4000 of my closest friends- Cat and Girl

January 17, 2024

Web comic artist Cat And Girl comic on finding her name in the theft list from AI companies scraping her art. Kinda hits ya right in the feels don’t it?

Tech Leaders Say AI Will Change What It Means to Have a Job

October 19, 2023

More AI stuff piling up over here. The pull quote from this write-up is:

“Earlier Tuesday, Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist whose firm was one of OpenAI’s earliest backers, laid out a stark timeline for AI’s transformation of work. Within 10 years AI will be able to “do 80% of 80% of all jobs that we know of today,” said Khosla, a tech investor and entrepreneur for more than 40 years. “

Good lord, AI is now in Squarespace.

June 30, 2023

“Write a paragraph about digital versus film photography using dark humor.” The web is gonna be nothing but this shit in under 2 months.

“Film versus digital photography - a battle as old as time itself, or at least as old as film and digital cameras. It's like that eternal struggle between black and white movies and Technicolor marvels. Film photography, with its pretentiousness and hipster vibes, making every snapshot look like a vintage masterpiece. You know you're in the presence of a true artist when they whip out their clunky film camera and start mumbling about the joy of waiting weeks to get their photos developed. On the other hand, digital photography is like a shameless selfie addict on Instagram, snapping away without a care in the world. Instant gratification, baby! Who needs soul and depth when you can slap on a filter, call it art, and gather a hundred likes before lunch? So, take your pick - the slow, "real" art of film or the instantaneous, self-gratifying world of digital. Both will capture your memories, but only one will make you look superior while doing it.”

The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

June 14, 2023

Annnnd it begins. AI trained on AI spins out and becomes totally worthless. That, plus the internet being flooded with AI generated content will be interesting.

“Specifically looking at probability distributions for text-to-text and image-to-image AI generative models, the researchers concluded that “learning from data produced by other models causes model collapse — a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution … this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning.

“Over time, mistakes in generated data compound and ultimately force models that learn from generated data to misperceive reality even further,” wrote one of the paper’s leading authors, Ilia Shumailov, in an email to VentureBeat. “We were surprised to observe how quickly model collapse happens: Models can rapidly forget most of the original data from which they initially learned.”

In other words: as an AI training model is exposed to more AI-generated data, it performs worse over time, producing more errors in the responses and content it generates, and producing far less non-erroneous variety in its responses. “

Photoshop Beta

May 23, 2023

So we have been testing the crap out of the new AI stuff in the Photoshop Beta and there is some pretty interesting stuff going on for sure. The “Remove” tool is the biggest improvement since the Healing Brush was introduced, what almost 20 years ago now?

This is just the first swipe. While not perfect, it’s getting us like 80% of the way there.

The new AI fill was just added this AM and I just went to extend the BG of an AI image I generated for a recording of one of my bands. While it’s mostly screaming jibberish, it’s a start and could give us something to poke and prod around with. Need more testing and I need more coffee.

Between this and getting AI running in Houdini, there is some very interesting times ahead for sure. Getting that all set up is the next “Tinker Time” for me for sure.