain in the city? I never see them anymore. I did find one here, at the Convention Center trolley station, next to a brand new high-tech PRONTO ticket machine!
Put that pay phone in a museum!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
Strange to say, but one of the most iconic landmarks in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood is a gigantic water tower.
Even stranger, should you wander around North Park, you’ll discover not one water tower, but two! The one is absolutely enormous, but the other is much smaller–and in fact isn’t a genuine water tower at all!
I took photos of the mini-water tower several weeks back. Drivers coming down Interstate 805 might glimpse it by looking up as they pass north of El Cajon Boulevard. It’s located at the intersection of Meade Avenue and Boundary Street.
The smaller tower is actually an AT&T cell tower that was erected several years ago. North Park signs on the disguised antenna greet alert travelers coming in either direction down the freeway. I was surprised to find a small, somewhat neglected garden beside the unique cell tower.
The genuine, gigantic, historic North Park Water Tower is over 140 feet tall. It stands near North Park Community Park just south of El Cajon Boulevard and was built in 1924.
According to this article, there were claims that it was “largest elevated tank in the world” when constructed, and held more than one million gallons of water but now is decommissioned and empty since the 1990s.
Today the tall North Park Water Tower is an iconic landmark that can be seen from many city blocks in every direction. Its unique design and historical importance has been recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
I saw these during my recent walk through El Cajon.
Decorating the AT&T building at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue are various historical photographs on tiles. The old photos show telephone company personnel at work or out in the community.
One photograph shows Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. employees or dignitaries on a parade float. That was the name of the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, now owned by AT&T, between the 1910’s and 1984.
I assume these photographs were taken around San Diego, but I don’t know. The one taken of a worker with his truck out in sagebrush covered hills does seem to show a Southern California landscape. The exact same photo can be found on an AT&T building in nearby La Mesa. You can see that here.
Do you know anything about these photos? If you do, please leave a comment!
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I live in downtown San Diego and love to walk around with my camera! You can follow Cool San Diego Sights via Facebook or Twitter!
You can easily explore Cool San Diego Sights by using the search box on my blog’s sidebar. Or click a tag! There are thousands upon thousands of photos for you to enjoy!
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