It’s a scary moment, when you realize that nationalism is a pack of lies, like religion and being a sports fan. For me, it was slow-dawning but got a strong boost when I was in the army (1983-9, basic and reserve) the wastage and stupidity began to sink in on me and I was reading a lot of the history of other countries. It’s hard not to read stuff like The Best and The Brightest [worldcat] and start to realize that the author is not just pointing out that the emperor’s new clothes show a lot of skin, but so do all of his wise senior advisors. So, how did such a bunch of idiots accomplish this? Then, you realize that behind every Bonaparte is a Talleyrand. Behind every Trump is a Miller. And they create the sweet-smelling bullshit we are all fed as we grow up. What really did it for me was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History, [worldcat] which – my offer still stands – I will give anyone a copy of if they ask for it politely.

Reading Zinn caused me to shift my interest in history a few points to the side of where it had been focused straight on military history, and I began re-reading my favorite military histories and thinking about the political context. And/or wondering how it was pitched at the time.

This was the prompt:

a humorous sketch of two travelers on a path along a woods around 1750. they are on horseback. they are well dressed and look wealthy, one is a woman with some jewelry and the other a well-fed looking man in fine attire. standing before them on the path is a highwayman, pointing a pair of pistols at the two. the highwayman looks suave but tough, and is saying, “pursuant to the UN embargo on materials for nuclear weapons manufacture, article 2 of the NPT, we hereby sanction you all your gold and your lady’s jewelry.” there are no other people in the scene.
sketch style; perhaps in the style of arthur rackham.

The engine that produced it is Nano Banana 2. If you’re interested in using the latest and greatest image or video generation models, without having to download 50gb of data, and install obscure software, I recommend krea.com, which pulls a giant number of generators from the newest to the obsolete, and you can switch and test and everything runs in their cloud queue. It’s like Midjourney except Midjourney puts their effort into their model and Krea puts their effort into making everyone’s models available. They also have their own, natch.

I’ll make a prediction here, which is that right around now, the various engines will become meaningless. It won’t matter which is better, when they’re all better than good enough.

Also, Nano Banana and all the new hot engines, interface with or include dumbed down versions of large language models, to parse the users’ input and get an even better idea how the inputs can be shaped in terms of the model’s vocabulary. This allows much more freedom in prompting, as well as an ability to get all poetic and stuff. Or, to turn on a dime and get a very different image in a moment’s inspiration, i.e.:

a humorous sketch of two travelers on a path along a woods around 1750. they are on horseback. they are well dressed and look wealthy, one is a woman with some jewelry and the other a well-fed looking man in fine attire. standing before them on the path is a highwayman, pointing a pair of pistols at the two. the highwayman looks suave but tough, and is saying, “pursuant to the UN embargo on materials for nuclear weapons manufacture, article 2 of the NPT, we hereby sanction you all your gold and your lady’s jewelry.” there are no other people in the scene.
sketch style; perhaps in the style of charles schultz peanuts comic. Charlie Brown and Lucy are the people on horseback and Snoopy is the highwayman.

You’ll notice that Charlie Brown is muttering his characteristic “Good grief” and I didn’t even need to specify it. Don’t tell me about Snoopy’s double pistol, I noticed that.

Don’t you love the horses’ expressions?

What’s going on here: the LLM is rewriting my prompt in the process of producing the tokens for the image engine. A lot of people were asking ChatGPT to help re-write their prompts, or write them to begin with, so this evolution happened quickly.

Now that it’s getting to the point where anyone can illustrate anything with a little thought, we’re going to see the freeing of some forms of art from the chains of commercialism. Caravaggio would no longer have to paint boring saints in order to pay for his next meal – he can paint whatever he wants to; unfortunately since everyone is out of a job and global agriculture collapsed, there is no next meal.