Thankfully, I did not get covid, but I did get a pretty bad flu. I should follow your protocol. I hope this coming year is filled with more joy and less ennui for you. Your writings and drawings are much appreciated...Buff shrimp men for the win! 🦐

Sounds like you wish you had a flying 「Death Machine」

No. That sounds so much worse. I just want to walk to work.

I almost got killed by one of those "Death Machines". It was years ago, and I never been so close to death at any other point in my life. I am just glad that "Death Machine" at least comes with lots of safety features nowadays.

The world is a hell for sensitive hearts for sure.

Just like Homo Economicus, the idea people have of what makes a person "normal" is bizzare in reality haha

well it does say occasional right in the name

I'll rebrand as "Constant content" once I get my act together.

Don't fret about the audience.

I don't make AI art (yet?) because my GPU sucks and I don't want to alienate any artist acquaintances, but there's a lot more to AI art than what you describe here. There's inpainting & img2img that let people use more than just words to make art, and it's totally possible to make art that doesn't have many obvious tells (check out civit), it's just people are too lazy to go that deep and want a quick pretty image.

the ethical issues with ai art have been the main focus of the discourse from what i've seen. and those ethical issues, which are complex and manifold, are not going away any time soon. but even setting that aside, i still don't understand WHY ai should have any place in art. i don't understand what problem it solves, other than the kind of "problem" only a capitalist autocrat would consider as such.

the dada movement figured out that being conventionally aesthetically appealing did not make your art substantive or worthy of respect 100 years ago. the self-shame and need to hide that they generated it really does give insight into how the creators really feel.

I still like to look at pieces generated by someone who knows how to use prompts - there aren't very many of those types of people - but I am *entirely* over AI art after jumping in head first when it landed. I concur with most of your estimations and predictions.

@lhfm I'll admit this is a view of someone looking in from the outside. I've seen some interfaces that are not prompt based interfaces, which are really cool and would be useful to artists (which have been mostly alienated). But from what I've seen the prevailing paradigm is mostly word based interfaces.

@doxylamine, I feel you have a great way to sum up the general feelings I have on the subject too, and to be honest, the modern AI, with the massive (I'd argue questionable) data mining fundaments it has, feels like a technology that could only really exist in the context of a society as ours so intent on commodifying information, privacy and labour.