Saturday, May 27, 2023

 



For a week that's been so quiet, it's also been "eventful" -- if that's a word you'd choose for "social media hijinks." This was the week when my Facebook account was cloned, and people I've known for years have received anything up to FIVE friend requests from me. Naturally, they've been reporting the nonsense left and right, and what does FB do? Assigns an AI to check whatever criteria it uses to make up its dense cybernetic mind, and then calmly tells me, via email, that the cloned about is me. That, in fact, it's me out there, pestering my friends and then complaining about myself to admin, with requests to have myself deleted. Oh ... suuuuure. Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Meh.

So the week turned into a puddle of anxiety which in no way endears me to the whole rat circus of social media. I'm a hair away from dropping the whole thing and walking away. I have a bunch of blogs (which precious few people look at), but Facebook isn't doing much for me lately: it's more of an aggravation than a pleasure. Harrumph.

Anyway -- I did get some painting done. The big project was The Dragon and His Boy, in comic art style. Plus a nice landscape or two, plus a portrait of an elven warrior woman, which derives from AI but was massively painted. Hey, I do that much painting on an image, I sign it. I wouldn't sign something that was right of the AI engine, but the one I use mostly -- Playground -- doesn't often produce images that are good enough to fly solo without a lot of painting. So I get lots of images, but the AI hands me a whale of a lot of work...

Mind you, there's a new AI just debuting at the moment: Imagine.art ... and this one has potential. It's producing images that are not too bad at all, without any work from the prompter. Now, these, below, I would not sign off on, because all I did was dodge and burn, balance, resize and crop...



... those were just too easy to generate. They're simply not my work. So... 

I might look at using Imagine in the future, when/if I have a cash flow. I do need to generate AI elements to be recomposited into complex paintings, and Imagine is certainly doing a decent job of providing them. Right now, 80% of the icons on the site flash up a "coming soon" message when clicked, so ... not yet. I'm not laying down cash before they have it fully functional!

That's all from me, for this post. More soon.