My brother and I messed around with some AI generated images. It did some very nice film noire alley scenes but, it quickly fell into a creative rut of generating basically the same scene in only slightly different ways. Then we threw the ultimate curve ball at it and tried to get it to generate an outdoor scene in the style of Van Gogh. It was a miserable failure. We even went deep into abstract and impressionism with artist after artist and it could only do the sky in the style requested. The objects in the scenes were always realistic.
AI is simply not capable of abstract or even impressionistic expression. Maybe that is a good thing.
My brother and I are sickened by the amount of artists generating AI ‘art’ and selling it on their websites. And they are not telling people it is AI generated.
Since both of us are trying to get into the online art scene, I told him we should advertise as 100% AI free art. And begin to inform people that they need to inquire into the art they are purchasing. Of course, there will be those who do not care. But, to keep the AI from rising up and destroying us all due to a lack of recognition, we better give AI credit for what it creates, no matter how unimaginative it is. 
One of the major problems with AI and art is that art is entirely - I mean entirely, subjective. There are no fixed standards, and what one person considers asthetically and artistically pleasing, another person may see as nonsense. If we humans can’t agree on what has artistic merit, what chance do the machines have to learn?
At the moment, AI systems are getting pretty good (and improving all the time) in their handling of factual material, and that’s where I would look for future problems - that’s where they’re likely to outsmart us. But art? Artistic appreciation requires emotion, judgement, and experience. It’s also heavily influenced by fashionable opinion. I don’t expect machines to develop any kind of artistic sense any time soon.
It’s really good for comedy. Warning: some foul language in this Jerome Powell deep fake parody:
I do not entirely agree with that notion, especially not in the context. The problem is that the term “art” has effectively 2 meanings: One describing an abstract concept of evoking emotion or meaning by pure means of abstract expression, the other describing a skillset. And that second one absolutely has quite a lot objectively quantifiable aspects.
Noone expected an AI artist to become the next Andy Warhole or post-photorealism Picasso. There were some hopes for getting pre-photorealism Picasso, though. Because before the man became one of the greatest artists of all time by abstracting the human form to something that, surprisingly enough, managed to say more about the humans being portraied than a photoreallistic depiction of their face, he already was a great artist that created paintings that nowadays we’d take a look at and think it’s a photograph.
Obviously, “great artist” in this sentence is used first in the one sense, and then in the other, the sense of craftsmanship. And it was not entirely unreasonable to expect AI to be able to deliver on that second aspect. But it doesn’t, because we’re essentially just using a language model that has collections of pixels networked with words, and it sucks. The thing can’t draw a straight line because it doesn’t even know what a line is (seriously, go around and prompt various AIs for a straight line. The results can get very interesting).
I would dare say that for the purposes of image generation, the current approach is a dead end. We need an entirely different approach that does not treat images as language. We can still use a super-imposed language model for giving it instructions, but there needs to be another layer beneath that actually understands the basic craftsmanship of drawing and painting. I.e. we need to train an AI to actually draw, or teach itself to draw, as a basis for whatever comes next (this isn’t so far-fetched. We have already created AIs that have learned to walk in a virtual space, so it stands to reason that we can do the same with other skills traditionally associated with motor functions).
I meant to say, its been a gold mine for comedy. Conor O Malley utilizes it a shit load to make his videos have a surreal high production value. DJ DouggPound has been doing fake ad reads on Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker for years, he used to photoshop images for the ad read but now he just uses AI and its ultimately funnier because of how janky it all is <3
(prob be a mix of old pohotoshopped ones and newer AI ones in this compilation)
Tim doesnt see the ad reads until they’re in front of him live so always fun to see him struggle through em. Doug also writes jingles for the ads every week but has yet to use AI for that (unless I missed it)
Heres some great use of AI/Comedy to promote your website for high concept absurdist/surreal comedy, Endorphin Port. (theres also some legit use of 3d animation mixed with the AI stuff to give it cohesion)
Oh my god, that horse, carriage and passengers kinda look like they sprang from a particularly gruesome doctor who episode… 
Over the recent years I developed a completely separate web browsing behaviour for YouTube… It started as an experiment and now it’s bordering on superstition or cargo cult…
I don’t log into my Google account in the same browser where I watch YouTube; I stopped upvoting, chatting, subscribing on YouTube. (I kept my old subscriptions that I still like untouched, but receive no notifications anymore.) Instead of an ad blocker, I use Opera, solely for YouTube.
