brown to left, another dog's butt. The dog on the right is looking at you over his shoulder with his head partially upside down. What looks like an eye on the right is actually his nose. Further right of that is the front of his mouth, which continues underneath the muzzle and the side of the dogs mouth is what looks like a hole towards the top of the image.

Also, at the time most of the zodiac and star chart arrangements were plotted out, the Earth had an entirely different north star than it does now. So your modern star sign would not even be consistent with the ancient charts and star signs, yet somehow all the same definitions and assumptions are supposed to apply.

Not a shitpost, but don't eat too much black licorice all at once, it can cause heart problems. Too much of the glycyrrhizin produced naturally in the plant's root that's used to make black licorice causes your kidneys to flood potassium out into your blood and it'll mess up the electrical signals in your heart. You have to eat like two bags a day for two weeks though.

I think the "what if we're all in a video game" take is a thought terminating cliche based solely on our own culture and experience.

I'm less certain that we're not a brane stretched across the cosmological horizon projected backwards in time by the collapse of a universe-sized supermassive black hole, and that the answer of who runs the simulation or who's making the hologram is no one. But mostly I think that because I cleave hard to the idea that any natural process that we hypothesize about should have a basis in an existing model. Black holes are something that we largely exist outside and can study and have a number of comparable features that make them ideal to test these thought experiments. There's obvious uncertainties, like whether our universe is spinning, whether it even needs to be spinning, and the inconclusiveness of whether galaxies have inherited spin from that or not, but I also don't buy for a second that the big bang doesn't have an origin or natural cause or that it could possibly be "just is."

I normally open links in a streaming service instead to stop the ads, but one time I was having to watch youtube on my phone browser without any ad blocker. Every two minutes, another two minutes of ads. Shits unwatchable.

Ghostbusters.

Hear me out, while I get the guy representing the EPA in that movie was an asshole bureaucrat on a power trip, they literally had plutonium powered particle accelerators strapped to their backs in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world behind only places like the Kowloon walled city. The villain of that story was basing his decisions that the ghostbusters were dangerous frauds using the established knowledge and science of the era that ghosts and supernaturally powered entities were woo-woo wacky nonsense.

The movie plot is consistent with whole self-made-man pro-business pro-libertarian theming that was popular back in the 1980s. If the guy down the street who claimed to be a psychic medium and exorcist started stockpiling nuclear material to fight ghosts, you'd be concerned too. The plot only works because the guys who believe in pure superstition and myth were right. And then, out of sheer narrative spite, the only guy trying to limit the amount of collateral damage those guys could cause gets boiling hot molten marshmallow dumped on him and probably ended up in the hospital with third degree burns over 90% of his body.

There's a reason the second movie starts with them financially underwater because of all the destruction the first movie caused.

I'm going to try a different tactic here, in that I don't expect I can convince you of anything on the other side of the argument that you're engaging with, but something that might be useful to learn from is some constructive criticism of the works that the AI produces. In doing so I'm going to try to avoid what I think a lot of proponents of your style consider gatekeeping.

The piece that won this competition is technically sound, it has an aesthetic presence, we can agree here. If anything AI is kinda good at doing this because it's trained to recognize the patterns that lead to this in the data and other artwork that was used to train this.

I'll also even say that if someone spent 80 hours cumulatively taking 900 photographs of a particular scene to try to select just one that's of particular quality, that we might even say they put in artistic effort into it. It's just that that alone, the time and effort spent on curating a work, is not all there is that defines it as artistic. In this other case you keep posting about found art, a urinal that someone spent maybe 5 seconds on is also considered art.

It's also true though that when that guy described the urinal and why he thought it deserved to be considered art, that he put thought into that. He made the selections he did for a reason.

So lets go back to our award winner. It's competent, we agree, enough that a judge didn't even realize it might be AI (I'll get to that in a second). I'll even say that the fact that the winner could add in an entire head on one of the characters in the pieces and have it blend well enough with the shading and lighting of the work suggests the guy who won with this piece probably knows at least some degree of traditional art concepts.

We can also see that it's a blend of styles, the composition looks even renaissance a bit, and clearly also the person who submitted this knew enough about other art forms to recognize that. There remains one major question though: what story is this picture telling? The renaissance images that it's an homage to are generally based on the moment in some story. A picture of Napoleon on a horse isn't just Napoleon on a horse, there's usually indications that he's maybe returning from some battle. Images of Samson and Delilah focus on the moment she attempts the assassination.

That's what people are trying to get at here. The artist says that his prompt was to make a mashup of styles (victorian and space themes, which does not seem even remotely like what he ended up with), and then refined it further with the lighting and shading, positioning and elements. I can agree this takes effort, it's just also this is like saying the movie Wild Wild West should have won critically acclaimed awards for the cinematography. Even where he had intent, it seems like it was overwritten by the very tool he used, and it seems like he didn't believe enough in his own original vision that he noticed that it wasn't actually what he asked for.

So lets get to the judge then. I think there would be very real outcry if say, a judge for a oil painting competition was unable to tell the difference between an the works made in the requested medium and a photograph that was submitted for it. I could see an argument, much like for how photography was separated out from other artforms in competition, that the same should be done for AI. In addition, I think that the effort to make the AI emulate existing styles and convince people it was made with previously existing tools actually limits the possibility of what the style can create. Almost a decade ago, people were fascinated by google deep dreams because it was a machine creating a rendition of how the machine "thinks," and showing all the strange symbolism and logical connections that were programmed into it and how they had developed, in a way very different than anything a human artist might think or do. I think that's the envelope people and AI should be pushing here, I think it should be a completely different category, I think it should have it's completely own style.

I also think the current AI programs suck for a variety of ethical reasons I won't get into, but I don't rule out that there couldn't be versions made that lack those problems and aren't just an gimme to corporations looking to streamline every process on the cheap. But if you want AI to be taken seriously, if you want anything you try to make with it to be taken seriously, these are all thoughts you should probably consider.

Firefly was found to use suspect training data too though... It's the best of them in that it's actually making an effort to ethically source the training data, but also almost no one uses it because programs from professional adobe suite are expensive as hell.

https://martech.org/legal-risks-loom-for-firefly-users-after-adobes-ai-image-tool-training-exposed/

Before the ship it was an old scottish folkstory about a guy going home on a stormy night, encountering a coven of witches, calling out out to one that had a really small shirt (cutty sark) and never being seen again Ichabod Crane style. The figurehead on the ship is what gave the ship it's name, because it was based on that story.

I can only post a classic in response.

https://salticid.tumblr.com/post/143699141224/a-girl-talk-to-me

Stephen King is absolutely the next person I think is going to have some heinous shit come out about him, like happened with Gaiman. Too many years writing in a cocaine haze, on record defenses of Woody Allen marrying the step daughter he raised, the whole thing with the ending of IT.

Not commenting on the Epstein List, tbh it's political football and I don't know if we'll ever have anything confirmed until well after anyone who could be impacted by it is gone. King's just one of those people who if you look close enough there's reasons to be suspicious, but who is such an industry giant that I think no one wants to say anything.

What if you're kind of a shitty friend on top of an introvert though. Like they invite you, and you're happy to be there, but then your over-emotional response either starts to seem sarcastic or ruins the vibes. So the next time two years later when someone dares to try again not only are you ashamed about it but your reaction is twice as bad because of it. Then everyone starts to feel so awkward that they just ghost you. Seems like at some point you should probably just decline to spare everyone the experience.