You can fool some of the AI some of the time...
A fib is still only as good as the fibber.
Mary and I spent a few, delightful, early New Year’s Eve hours in the home of friends who somehow always draw together smart, friendly and wildly un-cliquish gatherings; low-key, very foodie, pot-luck, game night, chat fests and hangs.
I don’t know quite how they pull it off so consistently, but they do, and whenever we are invited to attend one of these friendly, dread-free gathers we try to say yes. They consistently end up being more fun and much more interesting than one might reasonably expect of such affairs, with a noticeable, generous, grown-up balance of active listening to speaking and almost nothing in the realm of flaming, attention whore ego.
This one was no different as far as the fascinating mix of people, though there were no table games or spins of old, classic vinyl downstairs in the Lava Lounge this time, just friendly noshing and conversation in the main floor, living room, dining room, kitchen space while the world outside grew dark and the year drew to a close.
One conversation that especially fascinated me was a catch-up with a woman I consider brilliant, an author/chef with several very cool cookbooks to her credit, who has, at least for the time being stopped writing altogether because of AI.
Yes, AI…
Artificial Intelligence.
Her sense, she explained is that AI has pretty much destroyed any ability to make a living in her field of food writing, and that based on a few, early experiments of her own, it (AI), actually does a pretty good job of things and in far, far less time. So, rather than patch and don her Don Quixote armor and continue to ride out across the plains to fight the giant windmills of progress, she explained, she has simply turned her efforts elsewhere. Now she creates healthy, delicious, airplane meals and picnics for jet-setting billionaires. No, I am not kidding.
This kinda blew my mind and really got me thinking.
So here is the inflection point in this story where I could seamlessly switch over and begin fanning the flames of outrage and fear, slowly building up that easy-target, straw-man into the outrageous, boogey man of your nightmares. He’s coming for you and your job too!!! Be afraid! Be very, very afraid. And mad. Be mad as hell!
That shit sells.
Let’s face it, I’d probably get more readers that way. Probably more comments and likes, and reposts too. I don’t love that that’s true, but I think it probably is.
Instead, I’m now going to disappoint a few of you and bore others, partially deflating that sweet, addictive, pressure balloon of outrage, …in this case, AI outrage, while hopefully intriguing or simply confusing others enough to stick with me here a little longer.
What the heck does a pretty little Fox Sparrow have to do with friendly, New Year’s Eve gatherings and cookbook authorship, or AI for that matter? Why am I showing you a portrait of an exquisite little Passerella iliaca songbird that I met day before yesterday, along the trail, who, as I quite deliberately dawdled and tarried, took a break from scratching through the damp, fallen leaves below to flit up and perch for more than an entire minute on a black, plastic sprinkler head, a kindness that I am not at all accustomed to when it comes to normally shy, Fox Sparrows, but one I most certainly asked for. It was a gift with a flaw.
Notice the small, squarish bit of leaf stuck on Mr. Fox’s outermost, right, toe/claw and the one, wild, feather/hair sticking out at an angle on the back of his neck. These small, distractions are super easy fixes with a program like Photoshop, which, with a little practice can easily make them disappear entirely within a matter of seconds.
But what about the visual affront of that rain-wet, shiny, black sprinkler head, with all its eye-catching textures and reflections? What the heck does a fella (or gal), do with that newfangled, Darth Vader looking hootenany, to keep it from stealing your eyeballs away from the intended star of the photo, that beautiful, calm, poetically feathered little sparrow person? Go ahead and look again. I’ll wait.
And all of a sudden we’re back, flirting with the sweet-talk and promises of that naughty suitor, that technological hussy, Artificial Intelligence.
I could try to ignore Darth Sprinkler and pretend it’s not a problem, but you and I both know, you can’t not see it there. So maybe I just ‘select’ it (draw around it), and try to give it the old ‘clone war’ treatment. But wouldn’t that leave my little, bird friend simply floating there in the air, levitating somehow, wings folded while in perfect standing posture. Total bullshit.
You would no longer trust my image to be real and with almost every one of you, some part of your brain (conscious or …not quite), would be trying to figure out just why those alarm bells were going off.
So what I want (It’s still close enough to Christmas for the wish list part of my brain to keep interjecting itself into all manner of scenarios), is for this lovely little bird to be standing atop something that looks real and believable, and not at all fake or distracting, which of course would be a lie, but, you know, more of a helpful little fib than some outrageous, Pam Bondi sized whopper. We don’t need Epstein files magnitudes of chicanery here. We’ll keep it small and just call it research.
New iterations of good old, reliable Photoshop seem hellbent these days on prompting me at every juncture to come over to the dark side, meaning (in less than ‘hero’s-quest’ language), that below each open image there resides a little box that asks you if you’d like to ‘AI’ that picture you’re working one in one magical way or another.