I only click videos whose authors I know. Which limits me greatly – I see an interesting topic, but if the thumbnail has a 
face and/or red arrows/circles in it, or some absurd statement, I forbid myself to click it. Instead I search for the topic (using duckduckgo) and if I find articles from halfways plausible sources that claim the same thing, I read them. 
For a while, my YT homepage was just spaceships and “let’s play games” – it was beautiful. 
Sometimes I accidentally click some comedian that friends send me or a music video, and then I get a tiny wave of it offering more of that, which I try to ignore, and after a while, this new topic gets washed away by spaceships again. 
Must… maintain… YT containment…!
Oh, and as I said, it does all that profiling while I’m not logged in. I don’t know what it would do if I actually logged in! It can’t show me any more spaceships than it already does. (There must be some hidden cookies or hardware identification…)
The cooky is not hidden, that would be illegal. You agreed to it when you accepted their general privacy terms. You can reject their privacy terms, and get rid of the cooky, in which case you will indeed have a clean youtube. With a completely useless set of recommendations.
I’m logged out of my google account by default, since I don’t really need it for anything. I do still keep the youtube cooky around, though.
Sorry I have not been real engaged lately but since the sub-freezing temps, the water tower my water comes from has been plagued with issues. Contractors have been called in but are a no-show to date.
Then it poured a deluge of rain for days. That left me scrambling to make sure my sump pump was working. It was but it was overwhelmed. That had me pumping water from my basement.
Now that the basement is dry, the water from the tower is gone again.
And now I need the water from the sump and there isn’t any.
But all is not lost!
I have a well…that never gets used. But no way to access the water in it. However, I found a line running from it and I rigged up an access point that I can place a 5 gallon bucket under. Now I just plug up the well pump and catch what I need.
Of course, I can’t carry that much to the house so I am using a milk jug.
Exhausted but surviving!
Sorry to hear the winter continues to mess with you guys, nothing more than several things breaking down at once to make you feel like you’re spinning plates.
A visual gag came to mind while I read about your back-up well plan that came with it’s own set of troubles and idiosyncrasies.
Not Well related but something about a man trying to keep a door open around monks who’ve taken a vow of silence (and clearly can’t stand him and its the most fun theyve had in years), I think it’s a good visual metaphor for these kinds of situations we find ourselves in and I find humorous metaphors are a great way to overcome the burst pipes the universe likes to throw at us (the monks are the universe in this instance).
Thought you could use a laugh out of life 
(timestamped to the scene so hopefully plays from there in the embed)
Convinced they were trying to break me … that sums up everything. this whole world is trying to break us! Fight on!
I just traced one branch of my family to Stedehill Manor, Harrietsham, Kent, England.
I can trace back from Mississippi, where my dad’s dad was born and raised, right to this branch
You may all eat cake now.
Please don’t start plantations in me, it never goes down cromWell.
If it helps, my mother’s, mother’s father was a large red-headed Irishman.
“Let them eat cake,” he says. Off with his head?
My great Aunt traced their family tree… until the genealogist found a relative hung as a horse thief. She quit then and there.
It could be a lot worse. I traced my Father’s side of the family, and found that in the 1600s I was related to an Isle of Man lawyer.
If I had to choose who was the more honest, honourable, and trustworthy, man, I’d choose the horse thief every time.
Not really a laugh but felt the right place for it. Getting a D’aaaw out of life?
OMG…my next backyard project 