Mentioned that I have quit checking news recently (and in fact blocked the sites I used to check using a Firefox extension called Leechblock to remind me of this decision). But I still need “something” to check in on to keep a loose contact at least with the outside world. I’m not on social media anymore though, so that isn’t an option. Too toxic, too full of bullshit & algorithm chasing. So what have I filled the gap with?
Two things. First is my regular Fraidycat RSS headline feed. When I find interesting sites, I plug them in there to keep track of them over time. This used to be sort of an after-thought after checking the news. But now it is one of the main jams. Second is a site called ooh.directory and its recently updated page, which acts as a sort of aggregator of the latest posts by blogs which have submitted their URLs to the directory (there’s also a page for newly added blogs, and a page for a random set). It’s kind of like an old-school blog aggregator, and because included sites seem to be largely self-selected by contributors, its overall content quality is high, and also pretty random. Because of its format also, it seems to not have really any of the drama (that I can tell) which you might be inundated with on social media.
I do still occasionally look at random news articles that might come up incidentally as part of checking my regular RSS sources, but I no longer seek it out, and frankly don’t plan to go back to it any time soon. This new configuration seems a lot healthier.
I’m Not A Robot is the 122nd installment in the AI Lore Books series. It tells the story of a brain in a jar in a laboratory whose job is to endlessly watch YouTube videos at extremely high speeds, looking for patterns that are unknown to it on behalf of the insidious AI organization called Information Control.
The text was generated using a combination of human writing feeding iteratively into Mistral and Llama via TextSynth website, like the other recent ones. There are I think a handful of Dalle images in here, but the book leans heavily on Ideogram for images. And this is the first book I made extensive use of Adobe Firefly outputs – yes, just a few days after saying they are not that great, and that I would be (mostly) moving off Adobe. I still think the outputs from Firefly are not great, but in this case I was able to make that not great quality work for me, as it does produce some pretty messed up images. If I were looking for more “normal” images, I would probably be annoyed with it, but given how warped they came out, I actually ended up liking it better than I thought I would. And if you keep the quality on small/low, it generates lightning fast. And even though I hit plenty of filter-hiccups, it never rate limited me, so that’s pretty cool.
You can see some samples of included images below.
When I look at that first preview image top left, all I can think of is Elon Musk for some reason. Like that’s what he actually looks like with his mask off. Would not surprise me one bit. However, he doesn’t really feature as a character in this book – though he serves as inspiration for a sort of Palmer Eldritch character featured in a number of the other volumes for sure.
Anyway, I like how introspective this text is, and I end up feeling for the weird brain in a jar as it describes its twisted life experience doing what it is forced to do.
The title is a reference to how CAPTCHAs always want you to declare you’re not a robot. The last book, Smash That Like Button, actually has CAPTCHAs featured very prominently in the storyline, though this one does not and just continues that thematic echo in the background.
I thought I had more to say on this one, but I guess that’s all for now. Enjoy!
What started out as a one-off joke turned into a pretty good image set, centered around the theme of retro propaganda posters encouraging Americans to come live the “American Dream” – in Canada. More images at the link, and here are a few highlights below:
I actually am an American (and also a Canadian as of several years now) living in Canada, since summer of 2011, give or take. (Yes, Canada is everything you think it is).
I have a lot to say on this topic, but for now the images speak for themselves. I know a lot of people have a lot of anxiety about what happens next. One way I’m managing it is by willfully not checking the news anymore, because it’s all bad all the time… (and I feel way better for it).
But it doesn’t have to be this way, America. You could still come live the American Dream – in Canada. There’s still time to give us your tax dollars.
These images are mostly Ideogram, iirc, and a few scattered Dalle.
More to say on this topic another time. I’m just doing some house-cleaning here.
See, The Algorithm is doing more than shaping your feed. The Algorithm is shaping you, and everyone on the Social Network. The Algorithm rewards and punishes us at random, leaving us to guess what the secret factors are. The Algorithm encourages us to self-censor, or to create content we don’t care about. We just want to be heard. We just want to share and connect with friends. The Algorithm knows this and knows how far we’re willing to go to get what we desire.
Well, I refuse to be a slave to The Algorithm. I’m not going to try to guess what The Algorithm wants. I’m not going to play its games.
I realized I feel completely calm after the initial sadness. Why worry about the Apocalypse once its underway? Dystopia is my “wheelhouse” and something which I am oddly adapted to handle. This is what I’ve trained for all this time. I don’t have to wonder and worry anymore about which timeline I’m in (the hell one), just harden down for a very long winter. Gonna read Radio Free Albemuth again. Aramchek forever!
AI is a tool like the paintbrush, or the printing press, or Photoshop. It will be used for good things, and for terrible things. The same printing press that birthed Mein Kampf also gave birth to The Color Purple. It’s as good a tool for art as the artist using it. To those who are against it, I’d say to fight AI is to fight the sea. It’s a useless endeavour and achieves nothing. It’s better to be curious, than it is to raise the drawbridge.
I wouldn’t quite put it in those words, but that’s why I’m quoting what he said instead. I’ve quoted Toledano in the past and his work continues to interest me as many of the themes and tools parallel ones I’ve been exploring.
I’ve been a paid subscriber of Adobe Creative Cloud for years now, but financial circumstances call for some belt tightening in the world of online subscriptions, even supposedly “essential” ones like this. After taxes, the price for a year subscription to all Adobe apps in Canada has risen, after tax to something upwards of of $993 CDN/yr.
I use Photoshop often, and I use Lightroom to organize AI image galleries into folders (I don’t use any of the editing features built into Lightroom). When I’m working on print books, booklets, and small home-made newspapers, I use InDesign, but tbh I hate that app. Very occasionally for weirdo one-off projects, I’ll crack open Illustrator or something else, but it’s not usually with glee.
