I think this one is actually pretty good.
That’s a “dad joke”, right? Actually, it reminds me of a joke attributed to Voltaire and the Marquis de Bièvre – allegedly challenged by the king to “make a witty pun about me” he replied, “Ah sire, le roi n’est pas un sujet!” (It works in translation: “Sire, the monarch is not a subject!”
As they say, “quit while you’re ahead.” But, no:
I’m more fond of visual quirkiness, but that ought to be understandable since I like to make things. Seldom are they funny, but I notice visual quirks and that’s often what makes me happy about a given thing.
It has something to do with my memory (which does not work so well, anymore) but I often find lyrics from songs breaking into my live-stream, often from the deep past. I was telling Jenna the Welder that she needs to wear her fire resistant boots when forging hot steel, and muttered, “… shoes that no man would want to wear” (a fragment from Bauhaus) and later that evening I decided to ask Midjourney AI for some “shoes that no man would want to wear” I also asked ChatGPT where the lyrics “shoes that no man would want to wear” come from, and it told me about a song:
Walking in Memphis” by American singer-songwriter Marc Cohn. The song was released in 1991 and became a hit, reaching number 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.
I then asked ChatGPT about “The Man With X-Ray Eyes” from 1981 and it apologized.
Shoes that no man would want to wear [Incomprehensible] the night’s last cold stare Red fist curled ’round the house Wash away, boy, Shelly’s shoes…
Did Marc Cohn listen to Bauhaus back in the day? Bauhaus actually used that trope at least twice, another time on an errata track called “Departure”:
At night he would listen to the click of heels on the concrete outsideAnd try to imagine the facial features of the unseen figureHe would always see his own faceAnd another realization of this prophecy rang terrible and trueFor at this moment, it was indeed, his own feet that filled the shoesShoes that no man would want to wear
Midjourney AI and mjr: (lyrics from Bauhaus’ “departure”)
I got some good results out of Stable Diffusion by feeding it The Sisters of Mercy “Driven Like The Snow” but now I can’t find it. It was a suitably gothic night-scape with snow and a streetlamp – very evocative.
All future creativity will consist of feeding inappropriate song lyrics of the past into generative AI making things other than songs. Imagine the sorts of things you’d get from an AI hooked up to a CNC machine and fed on Rammstein lyrics, or an AI weapons designer fed exclusively on Bob Dylan. And so on.
As for where the songs of the future will come from, I’m guessing we’ll feed in the functional design spec documents of sex toys, blood-vessel-dilating pharmaceuticals and perfumes. That’ll do for the lyrics, the melodies will be generated from the accounts of whichever Silicon Valley company has been bought by the most eccentric billionaire this week.
(Aside: it was reasonable to assume, some time around 2010, that Elon Musk had fantasies of being Tony Stark (i.e. billionaire genius playboy philanthropist superhero techlord who fights crime). It’s become obvious since that his role model was Thanos. Or Kang. Or just Bolivar Trask.)
Never forged steel, but I have blown glass (not the candy glass, the real thing) and have, while fulfilling my fine arts requirement, dropped a glob of molten glass onto my foot. Luckily, I was wearing cowboy boots (with lug soles (New Hampshire in the winter)). Had the neatest charred area for the rest of the boots’ life.
@1:
You may in fact have that entirely the wrong way round. It could be that Tony Stark would have been Elon Musk if not for his transformative revelation in the desert caves. Maybe a bit of that is all Elon needs.
xohjoh2n says @3:
I seriously misread that and was wondering about Creme Brule deposits on the floor, chocolate fondant on the walls, and a really slow-motion chocolate fountain creating stalactites, stalagmites, and columnar formations.
@4:
I tried to find some pudding-related play on Iron Man or Robert Downey Jr. and completely failed.
(And apparently my Midjourney foo is really bad as I repeatedly fail to get it to come up with anything like I imagine my prompt should do. In this case “/imagine Elon Musk as an (actual plate of) Eton mess” just comes up with a particularly younger and prettier version of him eating something that may or may not be an Eton Mess. Maybe Marcus can do better, he usually appears to do so.)
The best pun I’ve ever seen is, “Be he never so humble, there is no police like Holmes.” When a general language AI, not one specifically built to make puns and nothing else, can produce a similarly exquisite pun, then writers can begin to fear for their livelihoods. My best pun so far is, “To hair is human; to furgive, feline…”, and that example shows where language AIs will have to change. Because language changes and its usage can abuse the ‘rules’ for getting the most meaning, and multiple meanings, out of words. The essence of punning is using multiple meanings and multiple ideas combined into a non-obvious combination with a clever new meaning. If it maps onto an existing saying or rhythmic set of words, all the better.
Nah. A large part of the point of Stark even from the very first MCU outing, unlike Musk, is that he actually is verifiably an actual wizard-level genius.
Obadiah Stane: “Tony Stark was able to build this in a CAVE! FROM SCRAPS!!!”
Top level Stark Industries engineer and therefore, it’s reasonable to assume, fairly genius engineer himself: “I’m not Tony Stark.”
Brevity is the soul of wit. Asked for the shortest joke he knows, Jimmy Carr responded with “Venison’s dear.” When a general AI can come up with something at that level we may need to worry.