“Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.”
“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”
“Put simply, the numbers don’t add up. Data from Patreon and Substack suggests the average conversion rate from follower to paying fan is about 5%. This means a creator would need a total fanbase of 20,000 followers to yield 1,000 paying supporters. And building a core fanbase of 20,000 engaged followers is extremely difficult in today’s crowded creative landscape.”
“A Vicar asks his congregation in the valleys the question “What would you do if Jesus returned tomorrow?”. A voice in the flock pipes up; “Move Barry John to inside-centre”!”
“Much furor has been raised in recent months over the unauthorized scraping of the web to train AI models; OpenAI even thanked the faceless “millions of people” who created the data to train GPT-3 in its paper describing the model. But when it comes to data willingly shared with Facebook and Meta, that Faustian bargain was struck long ago.”
“I can get through this.” / 2. “I’m not going to let myself be a victim.” / 3. “Life is hard.” / 4. “This, too, shall pass.” / 5. “What can I learn from this?” / 6. “I need some time.” / 7. “I still have things to be grateful for.” / 8. “It is what it is.” / 9. “I’m letting this go.”
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.“
“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.”
“The act of entering an airport starts with the removal of personal sovereignty. If you linger at a curb, you will be ticketed. If your bag is overweight, you are screwed. Inside, you are scanned, told explicitly what you can and cannot take with you, and people must submit or be punished. Often surly people are yelling at you about your laptops, shoes, and belts. It is now also taken for granted that if you wish to consume anything at an airport, it will cost 2-3X what it does in the wild.”
“One significant anniversary in 2023 passed almost without mention. In May 1923, the Welsh women’s peace petition was initiated – a plea from the women of Wales to the women of the US, urging the US to take its place in the newly formed League of Nations and encouraging its full participation in the permanent court of international justice, which had come into being in 1922. The text refers to American-Welsh cooperation in the 19th century, and welcomes the steps taken after the first world war to control the arms trade and tackle what we now call human trafficking and the movement of illegal drugs.”
At Techcopes, you can access a variety of font generator tools to customize and enhance your text in different styles for different social media platforms.
Before I leave, I ask Loeb what is to be gained from looking for aliens, and his reply is surprisingly humble. “We know from our private life that if we find a partner, it gives new meaning to our existence,” he says. “So finding a partner somewhere in the form of another civilisation that can teach us things that we can imitate, that we can aspire to, will give us a meaning to our cosmic existence. The universe will not be pointless any more.
The publication is suing both companies for copyright infringement and asks them to be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for allegedly copying its works. It’s also asking the court to prevent OpenAI and Microsoft from training their AI models using its content, as well as remove the Times’ work from the companies’ datasets.
Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere. The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.
There was confusion in the plenary hall shortly after the agreement was passed as many parties had assumed there would be a debate over the text. The Alliance of Small Island States, representing 39 countries, said it had not been in the room when the deal was adopted as it was still coordinating its response. Its lead negotiator, Anne Rasmussen, from Samoa, did not formally object to the agreement and believed the deal had good elements, but said the “the process has failed us” and the text included a “litany of loopholes”. “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual when what we really needed is an exponential step change in our actions and support,” she said. Her speech was met with a standing ovation.
Generating images was by far the most energy- and carbon-intensive AI-based task. Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle. Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion XL, did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, the California-based company said in a regulatory filing that the personal data of 0.1% of customers – or about 14,000 individuals – had been accessed by “threat actors”. But the filing warned that hackers were also able to access “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry”. The company confirmed to TechCrunch on Saturday that because of an opt-in feature that allows DNA-related relatives to contact each other, the true number of people exposed was 6.9 million – or just less than half of 23andMe’s 14 million reported customers. Another group of about 1.4 million people who opted in to 23andMe’s DNA relatives feature also “had their family tree profile information accessed”, the company also acknowledged. That information includes names, relationship labels, birth year, self-reported location and other data.
If you do not want your website’s content used for this training, you can ask the bots deployed by Google and Open AI to skip over your site. Keep in mind that this only applies to future scraping. If Google or OpenAI already have data from your site, they will not remove it.
Scientists believe we have great thoughts in bed because our brain is in a state conducive to neuroplasticity. Occupying ourselves with smartphones has replaced staring off into the distance and daydreaming. People equate boredom with low productivity, but making time for boredom may help you be more creative.
…if an AI company was aware that its training data included unlicensed works, or that its algorithms generated unauthorised derivative works not covered by “fair use”, then it could be liable for damages of up to $150,000 for each instance of knowing use. And in case anyone thinks that infringement suits by angry artists are like midge bites to corporations, it’s worth noting that Getty, a very large picture library, is suing Stability AI for alleged unlicensed copying of millions of its photos and using them to train its AI, Stable Diffusion, to generate more accurate depictions based on user prompts. The inescapable implication is that there may be serious liabilities for generative AIs coming down the line.
