chefandy

If you're looking for video for casual personal projects or fill-ins for vlog posts, or something to make your PowerPoint look neat, this seems like a rad tool. It has a looong way to go before it's taking anyone's movie VFX job.

I’m a technical artist, so wielding tech to make art is my thing. I come from a dev background but just graduated from art school this year.

I reckon there are some hurdles to overcome before seeing a lot of non-technical generative AI imaging uptake among advanced and professional artists. A) most of these tools UIs aren’t useful to traditional artists in any part of the direct creation process yet, B) the prompt-based workflow, conceptually, doesn’t fit into traditional art processes so it’s essentially starting from scratch, and C) some vocal denizens of the DIY NN scene have done a fine job of making it as unappealing as possible to traditional artists.

I know plenty of artists— both commercial artists and professional fine artists— that use simpler generative tools like midjourney for mood boards, reference, etc. but don’t know a single one that directly uses the output to make art.

One big problem is that the UIs of all local stable diffusion front ends are not designed for people to make art— they’re designed for people to operate a neural network image generator. From a technical perspective, that’s the same thing, but from an interface design perspective, it is a very different goal, and it shows. For people that are enamored with the technology, or for people with a technical background that are used to wielding a bunch of abstract acronyms and don’t have to build up a bunch of base knowledge, that’s great. For people that just want to express themselves and already have another way to do so, it’s a huge, annoying impediment. (And while it’s done with the best of intentions (usually,) assuming non-technical artists will be as enriched by the technical knowledge and tools much as technical people without art expertise comes across as pretty conceited.)

Another problem is that getting an image generator to create things in a way that makes sense in a normal artistic process is difficult. Art, generally, is about building things from broad stroke base to the finest finishing details with direct, granular control, and deciding/discovering what that finished piece will look like while you go, with all of the kismet and happy accidents that go with that process. You don’t usually make huge changes after you’ve polished it up because you probably wouldn’t have gotten that far with an element that didn’t work. When you start with something that has all of the “finished product” detail implemented already, that entire process is turned upside down. It’s distracting. Think about the way Bob Ross worked his way through a painting— do you think he would even want a workflow where he used words to describe a completed painting and then decided things he wanted to change about it? Not being an artist, encountering that tool is incredibly freeing. When you’ve put a bunch of time and practice into figuring out how to wield that artistic perspective and then use the tools you prefer to build and develop your visions from raw ingredients, it’s restrictive, disorienting. The thing you’ve been organically growing into for years that makes your art yours— the way you make basic shapes, flicks of the pencils or brush, ways that you might subconsciously separate tiny little background elements from each other, all of which are equally applicable with digital tools— is missing from this piece and has been replaced with an amalgam of many other artists hands. That’s the reason many people like generative image stuff: you don’t have to understand all of the tiny little components that make a piece what it is and just think about the objects and comparatively very-broad-stroke style. You’ve lost the verbs and adverbs from your process and are left only with nouns and adjectives.

Also, while obviously not representative of the user base on a whole, the active, vocal community of stans that can’t distinguish between Reddit and the rest of their interactions have done a great job of alienating traditional artists. Their gleefully predicting the obsolescence of traditional artists— using tools built with their work without permission, no less — makes it tough to tap into that excitement. A lot of us have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay, and cancer to treat, and while many disciplines are not as vulnerable as many think, people like concept artists are actively being screwed over because tech money decided they want to get paid for our hard-won skills instead of artists. This alone makes it a tougher sell than it should be.

Masons deliberately don't respond to these sorts of things but few things tick me off quite as much as proud, confidently administered ignorance.

Oh, is that what I said? Or is that what you wish I said because you had a specious response to it pre-cooked? Does your response directly address anything I said? Are you sure you're responding to me and not some conceptual 'other side' that has predictable views that perfectly yin-yang curve around 'your side' because falling back into groupthink is a lot easier than having to actually read and think about what other people say, and be accountable for saying things that are easily provably completely incorrect? Are you sure that's not what's happening here?

That’s awfully long for a headline but I do agree it’s clearer

Your distinction— understanding the law, broadly, and being able to try a case in court are themselves two extremes on the spectrum of people that understand law. The invective for clickbait obviously exists.