When Adobe released Firefly, I found it to be pretty meh. I appreciate being able to use generative fill to retouch images generated with other AIs, but I don’t enjoy another company interpolating a layer of scolding when something I need to do to tell a story or make a particular piece of art doesn’t meet their “content policy.” I’m done with all that.
Recently, The Verge quoted Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe, as saying that artists and creative people will be “left behind” if they don’t embrace generative AI – no doubt meaning Adobe’s version of it.
(Image via Ideogram)
I think that’s sort of a silly and unnecessarily dramatic all or nothing attitude to take, especially for a company like Adobe. The future of AI and the arts is shades of grey and making it all work for you in a way that feels good to your sensibility – and that includes not using it. Taking this other more drastic position makes Adobe leadership read as, unfortunately, authoritarian and more than a bit out of touch with the mood of the moment around AI among (some) people in the arts.
More than any gaffes Adobe has made around its handling of AI though, I’m feeling more offended by the price tag. I went through the ropes to figure out how I could cancel it. After trying to do exactly that, the system offered me a discounted rate for a year, something around $672~ iirc (guesstimate), and also suggested I might get a “custom deal” if I chat with an agent. I did, and they offered me the new magical rate of CAD 467.88/year because I’ve been a customer with Adobe. I told them to put that on hold while I reassess the situation.
My assessment of it is this: it’s predatory to offer different pricing to people who try to cancel, and it makes me not trust the company to be honest and transparent about their pricing if they have this sliding range. What’s the true cost per user on their end? Exactly how much profit do they make off each person who subscribes?
I did find that there is a much lower priced series of Photography plans offered by Adobe where you get Photoshop and/or Lightroom and some amount of cloud storage. I hate and don’t use cloud storage, personally, but the rate of CAD $12.99/mo for the 20GB plan doesn’t sound so bad.
But the whole thing has accelerated my desire to escape the Adobe mad-house. Which is really too bad for them, I think, given that I am an artist making heavy use of generative AI in my work. I should be squarely in their target market, but they don’t seem to be innovating out on the edges of where I can sense this technology ought to go. They seem too entrenched as a deeply established player with vested interests to really get out there and experiment and break new ground nobody has done so far in the industry. And really really serve the needs of this new emerging class of artists like myself.
I just don’t see that currently out of their product offering though, and given those public statements in The Verge, I’m wondering if their leadership has the vision to get there from here. And since I don’t really see listed that they are hiring, you know, actual artists to help them figure these things out, I just don’t see how they’ll stay at the forefront for long. Especially now that there are competitors out there with ever-increasing product offerings that are looking if not perfect, then at least adequate, and something you can “own” (via license) instead of a cradle-to-grave subscription.
Maybe it’s time to leave Adobe behind?
So, my current thinking is:
Draw down to just the Photography 20GB plan for 1 year as a test.
Buy Affinity Publisher as a replacement for InDesign (I don’t collab with anybody using InDesign, so there’s not really any love lost there).
Buy Pixelmator Pro to try it out as a full-on Photoshop replacement, and test if Photomator can replace my simple use of Lightroom.
Upgrade from the ebook only version of Vellum, which I love, to the version that includes print output for rapid projects.
Even if I bought a bunch of other programs and don’t like them, I’ll still have paid less than I would have for the “deeply discounted” suspicious sliding pricing Adobe seems to be employing to keep people paying at all costs.
I wish this weren’t the case. I wish Adobe were still great, and that it brought the excitement to use its products like it did when I was first learning them decades ago. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Recorded this piece today with the wonderful Dave Birss, and Dr. Shama Rahman on the topics of AI, creativity, art & copyright. They even let me show off my drawing robots and a basket that I made. Good times and great conversation!
Time to post an updated welcome note, as I expect there may be a few new visitors from a podcast I’ll appear on in short order (details to follow on that).
If you’re new here, I recommend diving into my About page and following whatever trails pique your interest.
My AI-assisted books can be seen here. The most recent ones are at the top.
Check out my prior welcome note from the end of August of this year for more in-depth links to explore. Lots of details there I won’t rehash again here.
I’ve written in the past (2023 especially) about the intersection of art, copyright & generative AI in this submission to the US & Canadian copyright offices’ public consultation, reproduced here on Berkeley Law.
I’ve also been getting into building low-tech “human-powered” robots and drawing machines, which you can see some examples of and thinking around here, where I am trying to get to the bottom of what it means to be a “real artist” exercising the creative spark/modicum of creativity (and required for copyrightability) versus merely executing purely mechanical processes.
That’s already a lot of links for anyone curious enough to dive in. Enjoy!
Many sources have already reported on how a Halloween-themed SEO company’s website used AI to auto-generate content about non-existant related holiday events, including a Halloween parade in Dublin:
“Please be advised that contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight,” the official social media account of the Gardaí posted last night.
“All those gathered on O’Connell Street in expectation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely. Thank you.”
But what no one wants to admit, is that there was indeed a Halloween parade in Dublin, but that many people were not able to see it for various reasons. I have incontrovertible hard photographic proof here, something which is as impossible to fake as the original event listing. Here’s a sample below, with the full set at the link.
What most people don’t know is that in the mythological lore of Ancient Quatria, the pivotal Return of the Magicians to our world from the Hypogeum at the most chaotic and troubled time is at first not recognized. It is said that initially they would appear as ghosts or strange animals when they first arrived on our plane, strange and insubstantial… And that it would only be the children and the pure of heart who would be able to see them. And in doing so, in bearing witness using the eyes of imagination, their true bodies would be made fully manifest in our world, and likewise their magic too. So, no surprises here!
