Oooh, thanks for that game link, Cass! I am looking forward to trying it out in the morning.

Buying tickets online for a concert or airline usually involve weasely worded mandatory checkboxes luring you to spend money on added "insurance" or upgrades. In many cases it may be the only way to do the transaction, so I take my time and keep my temper under control.

I tend ignore buy online deals - worked over 5+ years at Reuters, tend to be leery of the entire experience.

OK, I got 100%. I am naturally suspicious of this kind of stuff and always double check these kinds of things. Good reminders, though.

Good morning, I guess I got my experience of these patterns back in the days of pirates downloads etc. It was always the small gray text link and not the fancy download button.

But of course sites like booking com also use these patterns like only one room left. Fortunately the EU is also going against these patterns

Driving a Tesla is a good way to train your eyes to see dim and tiny objects on a screen.

In our own products and when I was working with voting machines we've tried to remember that some people various troubles dealing with screens. Of course there is the choice of colors to try to deal with the various forms of color blindness. Font choice is important as well - for instance Airbus uses the B612 font on cockpit controls.

But there are other issues - I have real trouble at times getting my fingers to do what I want - I often simply miss a touch screen icon. And I'm even worse when using a stylus type device. I have a terrible time filling in those bubbles on ballots and sometimes trying to draw a line between an arrow head and arrow tail on those kinds of ballots. I can do better with a mouse (which I use with my left hand because I got carpel tunnel from years of using my right hand.)

https://b612-font.com/

Driving a Tesla is a good way to train your eyes to see dim and tiny objects on a screen.

Holy f*!! That's no way to have to drive a goddam car.

I've been forced to unwillingly participate in neoliberal extremism my whole life to stay alive. Advertising is bad enough. Deceptive practices like dark patterns reinforce my conclusion that my society values the lives of greedy liars and cheats over mine. I don't see it as a game. I see it as a cancer on civilization feeding on the already miserable.

I think you can't not get 100% on the test... they prompted me on one item (enhanced support seemed to me like something some customers might want to buy) and I still got 100.

This cracked me up tho... I see what they did there

@Lisa Stranger in the vast majority of instances the only thing "enhanced" is the vendors' revenue.

Still breathing.
Forgot today was a holiday, and that my appointment is tomorrow.
Fingers crossed that my health insurance issue is resolved.

The linked 'test' reminds me of the "security training" I had to take at work. Those were all very simple, straight forward options.
None of the reversed slider controls, "click if you want to not cancel your sub" sort of stuff. Tiny grey boxes to opt out, or way down at the bottom, below the submit button, a filled checkbox to subscribe to added services, or "newsletters".
Or some of my all time favorites, where you download a popular 'FOSS' application that has been clickwrapped with added junk. Sometimes the 'custom' install option would allow not installing the xtra PUA stuff. Not 'reallllly malware, but who doesn't need some browser add-ins or DNS redirectors?

Having a bit of a go-round with Comcast... sigh. Internet is very weak, none of the solutions working, so the guy upgraded me to a higher speed plan (which I really didn't want) instead of resolving it. Now it's still in-and-out and when I call customer service they say "did you know that most problems will resolve themselves in 2 hours?" instead of letting me talk to someone. GRRRRR. This is their version of this game. I want to call and tell them to put me back on the $10-a-month cheaper plan, and make any of it work!

Also, we have vaiantly struggled up to 11 F, after starting the day at -1. Stiff breeze from the NW makes the windchill -4. Think this is about as good as it gets for today. Worse expected tomorrow. 🥶

WOW! @Cass M 👋🏽 What a GREAT game! I'm off to spread it to a few people.

Here in Santa Cruz the forecast for next Saturday calls for snow. Snow? In Santa Cruz? Is Hell freezing over?

I do kinda hope to see snow here - we need the water, it's been dry. But even more is that I am such an emotional wreck with this on-off-on-off cycle of pain and bleeding and infection that I put such distant events, such as next Saturday, into a fantasy realm of the hypothetical.

@Karl Auerbach I assume (at least hope) somebody in the medical profession is keeping an eye on that? 😬 UTIs suck.

Last I heard before I gave up news over the return of Satan, Houston was forecast to get 8" of snow, with measurable amounts all along the Redneck Riviera. Gainesville might even see a coating of ice.

@Lisa Stranger - Thanks for the warning. Evey medical person I have seen so far has stressed the need to keep things clean and sterile. I've gone through a lot of alcohol wipes this last week. And I see the urologist in about 2 1/2 hours.

Oh, good. Hopefully you'll come home minus the plastic tube!

Nope, still have the tube for another week. But I start a new drug to prepare for the removal.

I've been imagining the removal process. I've got two images, the first is that I hold my nose and close my mouth while the doctor gives me a very tight squeeze. The second involves a tow rope and a winch.

Ooof. Snow in Houston. Now, that's something.

hmm - I have a little trouble calling AI-generated images art, even if it looks nice

Yeah, hard pass from my side also.

It is dead pixels to me.

