AI Studio 101

by Rich Jones

This is a guide for complete beginners who want to build useful and interesting Artificial Intelligence systems using AI Studio. We're going start right from the very beginning, so you don't need to have any prior programming or mathematical knowledge.

AI Studio is a web-based tools for building and running your own AI systems using the latest AI models and everything else you need to glue your system together.

Getting Started

First, create your AI Studio account. It's free! Next, sign in and create a New System. You can choose a template or start with a blank canvas. Let's start with a blank canvas for now.

At the top, you'll see your project name and a bar of button. On the left, you'll see your blank canvas, and on the right, you'll see the console where you'll interact with your system.

A system is a graph of "nodes", little boxes which perform some task. Some might take input from a user, other might generate some text or a picture, others might glue the others together or perform some other useful transformation.

To add a node, right click on the canvas. This will open a menu with all of the different nodes available to you, organized by category.

Let's start by adding a way for us to talk to the system. Under the "Input / Output" selection, choose Console Input. Do the same again and choose Console Output.

Grab the little circle on the Console Input "output" and drag a line to the the little circle on the Console Output "input". It should look like this:

Now, press the green "Run" button in the top bar. Your system is running now. When you type something into the input box at the bottom and press Enter, you'll see it come up. One for your input, and then the same output echoed back at you. Okay, not very impressive yet. Let's do something magical.

Generating Images

Right click on the canvas again and select "Huggingface - Generate Image". Change the connections so that the links go from the Console Input to Generate Image and Generate Image to Console Output.

Re-run the system. Now type in something like "a cute fluffy penguin" and press enter.

Boom! You've got a brand new penguin, all of your own.

Generating Text

Okay, let's keep pushing it further. Let's have the system read an article and then draw an illustration for it.

Right click to bring up the Add Node menu and choose "Web -> Get Article Text". This module will fetch a page at a URL and extract the article content.

Take the URL of any article you want to illustrate and place it into the box. You can even pick this one!

Next, right click again and add "OpenAI -> ChatGPT". In the instructions box, put the following instructions:

"You are controlling an AI Illustration machine for an online magazine. When an article is given to you, read it and create a prompt for an AI image generator. The illustration should be aesthetically pleasing, detailed, and relevant to the main subject of the article."

Putting It All Together

Finally, add the "Control - Start" module and link it to the Input of the Get Article Text module. This will trigger it when you press Run, so you don't have to type anything into the console. Alternately, hook up a Console Input to the URL input of the Get Article Text module and any URLs you enter into the chat console will be illustrated.

When it's all hooked up, it should look like this:

Finally, hit Run! There you have it, your own article illustration machine!

Now you should have an good understanding of some of the basics. Play around with different nodes and architectures to see what you can create, or check out some of our other articles to see some other patterns you can explore.