Speedysnail

Twitteration

In the space of a few weeks, Twitter has been taken over and brought to the brink of collapse. Welcome to hell, Elon. Like Trump, Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego. Elon. Trump. Resentment. Elon and Jack aren’t competitors, they’re collaborating. Musk doesn’t have a degree in Physics, or any technical field (archived). A recent OED Word of the Day was twitteration (n., a state of nervous excitement or agitation; anxiety, perturbation), reflecting the widespread sense that the site’s days are numbered.

If you’re looking to flip the bird the bird and embrace the mammoth, here’s a useful tool for finding some of the people you’ve been following on Twitter. It’s a couple of weeks since I set up a new account on a Mastodon server. Second time lucky, I hope—the first one I joined years ago now redirects to a porn site, which isn’t a great sign.

20 November 2022

Further Dalliances

I’ve been continuing my earlier experiments with DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion—now with added Midjourney. Click through for a gallery.

1 September 2022

Unstable Dalliances

Since my initial burst of activity with DALL-E 2 I’ve tried a few more queries on it, most of which didn’t produce much of interest, but there were a few exceptions. Things got more interesting when I was able to compare it with Stable Diffusion, which has been opening up to beta testers and let me (and thousands of others) on a few days ago. Unlike DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion is aiming to be completely open, with no holds barred, which means it’s inevitably going to be used to churn out AI-generated porn and to rip off living artists. Not the greatest advertisement for the power and promise of artificial intelligence. But judging from some of its results, I wouldn’t panic just yet (click through for a gallery)…

Stable Diffusion rendition of grizzly bears sitting at a desk

Read more…

14 August 2022

Intelligible Artifice

It seems a lifetime ago now, but as an undergraduate I took courses on Computer Graphics, Digital Image Processing and Artificial Intelligence, so it’s no surprise that I’ve been fascinated by DALL-E 2 and the results that people have been getting from it. I signed up for the wait-list two months ago, and yesterday received an invite. I’ve already burned through half of my fifty credits for the month, so had better start pacing myself… but it’s so much fun. Here’s a gallery of my best results so far.

DALL-E 2 rendition of a spaceship over Edinburgh

1 August 2022