Glad to hear during PMQs that the Aylesbury Link Road is part of Network North and will now get built.
Yes. A very odd PMQs beautifully summed up by yourself.
Starmer oddly off form, more stammered than Starmer, Everything he asked Sunak was ready for with polished reply, so not even a scratch inflicted today in an oddly flat as pancake commons.
0.0 I’m calling it.
Even Guido says this is a 'low energy' PMQs
Correct me where wrong, at Leversson enquiry Guido said he has always been completely open about what he doing - he’s an Irish Nationalist determined to bring as much chaos and pain on the English as he can manage. Why the English actually not believe him when he says this, and see themselves as useful idiots reading and spreading things from his blog? 🤷♀️
I rarely if ever quote Guido but his comment popped up on my pc and I thought it was relevant
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
Following on from Sunak announcing that HS2 cancellation funding would be available to build the Aylesbury orbital road, I missed the final question where he confirmed to a Manchester MP that "all the money saved from the HS2 cancellation will stay in the north".
Glad to hear during PMQs that the Aylesbury Link Road is part of Network North and will now get built.
Yes. A very odd PMQs beautifully summed up by yourself.
Starmer oddly off form, more stammered than Starmer, Everything he asked Sunak was ready for with polished reply, so not even a scratch inflicted today in an oddly flat as pancake commons.
Jo Coburn: FT says no talks with Canada says Canada Andrew Liar: Oh yes there are Coburn: But they're not are they? Liar: You can trust the Business Secretary. Never tells a lie
I almost feel sorry for Andrew Bowie. He knows he lying to cover for a liar, and is prepared to do so regardless of how much of a hole it makes him look.
Canada is what Starmer should have opened with. You can come to the commons and trash a city grandee, but you can’t be so undiplomatic about Canadian government calling your business Secretary a liar. How would Sunak has answered? Canadian government has it wrong, we are currently holding these talks with them?
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Indeed. This isn't about party politics or partisanship. We can't have it where the reasonable assumption is that everything said by every minister is a lie. That ministers can lie endlessly on different subjects. We need to rebuild trust in politics.
Following on from Sunak announcing that HS2 cancellation funding would be available to build the Aylesbury orbital road, I missed the final question where he confirmed to a Manchester MP that "all the money saved from the HS2 cancellation will stay in the north".
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
The Tory cupboard is quite bare, they aren't overblessed with choice
Mind you, if they are reduced to 35 MPs, the choice might be even smaller, and easier
They are a dying party that got a second wind as a result of Brexit. That hasn't gone particularly well. Starmer is bland but I fear for the country without an effective opposition given the nature of our constitution. Perhaps we'll just have to rely on the Lords....
Reform is a plaything of Farage. It'll target Labour on cultural issues but I can't really see it appealing in the red wall or to economic centrists.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Jo Coburn: FT says no talks with Canada says Canada Andrew Liar: Oh yes there are Coburn: But they're not are they? Liar: You can trust the Business Secretary. Never tells a lie
I almost feel sorry for Andrew Bowie. He knows he lying to cover for a liar, and is prepared to do so regardless of how much of a hole it makes him look.
Canada is what Starmer should have opened with. You can come to the commons and trash a city grandee, but you can’t be so undiplomatic about Canadian government calling your business Secretary a liar. How would Sunak has answered? Canadian government has it wrong, we are currently holding these talks with them?
Badenoch not at PMQs.
How can she be at PMQs when she is in Ottawa signing off the UK/Canada Trade Deal? You can’t be in two places at once moonthickie.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68349246 ..The PM was asked whether he could categorically deny Mr Staunton's claim that a senior civil servant had told him to "stall" on compensation payments, to allow the government to "limp into the election", apparently to help state finances. He did not answer the question directly, but insisted that the business secretary gave a "very clear explanation". "Kemi made a fulsome statement about this in Parliament," he responded. "She was right to do so and gave, I think, a very clear explanation of everything that's happened."..
(Or perhaps he does ?)
Sunak is saying Badenoch's explanation is full of something, so I think appropriate.
Fulsome is also I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, which is a kind of Badenoch metaphor so it works there too.
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Indeed. This isn't about party politics or partisanship. We can't have it where the reasonable assumption is that everything said by every minister is a lie. That ministers can lie endlessly on different subjects. We need to rebuild trust in politics.
