Cory Dransfeldt has great posts about AI, and this one is no exception. Of course, he’s right in his stance on AI-generated images, but as with everything, I don’t find the conclusion so simple.
The images it generates are, at best, a polished regression to the mean. If you want custom art, pay an artist.
As I have covered before, my thoughts on generative AI are mixed. While I understand many of the issues people have with it, I can’t find the same motivation.
One of the first sections I added to my new blog is a reading page. I adore reading, and if I’m not reading, I am often pondering over the things I have read. It’s an obsession, but one I happily embrace. The only problem with my need to track these activities is the standard at which I consider something as read.
There’s been debate online about the distinction between reading a book and ‘reading’ an audiobook.
I wrote a few days ago about my personal take on AI being trained on my writing. Although I expected much more anger, hence the rather long block at the bottom, I am happy to see some nice responses and some pushback on the ideas. It sparked several emails, a few text messages, and one very well-thought-through response post.
Erlend on Mastodon raised a very good point when considering other people’s choices:
Kyle Hill in their YouTube video on generative AI:
The Internet feels steadily more lifeless. But that’s because, like those alien civilisations, the real human users are hiding in private apps, servers, and RSS feeds, lest they be beset by these digital predators. This is Yancey Strickler’s dark forest theory of the Internet, something to explain the declining realness of the web.
This tracks with my own usage of ‘the web’.
For mother’s day in the UK we went to feed the animals at J and J Alpacas. This was a really nice experience and we also saw some lambs being born. Of course I couldn’t resist taking my Ricoh GRiiix along and snapping a few shots.
I’ve been mulling over this clash between AI and the content it’s trained on for some time now. As a frequent user of AI and a regular online publisher, I see both sides of the coin. I’m well aware that the articles I put out there probably end up as fodder for some AI training algorithm. And while I know many writers are upset about their work being used this way without compensation, I personally don’t get too riled up about it.
On their Bear blog, tiramisu writes about their family:
it doesn’t matter what he thinks or feels about things like family vacations. He does them because they’re things he should do, and moments like that illustrate how differently our brains are wired.
This cuts very close to home for me. I am a father, a husband and everything else first before I am an individual. That’s just the way I am.
Cory Dransfeldt writes in a way that feels like it’s aimed at me, because everything is a checklist:
Check, check, check, clear the queue, close the rings, get to zero. I know this looks neurotic; it is neurotic because I’m neurotic. I always have been, or at least as long as I can remember.
My wife and I have joked for a long time about the fact that if an event isn’t in our calendar, it doesn’t happen.
Every so often, I end up here, in a place where every task completed is met with a few more added to the end. As the list grows, so does my anxiety about trying to reach the end—an end that is never in sight, let alone becoming any closer. At this point, I try to remind myself of a mantra picked up from Oliver Burkeman: “There will always be more work,” but it still gets a bit much sometimes.
Brandon encouraging more people to blog the way he does:
It’s easy, blog about what you like. Talk about the things that you are passionate about, things you find joy in, or document your day-to-day.
I really enjoyed this post, despite disagreeing slightly. You see, we both come from a place where blogging is pretty easy; we write about all sorts of things. However, it isn’t that easy for a lot of people.