None of those facts means that it’s easy, or even possible to write a headline-length blurb can give laypeople the context they need to know what’s happening.

Maybe I’m wrong? Can you propose one that does?

Freemasonry only has 3 “ranks”. The organizations that have other levels, like the Shriners, York Rite, Scottish Rite (created in France in the 19th century) aren’t organizationally or legally related to any actual Masonic grand lodge — they’re a completely separate organization that only accept 3rd degree masons— the highest Masonic rank — as members. The conspiracy theory information you cite can’t even keep basic facts straight about the way freemasonry operates. I’m not even a Mason— this information is really really easy to find online.

For sure. I think part of it is what happens when Dunning-Krueger strikes someone confident and charismatic enough to teach their ill-conceived ideas to others who find the idea appealing enough to take it and run with it. A runaway bullshit train. Eventually it becomes widespread enough to become “conventional wisdom” to to some groups and most people don’t question conventional wisdom imparted by people they trust. It seems a lot of conspiracy theories work that way.

Sure, that makes sense. Additionally, whether something is misleading had as much to do with the person reading it as the person writing it.

Can you propose a more appropriate one? I can’t think of one that is still headline length.

share the chats then

I agree that most readers won’t really ‘get it’ by reading the headline, and appreciate your useful addition so we all can get some context without the click, but in defense of the author, I think writing layperson-accessible headlines for technical legal articles is often impossible. Having attempted to make interfaces and applications that made raw legal data useful for laypeople, including with NN summaries and such, if there’s a meaningfully better solution, I sure couldn’t find it after a few years of work. For the same reason reading case law doesn’t effectively help laypeople represent themselves in court, you need context and background knowledge to make sense of legal concepts. (If you’ve ever seen an overconfident ‘sovereign citizen’ cite opinions in court while representing themself, you’ve seen why. And while most are obviously under-educated for the task, they’re probably not unintelligent and they clearly put a lot of effort into it.) To people used to reading legal texts and familiar with the trajectory of decisions in this space, the headline makes sense, and I think that’s probably the best you can do. Trying to construct a headline that’s representative while also giving laypeople the background and context they need to make sense of the topic becomes way too long to be a headline long before it accomplishes it’s goal.

The approach works better with dedicated technical writers. It makes sense to have distinct user-focused goals for documents before they’re written, and then just dig into the necessary parts of the software enough to make that happen as needed. When it’s developers doing the docs, they’re approaching it from the other end. They’ve got a chunk of code they need to cover, and reasoning about user needs is pretty difficult from that vantage point. Picking an approach vector when you don’t know the airport.

Lots of folks in these conversations fail to distinguish between LLMs as a technology and "AI Chatbots" as commercial question answering services. Whether false information was expected or not matters to LLM product developers, but in the context of a commercial question-answering tool, it's irrelevant. Hallucinations are bugs that creates= time-wasting zero-value output, at best, and downright harmful output at worst. If you're selling people LLM pattern generator output, they should expect a lot of bullshit. If you're selling people answers to questions, they should expect accurate answers to their questions. If paying users are really expected to assume every answer is bullshit and vet it themselves, that should probably move from the little print to the big print because a lot of people clearly don't get it.

When I've gotten friend from a job they stopped being mentally classified as a coworkers and started being classified as a friend I met at work. Aside from random bullshitting about shared experiences or whatever, I rarely felt compelled to discuss work with them any more than I did with other friends, and they can be really great at giving frank feedback when other coworkers might not have the guts. Unless there's a boss/subordinate relationship or a romantic connection, I've never seen or experienced any real problems or drama spring from workplace friendships.

I think that's probably ideal as a default approach. In my experience, when it moves beyond that into friendship, it's pretty organic rather than a conscious change in approach.

Some of the most loyal and connected colleagues I've had have been autists. I have a lot in my family so there's probably some amount of "safe person" vibes I give off, but in my experience, many autists realize the value of someone they can feel comfortable talking to and confiding in that can comfortably navigate social situations and professional communication. Lots of "I just don't understand why they reacted like that-- what's your take?" kind of conversations. Most of these folks have been younger than me, though, so there could well be some other cultural factor at play: some way that young people are getting different experiences/skills/comfort levels now, or maybe their interaction style/strategy will change as they get older?