I agree but I remain doubtful Starmer has the answers, especially to the big questions including the NHS, immigration and net zero
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Well yes. Putting the country first.
If you are saying this on 21st of February Big G, imagine mood of the electorate and business groups as we enter September without one. There really is no swingback for the Conservatives, only great risks of entering choppy waters of that background narrative second half of this year.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Imagine it. Jesus Christ, elected as Tory MP for Lincolnshire makes a speech in the Commons pleading for compassion for the poor, being denounced by HYUFD, MP for Cymru West as a hang-wringing un-Conservative socialist on GBeebies.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Isn't the point about a ubiquity of trash not about AI's capabilities - which are very impressive - but what we ask it to do? If you put AI in the hands of Martin Scorsese or Amis (or pick your own auteur not called Martin - pretty much anyone creative who isn't an idiot), and asked it to turn fragments of unrealised ideas they'd had into fully realised projects, then very soon it could produce some pretty astounding work.
But that looks unlikely to be what it's asked to do, which is produce immense amounts of complete tat at volume that satisfies an urge. AI YAF novels about trans vampires that sell cheaply on Amazon. AI 'films' by Twitter blueticks who think civilisation peaked with the American Pie films, etc. Or meaningless corporate self-help twaddle about awakening the 'CEO in you' or Bitcoin scams.
The restrictions on AI are not, I don't think, going to be about its capabilities, which are immense. But that market forces and humans are liable to push it towards creating the banal at great volume, rather than the unique and meaningful.
I get this point, completely
However the good AI art, I believe, will still prosper despite the mountains of dreck; just as good human art - novels, movies, music, painting - still finds a market, and sometimes does extremely well, despite the tons of tat humans also consume
It will be REALLY exciting if/when the AIs start making art for other AIs. WTF will that be like?
Jo Coburn: FT says no talks with Canada says Canada Andrew Liar: Oh yes there are Coburn: But they're not are they? Liar: You can trust the Business Secretary. Never tells a lie
I almost feel sorry for Andrew Bowie. He knows he lying to cover for a liar, and is prepared to do so regardless of how much of a hole it makes him look.
Canada is what Starmer should have opened with. You can come to the commons and trash a city grandee, but you can’t be so undiplomatic about Canadian government calling your business Secretary a liar. How would Sunak has answered? Canadian government has it wrong, we are currently holding these talks with them?
Badenoch not at PMQs.
How can she be at PMQs when she is in Ottawa signing off the UK/Canada Trade Deal? You can’t be in two places at once moonthickie.
The Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has not met with any LGBT organisations since getting the job in September 2022, but has met two groups which campaign against trans rights, according to a freedom of information request highlighted by Labour MP Ben Bradshaw #PMQs
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
They don't seem very terrifying. Hammer House of Horror-esque, or perhaps After Tales of the Unexpected.
But I do wonder if the text was done by AI: By this time I’d realised that the words you use in your prompt are super important... ... This is not a little car you are taking to the shops, this is a jet plane capable of soaring into the stratosphere. And remember, the machine is whisking these images out of the egg-white of artistic history in seconds.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
Explosive evidence from Johnny Mercer to the Afghan inquiry today + a major new headache now for Grant Shapps / No10. Accuses ex-Director of Special Forces Roly Walker and Army head Mark Carleton-Smith of concealing information over whether the SAS executed 33 unarmed Afghans (1)
Mercer says Walker and Carleton-Smith (both ex-SAS) allowed him to mislead the Commons by effectively telling him there was nothing to see when they were aware of secret email chains. “I am angry with these people. They did not do their job. I was being gamed the entire time" (2)
Blue on blue: Mercer also accuses former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace of not taking the allegations seriously enough. As Vets Minister, Mercer formally wrote to Wallace to ask permission to make a new Commons statement to correct the record. Mercer says Wallace refused him (3)
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
Is it what you want though? Does it bring an electable, centre right Conservative Party back?
Sunak and Hunt are as centre right as the Tory leadership is likely to get for the next decade, if they lose the next GE the party will likely move further to the hard right in Opposition
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Isn't the point about a ubiquity of trash not about AI's capabilities - which are very impressive - but what we ask it to do? If you put AI in the hands of Martin Scorsese or Amis (or pick your own auteur not called Martin - pretty much anyone creative who isn't an idiot), and asked it to turn fragments of unrealised ideas they'd had into fully realised projects, then very soon it could produce some pretty astounding work.
