It is perhaps inevitable that we’re now being besieged by arguments on what art is, and what counts as art. AI has done a number on us. And before the shrieking starts, note that I’m not one of the AI haters or even one of the AI skeptics. (I’m a skeptic as to how wisely humans will use AI, but that actually makes me a human wisdom skeptic, and guys, what else is new?)
But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time. People used to paint to be as realistic as possible, so you could look at their picture and it would be like the picture their eye saw. And then– Cameras.
Decades of learning, people who had devoted their entire lives to pursuing this art, who were d*mn good at it, and who might be in their near-old-age and there, cameras nuked their lives. Okay, it was somewhat mitigated by the pictures being in black and white, but that wasn’t forever either. And what were they supposed to do now?
Well, obviously — though I don’t know enough of art history to give you names — some arts laid down and died, probably portraitists most of all. But I’ll be honest with you, out there, staring at the screen, it’s not actually that difficult to make an artist lay down and die. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to make them produce art, but that’s… something quite different from actually standing up the great wide world and staying “You, out there, buy my mad, beautiful thing” (I swear, if M. C. A. Hogarth doesn’t make t-shirts and stickers and bumper stickers with “Do your mad, beautiful thing anyway”, with a drawing of the tesla, I’m going to do it!) Because all of us have rats in our heads. To produce art you must simultaneously believe your mad, beautiful thing, is the best thing ever and also the biggest piece of crap ever produced. So, you see, putting it up to the judgement of an (at best) indifferent world is a bit difficult. (Not lying. To this day I ask my fans to read reviews before I even look at them. Yesterday it was a review for the anthology Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova, and incidentally that story is Brund and Skip and a different perspective on the future book The Worlds of Men.)
But we do know that not all artists laid down and died. A lot of them painted better, more expressive portraits than the camera back then could capture, on top of which, of course, a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph. And then this weird trick happened, and photography became art too. No, seriously, it really is. The funny thing is that I can draw (and could have been a contenda! if the fire in my belly went that way. It doesn’t.) but give me a camera, or you know, a phone, and I become a monkey with ten thumbs. Cedar Sanderson has a cat that looks almost like mine (They’re sisters, two consecutive litters, her Toast and my Muse) but she takes pictures of Toast and makes her look alive, and expressive, all personality coming through. Me? I take a picture of Muse and she’s a pretty flame point. You can even sort of see that, but definitely not her feisty, commanding personality. (She’s Greebo’s heir and was just herding me to my desk to write, because she knows which side of her tuna is buttered.) I’m also in awe of her insect/nature pictures. I don’t even try, even though I life in a woodland area, where … so many interesting spiders. My younger son, when he visited, captured an image of a spider eating a colorful insect, and it was like a painting. If I’d done it it would have been “Oh, it’s a spider. Ick.”
So there’s something that goes into photography that I don’t have.
And all the flopping around about AI “stealing” art… mostly by artists who are so by virtue of being called so by elites — what I call “unremarkable image or object, but really call description” “artists” — is nonsense. By that reckoning “first learned from what came before, copying the bits that we like” every artist is a plagiarist, all the way back to Lascaux (And only because we don’t have much from before.)
But is AI art disquieting? Threatening to those of us who spent a lifetime learning the best techniques and becoming damn good at the craft part of what we do? Hell yeah.
Interestingly, the artists I know who are compulsive — they HAVE to do art — and dedicated — practice, practice, practice — might be slightly discomfited and a little afraid — we’re all cracked like an unsound cup, okay? Again, it doesn’t take much — but they’re not lying down and dying. And they’re not stomping around throwing hissy fits that “If that’s AI, you might as well not bother.”
I don’t even know how much of the anti-AI mob sentiment is real, and how much is being stoked by global enemies terrified of America plus AI. I know a lot of it is just those enemies. And I wonder if it started that way and hit the soft heads of the wanna be artists and those who consider art a sort of grift.
I’m not a visual artist — again, I think I could have been, and the last art class I took — fourth year? — the teacher agreed and tried to convince me to pursue it professionally. Dad offered to pay for a third degree in art (He did NOT pay for the first two. One was paid for by my having very good grades, and one I paid for.) Because it was his first degree, and he always dreamed of one of his descendants picking it up. (Squints at the future. The Little Pickle does these amazing little symbolic paintings. Also not her main avocation, but you know? Maybe there will be kids who have dad’s ability and fire.) I still love to do portraiture, by hand, and am currently trying to figure out if there are life drawing/painting classes nearby. My favorite is doing those in conde crayons, all earth tones. BUT it’s not my professional thing. Not even close.
And yet, I dropped into AI art with both feet, because it served my actual need for my real professional artist avocation: writing. I needed covers. And before you flop again (what are you a fish?) and whine about taking money from an artist’s mouth, I WASN’T using professional artists before. The only one I’d have considered is Cedar Sanderson, and I suspect we’d have butted horns so hard — because we have different concepts of what makes a great cover and also because I knew enough to be dangerous — that it would have forever ruined our friendship. I like her, so I’m not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I also used Jack Wilder (See the amazing Dyce Dare covers) but guys…. getting Jack to do covers when I need them (I’m not good at planning. It’s always an emergency) was like nailing jello to the wall. He’s got to be one of the busiest men in sf/f.
So what was I using. Oooh, boy. I have some covers to redo. I started by trying to hire an artist for my first indie novel. It… didn’t work out, and I didn’t like the product. Which is not a big deal, because well, I couldn’t pay much (I still can’t, because I never know how a book is going to DO) though what I lost in that was more than I could afford at the time. (Remember, I had NO indie business, yet.)
So I started hunting down for stock images and altering them, and trying to make them fit. Honestly, sometimes I suspect I went beyond the license, and the covers still looked… well, like bad 70s covers when book publishers had first discovered cameras. (Not MOSTLY SF/F where seventies covers are sometimes great, but main stream or mystery 70s covers, at least in Europe. They were… odd. My favorite mystery series had silver covers with an inset of a picture of the human body. No, not A human body, which might have worked. Just a random portion of the human body, scaled up so far you couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked vaguely disquieting. (Have you ever looked at your nostrils? I mean, really looked?)
From that, after I spent weeks crying in front of the computer, and refusing to cook dinner because I couldn’t even, my husband dropped DAZ 3-D in front of me. Oh, I continued crying and screaming for six months (Most of this is not literal) while I rendered naked people with no hair. And then something clicked.
Were those covers good. Eh. Some were USABLE after extensive processing, but honestly it’s hard to get rid of a certain uncanny valley feel for those and anyway, I was still working through filters and lighting and… when AI hit. And the game changed.