“Despite the increasing adoption of the technology, campaigners point out there is no legal basis for police to use it, with a courtroom challenge finding that South Wales police’s use of biometric surveillance was unlawful and breached privacy rights and equality laws.“
“I’ve been using the voice function since yesterday and noticed that it makes breathing sounds when it speaks,” said one Reddit user. “It takes a deep breath before starting a sentence. And today, actually a minute ago, it coughed between words while answering my questions.”
“Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called “teen fundamentals” which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity, and teenagers’ tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and asked how these asked how these characteristics could “manifest . . . in product usage”.”
“Now Earth’s oceans are no longer unique. They’re just strange. They exist on our planet’s sunlit surface, while the seas of the outer solar system are tucked beneath ice and bathed in darkness. And these subterranean liquid oceans seem to be the rule for our solar system, not the exception. In addition to Europa and Enceladus, other moons with ice-covered oceans almost certainly exist as well. A fleet of spacecraft will explore them in detail over the next decade.”
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply… There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
The ‘Welsh Not’, which usually consisted of a small piece of wood or slate inscribed with the letters ‘W.N’, was hung around the neck of a child who was caught speaking Welsh. At the end of the school day, the child wearing the ‘Welsh Not’ would be punished by the schoolteacher via People’s Collection Wales.
A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.
The original Wicker Man origin: an image from a set of 8 extra-illustrated volumes of A tour in Wales by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) that chronicle the three journeys he made through Wales between 1773 and 1776 (via Wikipedia).
A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.
Why fidgeting is good for you, first paragraph bloody shocking as never thought this to be true, do people actually think that (asking for me as a fidgeter)?
Turning Empty Offices Into Vertical Farms (good for cities who are emptying due to working from homers and want to utilise their empty buildings but of course the great and good won’t contemplate that as that’s about doing something different and ah well sighs etc).
The Text FX project (from Google Labs) for some wicked fun ways to “expand the writing process by generating creative possibilities with text and language.”
I don’t pay much attention to web3 stuff as I used to although this newsletter (from Molly White) keeps me in touch in what’s happening in the silly crypto space.
Lunar Codex is an attempt to put an archive of 30,000+ creative artists from 157 countries on the Moon in 2026 as part of NASA Artemis program.
About how the EU is moving closer to AI laws (including banning use of facial recognition tech by police & emotional recognition at work places & in schools.).
Meet the people still living on SecondLife: I still remember intro’ing folks to this in my presentations / workshops back in 2006-11, the concept of avatars, virtual currency / concerts / lectures etc.
emojikitchen.dev has over 30,000 unique emoji mashup combinations for you to play with and use.
shapecatcher.com to draw in the box and it will help you to find the most similar unicode characters (urrently, there are 11817 character glyphs in the database).
clipdrop.co/uncrop “uncrops” your images and broadens them out (just like Photoshop Generative Fill Firefly but without text prompt) for free. Here’s an example from my AI creations:
And finally, Midjourney just released their ‘zoom out’ feature (you can either 1.5x or 2x) which is like automatic generative fill / out-painting. Here are my first attempts:
A QArt Coder which makes QR codes with pixellated images which you upload.
Over 4100 pixel-perfect icons for web design via Tabler Icons, free and open source icons designed to make your website or app attractive, visually consistent and simply beautiful.
The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content (although no information about the humans behind it).
Make It Big, an app to have full screen text message on your (iPhone) (I use it at events I’m facilitating to tell folks speaking what time they have left).
After about 20mins of reading and prompt writing, these are the first images I created on the AI-assisted-image-creation-platform Midjourney.
The fidelity of these creations are incredible. Check out these closeups:
As a further experiment and using one of the already created Celtic warriors as the basis for the design, I went on to develop some potential covers for a fiction book I’m writing:
First set of images from prompt.A further potential option.Another different option.
The reason for exploring this new platform is to understand the potential for creating images for my own creative projects and also is this something to build into the public speaking masterclasses I deliver for clients.
In a part of these masterclasses I talk about and show how to craft kick-ass presentation decks. In doing so I utilise a vast array of open sourced and creative common licensed content available on the web via a sweet bevvy of amassed resources over the years, which means that within twenty minutes or so I can find some wonderful items to embellish any story being told and build out a pretty wicked looking deck.
However, after just an hour or so playing on Midjourney, I see it becoming a powerful part of a storytellers toolkit as the business case will be: why trawl through different sites if you can very quickly state your needs and get a high-fidelity version of a specific image which serves the need.