Meh, I faced similar skepticism about data visualisation, or even just digital art, last year.

Art is about choices. The computer doesn't spit out any old random image but something the user instructs it to generate. Often the user than has to further choose from the array of generated images, or tweak the prompt to get it closer to their intent. At all stages the user is undeniably choosing self-expression, and if that's not art, then I don't know what is.

The actual implementation, the details, are just scraped from actual artists, and it shows.

It is plagiature, and poorly executed plagiature.

For instance, in this image the "squiggly bits" near the sun are recognizable as Gustav Klimt-inspired, but only superficially.
It's just some squiggles that look a bit like Klimt's works - on close inspection, it is just trash.

Plenty of artists produce absolute trash. Especially some of the famous ones...

And yet, they are artists, not a bag of fermenting stolen art.

Nonsense. No theft or plagiarism beyond the sort of inspiration has happened beyond the sort of inspiration that any artist gets from seeing somebody else' work.

It is literally theft.
Works scraped and recycled without consent or consultation.
That's theft.

And there is no "inspiration" involved.

LLMs can be made to regurgitate personally identifiable information from its training data. Text-to-image generation is no different, it's ultimately just regurgitation of stored bits.

It is no more theft than anyone else seeing an image, having their brain (quite literally) altered a tiny bit by seeing it, and going on to create something of their own. Art is there to be viewed. Viewing it is not theft. It is not reasonable to say "you can come to the gallery but we forbid you to be inspired by what you see."

Regurgitation seldom results in anything coherent. What the image generators do is rearrangement, which is an awfully big part of what humans do. They are not literally "inspired", but the principle is much the same (and actual inspiration is necessary for the prompts anyway).

Humans also are fully capable of reproducing their training data with sufficient prompting. 😀

Bits are copied with digital precision.

There is no interpretation, no inspiration, no adaptation involved in GenAI.
Just patterns stolen and re-applied.

No, sorry, this just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Humans are fully capable of digital-level precision; look at forgeries or hyper-realistic paintings.

There is absolutely and undeniably adaptation in creating an image based on text to mimic a specified style. There simply can't not be.

There is inspiration in the un-emotional sense of making a thing look somewhat like another thing, based on a memory of those things.

There is interpretation in that many different possibilities are valid for the same prompt and some arbitrary way of proceeding must be decided upon.

And forgeries are illegal.

Hyperrealistic paintings are not, because they are as much an interpretation as any other painting.

A text-to-image model has no mind. It's just data being shuffled around.
Algorithms don't stop being algorithms for happening in a black box.

We prosecute forgers, we don't say their reproductive skills make their talents invalid.

The act of making a copy does not itself constitute any sort of immoral act. It's the permissions and consent that go along with it.

It isn't relevant that image generators don't have minds. If anything, that shifts the burden to the users. Using them to make a perfect reproduction could certainly constitute theft. Using them in general most certainly does not, nor does the initial scanning of electronic material used in the training data.

No, once again, as the courts have established, the product of an "ai" does not have value.
It cannot be copyrighted.
It is simply not a creative product, just a mathematical derivation of existing works.

The user is not a creator. They're deluded if they think they are.

LinkedIn is chuck-full of such deluded CEOs who think that they themselves are the ones producing all the value in the company, and that their workers can just be replaced with "ai".

They are mistaken. So is anyone else who thinks writing a prompt is somehow a creative process.

Eh what ? Sorry but that's bonkers.

Which part?

That there are CEOs who think they produce the value?

Or that these CEOs make exactly the same mistake you are suggesting?

That creating a prompt is not a creative process. That is self-evidently wrong.

Creating a prompt is not a creative process of producing an image.

Compare to comissioning a work from an artist.

You give them a prompt.

They use their vision and technical skills to produce the work.

The prompt is merely a limitation on the creative process.

Writing microfiction can be a creative process, and microfiction could serve as prompts, but nothing changes the fact that writing the prompt is not part of the creative process of the image.

With the image generator, you are simply stealing someone's vision and technical skills. There is no creative process involved, except the creative processes that were ripped off in training the AI.

Nope, sorry, still bonkers.

contrast with using tools for drawing, painting, sculpting, etc

most often the artist is not even touching the drawing or the painting, only the tool is.

one could argue that such artists are not being creative, they're just applying forces on the tools, and it's the unintelligent tools that are doing the job. therefore it's not art?

on to printing and 3D printing. does the use of printing tools make the output not art? or maybe the art already done by the time the printing equipment gets involved?

@know I had not created my aspect "Free-Thinking a s o" to permit such publications = "Frree-Thinking" is an aspect for "Free-Thinkers" ! it's a place for these and those who want to share their reflections and thoughts about thiss & that ... this painting/drawing is cool, but it is not a work made for free-thinking ... please use this aspect with care, thanks !!

Again: It is like comissioning an artist. The prompt is just a limitation on the creative process of the image, not part of it.

I've been commissioned to produce images and creative control belongs with the client. They provide instruction, I make an image, they give feedback -> repeat until done. Okay, it's not the same as them actually picking up a metaphorical paintbrush, but that doesn't matter : they are unequivocally part of the creative process.