Even in its early incarnation, where I sometimes used pieces of 10 AI paintings for a cover, it blew DAZ 3-D out of the water (Though I’ve found I can get Daz 3-D to do the base picture, then take it to AI and alter it, on rare circumstances when I’m asking for something AI simply doesn’t do well or at all. Would you believe classic pulp robots is one of those? Sure. I knew you would.)
So I jumped in, both feet, because mama has books and needs covers. And redid them when AI got better, and I have probably 10 covers crying out to be redone now, when I have (AH!) time. Which brings us to…
I know the artists who use AI for covers. I use AI myself. The amazing thing is how different our covers are, and how you CAN too tell style. Maybe it is our favorite AIs. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve TRAINED them. At one time, before we were even doing covers, our friend group all put the same prompt in, and even then, at the dawn of AI, what we got was completely different, because even then we’d trained AI to our vision.
So, is it art. I don’t know because I don’t know what art is — which is what is emerging from the big argument on X. That there are as many opinions as there are people. And we’ll go into that tomorrow under “the war on fun.” — and no one seems to know, though each person has mad-serious opinions.
BUT I know that even with AI use, the product is highly individual and tracks to the human doing it. More, honestly, than to the AI used (I have friends who’ve changed AI engine, for price or ease of use.)
Ah, but AI art lacks the divine spark.
Maybe it does. AI writing tends to lack bodies. (I’ve spent a lot of time reading AI novels, in Jane Austen Fanfic, and it only hit me why they’re so tiresome after about 100 of them. There is no stage business. No one fiddles with their bracelets, or adjusts her shoe, or even plays with a stray lock of hair. Or sips too-hot tea. Only bits of stage business are in STRICT service of the narration. “She looked at him when he spoke.” Not “While he spoke, she played with her embroidery thread.”) Now, once you figure that out — and btw, most writers also forget bodies. At least at first. And in my case when I’m exhausted. Which is why I have that — it’s probably easy to incorporate that into your prompts.
And I’m sure that a lot of AI art lacks something, even if it’s gotten better at hands.
BUT obviously not all, since I can tell whose AI art I’m looking at, and when a house changes cover artists even though both use AI. There is definitely a spark between artist and art. Which will probably get better now that we’re past the phase of screaming at the AI “I said a woman in a dress and a bird. Not a feathered woman and a bird in a dress.” (Don’t ask. Trust me. Once seen it can’t be unseen.)
I think yes, it’s uncomfortable and it’s going to demand that we change, and it’s sparked a scream and shout on X. Which is why we’re going to cover that tomorrow. Yes, I know there’s a war on people having fun. BUT must it be bipartisan?
But is it any more of a disruptive technology for artists than the camera?
I’m not convinced. I think it’s exactly the same. And artists who are compelled, are going to learn to use AI and to make their art better. And others won’t use AI but will learn to make their stuff so distinctive and amazing that AI can’t take their mojo.
And yes, in this case “artists” include writers, who are going a little crazier than even visual artists, partly because this technology has come for us too. (Note we had a minor disruption for wordprocessing and for dictation, but not as hard and fast as the camera for visual artists.)
I can’t tell you what other writers are doing. I can tell you what I’m doing: NOT laying down and dying. My stuff tends to be weird enough it’s hard to imitate, anyway. (Except to younger son, who can do a dead-imitation, the little SOB.)
And other writers are using AI agents for publicity, to remind themselves of various tasks (I need to figure out my substack. No really.) To convert books to epub format. Etc. etc. etc. Things that cut down on the other tasks and allow them to write more.
Me? I found it’s dangerous to talk about my universe to an AI, because I’m tired and slightly depressed. Because it gives me IDEAS. But then again, everything gives me ideas. I do have an idea for a youtube feature, though. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. But I’m holding onto the idea until I am done unpacking. Probably new years. If this works it might sell me a lot of books. Even more than the music did. (And I need to resume that with other series.) Now this type of brainstorming used to work great when Dan and I were both young and childless and used to drive nowhere in particular at night. Same effect. (Of course, mathematicians and AIs…. what am I saying?) BUT then the kids came and we got very busy, so I hadn’t had a rubber ducky with no time limits and very busy for a long time. Which, I’ll be honest, was kind of nice.
So, AI art is still human. But is it art? I don’t know. The divine spark or lack thereof is literally above my pay grade.
BUT I’m an artist, or at least a sad compulsive who expresses herself in stories. In my (it’s getting to be longish, no?) life, I’ve tended to grind everything in my writing mill and use every technology, every even, every friendship (people, we’re despicable, we writers!) as fodder to the thing I couldn’t stop doing.
AI is just more grist to the mill. It will get used in the service of creation. And what come out the other side will stand or fall on how well it’s used.
Much of that is what I’ve been saying elsewhere. i.e. the new artists will be the ones who can figure out how to properly wrangle the AI image creator into creating the image that’s in their head (or get close enough). The technology is here. People whine about the effect of it on pre-AI artists, but you can’t put this particular genie back into the bottle. Professional artists need to adapt to the new tool, or find a new job.
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Adapt or die does seem to be of the iron rules of life.
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I have seen some beautiful work from wildlife photographers, made from their own photographs. I wish I could afford the prints.
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I think, as in coding, AI will end up a very useful assistant. For a writer it probably can act as a feedback mechanism… as long as you account for the ‘only knows what’s on the internet’ … and ‘gets stuck on a thing and won’t admit when it’s wrong’… and the ‘either way too precise or way too symbolic’… and the ‘fails at emotional texture’…. and…
But still, I think if they don’t all crash and burn, it will be a useful tool. It just won’t be sapient any time soon. Regardless of the ‘regulatory-capture-please’ companies’ very human hallucinations about anthropomorphism in code.
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For my money, it’s already there, assuming you know when to disregard its advice, and the same would be true of any human offering feedback. I will say that i feel like they are less useful for line editing than some other tasks because they have no “ear” so to speak. But they’ve been taught enough about structure/pacing to produce useful insights there, and they’re excellent typo hunters.
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As to line editing, AI only knows what has gone before, and language is a constantly evolving beast. Shakespeare is said to have used 3,000 words that were never seen in print before. Some he doubtlessly made up like honorificabilitudinitatibus. Others may have been common in spoken language of his day and just never written down.
Likewise, grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. The grammarians come along after the fact and try to systematize the way people have already written. I take pride in knowing when to ignore “proper” grammar to get the reader to read my prose the way I want him to hear it in his head.
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Yes, agreed. those of us cheesemakers who make cambozola (or whatever esoteric cheese you prefer) are not really threatened by the velveeta makers opening another half dozen factories. On volume, we were never in competition with them anyway, and we are definitely catering to different tastes anyway.
