About

Hi, my name is Benji Smith, and these are my experimental AI Art projects.

I'm the founder of Shaxpir, the creator of Prosecraft.io, and the author of Abandoned Ship.

I studied theatre and creative writing in college (25 years ago) which is where I also started drawing and painting. I mostly paint with acrylics on large canvases, and give them as gifts to my friends or hang them in my own home.

After college, I started working as a software engineer, specializing in computational linguistics and machine-learning. I'm especially interested in how deep-learning technologies can be used to create TOYS and TOOLS for creative people.

As engineers, we should spend just as much time building toys as we spend building tools... When people have a chance to PLAY, it lights up their mind with possibilities, and the things we originally built as toys quickly start to become essential tools. Creative work needs play!

As an artist and as a technologist, I'm always looking for creative sparks that inspire stories, and I'm always tinkering with new toys to tickle the creative imagination.

I hope you enjoy the imagery in this bizarre set of AI paintings. Each of them is a vivid and mysterious window into a strange and unique story-world.

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Oh, and in case you were wondering...

Back in the early days of word-processing, my name "Benji" would always be flagged as a misspelled word, and auto-corrected as "Banjo", to my eternal amusement.

It cracks me up to imagine that the AI enhanced version of "Benji Smith" would naturally be known as "Banjo Smooth"