In just a few words, models of it can be encouraged to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made from non-creators for other non-creation to feel creative”.
In other words, they are not built for current creative professionals. This is something Wong is hoping to change with Flora, a new start where he is the founder and CEO.
Flora began this week, completed with a manifesto stating that “the creative tools of it should be more than toys to generate the slope of it” and describing Wong and its team as “fixed with the construction of a tool that will deeply form the future of creative work”.
The manifesto positions Flora as something different from the existing tools of it, which “make it easy to create but have no creative control”, and from the existing creative program, which gives users “control but are unstable and require time”.
Flora is not trying to build better generating models of him. Wong argued that one of the main statements of the beginning is that “models are not creative tools”. So, instead, Flora offers an “endless canvas” that integrates with existing models – it’s a visual interface where users can generate text blocks, images and videos.
“The model doesn’t matter. Technology doesn’t matter,” Wong told me “it’s about the interface.”
For example, a user can begin by encouraging the flora to create an image of a flower, then require details about the image, with those details that lead to more different stimulations and images, with each step and variation designed on the aforementioned canvas, which can also be separated for collaborative work with clients.
Wong told me he wants Flora to be useful for all artists and creators, but the company is initially focused on working with visual design agencies. In fact, it is repeating the product with feedback from designers at the famous Pentagram agency.
The goal, Wong said, is to allow a pentagram stylist to “just make 100x more creative work”, say by creating a logo design and then quickly generating 100 changes. He compared it to the evolution of musical composition – where Mozart “needed an entire orchestra to play his music”, a musician can do it all “from his garage in New Jersey with Ableleton, doing it himself and posting it in SoundCloud.”
Wong has a backdrop in both art and technology itself, after working as an investor in menlover ventures but leaving when he realized, “I was not the person I would return.” Determined to become the type of founder worth investing in, he eventually joined the New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, a graduate program focused on using technology to create art.
When Flora launched an Alpha version in August, Wong decided to “launch with an art project featuring our technology in real time”, with the Flora site showing a direct food from a Gopro camera on Wong’s head, and website visitors who took the opportunity to stylize footage after Flora Waitlist record.
Given his ancestry, Wong knows that there are artists and professionals who are skeptical or even with opposition to the use of art – in fact, the pentagram generated some controversy last year when he used Midjourney to create an illustration style for a project with the American government.
Wong said that where existing models have been embraced by the “locals of him”, he hopes that Flora can win over the “curious one”, and eventually even become very useful that even the “haters of him” think they should try it.
When I raised concerns that models of it can be trained regardless of copyright and intellectual property, Wong noted that Flora is not training the models of it itself (because it is using other companies’ models), adding, “We will follow social standards.”
And while he is passionate about not wanting Flora to be used to stimulate a flood of slope of he (“we will get caps that say” Anti-Ai slop “), he suggested that instead, the beginning will allow artists to unlock” new aesthetic and creative opportunities “, in the same way the brown and more casual camera.
Flora is not revealing funding details, but its supporters include A16Z games. The product is available for free with a limited number of projects and content generated, and then professional prices start at $ 16 a month.