On a marginally related note, it’s been about 14-15 months since the first time I dabbled in ai videos, and somehow it’s evolved in that time from Edison grade movies to maybe early talkie era (albeit with color, special effects and drone cameras). I feel excited, but also tired. (Like Sarah, I was a Daz user, and that came with similar vibes at times).
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Blessed are the cheesemakers
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Yeah, I’m bad at AI, and even I’m doing better than the old clip art covers. And, uh, yeah, need to redo at least half my covers. And book covers aren’t high art, they’re advertisments.
As soon as I have time . . .
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if you can figure out how to buy more of that time thing, let me know.
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Young Wizard: Well, I’ll see if I can make more time.
Older Wizard: Do Not Try It.
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Develop space travel and go to a planet with a longer day. problem solved, well sort of…
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It should be noted the the natural diurnal cycle observed in experiments without external cueing, conducted in venues such as deep caverns, happens to match up nearly exactly with the length of a day (technically a ’Sol’) on Mars.
Talk about manifest destiny…
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So, from the movie “The Martian”, the potatoes he grew were
Sol Food.
8 – )
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“Yes, I grew potatoes in my own shit. It’s as gross as it sounds.”
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I fed Claude Sonnet your piece, and this is among what he wrote:
/Her strongest observation is the empirical one: people using the same tools produce recognizably different work, so the human signature survives the medium. The “same prompt, completely different results” experiment among her friends is a small but telling data point. It suggests the question “is it art?” may be less useful than “whose is it?”
/Where I’d push on the analogy is the scale and generality of the disruption. The camera automated one skill, rendering what the eye sees. Generative systems touch rendering, composition, style imitation, and prose all at once, and they do it by training on the existing body of work. Her dismissal of the “stealing” argument (every artist learns by copying) is fair as far as it goes, but it glides past the real disputes, which are about consent, compensation, and the sheer volume at which a model can absorb a living artist’s style. A human apprentice absorbs one master at a time and takes years; those are different economics even if the epistemology is similar. Reasonable people land differently on that, and it’s a legal and economic question more than an aesthetic one.
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Lol, yeah, that’s claude.
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:laughs:
Except that’s not accurate at all to how people learn art!
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I’ve been watching my daughter learn to draw, and you can see influences of what she thinks is pretty this week showing up differently all the time.
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When I started trying to write for a living, I wrote bargain basement Ray Bradbury. Eventually I evolved my own style, and it would take a better critic than I to figure out my influences. I’ll cop to Bradbury, Shakespeare (in a very small way), Heinlein, Kipling, and even a little Zelazny (I did that thing).
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“Zelazny” isn’t very specific. He made a point out of never maintaining a specific style. And he wrote too many stories in New Wave, which was trendy when Moorcock was buying it when he was an editor, but bit the dust hard after that.
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Yep, hence a little Zelazny, but, “I did that thing” was one of his tics that nobody else did.
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THAT too.
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Slightly OT, it looks like “consent,” is going to be the next hysteria (which is a heck of a bunch better than “THE JOOOOOOOS!”).
Note on Twitter that a Scottish museum was pulling mummies off an exhibit because “the deceased,” never had a chance to give consent is a pretty big clue that someone’s brains have completely turned to mush.
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But those who have the ability and authority to consent is the variable list, basically by victim status, changeable on demand to support the revolution.
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It flatters itself on the model absorbing the living artist’s style…. The rest, not disputing. I’m not turning back the money from the anthropic settlement, because they could have paid for those books, for crying in bed. BUT still not plagiarism.
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LLMs target the median. Which means you provide the creativity. For the most part.
The weirdest thing are the people who apparently us AI to generate their entire product and never both to look at it before sending it in. I’m thinking those must be the credentialists who never realized that delivering a bill of sale was not the same thing as actually delivering a result.
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THIS. Some of the JAFF. “Did you even read this?”
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I have been making AI art for years, off and on. Lately, in NightCafe. (A sampling of my stuff, should anyone care. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/collection/kYANuuHpETOHwoqqrpPE?ru=Jasini)
I’m sure that someone with artistic talent or skill could do a lot better, and not rely on Vincent to rewrite every simple prompt and pick the best results. But even someone like me can get decent results from writing a couple of sentences.
My son, OTOH, considers AI to be anathema. I’m not entirely sure he is capable of seeing it. He just sees “AI slop” and the image itself vanishes. I expect he’ll come around eventually. But he may be the last person on the planet to do so.
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I remember the guy who posted a real but obscure-ish Monet (like one of a bazillion paintings of his water lily garden at Giverny) on Twitter labeling it as a fake Monet, and the vast majority of his commenters fell for it, pointing out all the AI “tells”, with only a couple saying no actually, that is or could a photo of the real thing, let me do a reverse image search to find out.
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https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/6-7-million-people-ripped-apart-ai-generated-monet-painting-real/
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Wow that was only five months ago? Thought it was 2025 or something. Thank you for finding.
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Quite welcome, I was going “yeah, I remember hearing about that-” so I had to go find it, and once I’ve done that I may as well post it, too.
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I like the Studio Ghibli Baba Yaga hut. That’s a giggle. ~:D Something a human being would never bother with in that level of detail and finish, because it would take a week.
I will observe here that “Hating AI” is a virtue signal amongst the Zoomer crowd at the moment, the same as “Palestine” and a few other idiot things. Propaganda works, right?
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No, he’ll be the convert right before my son who loves to doom about the coding apocalypse about to face us all.
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“People see what they want to see” is trite, but largely accurate.
Ask a random selection of people if they’ve seen the movie “Gran Torino”, and if so, what they thought of it.
“Loser old racist gets his comeuppance” certainly wasn’t what I got out of it…
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Funny how that “racist” expected everyone, including the different, to live up to the standards he met, and critiqued folks who chose to not do so, for not doing so.
Versus the oh-so-sophisticated Leftroid “Well you cant expect -them- to ….”, because racism.
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I also think that AI needs to be something you opt in to, not something you have to opt out of, and that with difficulty.
It’s best treated as a rubber duck. What you get out of it is what you put into it.
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my phone, argh.
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“But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time.”
And before that, the printing press…
We’ve seen this before. It’s deja-poo.
I think, based on my generally jaundiced attitude toward the news, that a fair number of sock-puppet factories and “influencers” are being paid to view-with-alarm anything AI related.
My daughter is an artist. I’ve seen what she does, and I’ve seen what AI does. If you want a book cover to advertise your latest tome, and all it has to be is a visual cue on the Amazon Kindle web page, it is hard to beat AI. Basically free, you do it yourself, and it’s ‘good enough’ for a thumb-sized icon on a phone.
