Please make this thing the community logo
Ed…Ward…
Noooo… Why the fuck would someone use AI for this instead of, I dunno, inviting local artists, including the local kid artists (seriously, if you’re a creative as a kid, participating in a big community art project like a town mural would be a dream opportunity), to paint that mural?! Leave AI out of shit like this!!
Seems like the title is misleading. Apparently it’s put up privately by a landlord and not actually a community owned/operated thing.
Ok, but still why would you do that? Why not hire an artist or get lcoal school kids to make something if you want to display a mural. There is no shortage of artists willing to do it, and anything they made would looks much better than this for a similar cost
Oh, I totally agree. I just wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t a community organized space. I thought about adding to the comment, but it got a bit wordy so I posted it as is.
For what it’s worth, an independent landlord would have a much more difficult time setting up a legitimate kids mural thing than the local municipality would for a park or train station or something. I’m not saying that’s an excuse to use AI, just that it’s not done as often as community art events are so I can’t imagine it would have occurred to them or seemed worth their effort. Presumably, it’s something they do for fun to add to the community atmosphere. I feel like they probably got scammed somewhat. I imagine they would not have put it up had they known about the quality of the image. Feels very boomer coded to me, but maybe I’m projecting based on some older people in my life. I could totally see one of them paying for something they think is going to be nice for the local festivities and then some random subcontractor shows up with this which they never even looked at or approved. They might have gone in knowing it was AI, but I can’t imagine not at least looking at it before approving it, so I feel like they just went with the cheapest option and didn’t think much more about it. Not that it’s an excuse or anything. I just wanted to make sure people knew the article suggests that this is not funded by the government.
Like I eluded to twice, participating in a community mural project would be a creative kid’s dream opportunity.
I’ve been in a few stores/public places that used self-generated images for murals like this. The reason they’re doing it is because it’s free. It used to be some graphic design student’s first job but they can now cut that position entirely. Who cares if the end result is liable to summon unholy extradimensional horrors?
Letting the community paint a mural could also be free at least to the people participating, and as I stated, would be a dream opportunity for particularly creative kids in the community, although I don’t know about current kids given I grew up at a time when huge wooden playgrounds put up by the community were a thing.
Sadly the one where I live got torn down and replaced with a modern plastic facility after 25 years, but the art tile walls and towers made by the members of the community who originally built the wooden facility, were all preserved.
-sigh- Lawton, OK, you used to be cool once…
My sad prediction:
AI won’t get much better. Its current state is the peak, since it’s already been trained on everything the internet has to offer, regardless of copyright, and is already consuming unsustainable amounts of compute, and therefore energy.
But it also won’t go away. We’re just not living in a world where a product that sucks will fail anymore, as long as it’s pushed by big corporations.
And they’ll keep pushing it, cause if they stop, they’ll go bankrupt.
So where does it lead? A shift in culture! AI will keep being pushed down our throats until we start to accept it. It’ll become an “art style”. I think it already is.
Just look at this year’s Coca-Cola christmas ads. One of the largest corporations in the world uses AI for its most important ad campaign of the year, regardless of all the obvious errors in it. This is the new normal, and anyone criticizing images of humans with crab claw hands will just be called a luddite.That’s a little extreme.
“AI” that actually works is much more modest than you think: it’s trained on small, focused, curated, legally licensed datasets mixed with synthetic data. It’s small and task focused. It’s heavily augmented and constrained to actually do what it’s supposed to, and not a bajillion other things.
It’s getting lower power. If bitnet takes off, inference costs will plummet, which means a lot will probably just be done on phones, with more control from the user.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is still going to be sloppy shit. This kind of stuff is going to be the norm, and way worse.
…But I think a “race to the bottom” will be a mixed bag, not pure cyberpunk. There’s a point where some uses get so cheap and “good enough,” it’s just too cheap to sell. Like someone trying to charge money for basic text editors. This is why the tech bros push the existential AGI angle so hard, as “devolving” into sets of specialized tools means their profit scheme implodes… Hence, hopefully, lazy landlords will have something a little less shitty to make an ad with than ChatGPT.
Alternate title:
“Is it possible to vandalize your own building? For one landlord, the answer is an emphatic YES”
Chthonic: of or relating to the underworld
“What in the AI is going on here"
Lol this is my new favorite phrase. :-P
