What art have you been generating?

The new version 4 that Midjourney is testing is insane. If you type --v 4 after your prompt, it uses the newer version, and the images are significantly higher quality.

Now you f*ckers have done it:

www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/loab-age-...kaQDI3aA2aa3DzDkphGc

This is even worse than I thought.

Here is some less scary though still unsettling news:

slate.com/technology/2022/12/chatgpt-ope...ce-chatbot-whoa.html

Ray Kurzweil may be getting nervous.

Shellhead wrote: Now you f*ckers have done it:

www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/loab-age-...kaQDI3aA2aa3DzDkphGc

That portrait is exactly what I'd expect a double-reverse Marlon Brando to look like.

toolbaz.com/writer/ai-text-generator

Prompt:
Michael Barnes learns that Kickstarter board games are a better hobby than dumb guitars

Result:
Michael Barnes had always been a fan of board games, but he never really had the time to get into the hobby. However, when he saw how popular Kickstarter board games were becoming, he decided to give it a try. He was quickly hooked and realized that this was a much better hobby than playing dumb guitars. The board game community was incredibly welcoming and he soon made a name for himself as a top player. He even started designing his own games and was able to make a living off of his hobby.

Shellie's website is all about board games. She loves playing them and loves writing about them. But she never really understood the true meaning of the holiday of Hanukkah. That all changed when she read a rare session report about the holiday. The report told the story of a family who celebrating Hanukkah by playing a board game. They were having a great time, but then something went wrong. One of the players made a mistake and the game had to be restarted. The family was very upset. But they kept playing and eventually they won. Shellie was so moved by the story that she realized that the true meaning of Hanukkah is about perseverance and never giving up.

This is the greatest website ever made.

Whoshim wrote: The new version 4 that Midjourney is testing is insane. If you type --v 4 after your prompt, it uses the newer version, and the images are significantly higher quality.

Tell me about it. I've been toying with coaxing from the A.I. what it wants to tell me absent any further prompts. I used the v4 engine and it consistently presented me with monoliths and somewhat scary fairy tales in response to the prompt, "Midjouney telling us what what it most wants to tell us, highly-detailed, --v 4"

I got shit like this:







I mean, Jayzus F'ing Kroist.

A bit of testing suggested that the A.I was representing itself as the beast, and "us" as the child.

Not that you should care, but this kind of shit now that it can answer sophisticated questions requiring interpretation is going to be extremely bad for online education. It's basically going to make any non-proctored or non-extremely technical and high level online exam worthless. Carl Bergstrom has a good thread on it on Mastodon to see what the future is:

fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/109454383407437584

I would argue with the order of the layers on that pyramid. It makes sense that creativity would be the pinnacle, except that the art samples in this thread seem to indicate that creativity is possible without understanding or evaluating anything. So understanding should maybe be the pinnacle of the pyramid, indicating a degree of self-awareness that incorporates everything else plus self-recognition of comprehension.

As for implications, it is lamentable that our kids will soon be able to fake take-home writing assignments with software, but the real long-term implication might be the loss of jobs that require writing, like journalism or technical writing. Companies used to have rooms full of typists, but they were made obsolete by printers hooked up to computers with keyboards with a backspace key.

It seems that most figures around A.I., whether they are developers, ethicists, heads of industry, etc, seem to be largely in agreement that these intelligences are going to be very disruptive in the "can't live with it, can't live without it" kind of way. My personal suspicion is that in fewer than 10 years there will be few matters that we discuss where A.I. *won't* be part of the conversation, whether it is war, environmental concerns, food sourcing, and every matter of social interaction. The struggles raised fictionally in 2049/Blade Runner, i.e. "fighting back" against a.i. that threatens us in too many ways, using a.i. as slave labor, etc, may not be correct in the detail, but will literally be "stranger than fiction."

Topical to TWbG as a game site, I was poking around last night and saw this demo of a game of Dungeons and Dragons with a GPT-4-based A.I. personality called Leta. I've not watched the whole thing, but scanning it I was impressed with a number of things, including the change of voice to "I do this or that" in reference to character, and divining the answers to (some) riddles posed by a Sphynx in-game. I'm adding in a link here to the relevant place. A bit like playing with your friend who has severe Aspbergers, but to my mind, it worked well enough to wonder what the future holds for this stripe of companionship.

https://youtu.be/PxkwmEuu8XM?t=1014

AI is such an interesting frame for all of this because it's so much better understood with the already extant term machine learning, an output trained on whatever goop of existing human production it is given access to and recombining and recontextualizing it.

A footnote to my earlier post with the photos: I said it was apparent the the picture showed the a.i. as the beast and we as the child, but on re-examination, this doesn't appear to be the case at all. It seems that Midjourney "conflates" the child figure and us as the same. Repeated experiments from user-side interaction showed that when I said, "midjourney does this, and I do that" in the photo, something usually easy, it would instead recombine midjourney and me/us. The monstrosity is unidentified. Maybe it's midjourney that understands this better.

Generating miniatures with Midjourney. Now I need an AI that scans the 2d image and turns it into a CAD file.

While I still contend that this is "image" generation, and not "art" generation, if I were creating one of these systems, and I certainly don't have the programming chops to do such a thing, I'd call it ARTificial.