If you want something good, and you need it to be an original thought and not a derivation of pop-art squeezed out of an AI, then you need an artist.
Most of us don’t need an artist most of the time. But for example a media company or a video game company does need one. That’s the core of their business. AI isn’t going to be sufficient to the requirement.
For the same reason that sometimes you need a hand-written invitation or an oil portrait instead of a photograph. Maybe not for mass production, but the caligrapher and the artist can still find a job. Or wood carvers, chair makers, roof thatchers, etc.
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The thing that I think will be transformative is it will allow a bare handful of people to be those singular visions, and produce AA or AAA grade products without the legion of cooks in the soup. We’ve already seen how small teams can produce excellent games with the pre-AI tools. Adding LLMs to the mix just leverages that even further.
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“…produce AA or AAA grade products without the legion of cooks in the soup…”
This is happening already. Indie games are charting big while MegaStudio AAA Wokeslop is getting slaughtered.
This week’s example is BioWare, closed down by EA because their games have been bombing like a B-52. And oh baby are all the little Twitterati just sooo upset and blaming GamerGate and the chuds. (Unwashed disgusting gamer boys in ZoomerSpeak)
Because when your $200 million dollar game brings in $70 million, that’s totally down to gamer racism, dewds. It’s the only explanation.
Get a few artists together and make something APPEALING, spend $7 million on AI and bring in $70 million in revenue, that’s a business model. Chuds got money burning a hole in their pockets, the astute investor will ask what they want to see and give it to them.
Unless of course somebody was paying EA/BioWare $300 million to make Wokeslop for $200 mil and sell $70 mil to the racist chuds. That is also a business model. And that’s what I think was happening until this year.
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More and more I am convinced that if they could force us to buy their wokeslop; they would. And they deeply resent the fact that they can’t force us to do so.
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And take away our Union of Soviet Writers cards. They would give them out for the pleasure of taking them away.
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THIS.
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Directive 10-289. If you bought a book last year, you have to buy another copy of the same book this year. 😜
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Once they captured HR they could turn game “development” into eternal delay programs staffed with correct thinking “developers” who had no actual skills. This resulted in games divided up and farmed out to multitudes of little outside dev companies, but the staff in house still got paid, and they imposed the correct thinking on those contracts and thus on anything that made it to release. Thus ten-plus year “development” cycles between releases, and what eventually comes out is riddled with poor choices, both in the actual game mechanics and the creative content.
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You’re probably aware of this already, but Chris Avellone, who worked on the amazingly-well-written game Planescape: Torment (among several other game,s most of them excellent) explained what Bioware was doing with their hiring practices:
https://xxcancel.com/SmashJT/status/2113378143767790014
Short version: on November 27, 2024, Avellone said “I had an experience with a BioWare producer who showcased the full extent of their hiring practices, and it’s a story for another day — but definitely was cause for a lawsuit.” Once BioWare shut down, someone asked him “Is it time for that tale?” and he answered: “I guess I can say it now — so when applicants would apply to the studio, the producer would go through their LinkedIn to see what posts they liked, and if he disagreed with their political/social Like, he’d advocate not to hire them based on their Like.”
Follow the xxcancel.com link (or just replace with x.com if you have an account, but the xxcancel.com link will take you to a working Nitter site where you can read the post without being logged in) to see him expand on the idea in further posts.
But the really short version is: BioWare was prioritizing other things above hiring for competence. And you all know what happens when you do that: you get people who aren’t competent.
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In particular Bioware was targeting wokeish people who worried about their politics over gameplay and audience. There are folks that like that stuff (beats me why but they exist). Thing is the Venn diagram of those folks and most avid game players (who are the ones dropping $80 for a game that needs an $1800+ machine to even run tolerably) has a VERY small crescent. And those that aren’t going to buy the grey goo are avidly against it (remember Gamergate?) so you may be tainting ALL your products even ones that are otherwise pretty good. I have a set of life rules and three of of them is
Bioware was violating rule 18 with gusto. Not everyone has my internal rules. but the purpose most gamers have for games (interactive fiction) is story and escape like my rule 17. It’s entertainment, and when it becomes lecture it is far less entertaining.
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A lot of AI art is pretty bad. But frankly, most human art is pretty bad, too.
Book cover art seems to go to particular extremes, from Bonestell and Frazetta and Merrill to slightly-out-of-focus photographs of dolls and random items or paintings that look like they came out of a seventh-grade art class.
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On the other hand, the possibility of NEW art is certainly a thing.
https://badtimesai.app/
This is the dancing dog thing that’s been burning up social media lately. You can have your own dog/cat/wombat dance to Bad Times. It’s hilarious. ~:D
But is it Art, capital “A”? If graffiti is art then this is, haterz.
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Sarah, you could have included the source for the title….
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_conundrum.htm
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Anthropic’s IPO prospectus dropped today. Bit of a dog’s breakfast I’m afraid. I wasn’t able to pull out all the circular financing, which seems to make up much of the revenue, or not it’s unclear. Don’t care enough to try anymore, really. When I determine, as I have here, that management is deliberately confusing things, I stay away. learned that from my da, and Buffet as it happens. Still, they’re pledging mega money to space-x, which I do own, so there’s that.
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Space-X, yes. Anthropic, no. OpenAI, hell no.
Too much shenanigans.
When Elon says a datacenter will have a 6 month payoff horizon, I mostly believe that. Mostly. I do maintain a healthy caution, because he could be wrong.
When the Anthropic guy opens his mouth and says anything at all, I go check to see if he’s lying. This is not a good base to stand up an investment upon.
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I know the name is Amodeus which is “loves G-d.” (eh.) But I continually think it’s a bad cover up for the demon name Asmodeus. Maybe it’s me.
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It’s not just you; I constantly misremember his name as Asmodeus and have to look up what it actually is.
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Uh. I wonder if it’s a uh…. hint.
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Yeah, I do a doubletake every time I see his first name too, for the same reasons. I will say, in his parents’ defense, that he has a sister named Daniele, so I don’t think there was any sinister intention on their part.
In the interest of byipartisan AI snarking, I will add that I find it off-putting that the rocket surgeons at OpenAI supposedly codenamed an advanced prototype model “Bel” in the last few months.
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I think they’re just trying to scare us.
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No wait, we were talking about the family surname weren’t we? Brain was fried yesterday.
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I’m not so inclined to ‘benefit of the doubt’ when it comes to naming things like that – you only have to look at the religious beliefs of the one-worlders to see where they are mostly coming from.
