Tests

A Note From Yesterday

Goings On, Tests /

I’m very busy today, so I’m writing this yesterday. I’m going to go watch my niece and nephew for a few hours, then get Krystal and I lunch, before going to see Scott Thompson in his show “Buddy Cole in King” over at City Winery. I’ve been a massive fan of both him and that character ever since I was a high school-aged terminal closet case, and he was portraying the only gay person on television in the early nineties who wasn’t meant to teach people about Aids.

Given I’ll be otherwise occupied trying not to make eye contact with one of my heroes in a small comedy club, this seems like a good opportunity to test scheduling a post. Has this worked? I’m sure it has. I’ve been working with this software professionally for over a decade and can assure you that this post arrived on schedule. Still. Testing things that I know work is how I can be sure they are still working.

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Thanksgiving Vacation Day 1

Tests /

I’m on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday, and decided to spend some time learning about generative AI in Photoshop. If you work long enough refining what the AI prompt first generates, you can eventually produce some really specific and fairly impressive results.

I asked it to give me “classic holiday cartoon scene, thanksgiving vacation, mad scientist lab”, mostly just to have something to start with that might spark an idea. It returned three things, including this:

I thought it would be fun to turn this into a thanksgiving scene where a robot doctor, an alien, and a monster all share an apartment and are having Thanksgiving dinner. I did the refinement using only the various selection tools and the text prompts of the generative fill, adding and removing things to clean the image up and tweak it into something coherent. The end result took several hours, but is quite close to what I originally had in mind.

Can you create actual art with this technology? If I ask a machine to give me a picture of a cat and it gives me a picture of a cat, what it gives me might not be art. But work on anything for as long as I worked on this, and the end result is something new, regardless of the tools used in its production. I had a visual idea and used these tools to create it. That’s fair game.

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