But that looks unlikely to be what it's asked to do, which is produce immense amounts of complete tat at volume that satisfies an urge. AI YAF novels about trans vampires that sell cheaply on Amazon. AI 'films' by Twitter blueticks who think civilisation peaked with the American Pie films, etc. Or meaningless corporate self-help twaddle about awakening the 'CEO in you' or Bitcoin scams.
The restrictions on AI are not, I don't think, going to be about its capabilities, which are immense. But that market forces and humans are liable to push it towards creating the banal at great volume, rather than the unique and meaningful.
I don't actually have a problem with that. Fanfiction is incredibly popular, and the video-generation routines will make possible a huge amount of fanfiction video that will provide free entertainment for many.
In fact you could argue that, by lowering the barrier to entry for creating derivative works of fiction to essentially zero, that it would provide a challenge to creative types that they would have to produce something genuinely creative to draw people into paying £lots to watch it. We might see myriad fan versions of the last series of Game of Thrones that are far superior to the version we had to pay to watch.
It would also mean that the creatives of the next generation won't have to compromise their creativity to get a studio to fund their vision to the tune of millions.
It could be a really good development for creativity, while also seeing a massive loss of jobs and a contraction in the revenue generated by the industry.
Detectives investigating the SNP’s finances have requested to re-interview staff working at the party’s headquarters.
Workers, including those who were not in place when the inquiry began, have been sent letters asking them to speak to officers. A source said that this move was being directed by the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service.
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Indeed. This isn't about party politics or partisanship. We can't have it where the reasonable assumption is that everything said by every minister is a lie. That ministers can lie endlessly on different subjects. We need to rebuild trust in politics.
I agree but I remain doubtful Starmer has the answers, especially to the big questions including the NHS, immigration and net zero
He doesn't. I fear that the structural issues are bigger than our current partisan nonsense can fix. But a good start would be to remove the problem of lying government ministers. To fix something you first have to face the truth...
Biden's uphill struggle in the ECV. Ironically, these should be 'his people' but they have fallen for the trump snakeoil.
"Galston provided The Times with data showing that while the national share of white working class voters is 35 percent, it is 45 percent in Pennsylvania, 52 percent in Michigan and 56 percent in Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won in close contests in 2020 and states that the Democrats are very likely need again this November."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68349246 ..The PM was asked whether he could categorically deny Mr Staunton's claim that a senior civil servant had told him to "stall" on compensation payments, to allow the government to "limp into the election", apparently to help state finances. He did not answer the question directly, but insisted that the business secretary gave a "very clear explanation". "Kemi made a fulsome statement about this in Parliament," he responded. "She was right to do so and gave, I think, a very clear explanation of everything that's happened."..
(Or perhaps he does ?)
Ha! You could well imagine Boris saying this, knowing exactly what it meant.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Imagine it. Jesus Christ, elected as Tory MP for Lincolnshire makes a speech in the Commons pleading for compassion for the poor, being denounced by HYUFD, MP for Cymru West as a hang-wringing un-Conservative socialist on GBeebies.
It's sad that Badenoch is imploding like this. As a Labour supporter I was really hoping that the Tories would make her leader after the election. Perhaps we'll have to make do with Braverman.
This post makes me cross. 😡
If you believe in democracy and our country, you had better be joking. We need the best possible people as PM and LOTO.
Tory Idiots signed up to labour to install Corbyn. Up against Boris it was a toss up for some voters which was worse. We were just one bad recession away from PM Corbyn.
What did Tories installing Corbyn actually achieve for the Tories? Extra time in office longer than they should have been there? Well maybe that’s not particularly sensible, if it results in a support crash. Under 150 Tories in the next parliament is no actual opposition to what government is doing for at least one of multiple terms in office.
And then observing all this bad for your opponent, you then wish the same for your own side in your post.
Yeah sorry I'm a bad man. To be honest I don't see the Tories forming an alternative government any time soon so I don't think it matters much who they choose but I'd love it if they went down the rabbit hole for a few years, they are the chief architects of this country's problems and they deserve everything they get.
🤷♀️ To sign up to the Tory party just to vote Badenoch or Braverman and ensure the destruction of UK Conservatism continues, is undemocratic and unpatriotic.