As far as AI being ‘art,’ I regularly watch a couple of interior decorator YouTube channels. I’ve seen a white canvas with a white square painted on it being called ‘art.’ If that is ‘art,’ then just about anything coming from AI qualifies as ‘art,’ too. (I commented on that one that she needed to make more use of the term ‘wall decor,’ because a white square painted on a white canvas wasn’t ‘art’ by any definition of the word. I’ve noticed a lot less of that kind of ‘wall decor’ lately on her channel.)
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Their entire business argument seems to be a combination of “Briar Patch Protectionism,” [“Regulate us before we do something horrible, pllleeeeeeeaaaase regulate us!”] and handwavium. Bad handwavium at that.
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Thus “Please build regulatory barriers to entry to protect our sunk costs from those who would dare to create after us!”
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What burns me is their trying to make it that these programs have free will and thus avoid the liability for their product. If the program had free will then they’re slavers, if not they’re liable for their product.
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yep. So much this.
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So much this.
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It’s a darned shame they’re a bunch of creeps, because I like the end product and they do some semi-intelligent things with it in terms of trying to discourage engagement farming and sycophancy. But, meh, kinda hard to participate in society without doing business with scumbags.
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YES.
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Anthropic’s policy of vetting potential customers through Palantir put them on my “hell no!” list when I was ready to go to a paid account somewhere. One of the others wanted scans of both sides of government-issued ID, plus a live video of my face. That was a “**** no!” Grok cost 50% more than anyone else, and their free tier was noticeably lower quality, so pass. Deepseek would only accept a gmail.com email address, and I don’t have a gmail account, and can’t get one, since they require SMS “two-factor authentication” via a cellphone, which I don’t have. Another kept failing at the “enter credit card information” screen.
I wound up with a ChatGPT account because OpenAI was the only provider that operated as a business that wanted customers.
I guess the others, floating high on venture capital money, are too mighty to be bothered by petty $20/mo user accounts. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, but it was usually at the tail-end of a company’s run, when they decided to scrape off all their single accounts to concentrate on “enterprise business”, which usually lasted a year or two before they went out of business.
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Huh? Last I heard Palantir and Anthropic were butting heads after an initial partnership. There was a brief period last summer of Anthropic saying they would let the govt vet foreign nationals access to their models, but then they apparently decided this was unworkable and just blanket blocked users from certain regions (read:PRC) and vpns popular in those regions. There are of course other solid reasons to go with Chat instead (their image generation ecosystem, for instance). I got a free account with Claude some years ago when all this was new, Chat was slammed with new users and hard to get into, and Google had discontinued Bard and was only
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Yep, the Skyebrows Cinematic Universe is driving people to create beauty and humor, as well as talk about pain and dreams. His mom’s Carolina Overdrive songs are exceptional.
And Ace AT managed to get to his girl in India for a month, and everyone is hoping he can get out for good. If I were in the State Dept in any country, I would give him a visa. He seems like a highly desirable future citizen.
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Check this out: https://x.com/marksoares/status/2114480150855258485
It’s brilliant.
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Holy cow, that’s awesome!
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Audio engineering is advancing so quickly that my mind is boggled. Tracktion just dropped their Waveform 14.1 update (it’s a DAW) this morning. It’s been half an hour since I looked at the features, and I’m still trying to come to grips with the connotations.
And it’s way too much for my poor, old computer to handle.
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Oh, there’s also stuff like this:
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Put me firmly in the “It’s just another tool” camp. For at least 100,000 years, human graphic artists were limited to a frayed stick or blowpipe, ground charcoal and whatever funny colored dirt happened to be nearby.
When people settled down in the Neolithic, they started using animal hair brushes, plants like indigo and madder, and trading for other funny colored dirt. And I guarantee that cranky old curmudgeons like me were screaming “It’s not Art!”
Of course, Sturgeon’s Law is *always* in effect.
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OT – Walter Koenig has passed away. RIP Chekov and Bester.
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That leaves only George Takei and William Shatner to see who’s the last to go if I’m right.
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Shatner’s having too much fun to pass away. 😅
Takei, on the other hand, appears to be sustained by his hatred of Shatner. 😓
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Famous last words of John Adams, “Jefferson still lives!” At that point in his life the comrades then rivals had become comrades again, so it’s not clear how he meant that. But it turned out not to be true anyway. Jefferson had died hours earlier.
Of course Takei’s attitude is probably closer to Khan’s quote from Moby Dick, “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!”
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In a recent Shatner interview (I think on Frakes and Spiner’s podcast) he says basically his doc told him thanks to ongoing advances, if he can make it two more years he’ll get ten.
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“What about…” No, Grace Lee Whitney passed in 2015, and I didn’t see anything about it.
Koenig was the official star of a movie called “Moontrap” from 1989. I don’t blame him for taking the role; it probably looked pretty good in the proposals, but too many producers and a vague script combined with “death in the editing room” made it… pretty bad. It’s one of those movies where I wish I could get all the film and an editing console, because there was plenty to work with, it was just put together badly.
Of course, playing the straight man to co-star Bruce Campbell didn’t help Koenig any. Campbell was playing it straight, but it was painfully obvious Campbell was a better actor.
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After playing Bester for a while, Koenig got a guest shot on Deep Space 9. He called Joe and said, “You know these guys are totally ripping you off.” Joe just replied, “I know.” There was basically nothing he could do about it because the fragile, ad hoc network B5 was on, didn’t want the legal hassle. Actually it worked out for us, the audience because Babylon 5 never lost its appeal, but Deep Space 9 got remarkably better after they started copying what Babylon 5 was doing.
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JMS has written about his pitch to Paramount for a station-based Trek show before DS9, and how much of his pitch then showed up in DS9 with the serial numbers filed off, so one could reasonably assert he is the father of both shows, though an absentee father against his will on Trek.
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There is quite a lot of counter-evidence that he wanted to claim current science and traditional scifi tropes (including “look, it’s modern politics but with rubber forehead aliens!) as his own, with one of the minor pieces being “it’s set on a space station.”
When that’s what we were doing in space, at the time.
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Yeah, he might be seeing stuff just being sensitized to what he pitched.
I remain skeptical just because the whole pivot around which all the weekly stories turned on DS9 was recently-deoccupied Bajor and the politics with the Cardassians, the Prophets associated with the Bajoran wormhole and Sisko being The Emissary, and what unknown was on the other end of the wormhole, and there ain’t none of that in B5.
The whole Changeling thing I thought felt pasted on, though I have never seen anything on whether it was baked in from the start when they put Odo on the station as a long arc or not.
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The religious design for the Bajorans was… well, suffered Hollywood cultural understanding of religion, sadly.
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The only Good Bajoran Religious Leader was dumped on the other side of the wormhole and forgotten. [Frown]
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Sure, there were Plot Tricks like that, but it was more things like– “what, exactly, DO they believe? Besides light aliens from a time/space portal who are basically Q with fewer powers and more maturity.”
