“Ogbogu wasn’t familiar with Hollie Mengert’s work at all. He was helping another Stable Diffusion user on Reddit who was struggling to fine-tune a model on Hollie’s work and getting lackluster results. He refined the image training set, got to work, and published the results the following day. He told me the training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai, and cost less than $2.”
“This shift away needing to add ‘more emoji’ to creating more experiences that leverage the existing set is an important evolution for the future of emoji relevancy. Unicode can’t encode every concept in the world, every ingredient in the planet, every muscle contortion of your face.”
“I’ve never felt so conflicted using an emerging technology as DALL·E 2, which feels like borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”
“Veil’s website hadn’t been saved, and Pictures for Sad Children was hard to track down in its entirety. The last, tangible vestige of the comic came from those who had ordered a copy of the book. … They resolved to share the collection, mailing copies to whoever hadn’t cracked its spine yet.”
“For the next handful of years, his work was passed by millions of cars, with a precious group of them aware of the quiet rebellion whizzing by above. For some, it was a statement about doing it yourself; for others, a statement about the nature of art in a highway-ruled metropolis.”
“Here is where it gets interesting. If I use the same prompt and add ‘Amazing awesome and epic’, the picture gets noticeably better. ‘Oh,’ goes the neural net, ‘you wanted a good picture’. And how good a picture you get depends on exactly how you ask for it. There are several phrases you can add that seem to make things better, like ‘trending on artstation’ or ‘unreal engine’.”
“For years, Judy Malloy would not get the credit she deserved for being one of the earliest pioneers of ‘electronic literature,’ as the literary hypertext movement came to be called: pieces by men writing later became more famous and better-studied.”
“The concern trolling book lovers miss the point that other people’s bookshelves don’t exist to please or displease them: they exist because the owner of the rainbow shelves likes their books to be that way.”
“Going back to the Gossaert painting, I could now see that the documents were strung together and hanging from a peg. The leaves appear to be blank because they are hung upside down and back to front, with the oldest items adjacent to the thong and vellum label, and the most recent items near the reinforced point.”
“The colors are different, but decisions are still being made to make them as bold as possible. The green of Gwen’s outfit, as seen here, can only exist online — which is to say, in RGB colorspace.”
“Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors.”
“I did consider running the Peanuts text through a GPT2 text generator, allowing the system to write the words as well — novel words, in the style of Peanuts. Would this take me closer to committing a crime? If the resulting output becomes indistinguishable from original works, is the model guilty, or am I?”