GROK IMAGINE
I guide understanding and aesthetic preference for xAI’s vision models as part of the Human Data team to enable helpful and creative multimodal AI.
- 2024-2025: Guided alignment with aesthetic preferences and instruction following for xAI’s first in-house generative image model (Aurora), helping it excel at both photorealistic rendering and medium- and material-accurate artistic rendering.
- 2025-Present: Working on the current Imagine model, supporting image generation, video generation, and editing, providing taste guidance and deep understanding of style, composition, lighting, motion, special effects, and other technical elements.
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Working with students in communications, arts, and various design fields, my teaching here specialized in comics.
I draw in part on my digital studies work on alternative literary forms, including elements of visual textuality, as well as two projects directly on comics. In 2014, I spoke at Marvels and Monsters: A Symposium on Asian Images in Comics and Graphic Novels. Then in 2017, I published an essay on The Surrogates in Cyberpunk and Visual Culture.
My course covers the history of the “graphic novel” and how the comics form works. Understanding a wider range of ways in which information can be communicated, as well as decades of experiments in how to utilize a page space (including explorations of human-computer interfaces), expands students’ reading and expressive capabilities.
Artist Richard McGuire noted being inspired to create “Here” by seeing the then-new interface of Windows.
In McGuire’s finished comic, the overlapping windows of the computer interface enable a new kind of story.
Born-digital writing develops with the models of computer interfaces as well as various literary and artistic references.
From 2013 to 2014, I served on a curriculum development committee, which included determining the ongoing standards by which new general education requirements would be assessed. Most of my courses, with selections below, I created and led to satisfy both
1) “Understand Relationships between Science or Technology and the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences,” and
2) “Practice and Respect Critical and Ethical Reasoning“
During the pandemic, I worked with promising educational communities — Interintellect, Hyperlink Academy, and IndieThinkers — as well as my own PreCursor Poets to connect with a global audience of learners, writers, artists, scholars, and all manner of the intellectually curious.