Giving them a quasi-Indian-religious-caste-system was great development for Kira for “oh, fudge, the Cardassian occupation wasn’t totally evil against totally perfect good.”
Just like the X-Files not managing to effectively finish the story, the long running plotline thing got kinda off the rails at the end.
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Ooh, dang it!
Should’ve had a peace conference between the Founders and the Federation on the planet with Kai Opaka (I had to look it up, remembered it as Kai Okapi) but For Reasons the Cardassians were on the Federation side so you get nice, juicy drama THERE…..
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Ethical Q.
<Sudden blinding flash of light. John Delancey is now standing there.>
“What do you mean? I HAVE ethics. They are just beyond the comprehension of lower beings such as yourselves.”
Disembodied female voice:
“Q, this reality is not within your assigned set. You are out of bounds.”
“Oh, alright Q, fine! There are much more interesting things to influence back there anyway. Why, that whelp of Picard is a just a plethora of potential.”
Q snaps his fingers and vanishes in another blinding flash of light, leaving the Huns once again alone.
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It’s the perfect Hollywood religion, one that does not require any faith whatsoever, since the Prophets are Right There In The Wormhole.
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I see quite a few parallels there: a space station close to an instant transporter, inscrutable ancient beings, the human station commander(s) deeply involved with them, two alien races with a long bitter history of war, invasion by a powerful alien force…
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UN in space (I know, stop right there – JMS’s baseline politics shining through in the premise) in neutral territory but built by Earth, which eventually secedes from Earth after evidence mounts of a totalitarian coup back home, which then participates in a civil war with Earth against a backdrop of wider wars and ancient enemies finally deciding to settle scores, with all FTL transport via a human manufactured jumpgate network that can be placed anywhere…
vs.
Alien-built frontier station taken over by the Federation around a recently deoccupied planet on a recently negotiated cease-fire border, next to a naturally occurring yet nonstandard wormhole, dealing with the politics and religion of the planet below as well as interstellar politics including across to the newly accessible region of space on the other side of the wormhole. All transport is independent of the wormhole via FTL drive unless one wants to travel through it to the one place it goes.
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Also, the opening episode has almost the exact same thumbnail setup– “Starfleet meets alien with powers beyond our reasoning, initiates a long-term relationship” — which then is almost directly paint-by-numbers the opposite in how it goes, including that the aliens can’t zip around everywhere but are also kinda…outside of time, maybe, wOoWwoOwoOo….
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Argh, almost these same thumbnail setup as Star Trek: Then Next Generation.
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He was so great as Bester. I loved hating his character.
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“Don’t you ever go away? Haven’t you caused enough trouble for one lifetime?”
“It’s a pleasure to see you too, Mr. Allan. Where can I find Captain Lochley? I should check in with her.”
“She’s busy, you can check in with me. … So what is it this time, Mr. Bester? Hunting out freedom-fighters, pulling wings off flies, annexing the Sudetenland?”
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“You could do that. And I could nail your head to the table, set you on fire, and feed your charred remains to the Pak’ma’ra. But it’s an imperfect universe, and we don’t always get what we want.” 😁
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“So get used to it!”
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Thank you! The challenge was “Haunted Houses” (up to four), so I made one traditional, and three fun ones.
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It’s a tool, and a fun, useful one. I just bought perplexity.ai pro today. It created all the prompts for characters in midjourney; it helps edit, and track, and research, and organize. It’s insanely useful.
We’ll figure out whatever needs to be figured out.
And anthropic? Yeah, going for an IPO. “Be scared! BUY MY PRODUCT!” So much for the fear mongering.
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I’m Switzerland in the AI wars.
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I probably would be Switzerland, too. But. I’m Cedar Sanderson’s mother. And I’ve seen what she does using AI to make book covers. They may be the modern version of ‘pulp,’ but those covers qualify as ART to my eyes. And I’ve been watching her and others (including some here) play with AI image-making for several years, and have watched the improvements that have come – not little steps, but giant leaps! I have mixed feelings about some potential uses of it – see some Bible prophecies! But that’s on the humans using the machines. The machines themselves are just tools, and can be used for good or ill.
AI writing is going the same route. For several months – maybe a year at most – I was really noticing a lot of ‘AI slop,’ especially in the JAFF that Sarah mentioned. I was wondering if the purported authors putting their names on some of it had actually ever even read the manuscript before pushing the ‘print’ button. But it’s getting better, and harder to tell that it is AI. Still not as good as purely human writing *done by a GOOD writer* but definitely better than some of the less-skilled humans writing and publishing. Personally, I just want good stories to read. If an AI can generate that, I’ll read it.
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I have a whole section of my website devoted to talking about how it’s done and the why and why not to do it, but I still like my first, early essay on it.
As to covers, it’s practical, particularly for short stories where you’re just trying to signal the genre. I have 14 writings for sale on Amazon (3 books and 11 short stories), and only one has a cover by a real artist. I certainly can tell the difference in quality, but did it sell more? Nope.
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Socrates was certain that written language would destroy human memory and ability to think. So innovation has long been controversial.
Meanwhile, young people’s text messages appear more and more to resemble pictograms rather than written text.
Does that mean humans will revert to Socrates’ ideal and lose written language? Doubt it. But maybe language will change in some way that is unforseen.
Just like everything else humans have used tools for since tools were discovered.
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“This whole ‘language’ thing is a trap. Pretty soon everyone will forget how to understand pointing and grunting.”
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The original universal language.
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Which it did. It’s documented that the memory level to manintain an oral tradition declined once people no longer had to rely on it. Use it or lose it is a saying for a reason.
See also levels of physical fitness required in an animal powered world.
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Honestly, at some level, Socrates was correct. How many of us can quote large swathes of poetry or stories from memory? Skilled bard types used to recite large epics from memory (likely with slightly different tweaks every time but Hey we have G. Lucas changing Star Wars every couple years). Computers have only made things worse, with a little skill with a search engine you can get whatever you want as fast as you can query. There is a quirky little movie called Desk Set with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn(Note I just used IMDB and Google to find Desk Set :-) ). Basically, Tracy plays a geeky MIT grad and efficiency expert who is trying to improve the research department at an Ad agency. They’re trying to add a computer (EMRAC) that answers queries. The three librarians (head played by Ms. Hepburn) are concerned that they’ll replace them with EMRAC. Ultimately Tracy’s goal was to free the research team up for the hard queries and let EMRAC do the everyday junk. Perhaps that’s where we’re at with AI.
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That’s exactly where we are with AI. The problem is trust: Can you trust that the AI (developer/trainer/training data) is producing an objective result, rather than Wikipedia on steroids?
