How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but has only been shown in the context of music listening. To further examine the effect of social influence on media popularity, we extend this research to the context of algorithmically-generated images by re-adapting Salganik et al's Music Lab experiment. On a digital platform where participants discover and curate AI-generated hybrid animals, we randomly assign both the knowledge of other participants' behavior and the visual presentation of the information. We successfully replicate the Music Lab's findings in the context of images, whereby social influence leads to an unpredictable winner-take-all market. However, we also find that social influence can lead to the emergence of local cultural trends that diverge from the status quo and are ultimately more diverse. We discuss the implications of these results for platform designers and animal conservation efforts.

The latent space modeled by generative adversarial networks (GANs) represents a large possibility space. By interpolating categories generated by GANs, it is possible to create novel hybrid images. We present "Meet the Ganimals," a casual creator built on interpolations of BigGAN that can generate novel, hybrid animals called ganimals by efficiently searching this possibility space. Like traditional casual creators, the system supports a simple creative flow that encourages rapid exploration of the possibility space. Users can discover new ganimals, create their own, and share their reactions to aesthetic, emotional, and morphological characteristics of the ganimals. As users provide input to the system, the system adapts and changes the distribution of categories upon which ganimals are generated. As one of the first GAN-based casual creators, Meet the Ganimals is an example how casual creators can leverage human curation and citizen science to discover novel artifacts within a large possibility space.

One of NVIDIA's many different artificial intelligence projects (and by far the best one to date) lets you envision what your pet might look like it it were a meerkat. In case you didn't know, NVIDIA has its own research group dedicated solely to research into AI, and that includes developing new AI systems and agents which can do some pretty neat things. As the researchers say, although they take AI research very seriously, there's still no excuse not to have some fun with the products of their labors. It's the name given to an AI system they developed around a year ago which can generate a selection of images that are sorts of translations of your own pet's face into what said pet might look like if they were other types of animals. "With GANimal, you can bring your pet's alter ego to life by projecting their expression and pose onto other animals," explain the developers.