Endangered Tales

Empowering Conservation and Sustainability through The Power of Storytelling -Using Open AI's super-trained GPT3 model and a Generative Adversarial Network for cartoon stylization (CVPR'18) on GCP.

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Inspiration

Importance of story-telling and perspectives to inspire Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability

What it does

Our project creates machine generated comics - cartoonized dialogues between critically endangered animals as they are deeply concerned about climate change and global warming.

How we built it

We use the streamlit platform to take input prompt as climate change or global warming from the user along with a pair of chosen critically endangered animals. We feed in the prompt and the selected animals to OpenAI's GPT3 to generate a dialogue with fine-tuned parameters. We parallelly cartoon-stylize the photographs of the corresponding animals using CartoonGAN, which is Generative Adverserial Network published in CVPR, 18. We embed the output text from OpenAI onto the images from CartoonGAN in the form of a comic and display it using streamlit app run on the Google Cloud Platform.

Challenges we ran into

  • The technical complexity of this project implied we took turns to nap and work full-time to get everything intact.
  • Division of labour according to the specializations of team members, especially as the team consists of newbie hackers.
  • OpenAI GPT3 prompt finalization and tuning.
  • Coding app from the scratch with all the connector modules and hosting it on GCP for the first time in a very short span.
  • The heaviest challenge we faced was the cross-country collaboration inspite of a team member dropping out due to an unexpected situation. We ideated a creative and novel topic, and prototyped it to a live demo in the last 24 hours of the hackathon!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to generate moving and important perspectives of endangered animals on the current issue of sustainability and biodiversity conservation using AI. We strongly believe that this power of story-telling connects deeply to all of us (Homo Sapiens) and moves us into action for conserving the biodiversity, and gets us together to fight the climate emergency and global warming.

What we learned

  • Teamwork and communication is key!
  • Tapping into what each of the team members deeply care about brings out the most creative beings.
  • Technical skills on multi-disciplinary topics across platforms.

What's next for Endangered Tales

Scientifically publish the work with further research and leverage social media to create public awareness on key sustainability issues with such powerful comic strips.

Contact:

endangeredtales@gmail.com

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