Er that is not what I'm suggesting, I would never join a political party I disagreed with in order to vote for a duff leader for them, I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I was merely opining that I'd like to see them vote for a duff leader themselves, something I'm sure they are capable of without my help.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
RIP the conservative party
Your aspirations will ensure the conservatives will not be on office for decades
Biden's uphill struggle in the ECV. Ironically, these should be 'his people' but they have fallen for the trump snakeoil.
"Galston provided The Times with data showing that while the national share of white working class voters is 35 percent, it is 45 percent in Pennsylvania, 52 percent in Michigan and 56 percent in Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won in close contests in 2020 and states that the Democrats are very likely need again this November."
I was reasonably confident Biden would make it until the last few weeks as more worrying polling plus his apparent further mental decline have changed the equation.
We need to be seriously planning for a second Trump administration that will be far more hostile to Europe and NATO than the first one. Frankly I think that's coming one way or another with or without Trump.
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Well yes. Putting the country first.
If you are saying this on 21st of February Big G, imagine mood of the electorate and business groups as we enter September without one. There really is no swingback for the Conservatives, only great risks of entering choppy waters of that background narrative second half of this year.
It's over for the Tories. Absolutely over. We didn't do what we said we'd do and did the things we said we wouldn't. The longer Sunak delays the election date the angrier the electorate are going to get.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
Jenrick wont have a seat.
Annoyingly most of the likely candidates probably will. Mordaunt the only other frontrunner in serious jeopardy.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Hoyle about to rule whether he will allow the SKS not a real ceasefire ceasefire amendment to be discussed.
If its not discussed and SKS asks Lab MPs to abstain on SNP proposal i predict around 100 Lab MPs rebel
Any mention of the hostages/Hamas ceasing violence on the SNP proposal? While it's all a bit odd of us to be placing so much significance on something we have almost no influence over it is a interesting barometer of where our parties and MPs lie.
Looks like the Greens are going for the antisemitic dogwhistle:
Stop arming Israel Prosecute war criminals Sanction Israel's political leaders Bar Israel from sporting and musical events
No mention of Hamas violence or the hostages being raped and tortured then.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
RIP the conservative party
Your aspirations will ensure the conservatives will not be on office for decades
Though people said the same when the rightwing Thatcher replaced Heath as Conservative leader in 1975, she was initially considered 'unelectable' by the media and establishment and One Nation types within her own party and the centrist PM Callaghan led her as preferred PM even into the 1979 general election campaign. However the poor economy under his government meant she won anyway
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Hoyle about to rule whether he will allow the SKS not a real ceasefire ceasefire amendment to be discussed.
If its not discussed and SKS asks Lab MPs to abstain on SNP proposal i predict around 100 Lab MPs rebel
Any mention of the hostages/Hamas ceasing violence on the SNP proposal? While it's all a bit odd of us to be placing so much significance on something we have almost no influence over it is a interesting barometer of where our parties and MPs lie.
Looks like the Greens are going for the antisemitic dogwhistle:
Stop arming Israel Prosecute war criminals Sanction Israel's political leaders Bar Israel from sporting and musical events
No mention of Hamas violence or the hostages being raped and tortured then.
One thing that has not been mentioned but it would be good if MPs acknowledged is the protests going on against Hamas in the Jabalia refugee camp.
R4 this morning noted, in relation to Israel's potential prohibition of visitors to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, how Israel's 20% Arab population, just like 90% of the rest of the Arab world, had and has not been vigorously protesting in support of Hamas for some obscure reason.
There is, proportionately, likely more protests against Israel in Trafalgar Square of a Saturday afternoon, than there is in the entire Arab world.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
The 3 compensation schemes are being run by the Post Office, whose Chair was Henry Staunton. What - exactly - did he do to speed things up during his year and a bit in charge?
Note: the fact that the wrongdoers- the Post Office - are in charge of compensation is itself a disgrace.
I mean it has taken several years on PB before I had the opportunity to use the word plasticity. In context. Responding cogently (imo) to some point or other about the arts.
With Badenoch and Braverman's stocks declining, perhaps the case for backing Priti Patel as leader of the opposition is getting stronger.
Jesus
Now that would be amazing !!!!!
