Weeknote for 12/3/2023

Productivity

😐

I spent the week procrastinating again. So it’s time to recommit to my productivity tricks. But I tend to forget them because there are so many, and that’s why I need my motivational posters, which I haven’t made yet. More on that below.

AI

🙂

While procrastinating, I dove into AI images. First there was the latest meme trend—“make it more” progressions, where the user asks for an image and then has the AI push one of its qualities to an extreme. For example, this accurate portrayal of geese. Most of the series end up with cosmic imagery, which the memers of Reddit find tiresome, and I thought this response was funny.

I also started gathering images for my motivational posters. It was sometimes a struggle to convey my ideas to the AI, and it still has its own struggles with hands, so for those cases I resorted to traditional Creative Commons photography.

And to explore DALL-E 3 I generated some Christmas wallpaper for my work computer. I got a little carried away and made way too many, but it came up with some good ones.

All the while I was wrestling again with the ethics of AI images. My position is still the same. But I hope artists can somehow organize like the Hollywood writers and actors to protect their livelihoods. Maybe one of the lawsuits will gain traction. But also part of me suspects the situation for artists isn’t as dire as some feel, because plenty of consumers aren’t going to be satisfied with imagery made by non-humans.