Behold the gateway drug. And the slippery slope.
“Why yes!” I say to myself. I would very much like to AI the hell out of that unfortunate Star Wars helmet dealy-bob, blast it out from under Fox-boy’s skritchy little toes and replace it with a groovy looking rock, or a stump, or well, something that looks properly woodsy and bucolic, rather than gawd-awful, outer-spacey, bad-guy shiny. Is that too much to ask?
And so I roughly select the Darth Vader sprinkler head upon which my feathered friend so nobly stands and type into the prompt box some variation of, “replace with tree stump or rock,” then set the AI beast to grinding.
Thirty seconds. Then sixty. Then ninety …and bingo. Only not so much, Bingo. The ‘rock’ looks like it was pooped out of a rock pooping machine designed by a fourth grader. (No offense intended to fourth graders.)
AI gives me three options to click between and all of them look like shit. Nope, again, not kidding.
I back up a few steps and try tightening up my prompt, removing any mention of ‘rock’ and asking instead to simply replace the ‘Darth’ thingy with a ‘tree branch.’
Again with the grinding. Again with the thirty, sixty, then ninety-ish seconds of guilty anticipation. And again, …ding. Three woodsy-er uhhh, branch variations on a theme, the best of which I’m showing you here. Gaahhhhhh!!! We’ve gone from Darth Sprinkler Head to Edward Scissortoes.
OK, ok, let’s go back to the prompt and tighten up our thinking a little more. What if we ask for a tree stump instead of a tree branch? Bam!
Oh, and maybe a mossy tree stump, you know, to soften the landing and maybe call out a little less attention to those long, curvy bird toes. (Click on the images to see them larger.)
Hmmm, could be worse. I know this and you know it, cuz we’ve already seen so much worse. Still feels pretty ‘meh,’ to me, and given that I’m a total, half-hearted noob to this new ‘process’ of cheating (I mean photo enhancement), I feel absolutely certain that anyone with a younger and more plastic mind, and just a bit more training could come much closer to a believable look and feel just in their first attempt.
Hello, geezer brain, is that me you’re looking for?
I could take any one of these new, mossy variations and ‘texture it up’ a bit in another app to soften the edges and hide the weird, lack of grain around the mossy, stump replacement (look closely at the edges, just above), and I daresay, in this instantaneous, internet realm of momentary glances and fleeting attentions, you’d never know you’d been duped. In fact, in 95% of the cases, I’d bet on it. (See below)
So, do I think AI could think up a believable Fox Sparrow out of thin air? Nope. It can barely deal with putting something believable under a little guy’s toes. And do I think that AI could think up such a weird story, spider-jumping from a friendly conversation with a cookbook author at a New Years party, to a Fox Sparrow sitting atop a Darth Sprinkler, to the minor ethical and artistic dilemma we’re exploring here, now?
Hell no!
Time will tell just how dark this new ‘dark side’ is capable of becoming. Like you, I keep seeing these AI generated films and hearing these AI generated voices of famous people saying things they never actually said. Television commercials and bullshit, fear mongering, click-bait snippets on every form of social media. I read that a rather horrifying number of students are getting AI to write their term papers these days and that it’s a real problem for high schools and college profs who want their students to actually learn and demonstrate certain skills in preparation for real life, beyond.
It’s a brand new year and definitely a new era. People quitting what they love and are really good at because the proliferation and proficiency of AI has killed their ability to compete and make a living. Sheesh! Or at the very least, convinced them that it will.
We storytellers are guaranteed nothing in this fight, of course, but we still have something AI cannot yet even begin to imagine. And it ain’t going away.
Be brave and be weird, my friends, just as weird as your achey, joyous heart feels and your quirky, untamed mind thinks! Tell me a story. Take me on some wild ride that only your imagination can conceive. Make AI your bitch when it comes down to mossy perches for the birdys you call into frame, but waste no moment on fear that it is about to replace the spark and dance of heartfelt imagination. Tend to your heart. And write, or paint, or dance like it’s the only one you’ll ever have.
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Thank you for this. I think there's a value, actually, in showing the leaf bit, the unsmoothed feather and the sprinkler head, because it shows us the real nature of the bird and its environment. I will confess to cropping my own garden photos to downplay or eliminate non-plant messiness, but with a recent crop, I decided to leave in the mess of my potting table in the distant background. Not only did the composition as a whole look better that way, I decided gardeners could use the solace of seeing that other gardens also include some inevitable mess. We're not all wealthy estate owners with paid garden staff. And the birds who grace our back yards are gracing--guess what!--our real back yards. And thank goodness for that!
One of the things about Nature that I admire is how it’s messy, imperfect; one could even say dirty. Accurate representations, visual or otherwise, should be the same. A disinfected Nature is no longer natural.