The pre-update version of Gemini Advanced-- sold as a miracle worker-- wasted so much of my time in two small coding projects that I'll never touch it again. Constant hallucination, constant flip-flopping between the same three mistakes generating code no matter what the prompt was like... a much earlier version of copilot has steered me wrong a few times in fairly annoying ways, but is so helpful in smaller ways that it's been a net gain, though not a huge one.

> The ease of pushing updates encourages lazy coding.

Certainly in some cases, but in others, it just shifts the economics: Obviously, fault tolerance can be laborious and time consuming, and that time and labor is taken from something else. When the natures of your dev and distribution pipelines render faults less disruptive, and you have a good foundational codebase and code review process that pay attention to security and core stability, quickly creating 3 working features can be much, much more valuable than making sure 1 working feature will never ever generate a support ticket.

Thanks!

Taken, as recommended. It tingled.

If nothing else, I can confirm it’s delicious.

Ridiculous! Complete overreach. Be strong, oppressed one. “This too shall pass.”

Even if they were talking about interaction design (sometimes called IX) specifically, rather than experience design, the interaction is in handling, moving, and combining them. They don’t need to have a dynamic electronic interaction to be interactive. I’m not sure a toy with absolutely no interaction would still be a toy.

Of course there are legitimate uses, which means everyone should have completely unfettered access and nobody selling it should be responsible for irresponsible users. Personally, I’m sick of the government limiting my artistic freedom because the mediums I use might be misused by a tiny group of bad actors. For example, it’s unnecessarily difficult to source pineapple grenades for my large scale abstract punched tin crafts. The other people who live in my apartment building haven’t complained when I asked if they had a problem with it, so what’s the problem? And when I can get ahold of it, white phosphorous makes a great addition to my annual deep-woods pyrotechnic light shows. I just don’t understand this nanny state garbage.

You’re the one that made the direct government control analogy. I mentioned a number of non-individualistic mechanisms in my previous comment. I’m not going to keep engaging in a fishing expedition of things to argue about — I think it’s pretty clear what aspect of your stance I disagree with— and am going to leave it at that.

So does what I said. Someone taking pay for someone else’s work is pretty unambiguously shitty. But when you call taking anything that isn’t a physical item theft, a large percentage of people— especially in the ‘data wants to be free’ crowd— will roll their eyes, think “that’s ridiculous... they aren’t stealing anything. That voice actor still has their voice” and just stop listening. The only people that feel the impact of statements like that are people that already agree. It turns it from an intellectual discussion to a reinforcement of existing tribes. Divisive language works for rallying those who already agree around a specific cause but it’s not even useless— it’s counterproductive— for changing people’s minds. When’s the last time someone you disagreed with changed your mind by being more aggressive towards your stance, and more terse in their portrayal of the dichotomy? If you can even think of one time that it has, you’re in the extreme minority.

Sure, and people that already agree with you will feel good reading it, but other people who don’t agree see it as an attack. It’s pretty much impossible to slip a new idea into someone’s mind if your approach made them slam the door before even considering it. So what’s the benefit of saying it like that?

> Cooperation works if the potential damage caused by a rouge actor is sufficiently low. Otherwise, it's too easy to sabotage things. This is why we don't want random rouge states to have nukes. AI will give so much leverage to rouge actors that it will significantly shift the game theory in favour of not cooperating.

Governments successfully collectively controlling dangerous things so they don’t fall into the hands of rogue bad actors fundamentally opposes the extreme individualist every-man-for-himself perspective in every conceivable way. It’s the absolute opposite of “it’s everybody’s responsibility to protect themselves because everybody else is only going to look out for themselves.”

And when individuals have that much leverage, collective action is the only conceivable way to oppose it. Some of those things might be cultural, like mores, some might be laws, some might be more martial. I don’t see how extreme individualism even theoretically could be more powerful.

To be fair, they’ve got pretty serious potential for letting tech companies get paid for a seasoned voice actor’s unique delivery, tone, inflection, etc rather than the voice actor themselves.