Actually it’s a serious proposition. Safe seat. Experience, elder stateswomen in party. Off the ship long enough not to be remembered for its sinking. Right of the party. And if Badenoch and Braverman crash and burn in the contest, Patel is natural home for their votes.
It could happen.
It will be between those 3 and Jenrick most likely who is the ERG candidate in the next Conservative leadership contest, assuming Sunak loses the next general election.
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
RIP the conservative party
Your aspirations will ensure the conservatives will not be on office for decades
Though people said the same when the rightwing Thatcher replaced Heath as Conservative leader in 1975, she was initially considered 'unelectable' by the media and establishment and One Nation types within her own party and the centrist PM Callaghan led her as preferred PM even into the 1979 general election campaign. However the poor economy under his government meant she won anyway
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68349246 ..The PM was asked whether he could categorically deny Mr Staunton's claim that a senior civil servant had told him to "stall" on compensation payments, to allow the government to "limp into the election", apparently to help state finances. He did not answer the question directly, but insisted that the business secretary gave a "very clear explanation". "Kemi made a fulsome statement about this in Parliament," he responded. "She was right to do so and gave, I think, a very clear explanation of everything that's happened."..
(Or perhaps he does ?)
Ha! You could well imagine Boris saying this, knowing exactly what it meant.
What do they teach them at Winchester these days?
They teach them to keep the discussion well away from the fact that Rishi did not answer the question. (Which means of course that it would have been dangerous for him to commit himself to particular words. Which means either they know they are or think they may be in the wrong).
He maybe also knows that 'fulsome' sounds like 'full' but has a different meaning. He also knows that 'clear' sounds like it is correct but doesn't mean 'true'.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
'In a written statement to Parliament, Mr Shapps confirmed "an anomaly did occur" during the test on 30 January this year, but said Trident is "the most reliable weapons system in the world".'
Hoyle about to rule whether he will allow the SKS not a real ceasefire ceasefire amendment to be discussed.
If its not discussed and SKS asks Lab MPs to abstain on SNP proposal i predict around 100 Lab MPs rebel
Any mention of the hostages/Hamas ceasing violence on the SNP proposal? While it's all a bit odd of us to be placing so much significance on something we have almost no influence over it is a interesting barometer of where our parties and MPs lie.
Looks like the Greens are going for the antisemitic dogwhistle:
Stop arming Israel Prosecute war criminals Sanction Israel's political leaders Bar Israel from sporting and musical events
No mention of Hamas violence or the hostages being raped and tortured then.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
This is not fruitful. It is my job to understand creativity, it is not yours
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
pure and utter bollox, surely he was not a native English speaker.
At the conclusion of PMQs there were an extraordinary number of lengthy points of order from Labour mps
It now turns out Starmer was with Hoyle having a furious row over the amendments choice and his mps were delaying the decision to give Starmer the time
The SNP are incandescent and I doubt we have heard the last of this controversy
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
Off topic, but I thought I'd give a frequent commenter here some help in his efforts to write a book on the un-American diet.
There is a whole class of foods that contain a known carcinogen, but are promoted by many governments in the US. For example, my own little suburb of Kirkland runs, every year, an Octoberfest.
The health damages from these foods are well known, and can be especially dangerous for unborn babies. They are a plague in some of our native American communities, keeping them trapped in poverty and disfunction.
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Well yes. Putting the country first.
If you are saying this on 21st of February Big G, imagine mood of the electorate and business groups as we enter September without one. There really is no swingback for the Conservatives, only great risks of entering choppy waters of that background narrative second half of this year.
It's over for the Tories. Absolutely over. We didn't do what we said we'd do and did the things we said we wouldn't. The longer Sunak delays the election date the angrier the electorate are going to get.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
I went up it as a kid. It seemed unutterably futuristic back then.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
You're not wrong. And the timing? Putin at the gate, Trump menacing NATO?
Fuck everything else, make sure our missiles are working
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
We have come to the point in the political cycle that everything the government does is failing and the only solution now is for a new start with an early GE
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
It's an ugly looking thing in the wrong place. Sticking up out of lovely Fitzrovia
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
Jeez. It sounds like the wing simply.... fell apart
????
Is it wise of us to have a nuclear deterrent that is dependent upon another country? Is it in the US's interest for us to have a functioning system or would it be better that we didn't so we'd then be more reliant on Uncle Sam?
