It’s a scary moment, when you realize that nationalism is a pack of lies, like religion and being a sports fan. For me, it was slow-dawning but got a strong boost when I was in the army (1983-9, basic and reserve) the wastage and stupidity began to sink in on me and I was reading a lot of the history of other countries. It’s hard not to read stuff like The Best and The Brightest [worldcat] and start to realize that the author is not just pointing out that the emperor’s new clothes show a lot of skin, but so do all of his wise senior advisors. So, how did such a bunch of idiots accomplish this? Then, you realize that behind every Bonaparte is a Talleyrand. Behind every Trump is a Miller. And they create the sweet-smelling bullshit we are all fed as we grow up. What really did it for me was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History, [worldcat] which – my offer still stands – I will give anyone a copy of if they ask for it politely.
Reading Zinn caused me to shift my interest in history a few points to the side of where it had been focused straight on military history, and I began re-reading my favorite military histories and thinking about the political context. And/or wondering how it was pitched at the time.
This was the prompt:
a humorous sketch of two travelers on a path along a woods around 1750. they are on horseback. they are well dressed and look wealthy, one is a woman with some jewelry and the other a well-fed looking man in fine attire. standing before them on the path is a highwayman, pointing a pair of pistols at the two. the highwayman looks suave but tough, and is saying, “pursuant to the UN embargo on materials for nuclear weapons manufacture, article 2 of the NPT, we hereby sanction you all your gold and your lady’s jewelry.” there are no other people in the scene.
sketch style; perhaps in the style of arthur rackham.
The engine that produced it is Nano Banana 2. If you’re interested in using the latest and greatest image or video generation models, without having to download 50gb of data, and install obscure software, I recommend krea.com, which pulls a giant number of generators from the newest to the obsolete, and you can switch and test and everything runs in their cloud queue. It’s like Midjourney except Midjourney puts their effort into their model and Krea puts their effort into making everyone’s models available. They also have their own, natch.
I’ll make a prediction here, which is that right around now, the various engines will become meaningless. It won’t matter which is better, when they’re all better than good enough.
Also, Nano Banana and all the new hot engines, interface with or include dumbed down versions of large language models, to parse the users’ input and get an even better idea how the inputs can be shaped in terms of the model’s vocabulary. This allows much more freedom in prompting, as well as an ability to get all poetic and stuff. Or, to turn on a dime and get a very different image in a moment’s inspiration, i.e.:
a humorous sketch of two travelers on a path along a woods around 1750. they are on horseback. they are well dressed and look wealthy, one is a woman with some jewelry and the other a well-fed looking man in fine attire. standing before them on the path is a highwayman, pointing a pair of pistols at the two. the highwayman looks suave but tough, and is saying, “pursuant to the UN embargo on materials for nuclear weapons manufacture, article 2 of the NPT, we hereby sanction you all your gold and your lady’s jewelry.” there are no other people in the scene.
sketch style; perhaps in the style of charles schultz peanuts comic. Charlie Brown and Lucy are the people on horseback and Snoopy is the highwayman.
You’ll notice that Charlie Brown is muttering his characteristic “Good grief” and I didn’t even need to specify it. Don’t tell me about Snoopy’s double pistol, I noticed that.
Don’t you love the horses’ expressions?
What’s going on here: the LLM is rewriting my prompt in the process of producing the tokens for the image engine. A lot of people were asking ChatGPT to help re-write their prompts, or write them to begin with, so this evolution happened quickly.
Now that it’s getting to the point where anyone can illustrate anything with a little thought, we’re going to see the freeing of some forms of art from the chains of commercialism. Caravaggio would no longer have to paint boring saints in order to pay for his next meal – he can paint whatever he wants to; unfortunately since everyone is out of a job and global agriculture collapsed, there is no next meal.
Wikipedia has a detailed description of Zinn’s excellent A People’s History of the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States
There is a more subtle botch in the first picture. The lady’s upper legs are side saddle but she has a foot in both stirrups.
I agree that we are reaching the point where differences in the models don’t matter. A lot of the uses are going to be one off images stuck in presentations, non-public documents and memes passed between friends. For these uses it doesn’t need the technical quality that would be wanted for advertising or a movie nor does anybody care if it’s copying an existing piece of artwork.
The problem I have with the whole “are we the baddies?” thing is that it reinforces the frame that there are two sides to any conflict, one of which is “baddies”, and so by implication we are led to assume the other side must be “goodies”. (Yes, I know that’s a fallacy of formal logic, but have you met people?)
You’re some baddies – maybe even the biggest and baddest baddies, although it’s a crowded field – but you’re not the baddies. Other baddies are available.
These robbers would be a lot scarier if their flintlock pistols were actually primed to shoot. Looks like their frizzens are wide open.
Not exactly a new development. Problem is there are only baddies, admittedly with somewhat different degrees / flavours of badness :/
It still weirds me out that the truth is actually worse than the propaganda we were fed on the other side of the iron curtain.
And we come full circle. Krea: 5 fingers, Schulz 4.
So, by striving to be more correct, the AI drawing engines got it wrong.
But yes, they have picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit. We are now discussing frizzen.
See the top cartoon:
… there is no next meal.
Let them eat fakes!
Re Baddies, this is the place to remind ourselves of the wise words of thebest fictional politician, Lord Havelok Vetinari:
For more insights from Lord Vetinari, see here
Reginald Selkirk at #7 quoted Google AI as saying “Charlie Brown, along with other Peanuts characters, is generally depicted with four fingers on each hand (three fingers and one thumb), though depictions have varied to three fingers in some drawings.”
It seem odd to me to double-check one AI tool by using another, instead of checking primary sources. Schulz drew 5 fingers on the kids (4 for Snoopy). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peanuts_gang.png and spot check https://archive.org/details/peanutscomics19502000/Volume%201%20%281950%20to%201952%29/ .
Sometimes only 4 or 3 fingers are visible, but every open hand I saw has 5 fingers.
As secondary sources, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourFingeredHands under “Comic Strips” says “While the human Peanuts characters have five fingers per hand, Snoopy and his siblings have four.” and an anonymous commenter at https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeImCalvin/comments/2ua7ji/why_do_cartoon_characters_usually_only_have_four/ says Schulz “was a stickler for” drawing all five fingers.
You’ll also see Schulz drew stubby fingers, unlike here, with a different lettering style, and a much simpler use of background and details. He developed essential tremor after his heart bypass surgery in 1981, which he incorporated into his comics. This shows no sign of that. It’s Peanuts characters but not Schulz’s style.
I think the link should be to https://krea.ai and not to whoever is at https://krea.com.
No thanks, I’m not an useful idiot for the tech oligarchs, and Trump by extension. You’re one of the baddies too, indeed, only much worse for being a class traitor on top of it all. To the guillotine with you too.
Kreator P@#12:
I’m not an useful idiot for the tech oligarchs, and Trump by extension.
Wow, that’s a pretty idiotic extension – can we just call eachother idiots and leave it at that?
But, more to the point, inasmuch as you have one, I am hardly serving as a thoughtless cheerleader for our technological (specifically energy:) oppression. Indeed, in that area, I prefer to fancy myself as taking a strong anarcho-liberal stance. If you wish to accuse me of being an anarcho-libertarian, have your seconds contact mine to arrange the affair.