đSomewhere out there, in between and still nowhere in particular. Watching waiting but unsure who and for what. Clocks ticking forth the new dawn.
10pm and on. At least a bit further. The sounds of the restless city, a train and a bunch of cars and motorcycles and the visitors throwing shut the door of the bar. A young couple arguing again, in between houses and bus stop. Late commuters heading on, heading home. A tired messenger dropping Italian food for the students across the road, and video snippets of nocturnal garden wildlife merging into each other, shaping a world both close and surreal. Orion on a velvet sky, a notion of distance in the breeze from across the river. Have a dreamy night wherever you are.
Sommersonne Winterschatten und Holzbiene unter dem Schirm. Spuren im Beet und auf der Kamera: Marder, Waschbär, Fuchs. Immer noch keine FliederblĂźten. Zu mĂźde fĂźr bewusstes Treiben, zu sehr im Schwung noch fĂźr echte Ruhe. Weitertreiben, durch den Feierabend und seine Bilder. Beiseite treten, rĂźde Worte ignorieren. FrĂźh wie abends.Â
4pm and on. In and out of sync. The demanding art of longform conversations. Many aspects to everything, and a limited set of tools at hand to handle these. And now rolling with the tides, floating with the wind, still unsure whether to have achieved anything today. Maybe it doesn't matter but still it's not too pleasant.
Also, elsewhere, talking large language models, image generation and everything related to that:
Miyazaki himself has called AI âan insult to life itself,â while fans of his work happily and unwittingly feed the hungry AI machinery with opportunities for iterative practice, helpful feedback, and subtle signals for improving the technology along the way. All while completely disregarding the crooked practices that went into sourcing content for the models, and totally disrespecting the opinions and wishes of the creators of the original art upon which these cheap derivative imitations are fabricated.
Watching this happen is really frustrating. Watching artists see the time and talent and passion that they put into their work being so casually devalued by an increasingly effective array of smoke and mirrors (while simultaneously witnessing the harmful ecological side-effects, as some kind of demented cherry on top) is even more frustrating. And then for me, personally, being asked to weigh in on this, to take a strong position and ban the use of this technology within the omg.lol community, well, thatâs extra frustrating. But itâs happened a few times in the past 24 hours, and so here I am talking about it now.
I'm having quite mixed opinions on most of the AI and LLM topic going on out there for a bunch of reasons, somewhere in between the general attempt to be basically open in regards to benefits and hazards, advantages and negative side-effects of whichever tool comes up next - and bad gut feelings on many different levels, including distribution of power due to model control, hardware costs, energy consumption, infrastructure spent on such tools, and including effects like these. For this very aspect and in this situation however, once again I completely side with Adam and his rather well-written article, as well as the conclusions he is about to make here. Worth reading.