Pity neither Sarah Munby nor Grant Shapps are being called to answer questions about the memo.
Of course not.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68146054 ...The revelations uncovered by the BBC also raise serious questions for the public inquiry by Sir Wyn Williams, as to whether it is adequately scrutinising what the government knew about the Post Office's internal investigations. In UKGI's 2022 statement to the inquiry, there was no reference to Tim Parker's letter to Baroness Neville-Rolfe of 21 June 2016, notifying her he was calling off Deloitte's investigation. In 2018, two years after completing his review, Sir Jonathan Swift, formerly First Treasury Counsel - the top civil lawyer at Her Majesty's Treasury - was appointed to be a High Court judge. He received a knighthood in the same year. However, in the list of upcoming witnesses at the Williams inquiry, his name is absent...,/i>
I see the shiny new parliamentary precedent is that previous precedents should be dumped to make things easier for the 'main' parties. Hoyle is Michael Martin level fckn useless.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
pure and utter bollox, surely he was not a native English speaker.
Much as Picasso was influenced by primitive African art Hopkins was influenced by primitive Welsh poetry that relies for its effect on a curious concatenation of colliding consonants (this sentence being an example).
Comments
It could happen.
Well, one of them is a lie...
Badenoch not at PMQs.
Reform is a plaything of Farage. It'll target Labour on cultural issues but I can't really see it appealing in the red wall or to economic centrists.
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
Most art historians would agree that it is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Listening to PMQ.
Why is Rishi Sunk referring to 2019 as 'The Last Government'.
Does the Prime Minister have a problem being associated with a Government in which he was a Minister from January 2018?
Fulsome is also I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, which is a kind of Badenoch metaphor so it works there too.
If you are saying this on 21st of February Big G, imagine mood of the electorate and business groups as we enter September without one. There really is no swingback for the Conservatives, only great risks of entering choppy waters of that background narrative second half of this year.
However the good AI art, I believe, will still prosper despite the mountains of dreck; just as good human art - novels, movies, music, painting - still finds a market, and sometimes does extremely well, despite the tons of tat humans also consume
It will be REALLY exciting if/when the AIs start making art for other AIs. WTF will that be like?
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/02/18/i-agree-with-david-gauke/
The standard government line never actually specifies what pace.
https://archive.ph/dc2mP#selection-1981.81-1981.300
They don't seem very terrifying. Hammer House of Horror-esque, or perhaps After Tales of the Unexpected.
But I do wonder if the text was done by AI:
By this time I’d realised that the words you use in your prompt are super important...
...
This is not a little car you are taking to the shops, this is a jet plane capable of soaring into the stratosphere. And remember, the machine is whisking these images out of the egg-white of artistic history in seconds.
But - as you say, not your concern
If that candidate gets to the final 2 with Tory MPs then yes they likely win the membership vote
If its not discussed and SKS asks Lab MPs to abstain on SNP proposal i predict around 100 Lab MPs rebel
Mercer says Walker and Carleton-Smith (both ex-SAS) allowed him to mislead the Commons by effectively telling him there was nothing to see when they were aware of secret email chains. “I am angry with these people. They did not do their job. I was being gamed the entire time" (2)
Blue on blue: Mercer also accuses former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace of not taking the allegations seriously enough. As Vets Minister, Mercer formally wrote to Wallace to ask permission to make a new Commons statement to correct the record. Mercer says Wallace refused him (3)
https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1760294005399851062
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
In fact you could argue that, by lowering the barrier to entry for creating derivative works of fiction to essentially zero, that it would provide a challenge to creative types that they would have to produce something genuinely creative to draw people into paying £lots to watch it. We might see myriad fan versions of the last series of Game of Thrones that are far superior to the version we had to pay to watch.
It would also mean that the creatives of the next generation won't have to compromise their creativity to get a studio to fund their vision to the tune of millions.
It could be a really good development for creativity, while also seeing a massive loss of jobs and a contraction in the revenue generated by the industry.
