Randomness

Krea’s chat mode adds an interesting new dimension to image creation. For example, you can tell it “create a portrait of ben franklin” then, when it doesn’t look Franklin enough, you provide an image and say “more like Franklin” then work on the setting. It’s interesting.

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This May Sound Like an Ad

But it’s not, I swear! As far as I recall, the number of products or services that I have actually gotten excited about is, maybe, a dozen. I suppose that’s a side-effect of living in the past, where if someone comes up and wants to show me a new Tactical(r) self-defense cane, I’m going to be comparing it to long-established products like the Henschel VK4501 (aka “King Tiger”) which is almost certainly superior unless you are going on a plane.

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In The Beginning, There Was a Blog

Actually, I used to hang out at Affinity [aff] because sometimes there was interesting far-ranging discussions and art, and creativity. I started here at Pharyngula, when it was still under ScienceBlogs (I still have the mug!) and came to enjoy the rough-and-tumble crotch-kicking and religion-bashing. I still track there, but I have found that, in the last year, my ability to stay awake is seriously compromised, and the wars of religion are just a waste of time. In fact, I often catch myself thinking that the right-thinking people of the world were too busy pounding on theists to deconstruct the burgeoning fascist dictatorship that was growing in the wings.

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Creativity. Some Personal Observations

I used to be a highly creative person. I’m not bragging but one idea I threw out over a sushi dinner at Higashi West got turned into a start-up which netted the founder about $200mn. I’ve had a bunch to drink and topped it off with a Zoloft, so forgive me if I wander a bit. It’s snowing out and the shop is too cold and I’m not sure if I want to play computer games, tonight, or try to write.

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“AI Art Just Regurgitates Existing Images”

[WARNING: Long for today’s attention-spans. Readers over 50 should be OK.]

The Zombie of Bimmler

You’ve probably heard that before. Perhaps you’ve heard the same regarding large language models. One thing that this does is casually glosses over the fact that the two approaches work very differently. Or, more precisely, the two approaches are categories of approaches, which can have independent implementation details, as well.

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Remember What I Said?

A couple months ago, that I don’t think AI is going to threaten William Shakespeare’s high seat, but it might obliterate John Ringo by making him just another mediocrity in a sea of mediocrities? I asked my friend Ron, who’s up an all the current APIs and scripting languages, and he did a parameterized version of the original script that brought the computer security book by “R. J. Wallace” [stderr]

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