LG to conduct joint AI research with Parsons School of Design

LG AI Research will conduct joint research on artificial intelligence (AI) technology for creative practices such as art and design with Parsons School of Design, said LG on Tuesday.

Yvonne Watson, left, interim executive dean of Parsons School of Design, and Bae Kyung-hoon, chief of LG AI Research, pose for a photo during a partnership signing ceremony held at Parsons School of Design in New York, Monday. [LG CORP]

LG AI Research will conduct joint research on artificial intelligence (AI) technology for creative practices such as art and design with Parsons School of Design, said LG on Tuesday.

The two parties agreed to establish a three-year partnership for the co-development of creative AI technologies on Monday at Parsons’ campus in New York. Bae Kyung-hoon, chief of LG AI Research, Yvonne Watson, interim executive dean of Parsons School of Design, and others attended the partnership signing ceremony, according to LG.

Parsons School of Design, one of the most prestigious art and design schools in the world, will work with LG AI Research to develop technologies and services involving generative AI — which is capable of creating synthetic data with existing text, images, video, audio or code — based on LG’s Exaone engine.

Exaone, introduced in December last year, is LG’s large-scale multimodal language model. The Exaone engine was used to develop images utilized in designs featured during New York Fashion Week in February.

LG recently developed Exaone Atelier, an ideation management software service powered by Exaone. If a designer enters data into the Exaone Atelier in the form of text, image, video or audio, Exaone learns the data and helps the ideation process through the visualization of data, LG explained.

Exaone engine, which serves as the brain of the Exaone Atelier service, can convert text to a new image utilizing data of over 350 million images it learned, and is capable of creating 256 high-resolution images in seven minutes with one sentence, according to LG.

LG AI Research and Parsons aim to come up with a new method of designing using Exaone Atelier. The research center hopes to enhance its software services for designers and artists through joint research as well.

“Through the collaboration with Parsons, we hope to foster an AI design expert that can help maximize human creativity and productivity,” said Bae of LG AI Research. “We will continue our research to make our AI system be not just an image-generating AI, but an expert AI that can collaborate with and understand designers, and will grow the Exaone Atelier into a global platform.”

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]