Workers, including those who were not in place when the inquiry began, have been sent letters asking them to speak to officers. A source said that this move was being directed by the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-staff-to-be-re-interviewed-by-police-investigating-party-finances-wsq0jkzkb
"Galston provided The Times with data showing that while the national share of white working class voters is 35 percent, it is 45 percent in Pennsylvania, 52 percent in Michigan and 56 percent in Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won in close contests in 2020 and states that the Democrats are very likely need again this November."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/opinion/biden-trump-working-class.html
https://electionresults.parliament.uk/election/2019-12-12/Compare/County/Devon#3/Buckinghamshire;3/Hertfordshire;3/Lincolnshire;3/Kent;3/Hereford & Worcester;3/Essex;3/Hampshire;3/Dorset;3/Cornwall;3/Surrey;3/East Sussex;3/West Sussex;
Your aspirations will ensure the conservatives will not be on office for decades
We need to be seriously planning for a second Trump administration that will be far more hostile to Europe and NATO than the first one. Frankly I think that's coming one way or another with or without Trump.
@montie
It's over for the Tories. Absolutely over. We didn't do what we said we'd do and did the things we said we wouldn't. The longer Sunak delays the election date the angrier the electorate are going to get.
https://twitter.com/montie/status/1758404316631531751
https://twitter.com/Harris_X_/status/1760052845871587466
Trump: 47%
Biden: 38%
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Looks like the Greens are going for the antisemitic dogwhistle:
Stop arming Israel
Prosecute war criminals
Sanction Israel's political leaders
Bar Israel from sporting and musical events
No mention of Hamas violence or the hostages being raped and tortured then.
https://twitter.com/khalidi79397/status/1760069569173950833
One thing that has not been mentioned but it would be good if MPs acknowledged is the protests going on against Hamas in the Jabalia refugee camp.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1760095905267564586
Donald Trump 45%
Joe Biden 41%
Someone else 10%
Among Independents:
Donald Trump 39%
Joe Biden 31%
Someone else 21%
How many LAB support the SNP motion
How many LAB don't support the LAB amendment
Presumably CON will vote against SNP and LAB motions and support their own?
"Trident missile test fails for second time in a row"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68355395
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
My American friends are generally convinced Trump is gonna win, but that could be the fear getting to them
They think the young are gonna abstain on Biden, because Gaza, likewise minority voters, and Trump's base is, as ever, more fired up. DYOR
Pity neither Sarah Munby nor Grant Shapps are being called to answer questions about the memo.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
There is, proportionately, likely more protests against Israel in Trafalgar Square of a Saturday afternoon, than there is in the entire Arab world.
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
Note: the fact that the wrongdoers- the Post Office - are in charge of compensation is itself a disgrace.
He maybe also knows that 'fulsome' sounds like 'full' but has a different meaning. He also knows that 'clear' sounds like it is correct but doesn't mean 'true'.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Really? Like a SMLE? or a Vickers .303 HMG?
calls for the immediate release of all hostages taken by Hamas
I have pulled rank, to end the debate. Sorry
It now turns out Starmer was with Hoyle having a furious row over the amendments choice and his mps were delaying the decision to give Starmer the time
The SNP are incandescent and I doubt we have heard the last of this controversy
There is a whole class of foods that contain a known carcinogen, but are promoted by many governments in the US. For example, my own little suburb of Kirkland runs, every year, an Octoberfest.
The health damages from these foods are well known, and can be especially dangerous for unborn babies. They are a plague in some of our native American communities, keeping them trapped in poverty and disfunction.
(Here's a reminder from yesterday's NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/well/eat/red-wine-heart-health.html )
Now, there's a surprise.
"Boeing 757-200 Diverted From Route After Suffering Damage To One Of Its Wings"
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1760302382905237815?s=20
Jeez. It sounds like the wing simply.... fell apart
????
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It seemed unutterably futuristic back then.
Fuck everything else, make sure our missiles are working
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68146054
...The revelations uncovered by the BBC also raise serious questions for the public inquiry by Sir Wyn Williams, as to whether it is adequately scrutinising what the government knew about the Post Office's internal investigations.
In UKGI's 2022 statement to the inquiry, there was no reference to Tim Parker's letter to Baroness Neville-Rolfe of 21 June 2016, notifying her he was calling off Deloitte's investigation.
In 2018, two years after completing his review, Sir Jonathan Swift, formerly First Treasury Counsel - the top civil lawyer at Her Majesty's Treasury - was appointed to be a High Court judge. He received a knighthood in the same year.
However, in the list of upcoming witnesses at the Williams inquiry, his name is absent...,/i>
Hoyle is Michael Martin level fckn useless.