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Apr 28, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

It's OK, most artists make nothing at all. Much like how Ned Flanders feels in his skiing outfit.

Ai mostly generates agreeable nice looking art works that most graduates from aussie art schools would be unable to make in the first place. I know one woman who can actually paint like your average midjouney out put, her works sometimes sell for $15k, but mostly she works as a teacher and yoga instructor. What Ai is really doing is pointing out that art production is at best a ponzi scheme, where the winner takes all, at worst it's a social welfare charity for the indolent and feckless university crowd. I haven't been able to get Ai to write a genuine rubbish art statement and it can't emulate my wonky cartoons. Which saves me from being upset about it.

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Honestly, this makes me feel better.

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It's weird AI was suppose to free us from dull, repetitive work so we could create art and write stories. Instead the AI does the art and we are still stuck doing the dull repetitive work and still have a 5 day week, in the 21 century with the means of production the human race now commands that's bullshit.

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When I saw the column this morning I thought you'd specified teddy bears in your prompt to the AI, so it's a bit wild it came up with it on its own. The fourth image is *chef's kiss* for the tone of the column.

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you made the right choice - i gravitated directly to that bottom right one as well. Seems like those AI generators are still struggling with hands/fingers though. That will be the marker of end times when they get those right - means they understand their function and importance and will destroy us for it. ;)

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I've been seeing a few of those 'are you a robot' thingos where you used to have to click on all the cars, etc, but where the images are AI generated, so now you get click on all the 'rabbits playing football', etc. I assume one no longer has to pay royalties on the photographs.

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I thought those things were supposed to be training AI for self drive vehicles.

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I thought that they were training AI for passing "are you a robot" questionnaires. How difficult can that be? I was quite surprised to hear that the ChatGPT jail-break attempt involved paying a human (through Amazon mechanical turk) to solve one for it...

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