It would be a tragedy if AI slop destroyed wonder…

Middle of the road pseudo realistic non art. I am not against AI art, but I am against lazy AI art.

(profoundly not proudly…) the camera unleashed artists from a duty to be realistic, and as a result, visual creativity exploded. A return to middle of the road fantasy realism feels like a backward step. Fun, amazing and disturbingly empty.

More amazing and less interesting. This seems to be the trajectory of AI generative imagery and video. I am truly not against AI art, and apologies far being harsh, but I find this combination of literalness, realism and quasi surrealism proudly empty. /1

In a sense the indistinct edge is a space of possibilities whereas the digital edge collapses the delicious superpositions and ambiguity of the wave function. I have always felt like a bit of a digital image outsider for this reason. But I did massively overuse find edges when playing with MacPaint

Most of these projects are not specifically addressing chiaroscuro but are part of an examination /rejection of the digital edge. In truth, part of my fascination with machine learning models is because in the inner layers everything is liminal. Nothing is clearly defined. /3

I began to obsess about blur and legibility and the way that digital edgy detail often obscures important information in objects of vision. Shrouded is an extreme example. I am allergic to over sharpening so I guess this is my way of going overboard in the other direction. /2

Lots to say… the giver of names helped me see the challenge. Edges of objects in the real world are not always very clear and fragile digital approaches to chiaroscuro result in very noisy boundaries. San Marco Flow and the Plot Against Time series required an honest approach to soft edges… /1

I spent a lot of time seeking the digital equivalent to chiaroscuro.

Musk is a parasite on the future; he preys upon the imagination of others, taking any vision of a better world and depreciating it by hawking options on a transparently fake facsimile.

He is capitalism's full-throated assault on the utopian imaginary.

What people seem to feel and not express:

1—AI continues to accelerate at doing well at the metrics.
2—The metrics are incredibly lossy with respect to many important parts of human creative endeavors.
3—We have no collective plan on how replacement of human work will retain what the metrics lose.

Intelligent, sure. Sentient/sapient, no, there's lots of those.

I had the thought a while back that part of what's so weird about LLMs is that they have some of the qualities that make humans different from other animals, but none of the ones we have in common with them

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Yes, I posted in a post-conference organizing exhaustion haze and then noticed that you were probably fine tuning flux and not an llm. P.s I think you would have found the conference interesting. bmolab.artsci.utoronto.ca?page_id=4423. We will be posting recordings where possible.

Try the Blackwell version of unsloth?