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!
Series: Art Page 10 of 18
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.
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.
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.
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!
CoEvil is the 123rd installment of the AI Lore Books series. It depicts a near future/present where government devolves into an entirely privatized hyper-capitalist dystopia where society is divided into strict “subscription tiers.” Until, like in many of my books – especially the recent ones – things completely fall apart and reality starts disintegrating at the seams. The book is, er, inspired by “current events” and builds on storylines developed in previous books like The Continuity Codex, some others, and The Algorithm #5, which I think I may put up for sale as its own thing in the coming weeks as well.
This is the first book to use Recraft extensively for image generation, and the results are in general pretty good. I would call it a cut above maybe Ideogram. There are also a lot of janky Firefly images in here – a janky quality that I like, reminiscent in its way of early Stable Diffusion combined with the feelz of Adobe Stock images. There are also a handful of Dalle’s thrown in for good measure.
The text is a combination of my own writing with help from Mistral & Llama via Textsynth, like pretty much all the latest books I put out this year.
This is the first book to glancingly reference what I am calling “Natalitarianism,” which I plan to also make as the centerpiece of the next book or so, depending how things go. Enjoy!
Made with Dalle.
Four years is being extremely optimistic, in my opinion.
This has been making the rounds in the AI/Art infospace, that a group of testers of OpenAI’s upcoming Sora video gen model broke ranks and leaked access to the model publicly when they weren’t supposed to, and posted this open letter on Huggingface in support of the effort (signable version here).
ARTISTS ARE NOT YOUR UNPAID R&D
☠️ we are not your: free bug testers, PR puppets, training data, validation tokens ☠️Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150B valued company. While hundreds contribute for free, a select few will be chosen through a competition to have their Sora-created films screened — offering minimal compensation which pales in comparison to the substantial PR and marketing value OpenAI receives.
▌║█║▌║█║▌║ DENORMALIZE BILLION DOLLAR BRANDS EXPLOITING ARTISTS FOR UNPAID R&D AND PR ║▌║█║▌║█║▌Furthermore, every output needs to be approved by the OpenAI team before sharing. This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.
I guess I feel mildly sympathetic about “sticking it to the man” in a general way, but maybe I feel mostly confused on the specifics here. Not to sound too cynical, but were the people behind this letter not aware of what the nature of the agreement must have been when they presumably signed it?
None of what’s being described by them seems all that new or different for software companies, which routinely leverage unpaid labor out of their user base (ahem, social media anyone?), and *of course* inviting artists for early access is part of PR & advertising. That’s just a given for me on something like this. I can understand not wanting to be a part of that for sure, but I just end up wondering: why sign up then in the first place?
All that said, let’s find ways to pay artists for helping build these technologies, and let’s actually actively listen to their feedback (instead of, for example, banning them), because artists bring a whole other holistic and humanist set of skills to AI development that are so well-represented by the overwhelmingly technical, academic, PhD, research, math and engineering-types who currently populate the halls of AI power.
This one is a few weeks too late, but I’ve been meaning to post about an album that I was listening to obsessively for a few weeks straight, Hejira by Joni Mitchell, 1976. I first caught wind of this amazing album via Radio Paradise Mellow Mix which I listen to on a standalone wifi-based radio in my house, particularly via the tune Song for Sharon:
I thought this song was amazing, and when I read this comment on it, it piqued my interest to actually BUY THE CD!!!
For me, Hejira was one of the greatest work of art of the 20th century
Having listened to it a lot now, I think I would tend to agree. Someone else called it, paraphrasing, cinema for the ears. Utterly agree with that one. It’s one of the most lyrically complex albums I think I’ve ever heard, and the deeper I got into it, I was more and more surprised how little I’ve ever heard anybody talk about it. (I had to listen all the way through about 3-4 times before I really felt like I “got” it.) Plus, amazing Jaco Pastorius 70s melodic fretless bass… what else can I say?
The Wikipedia page on the album has tons of interesting morsels, some that are expressed in greater detail in songs on the album, others that provide good context and texture for the music. A sampling:
On her way back home, Mitchell met with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa in Colorado, an event she credited with curing her cocaine addiction and leaving her in a selfless “awakened state” that lasted three days.
During some of her solo journeys, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses, and told the varying strangers she met that her name was either “Charlene Latimer” or “Joan Black”. Despite the disguise, Mitchell was still sometimes recognized. She traveled without a driver’s licence and stayed behind truckers, relying on their habit of signaling when the police were ahead of them; consequently, she only drove in daylight hours. […]
Mitchell grew increasingly frustrated by the rock session musicians who had been hired to perform her music. “…There were grace notes and subtleties and things that I thought were getting kind of buried.” The session musicians in turn recommended that Mitchell start looking for jazz instrumentalists to perform on her records. In addition, her relationship with drummer John Guerin (which lasted through a significant portion of the mid-1970s) influenced her decision to move more towards experimental jazz music and further away from her folk and pop roots.
After recording the basic tracks that would become Hejira, Mitchell met bassist Jaco Pastorius and they formed an immediate musical connection; Mitchell was dissatisfied with what she called the “dead, distant bass sound” of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was beginning to wonder why the bass part always had to play the root of a chord. She overdubbed his bass parts on four of the tracks on Hejira and released the album on November 22, 1976. […]
The album title is an unusual transliteration of the Arabic word more commonly rendered as Hijrah or Hegira, which means “departure or exodus”, usually referring to the migration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (and his companions) from Mecca to Medina in 622. Mitchell later stated that when she chose the title, she was looking for a word that meant “running away with honor”. She found the word “hejira” while reading the dictionary, and was drawn to the “dangling j, like in Aja… it’s leaving the dream, no blame”. […]
Mitchell has described the album as “really inspired… there is this restless feeling throughout it… The sweet loneliness of solitary travel”, and has said that “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me.”
Anyway, just wanted to leave this signpost here for other musical adventurers to explore, or come back to. Here’s the opening track on the album, Coyote, which is probably more well-known than the one above.
Made my first and second attempts at wooden automata over the past week or so. I tried uploading videos of them but the internet is stupid and I don’t feel like jumping through a million hoops to make it work right now. So pictures will have to suffice for this round.
This is the first one I did, where the central bee is fixed on an upright dowel, attached to a horizontal circle which acts as a friction wheel/cam follower, which an eccentric cam raises up and down, while also turning it round in circles. The two flowers on either end simply rotate on friction wheels. The bee looks like he can’t decide which flower to land on when you turn the crank.
This is the second in the series, a robot whose body and hands (connected by paperclips) go up and down offset from one another by eccentric cams pointed in different directions. I tried initially on this one to do a different configuration for the cam followers, where they were square with wings extending down from them to keep them riding the cams, but with the wood I cut everything from and however I had it, I could not get them to work that way. So I just cut the circular cam followers instead. Since they naturally travel a bit while the crank is being rotated, the end motion effect is also that they rotate a little while bobbing up and down, and the motion is slightly constrained by the paper clips joining them together. Also discovered on this one how not being careful about aligning the holes in pieces does not make for good consistent planar travel of parts as they rotate.
These are extremely fun to make and figure out. I made them using a scroll saw (a Dremel Moto-Saw, the newer portable one, not the older one by that name) that I got and a Dremel 4300 with flex shaft kit – both of which I bought for being able to fabricate small mechanical parts for drawing robots and other little fun projects like these automata. I’m replacing this portable scroll saw from Dremel though with a larger Wen instead, as I think a more substantial scroll saw would be better for more serious scrolling – which is a whole wide interesting craft world and online subculture in its own right.