Man, Saturday seems to have come and went. Anyone noticing a theme this week? Today was spent running errands and cleaning. Luckily I woke up early enough to spend a bit of time graphic-novel-writing in bed. It's import to steal away those seconds wherever you can. After that, I got up, brushed my teeth, made breakfast, ate, browsed Reddit, played Magic, went grocery shopping, came home and did yoga, cut my hair, took a shower, cooked lunch and ate while listening to a podcast, sat down to generate some panels in Midjourney before realising I had to restructure some earlier pieces that would prevent me from actually moving forward with the story itself, abandoned that for a bit to play a few games of Magic instead of working, vacuumed my apartment, cleaned the windowsill in my bedroom as well as the inside and outside glass, then did the same for the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, the toilet bowl and the sink, and now it's after 17:00 and practically time to cook dinner. It's been dark all day. It feasts on my mental health like some fungal overgrowth, this combination of speeding time and daily darkness and errands. I'm not sure if it was the yoga or the window scrubbing, but I've tweaked something in my neck on the left side. Did I mention I might I have an ear infection?
Technically the day was productive, you might say. Why do I feel as if the time has been squandered? When I was cleaning the window there were two spiders that were somehow alive in this bleak Berlin winter, clinging to the space where the window joins the frame. Probably living in that peripheral zone where the warmth from the heater in front of the window provides a temperature habitable enough for these friendly neighbourhood spiders to survive. One was small and green, probably a little spiderling, and up top, too close to my freshly shaven head for comfort, was a fuzzy grey one that was very curiously eyeing my manoeuvres. Man, I hate this British English autocorrect that's enabled on this computer or my web browser. I need to change it. It's making a mockery of all my Z's, turning them into S's. I'm sure you've noticed. I try to correct them manually but I miss some of them. What's worse is when it starts adding U's to the O's, like it did back there with our friend maneuvers. I'll try and get that sorted out by tomorrow.
Tomorrow I'm meeting a friend I haven't seen in ages. He's a soft-spoken German guy, a biologist I think. We lost touch during the pandemic. We share some mutual friends so we run into each other on occasion, but I haven't sat and talked to him since my friend's birthday two years ago. I'm looking forward to catching up. I just hope the weather smiles on us and it isn't raining. I'll take bitter cold and clouds, but keep the godawful rain away.
Yesterday I left off writing about Midjourney and other AI art generation tools. The two other notable ones are Stable Diffusion and DAL-E. Personally, I find Midjourney to be the most artistically capable of the bunch, but I think Stable Diffusion takes the lead in terms of flexibility. It's kind of like comparing an iPhone to an Android phone; one offers streamlined ease of use and solid design while the other offers customisability and neat integrations and configurations that aren't possible on iPhone. But who'll win the race is anyone's guess. Right now, my money's on Midjourney. Microsoft has been investing heavily into OpenAI, the parent company of DAL-E, so there's a good chance that longterm they emerge as the victor, but for now Midjourney has them beat. This isn't particularly interesting, I know, I just wanted to paint the landscape a bit to explain that there are a bunch of scrappy startups racing to get out in front, not just in terms of AI art, but also in terms of language interfaces like ChatGPT (also owned by OpenAI) which, if you haven't heard of or played with yet, I strongly encourage you to. It's truly remarkable stuff. Higher education institutions and highschools alike are wrestling with how to handle the fact that students can now outsource their essays to AI and hand in written work that is generally indistinguishable from a piece of work written by a human. It's a brave new world.
The stuff that interests me most though, particularly in terms of AI art, is the philosophical / social / ethical questions that it raises. What is beauty? What does it mean to be able to control that narrative through this technology? How can we avoid bias? What about how to handle the bias that's already present in the reference material? The AI looks at millions of pieces of data in a dataset to understand how to 'draw.' When someone asks it to generate [a beautiful woman], and the vast majority of the source material it pulls from depicts young white women, is that problematic for a modern world which prides itself on inclusion and diversity? I think it is. Beauty standards are fluid and they change with the times. Which version of beauty is the AI presenting? What skin tone is being used when we prompt [a beautiful black woman], light or dark? What Asian country does the archetypal [well-dressed Asian man] belong to? These may seem sort of trivial at first glance, but I assure you they carry enormous weight which only snowballs once you start considering how to deal with graphic imagery or child pornography.
I don't want to end the post on child porn, but I'm out of time. I even gave myself a bit of extra minutes today since it's the weekend, but now it's approaching dinnertime and I need to start cooking. Maybe starting with a rant about the things I did today and how ransomed the day felt wasn't a great way to start. It was cathartic though, which I guess is my primary aim with this blog. No one reads it anymore anyway. It's effectively become a public-facing journal that I can look back on and wonder what I was thinking and doing when I was in my mid-30's. The answer is simple enough though and probably doesn't justify the existence of this blog: work and errands and watching the time drift away.
No comments:
Post a Comment