BCAD - Jmill & Lucy Qiu

What's up, y'all? So I'm J. Mill. I'm Lucy. And we are BCAD, which is Before QD, After Doggo.

It stands for many other things as well. And that's our creative studio. We made a card game. You've probably heard about it by now. But we make lots of other things, too.

We make books. Yeah, so this is my first attempt to do a graphic novel with AI back in 2022. And then it just came out, Mid Journey came out, and then I had a pretty intense psychedelic trip and I really wanted to record it. But I also don't want to draw everything line by line, so I just did a lot of the images with AI. And there's a lot of interesting images.

It's all generated by AI. And then during the trip, I was thinking, oh, do you know that blockchain just wants to date plants? And there's also, you can see the current, the AI back then can still not generate a bird with a thumb. So I asked my art mentor to draw a bird with thumb afterwards. And then just like, I felt like a lot of the sensation can really be captured by AI and then not by my own drawing.

I do live with drawing, but I felt that's the, I felt like the AI really helped me to express the trippiness I felt back then. So, yeah. So this is a book I made last year. I envisioned a coffee table style art book of printer test pages. So it's called Owning a Printer in 2023.

One copy exists. If you know a publisher that wants to publish it, let me know. So it kind of starts out tame, and then it gets trippier and trippier. And also, I need to take this to merch design, because I want to get this on a hat or a hoodie or something at some point. So it's not in chronological order.

The first book we did was a book called Moolah Bonding. And this is pre-ChatGPT LLM work. So basically, I think this is one of the first full books published that was written entirely by LLM. But the workflow was we were at a co-living community, and we made a Discord bots, and we had five of them where the character was written by five different people, and then we had a way to ask them a question, and then they would all answer in their personality and then we kind of curated it took it and then made that into like a book of like advice or parables that are coming from these four elemental gods plus this like abstract art god um and it had very rudimentary text to image also. This is like clip VQGAN diffusion, like pre-stable diffusion also.

Just a bunch of content from the book. And we made physical copies also. So there are three physical copies of this that exist. And this was a collaboration between a lot of people. And there's an open copy of the physical book.

Yeah, I just want to add on that, that there's actually a lot of people did chat about Serapi during our residency. And then there are some interesting questions there. Some of the recipes are very deep. I just want to point out that. But yeah, go ahead.

So we also do digital projects. We're both software engineers, and we're really inspired by kind of digital pranksters like Mischief and Brian Moore and artists like that. So we're making digital projects for a while, so we made Spaghettify, which is a VS Code extension to make your code worse. So it was expired by GitHub Code Brushes, which makes your code better. So these's expired by GitHub code brushes, which makes your code better.

So these are the things that it can do. This is a real VS Code extension. You can install and download. It's got lots of downloads, and I'm not sure why. So overly descriptive names.

Tell me you want to read that code. So introduce a bug. So this one, it added a subtle bug into this code or obscured it. And this is kind of the original we based it on. It was a fun project.

This is... Oh, yeah. And then we also did, like, probably one of the first few AI tower reader. We call it Bella Coven. And then images, yeah, generated.

And then when we published that chatbot, actually there's a surge of people who joined our Discord just to get a rating. And then, of course, on the left side is all the Wikigame AI. And then we eventually moved on to a tarot card we developed by ourselves. But here's just some example for that. And again, all pre-ChatGPT, pre-mid-journey, pre-stable diffusion, so this stuff was a lot more difficult.

This is Coke diffusion, so we imagined a world where text-to-image software was free but had native advertising, like the way the rest of the Internet works. So you'd give it a prompt and you would get your image back, but it had a little bit of Coca-Cola branding in it. We made a Twitter bot with this. And something really funny about this is that Coke actually ended up doing this. They had these like Diwali holiday greeting cards where like you prompted and it was for like the Diwali Indian holiday, but it was like, it would give you like a sunset with like a little bit of Coca-Cola in it.