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That’s…why you still need the Katherine Hepburn/a User capable of exercising judgment. Film actually demonstrates that perfectly well at climax.
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Indeed, an early application of GIGO being sorted by a clever human. For a screwball romance it has an excellent script. And of course, the Chemistry between Hepburn and Tracy is REALLY strong. Shows up on AMC from time to time often in December (it has a Christmas party in it).
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From Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus.
Socrates:
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What I really worry about is photography brought about the age of surrealism in art. If photography can do what I used to do, I’ll make something it can’t (until CGI). That trend led to modern “art”, most of which, for my money, is just rich people playing status games with each other and cheating games on taxes with the government.
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Ah but it also brought photorealism as well.
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I like some surrealism, if it is technically well done. Dali’s “Crucifixion (Vision of St. John of the Cross)” is magnificent, and unsettling. Granted, there is also a lot of Surrealism that’s either sloppy, dull, Freudian, or sloppy, dull, and Freudian.
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Off topic, but likely of interest to some:
Walter Koenig has passed.
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May he rest in peace.
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Of course it’s human art, it has to be. If we could train it on Tau Cetian art it could be otherwise, but no such luck yet. So it’s doing its thing (I still don’t quite get how an LLM does pictures) based on all the art that went before, placing that next pixel to meet the request.
The creativity is in the person driving the requests, because at base it’s a really really clever tool.
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That’s why I call it LDM — Large Data Model. Covers everything.
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In the Manga Naruto, there is an evil ninja organization formed mostly in contrasting pairs of evil ninja. One pair was ‘artists’ who had conflicting ideologies of art. The explosive expert was young, and thought that art was an event created, that then leaves. The evil puppet maker was older, almost immortal, and thought that art was permanent, and could be preserved permanently. Both were incorrect, because, well, evil perverts not real artists.
My mad vision of art includes but is not limited to, art is not only fine arts. Art is not only what we traditionally think of as art.
I think that humans make tools, and that thus they can make tools that are art. Even if obscure and inaccessible art, art that only a few people can see the beautiful things of. IE, engineering as art.
If mathematics can be beautiful, for example, therefore it is proven that the design of a machine can be art, even if not for the aspects that normal people look for.
Anyway, industrial automation, is it art? Truth, beauty, goodness?
I say it can be.
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Art is a made thing. Nothing says that made things cannot make made things.
Glyer extended a guest post on File 770 to Jon del Arroz, after they apparently had a nice civil talk at World Fantasy Con.
Arroz kept his post civil, informative, positive, and uncontroversial, but Glyer’s readership went all hatey (or pretended to be “disappointed.” I was disappointed in some of the names that participated in the ritual Two Minute Outrage. I guess some people do want to watch the field dwindle to nothing.
Glyer did not take down the post, so he at least seems to have determined on common courtesy and amity. Like a normal person promoting the survival of a fandom, in other words.
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We all outsource “our” work. The following may sound more harsh than it is meant, so please forgive my in-eloquent, non-augmented prose.
For example, the bread most people eat contains wheat flour, yeast, etc. They did not plant the wheat, harvest it, grind it to flour, mix it with the other ingredients, knead the dough, cook it, slice it, and put it on a grocery shelf. Not to mention the transport from field to grain elevator to mill to bakery to store. And they were not likely involved in all the varied packaging steps.
But they have no issues with asking, “Would you like me to make you a sandwich?” as though they were the sole worker involved
My Mother made wonderful sandwiches for my lunch. So much so that in 7th grade 3 of my friends agreed to buy food from the cafeteria so they could eat PB&J.
I see the use of AI the same way. It outsources some of the work; but not all. YMMV.
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Reading came to an abrupt stop and my tongue went into convulsions at “which side of her tuna is buttered”. Genius, madame
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LOL
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AI is nothing without humanity, humanity is the purpose of AI.
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Completely off topic, but I just want folks to know the lack of long posts and short jokes for a few(?) days will be due to knee surgery.
I have to be there around 9AM, and once the bodywork is done, I’ll stay overnight. I know there’s some kind of early-PT class (primarily bathroom related), after which, I’ll get a ride home. If I’m up to it, I’ll leave a comment.
I’m somewhere between excited and terrified, and praying a bit. (I’m lousy at the last, but I try.) Thanks to all who are keeping me in their pray lists, and to Himself who answers such.
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You have my email. Let me know how it went as soon as you’re coherent, please.
(And yes, will send library books. As I unpack the fiction. Not all mine, of course. It’s just…. everything got packed!)
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Will send once coherent. If not quite so, I’ll do a comment on a post. :)
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The mail of heat bounces anything from my metallic ISP, so any email will be from my gmail account. I have two addresses, but will try heat first.
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Good luck.
Prayers for good outcome.
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Good luck and I’ll keep you in my prayers. One bit of advice from having several acquaintances that have done various knee surgeries. Pay attention to the PT folks, what they have you do may feel like torture from the 9th level of hell, but they almost always know their stuff and care about their patients deeply. On average some of the most focused and devoted health professionals you’ll ever meet.
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Art is the process of creation, not the end product. Two means can produce precisely the same result, but it is ultimately what went into their making that bestows entirely different value on them.
I could spend a lifetime working on a piece of music or a sculpture or a movie, and it would still be art even if I never finished it.
Once you understand all this, A.I. becomes as utterly non-threatening as the camera.
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right. BUT no. Because when we’re saving the art in the louvre, we’re not saving “The process of creation.” ART goes into the making, but the product is art. And the meaning of the first art is merely “learning and ability.”
Don’t confuse yourself because words have more than one meaning.
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I was thinking this, too – such as, hand-crafted Japanese wood houses which are gorgeous and absolutely art. The process of creating them is art, and the finished product is art.
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I’ve been using AI tools for code generation for several months now. What I’ve found is that if I’m not careful, I get lazy and don’t read the code, so then I don’t actually understand (on more than a shallow level) what the code is doing. If I read the generated code properly and understand it, then I’ve barely saved any time over typing it myself.
Some exceptions exist: boilerplate. Unit tests. One-off scripts that I’m going to use and throw away, like the data-migration script that I had Claude Code write for me last month. 3,000 lines of code that I haven’t analysed, because I can run it on a test copy of production data and see that it produces the correct result. If it has security holes in it, who cares? It’s going to run on my dev machine, then I’ll upload the migrated data and delete the script.
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What I’m not happy about, though, is how many people are throwing true “AI slop” articles, generated and never even proofread, up online, and how often DuckDuckGo gets fooled into linking to them. Even in code generation, the LLMs hallucinate quite a bit, but there are inherent feedback mechanisms that help mitigate the problem there. If the unit tests don’t pass, then the code is wrong, go back and try again. And there are other feedback mechanisms, too; the result is that once the LLM finishes, the resulting code will at least run. But articles don’t have that inherent feedback, and so many people aren’t proofreading their stuff. Resulting in a bunch of articles that I can’t trust to be correct.
