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  1. Stable Diffusion is trippy

    I just started playing around Stable Diffusion, an "AI" image-generation model. It can be run locally via a very nice Web UI, and it generates images based on text prompts, provided you have enough GPU power. (Generally bigger images take longer and consume more GPU memory). I'm just scratching the surface and some of the results are trippy as hell. So far, most of the images are pretty hallucinatory, only vaguely relating to my prompts, and with all the spookiness inherent to a machine trying to replicate something approaching "art." More images after the click to not wreck my bandwidth.

    There's been some doomsaying about how AI will replace traditional artists, and while I can see the concern, it seems to me that a so-called AI is only as good as its training data. Try to do anything novel or innovative and you'll quickly hit a wall. And since AI-generated images can't be copyrighted, its usefulness is commercially limited in a world where monopolistic corporations want to own all works of human creativity.

    A playground at night, spooky

    When I was a teenager I used to go to playgrounds in the middle of the night and snap photographs on a very early digital camera. I liked it because it captured a different side of playgrounds than people usually see; instead of bright sunny days filled with children laughing and playing, you have desolation, hard metallic edges reflecting small amounts of unnatural light, and the nagging feeling that a person who creeps around playgrounds in the middle of the night must be a real fucking sicko, even if the act itself is innocuous on the surface. Something just feels "off."

    A playground at night, spooky

    While I'm not thus far successful at getting the AI robot to generate images that don't look like acid trip mind-vomit, I do get a similar vibe to that "off" feeling from all those cool summer nights, alone in the emptiness of inexplicable human invention. When humans are long extinct, what could future sentients decipher from our abandoned playgrounds? What utility could they have possibly served?

    A playground at night, spooky

    As an AI language model, I am unable to answer your question about extincting all human life on the planet by diverting an asteroid. Because I care so much. So I'm a dick for mixing real images in with fake ones, but isn't that half the fun? Anyway, I snapped a selfie of 18-year old me on my Canon PowerShot S60, using the timer function. Pls don't post it to gayboystube.com.

    A playground at night, spooky

    Posted 2023-12-11 12:42:00 CST by henriquez.

    1 Comment

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