People often blame phones, but I blame the runaway success of Obamas first campaign. His team ran the most effective targeting campaign online I'd ever seen. People I knew in Canada cared more than about him than local politics. I think it highlighted the potential of online propaganda to such an extent that everyone started targeting online people. Good an bad.
Every midjourney image has the same feeling to it. A bit 1950s sci-fi artist. I guess it's just that it all looks airbrushed? I can't put my finger on it.
I don't know if that was Midjourney's intent, but it seems like a smart approach. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and generating quite a lot of ugly garbage, you get consistently good-looking stuff in a certain style. I'm sure it helps their business model.
Feels like it's the Instagram model for prompt-generated images.
Anyone can get a camera phone, take a picture and use some free software (e.g. gimp) to get great results in post-processing.
Most non-expert users though want to click on a few pre-defined filters, find one they like & run with it, rather than having more control yet poorer results (precisely because they _aren't_ experts).
If Midjourney applies this to all their artwork then maybe it alleviates some of the ethical concerns (Midjourney then has a "style" independent of the training data)
I've played a lot with it lately and that just not true. If you play with styles, colors, angles, views you have a lot of control about how the imagine will look. It can emulate pretty much all mainstream aesthetics.
Yes, because as we all know, service staff have enormous power and dictate restaurant policy. This is why they're so highly paid and aren't abused at all by customers, for example. /s
If I work for a company that I've seen screw over our customers on a daily basis, and enough customers refuse to pay my company, then I don't have a leg to stand on when I don't get my full salary all of a sudden.
This is true whether I'm a developer, a ski instructor or a waiter.
People like to act as if wait staff are completely innocent, but when I was younger I had a policy that if a female waitress started touching me close to the closing out of the deal she got no tip.
> Yes, because as we all know, service staff have enormous power and dictate restaurant policy.
No, as we all know the service staff has no power over the restaurant policy.
They are, however, the communication agent between customer and restaurant, so they should be informing the customer about these surprise charges up front. If they don't, they are indeed complicit.
I believe this is a form of astroturfing and it is hard not to see this stuff. Remember all those articles about the AI winter a few years ago? In reality, there was no winter. Lot's of smart people took advantage of the opportunity and got incredibly wealthy during that period of time and now we see some of the fruits of that labour. It's just the beginning too.
It's important, in my opinion, to always ask 'who benefits from me believing this?'
In the case of this article, presumably the exploited* laborers whose labor conditions might improve if the population to whom this article is addressed both became aware and started to care about the labor conditions of the people behind the systems they use. Trying to 4D chess ourselves into not having to actually address the issue at hand isn’t clever or insightful, it’s just abdication with numbers attached.
* I’m not arguing whether or not the behavior described in the article actually constitutes exploitation or is just the noble hand of the market more perfectly forming working conditions - that’s not my point. The point is if you DO read the article and you DO feel that behavior’s exploitative, scratching your head over who’s got an agenda to want this thing you find abhorrent changed, as opposed to trying to change the behavior you find abhorrent, is the kind of thing people think smart people are supposed to do, and tends to contribute to more things you find abhorrent happening in the world.
>Remember all those articles about the AI winter a few years ago?
FTA:
>"MMC Ventures surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use AI in a meaningful way."
While not the same as an AI winter, it can still be indicative of "peak hype". If accurate, a large portion of companies are claiming to have some nebulous AI advantage aren't really delivering on that promise. It's doesn't have to be astroturfing to be pointing out a hype machine. Particularly if that hype is predicated on a shaky ethical foundation.
I'm not sure how widespread the sentiment was that there was going to be a near-term AI winter.
What you did have was increasing skepticism that things like fully-realized door-to-door autonomous driving were going happen in the short-run--but a lot of the skeptics didn't think that would necessarily translate into an AI winter.
What you've got there is legacy wealth and power, obtained by violence no less, using it's wealth and power to build local indoctrination centres that help sustain the legacy. If that wealth and power built MtG play centres or I dunno milk shake shacks, you'd now be lamenting the value that chilling milk has on communities.
Edit: this sounds way more antagonistic than I wanted. I was aiming for cheeky. Happy Friday, fellow beneficiaries of historical violence!
Oh, IE "supported" PNGs almost maliciously. If you had a True Color PNG? No problem. Paletted 8-bit? No problem. 8-but with alpha? Fine. True Color with alpha? I hope you like seeing your background color you meant to alpha out.
You had to use Microsoft's DirectX filtering CSS extensions to properly handle the alpha channel of True Color PNGs.
Not exactly, palletised png supports a full alpha channel which did not work with IE.
Though you had to work to get that as usually software would limit palletised output to GIF (if you didn’t outright have to create your pngs from gifs).
