A little over a year ago Amazon announced the Fire TV Ambient Experience, a feature launched alongside the Fire TV 65″ Omni QLED Series 4K, which essentially gave Amazon’s in-house HDTV capabilities similar to The Frame by Samsung, Art Store and all. Amazon’s digital art library arrived with 1,500 works of art before migrating over to the more affordable and TV-agnostic Fire TV Stick 4K Max. With accessible works representing artists from around the world, collections held by the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago now sit alongside Amazon’s proprietary designs.
Amazon’s Fire TV Ambient Experience offers users a way to enjoy both static and motion art while allowing music, podcasts, and audiobooks – from providers such as Amazon Music, Audible, and Spotify – to play in the background.
But digital art as a modern day television screensaver is fairly old news. The Samsung Art Store launched as far back as 2017 and now features more than 2,300 pieces of digital works with an even larger catalog of art institutions to choose from.
What is new is anything and everything associated with artificial intelligence. Amazon’s AI Art is a newly publicly launched artificial intelligence-enhanced feature within the Fire TV’s Ambient Experience. The new option allows Fire TV users the ability to conversationally command Alexa to dream up generative images on a whim. Request, “Alexa, create a background of a medieval castle on Mars,” using the Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd Gen) or Fire TV Omni QLED TV, and either AI-powered device will immediately conjure up a selection of fanciful images.
Access to the AI Art feature is available by simply holding down the Alexa button and asking something, “Alexa, create a background of a rapid river in Antelope Canyon.”
The AI Art feature is based upon Amazon’s Titan Image Generator model. Alexa turns a verbal prompt into four unique initial images, each further adjustable using art style modifiers such as pixel art, oil painting, watercolor, colored pencil, or Cubist to impart an additional aesthetic layer.
Upon completion, the generated image can be used as a piece of digital art on the Fire TV and can also be saved directly into a user’s Amazon Photos account.
If you’ve already used an AI image creation tool before, the process will feel intuitive. Those new to AI generative art will likely also find learning the ropes via verbal prompt easy, if not amusing and fun. It is important to note the Titan Image Generator was trained on a “diverse set of datasets” across a “broad range of domains,” but Amazon has not divulged which datasets were used, nor whether permission was obtained or sources compensated.
Amazon’s AI Art is a shrewd response to the evolving relationship between people and displays within the home. The television’s average size inches larger and larger every year, with many homeowners openly inviting their devices to hold prominent court within living rooms as both home entertainment systems and decor. Pair that trend with AI’s ever-improving ability to turn words into convincing pictures and near-passable video clips, the future of what we watch and what we display upon our walls may become one and the same.
To shop Amazon’s collection of advanced televisions visit amazon.com.
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