Examples
Whether you’re an architectural student talking about the parametric abilities of your discipline:
A team leader wanting to represent a metaphoric path relating to a bold business strategy needing to be pursued:
A human resources lead presenting to the board and needing a stock-style image of people laughing in a corporate setting around a computer to demonstrate the aim for a conducive work culture:
First set of images from prompt.Second iteration with version 4 (bottom right) being my fav, see below:Boom, Count Duckula in the proverbial flesh!
The only restriction is your own imagination (which I why like the term Augmented Imagination for AI)!
Limitations
It’s not a perfect platform.
Here’s what I got when I asked for a simple yellow post-it note with the word ‘help’ written on it:
There’s also a barrier to entry from both a digital interface perspective and also an image literacy angle.
Access to Midjourney (which is still positioned as being in beta) is via the Discord platform. This means the creation and indeed craft of producing these images is done out in the open in the semi-public hosted forums. I say semi-public because without first a Discord account plus accepting a few T&C’s to access, you can’t play.
Then there’s the literacy step. Knowing about cameras, lenses, exposures, angles plus lighting will give your images the edge above others. You have to be open to the messy process of nudging the system in the right way and nuances of language along with scene setting or even world building is needed.
Whether it be creating cute little monsters:
An atmospheric and rainy backstreet in an Asian city:
To a toy figure of Michael Jordan:
…you have to guide the output heavily.
The Trick
It can all sound too good to be true, or for some I’ve spoken to before I started playing, a little too confusing as well.
Once you get your head around the interface (as it’s quite jaggedy in it’s forum style, think ‘Slack channel peppered with a cacophony of people you don’t know saying wild and wonderful things with images blooming to life in between your prompts’, as it scrolls without you and finding your creations becomes sometimes hard work), I found the trick in creating impressive images is to balance simplicity and complexity.
Laying down the basics along with the intricate details of how to construct the output you want to see yields high-end results. For example, to build the image above I stipulated the scene, the person, the emotion displayed, the specific laptop being used, then the angle, the camera, the lens, the exposure, the lighting and the general ‘feel’—there’s a lot steering the production of what you see but it’s worth the time.
Built in to the Midjourney service are lots of ‘commands‘ to get your head around, and an interesting one is the “/describe” command which writes four example prompts based on an image you upload. So if you’re already using an image that you own or created you can upload and use the manufactured text prompt to get a sense of how you can create another one like it.
This and many other commands is a paid for service (as part of Midjourney subscription plans) and as I’m still using the free service I point it out as a great way to get started along with finding inspiration in prompt writing approaches.
“…You own all Assets You create with the Services, to the extent possible under current law.”
…although it also states they own it all as well (including the prompts and any reference material you upload) along with some other funky stuff in there, like anyone else in the community can use them and remix them also.
It’s a bit confusing.
Just be aware of the classic adage: if it’s free or cheap you’re probably the product at this stage.
Like most though I’m worried deeply about the ethical nature of these creative engines due to questions on where they sourced their data (the large language models, LLMs, used to ‘train’ the AI on—I recommend reading A Completely Non-Technical Explanation of AI and Deep Learning if all this is gobble-dee-gook). Plus, if any output is being influenced by specific artists or other creatives, where is the attribution and citations for them? Surely that should be there as standard and would be easy to code in if you’ve come this far…?
There’s also a question of fabricating ‘alternative’ realities (like the recent Pope in a Prada coat). But what about making different historical narratives?
Like in the latter years of his life, Steve Jobs spent most of his time in his small home office working on old school computers:
He didn’t, I made this scene and story up.
Or photos of Elvis when he was a baby already playing a guitar:
It’s captivating to be generating such quality with little effort. And there lies in the danger. To not respect the background nature of the inventive act of creativity is what I fear people will miss here. I’m lucky enough to be able to navigate through my understanding and respect for what informs these constructions (I mean the influences from photographers and my basic knowledge of cameras plus image form as well as the technological interface), and yet it’s so liberating at the ease by which impressiveness can be gained.
With all technologies, I always experience it through the lens of augmentation. Does this aid what I do and offer into the world, with kindness and deep consideration on the impact?
Midjourney and the larger AI suite of tools (currently) do nothing without us. They are value-neutral. However, it’s simple to see how much negative impact they will have in the future. Have us all questioning what we see whilst bad actors look to exploit this to their advantage. And I mean much more than cheeky photographers winning prizes using AI.
So for now I invite you to take some time and look at the public Midjourney showcase to see the possibilities of what people are producing, it’s very hard not to raise your eyebrows in awe.
What about you, what potential do you see in platforms like this? Where will you use it? Why won’t you?
Because you never know when you need to create a shocked looking blue faced pink sheep in a meadow:
All images produced in this blog post was done by Midjourney and the prompts I came up with.