So Coke actually did this. I like to think that somebody there saw this and thought it was a good idea. This is Boss Captcha. So this is a Discord bot you can add to your server. We made this right when ChatGPT Vision came out.

And so I thought, what about robots making captchas for humans? So it would take these images of mobile games and then make these various difficulty puzzles out of them. So we use this to like guard our Discord server. Yeah, but just to add on to that, just like, yeah, but basically if you cannot answer fast enough then you're a human in this case. So robot captures for humans.

That's the world we're headed to. Yeah. Here's just a project I did during this year at the Columbia space and it's a lot of stickers and I used stickers to do a lot of, try to fund raising because we like this year we tried to get really get toilet on our camp. Otherwise we have to like use the handmade ones, it's not very pleasant. And then so I come up with this idea where you can just like, if you're going to host any events, you can put a sticker.

It's like the best social layer. You can incentivize people to do the work. But yeah. Next. Yep.

And so we also do IRL events and handcrafts. So this is something we did called the Bombay Beach Yami-Ichi. It do IRL events and handcrafts. So this is something we did called the Bombay Beach Yami-Ichi. It's a variation on the internet Yami-Ichi, which is kind of like a festival of internet-related physical arts and crafts in a small sort of nominal exchange market.

This was hosted in a shed in Bombay Beach, California. There are lots of stuff we made, so it was kind of like experiential stuff. So we had an obsidian note vault, made so it was kind of like experiential stuff. So we had an Obsidian note vault which is where you leave a piece of knowledge and you trade it for a piece of Obsidian from our vault. Like the note taking software Obsidian.

So we got Tomorrow Never Comes and Tomorrow Was Yesterday connected to each other. Okay, so this is Ether Rocks. It's a play on Ether Rocks. These were a bunch of rocks that we found, and we rated their personalities, and then you would pay $3, pull two out of a bag, and then choose the one you want. We made food projects.

It's a ChatGPT cookie recipe. There's an Instagram food placemat we made, so you can put your food on top of it, and it looks like the Instagram frame. And then we had peaches and eggplants made out of candy. Okay, so we made stickers. Lucy made this.

This is a Fulu tag you can put on your computer to ward off computer bugs. These are some stickers designed by our friends. And then we also had a rack of KeyGen keychains. So it's keychains with KeyGen art. And then we had our friends.

And then we also had a rack of keygen keychains. So it's keychains with keygen art. And then we had like our friends and collaborators making projects here too. This is like a paper Facebook registration form that asks you to hand over all your data. And this is a roast mirror.

So you look into it and then with LLM plus text to speech, it basically talks shit about you. And we had that running all day. That was fun when it would just kind of start talking out of nowhere. We had Obsidian and Palmtree headphones made out of local materials and then a whole bunch of publications from our friends also. We also make digital games.

This is a game we made at Edge Esmeralda for the hackathon there called Mirage Garage. made at Edge Esmeralda for the hackathon there called Mirage Garage. So I'm really interested in the idea of not using LLMs to make chat GPT NPCs that nobody wants to talk to, but rather using LLMs as the rules engine for a game and you sort of end up with these really cool non-deterministic properties. So I was thinking here you have tools like the splitter and then you put in materials and then there's this sort of probability table of results you get out. You have a limited number of chances, and then you have to get to recipes to craft new tools.

So there's the synonymizer C, which whatever you put in, it'll give you a synonym out that starts with C. LLMs are really good at this type of thing, so this is really interesting to me. As far as what we want to do at Edge, like, I'm interested in exploring digital games still. I'm bad at finishing things, bad at publishing things, so I want to finish this and publish it. Yeah, same.

I'm just going to make more social apps that interest me and also more games. Yep. And all of the work here, we kind of got busy with startups after this. So it's been a while since the true BCAD projects dropped. So all this we kind of consider season one.

And then we'd love to do a BCAD season two at some point. We were doing like weekly drops on these projects for a while. So it would be like really cool to get back to that. But yeah, that's us.