Which all adds up to my attitude of “If I start suspecting your article was LLM-generated, I stop reading and go look for a different one”.
There’s also the problem of the low quality of much LLM-generated text. Here, scroll down to the README of this project’s GitHub repo and see if you can understand the prose:
https://github.com/gatewai-dev/framefields?tab=readme-ov-file
As I wrote elsewhere, “It’s cool that so many people are building useful tools with LLMs, but for the love of ones and zeroes, people! PLEASE write your README by hand, instead of handing it off to the LLM with no human involvement! You know how unreadable LLM prose is! Why do you make that the first thing people see when they see your repo?”
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The “search engine link stuffing” thing, and the parallel results contamination happening to the folks who only do searches using AI these days, is a majorly big deal. The proven best way to get an LLM to hallucinate is to train it on the output of other LLMs, so the results-contamination effect really endangers the whole “all of human knowledge at your fingertips” we’ve been enjoying for the past couple decades.
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Since you mentioned bad photos of flame points: I tried to insert pix of our two, but WPDE and all that.
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I’ve conceded that I may be a buggy whip apprentice while Ford is scaling up his factory. AI generated stories are pretty bad, right now (HFY on YouTube is a good genre to see that in). But it’s only going to get better, in that particular way that software improves. I don’t know why “specific” and “particular” crop up so much in AI stories, but it’s a huge tell.
I still want to know if I _can_. After that, I’ll worry about whether or not I will or I should.
I’m using local Stable Diffusion to generate cover images. 1000s of cover images because it’s not very good. But it’s not in the cloud, it’s not censored, and it’s not selling my metadata. It’s not as if my CPUs and GPUs are doing anything else. I’m using the “close, but no” set as blog post images (click on my name and just scroll if you’re interested). Out of well over 3000 generated, I have about 20 potential cover images. I still haven’t made a final decision, but I’ve stopped generating more.
I listen to a lot of AI music as background. I don’t really hear it when I’m focused on what I’m doing. Why bother with real music? Finding long runs without lyrics is difficult (although I bet AI could create a playlist from my 2K tracks ripped-from-now-thrown-out CDs). There’s a Deep Dub channel that has lots of different video, but all the audio sounds identical to me. There are several Tactical Music channels (what does that even mean?) that are mellow noise. MarbleDJ is interesting; he does techno with weird instruments.
I really should have used AI for a giant character spreadsheet refactoring. It took me days. An AI could (probably) have done it in minutes – but then I would need to upload everything into the cloud, which is simply not happening. I not like “the” cloud.
I’m going to try Strata (it’s on github) one of these days. It runs locally. It’s a resource hog, but I have the resources so I plan on firing it up.
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Huh. My name is no longer a link. I wonder when that changed. Just one shouldn’t send me to moderation: http://markedup.blog/
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Sturgeon’s Law states that ‘90% of everything is crap’. Looks like A.I. has a long way to go before it’s only 90% crap. 😁
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I sometimes take concept art from local models (or formerly midjourney) to google’s nano banana and ask for a reference sheet (multiple angles, closeups) then take it back to the local models for “put this person in this location and this pose” type work.
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Our Hostess Said:
The masters were still there. Any gilded age lady of means wanted John Singer Sargent to paint her, The camera would show her lines, middle aged shape and all. Mr. Sargent would portray her in full mature bloom with color to her face that would shame any 20 year old beauty. It’s worth going to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts just for his portraits, and you get his frescoes in the stairways as an added treat. I do think that some of the other schools of painting (Impressionism, Surrealism, pointillism and abstract) come out of saying “Well we cant match detail to the level of the photo easily what is unique in how we see. Of course Photography had similar comeuppances. The first was color. Developing and printing color images is VERY technical work. Precise temperatures (within a degree or farenheit) must be maintained during developing the film and the printing process is best done purely mechanically. This was a change from Black and white where the film was developed fairly simply and the photogrspher had great control over the printing process. The Printing process is where a lot of the magic happened, Ansel Adams work was 80-90% printing and 10-20% getting the initial shot. Almost all “Art” photography was (until recently) Black and White for that reason. The electronic camera which removes film from the picture (pun not intended) combined with things like Photoshop and Lightroom has totally changed the world of art photography. So sometimes change makes new art.
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Impressionism was at least partially about trying to convey what you saw rather than what you wanted to be there, with the loose rapid brush strokes being part of trying to capture that impression of the moment. Simultaneously more “individual” (in theory) than photographs, but trying to be faster and less deliberate than the mainstream painting of the era. Might have been competitive with early photography for speed, but i don’t know if anyone did a stopwatch comparison.
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Having very poor eyesight my theory when I first met impressionist art was that Monet, Manet, Gaugin et alia might have benefited from a moderate negative diopters prescription, perhaps with some astigmatism correction :-) .
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Can’t rule that out, but they also lived in the age of steam trains and Monet lived for many years in a part of France with a fairly English climate (read: lots of fog) so those were possibly contributing factors.
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Offering previews of Gemini to tech journalists and the like. Stayed with Claude out of inertia, enjoy it, but don’t endorse it over other options.
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When I was using AI for cover art and some interior illustrations (to make the page count work) for my book “Discovering America Again” (thanks for the plug a few months ago Sarah!)… it did some weird things. Like I asked for a scene with cowboys and buffalo… and the cowboys were riding on buffalo.
And here is a book idea for you (in the LeGuin mode). Imagine a culture dominated by AI. So you are not allowed to disagree with AI and people stop doing anything new – just using AI for everything. That culture would stagnate at the point that AI “took over” – since all it does is use existing materials from humans and rearrange them. In time, an AI refusing counterculture would appear…..
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sure, but that’s not how it works. Not unless there is a “state AI”.
For doing what you want (mostly) try nano banana. The style sucks, so rinse it through midje.
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I did one a while back where I asked for a fire in the living room. The next render, I asked for a fire in the fireplace in the living room.
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Someone called the llms monkey paws (in the malignantly literal wish sense) elsewhere online and I was like “he’s not wrong”…
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SO MANY on “Fire in a cave shelter”…. don’t get me started.
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So, it’s good training for when that Djinn shows up.
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a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph.
No, no, no. The WORLD was black and white. When color entered the world, everything changed. Black and white photos didn’t change because they were photos of an actual black and white world. Paintings changed because they were made of pigments that changed along with everything else.1
It’s like I don’t even know you people.
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SIR. That’s my life.
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