As a constraint, not as an enabler.

They do not at any point start becoming the astronomer/artist/equivalent.

They know what they like, when they see it. That's a constraint, not creativity.

Constraints can sometimes feel like creativity.
Like, an artist can say "I am going to do this work in this particular style, which sets heavy limitations on the tools I can use" - the constraints can then help overcome choice paralysis, by removing choices artificially.

But still, removing choices is not the same as making choices.

Still nonsense ! They actively tell me which parts of the image need adjustment and how. And removing a choice is absolutely making a choice.

Honestly this is exasperatingly silly. I'm giving up for now.

You are just incorrect.

"The Doors playing volleyball in Toronto" is not a creative process that leads to an image.
Even if you have a tool that then creates the image.

The only creative process involved in creating the prompt is just that - creating the prompt.
It ends there.

You do not become an artist just because you have a basement full of captured artists forced to carry out your dumbass prompts.

That claim simply has no merit to it. We are at an impasse, so I'm muting and moving on.

It has the merit of being undeniably correct. Sorry, not sorry.

The discussion is interesting, but AI is a fact and all we can choose is how we deal with it.

is a movie director an artist?

someone else writes the script, then actors perform them, with the director prompting them and the cameras to capture the scenes in certain ways, and then choosing the cuts. no creativity there?

@Alexandre Oliva They give awards for direction.
A director has vision and skill (whether good or bad) and applies these in doing their job.

But your claim here seems to be that since the dude that wrote a one-liner that inspired the screenplay is causal to the whole thing, that dude also deserves credit for the work of the actors, musicians, playwritghts, etc. etc.

And that is simply a wrongheaded idea.

You can at most get credit for what you did.

And what you did was write a stupid one-liner. It could be a great stupid one-liner, but the most you can claim credit for is a stupid one-liner.

Just because the tool contains stolen vision and skill, doesn't mean you become an artist.

you appear to be disputing a strawman. I'm just trying to think it through.

let's talk about skill, for example. I suck at web searches, my wife is a wizard. there's skill in that. it doesn't make the search prompts or results creative, but there's still there. it's an art in the older sense.

now, we know (at least I assume) that the neural networks we're talking about are not creative. so ISTM that it must follow that either (a) their output is never creative, or (b) whatever creativity appearing in their output is carried over from creativity in the prompt input.

(let's please not be distracted by copyright law; law is not a matter of morals or philosophy, it's a matter of power)

as a software developer, I often find myself writing a few (or a lot of) words and symbols in text editors to get computers to behave in novel ways. I'm pretty sure that there is creativity there, and the compilers and interpreters and computers and whatnot are tools that turn the mathematical algorithms I've devised and expressed in those "prompts" into (hopefully) useful actions and outputs.

just like hydraulics and engines are technologies that multiply human force, enabling people who do not possess superhuman strength to build (and to destroy) both beautiful and mediocre things, computers, compilers and generative LLMs seem to be tools that enable people to build both beautiful and mediocre things.

what sets beautiful from mediocre apart are the skill and dedication of the people and the quality of the materials involved in the process, methinks. though most of the outputs of LLMs are bound to be junk (garbage in, garbage out), I do see room for true artists to master the use of these tools and use them to bring us new and wonderful kinds of creative works.

The creativity was in the training data.
It never stopped being in the training data.

Prompt-writing is just prompt-writing.
The only skill involved is knowing the cheat-engine you're putting the prompts into.
People who think they are artists because they can write prompts deserve a special kind of derision.

They are the bird prancing about with stolen feathers in Aesop's fable.

Or Elon fucking Musk buying a company and saying "I created this car".

Fuck that shit.

I don't think creativity in making the training data is relevant to creativity in the process of reusing it, for the same reasons that making something new is creative, but making another copy of that isn't.

You seem to be repeating your argument, without as much as discussing how it differs from the creative processes that go into writing software (including one-liner scripts) and using that to get creative outputs. That suggests you consider them fundamentally different. I'm curious as to why. To me, both amount to skillful use of (automation) tools, so your so-far unjustified dismissal comes across as unconvincing to me.

There is no creativity in reusing it, obviously.
There is no vision, no skill, nothing.

It's just a dumbass consumer pressing a button while the world burns.

Software is creative when there is skill and vision involved.
If you're just using pre-made assets and pre-made scripts, it is not very creative at all.

But still more creative than punching in a prompt into a txt2img generator.

AI is the biggest existential threat the human race has ever faced. It needs to be erased, memory-holed, and further development into it made illegal. By force if necessary. I don't care about the feelings of the sad losers who think AI is legitimate or that AI art is art. Die mad about it.

I disagree.
It's worthless.
But that also means it's not very dangerous.

The problem is that millions of absolute fools think it's progress, and insist that we must invest into it resources that we cannot afford to sped.

The energy cost alone is prohibitive, at a time when we should be REDUCING energy use, not increasing it.

The only existential threat is human stupidity and greed.