We recently had the opportunity to attend the Image Generation AI New Year’s Party, hosted by the 東京AI祭 (TokyoAIsai) team! For anyone that remembers our Japan activities in 2022/2023 (AI Image Contest Pre-Exhibit & AI Image Contest Q&A), they used to be known as the AI Image Contest team; they have since developed into the TokyoAIsai team, with much grander plans: The Tokyo AI Festival 2024, which will be taking place in March! In order to slowly raise awareness and get people going, they’ve decided to hold weekly workshop events every Friday up until the grand Tokyo AI Festival.
So, to kick off the year, the first event was a little social get-together with a workshop. Since Anlatan is going to be their biggest sponsor and partake in the Tokyo AI Festival, we decided to attend in person while we began our own preparations for the venue and for the event in Japan itself. So both Eren Dogan the CEO, and Virginia Dornheim, our Project Manager (and incidentally the person writing this blog!), packed their bags for a short trip to Japan!
Image Generation AI New Year’s Party
The Image Generation AI New Year’s Party took place on January 12th, at 7 PM in the Shiba Koen Building, Kamiyacho, right next to the Tokyo Tower! The event was public and free to attend.
The Event Timeline was as follows:
Time
Details
19:00–19:30
Reception
19:30–20:00
Workshop
20:00–20:15
New Year’s Greetings・Toast & Meetup explanation
20:15–20:45
Raffle
20:45–21:30
Generative AI Networking Session
We had about an hour of preparation time to get our Macbooks in gear with some slides to accompany the NovelAI Workshop, before the event opened up to visitors at 7 PM. We quickly confirmed that users got the NovelAI Subscription & Anlas codes that we sent out as part of the event (which would be needed for the workshop), and provided the TokyoAIsai team with a batch of holographic/glitter NovelAI logo stickers. The TokyoAIsai team welcomed us with open arms, and got us all set up.
Before too long, 7PM rolled around, and Hiro kicked off the reception with a great welcoming introduction and some of the plans for a prosperous Tokyo AI Festival.
It was really exciting to see the room fill up with the attending ~130 AI-enthusiast visitors (we ran out of seating space, and some people ended up needing to stand in the back of the room!)
Next came our own introductions, for both Eren Doğan(Kurumuz), and Virginia Dornheim (Aini) — we each had our turn to go up and talk a bit.
And then, it was finally time for the workshop! Aini jumped into action to give a personal run-through of the Creating Consistent Characters with NovelAI Diffusion Anime [Female] tutorial we had created for our NovelAI Diffusion documentation & Anlatan Blog, before. The tutorial focuses on the basics of our Image Generation and introduces the tagging system in terms of creating a character you may use in all kinds of different AI art situations! Since other AI Image Generators don’t always have the same tagging strength as NovelAI Diffusion, we thought this would be a great introduction to that particular strength of our Image Generation model.
Since Aini doesn’t speak a word of Japanese, we had TokyoAIsai’s very own Hikari-san jump in for the live Japanese translation. It was a neat back and forth, sharing our own personal image generation experiences, tips, and tricks with the audience!
We spent about an hour going over the image generation process, and it was fantastic to see some attendees follow along, share, and tweet out their own freshly created, consistent AI Img gen girls! All in all, it was a very pleasant experience which we hope to repeat in the future (possibly in the form of some Twitch streams?)!
The attendees who ended up showing off their generations got an extra handful of NovelAI stickers!
We then played a little round of bingo with prizes before the general networking hour where attendees got refreshments and snacks during a good mingle session. It was fantastic to meet both old and new faces! Connecting with community members we had the pleasure of getting acquainted with last year was a fantastic experience. Getting face-to-face time with Eren, the CEO and brain behind NovelAI & Anlatan, was an exhilarating moment for many of the visitors.
We came prepared to communicate with our amazing new team member and interpreter, Sonya Hashimoto, so the language barrier was completely overcome! We also received some of the goodies that were created by AI Image Artists with the help of NovelAI Diffusion!
Physically holding the tangible manifestation of the creations produced by our community through our products is truly a remarkable and gratifying sensation!
Time really went by in a flash, and before long, the event ended. Unfortunately, we had to pack up and head out of the venue due to time restraints. The event was fantastic, and following up with the reactions and coverage from attendees on social media was truly enjoyable!
During the days leading up to our return to our home countries, we made the most of the remaining trip time by strategically exploring the actual venue, the Tokyo Shibuya Stream building — a truly stunning location! As the largest sponsor, we’re excited to announce that we’ll have two Anlatan booths during the event, one on the outside and another on the inside floors. Our plan is to bring out a significant number of team members to represent us, connect with our community, other industry members, AI enthusiasts, and welcome new faces!
We can’t wait to talk to everyone again in March during the main event — the Tokyo AI Festival on March 23rd and 24th! If you are located in Japan or visiting during that time please feel free to stop by! The event is free to attend, there will be a ton of activities and sights, so check out all the details on the official Tokyo Ai Festival website.
