art

Killing Off the Geese that Lay Golden Eggs

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We all know the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, and the idiot who killed the golden goose got no more golden eggs. It’s been considered good practice not to kill something that is producing important things for you1.

This is what some companies are doing, though, when it comes to AI. I pointed out here that companies have been doing it before AI, too, though in the example of HuffPost the volunteers who once contributed to it’s success simply got left out in the cold.

It is a cold world we live in, and colder each day. Yet more people are being impacted by generative AI companies, from writing to voice acting to deepfakes of mentionable people doing unmentionable things.

Who would contribute content willingly to any endeavor when it could simply be used to replace them? OK, aside from idiots, who else?

I did hear a good example, though. Someone who is doing research and is getting paid to do it has no issue with his work being used to train an AI, and I understood his position immediately: He’s making enough, and the point of doing research is to have it used. But, as I pointed out, he gets paid, and while I don’t expect he’s got billions in the bank, I’d say that once he’s still getting paid to do research, all will be well for him.

Yet not all of us are. Everyone seems intent on the golden eggs except the geese that can lay them. If you can lay golden eggs, you don’t need to go kill geese looking for them… and dead geese…. because it seems that tech bros need reminding… dead geese do not lay eggs.

  1. I’ve often wondered if this didn’t start Hindus not eating beef, as Indian cuisine relies heavily on the products of the cow – so a poor family killing a cow for meat would not make sense. Maybe not, but it’s plausible. ↩︎

How To Keep Bored People Entertained In The Future.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 4 Comments

Sometime in the future, assuming humanity survives despite itself, there will be archaeological digs that will try to understand we, the predecessors to whatever comes next.

They’re going to want to know how we lived, what we did – really boring stuff for us. It’s not exciting at all or you wouldn’t be reading this.

So, you know that drawer where you have all that stuff you cannot get yourself to throw away? Take that drawer and empty it out on a work table. Don’t use the good table. It is necessary to use the bad table, the one that has an awkward tilt and is scratched up so that your significant other won’t be upset.

Stare at the stuff for a while. Soak in all the junk, the USB cables, the charging cables, etc. Maybe break some of the stuff open just to see what’s inside. Connect what you can connect with glue, screws, nuts and bolts – whatever. Make a doohickey, or a whizbang, or something like them. It should have absolutely no purpose, but it should look purposeful. It’s a good idea to make sure it won’t hurt the environment.

This can take some time, so make sure you stop for meals, sleep, etc.

Once you’re happy with your object, type up some instructions on how to use your device. Be imaginative. For example:

SuperWhamoDyne Internet Oscillator (SIO) Instructions:

Make sure it is a sunny day, and place outside until the lights come on. The SIO will create an Internet connection to the Muskovite Satellites in orbit and begin the oscillation that will cause transmogrification of information so it is more consumable.

It is advised that you and your computing device are at least 100 meters away when operating it, as this device sometimes attracts lightning.

SuperWhamoDyne! The Future Was Misplaced!

It’s suggested that you use automatic translation to some language that has fallen out of popular use, then laminate it.

Now that you have your object and the instructions, and cleaned out that drawer, the next step is to take it somewhere remote – away from people, and simply leave the object there with the instructions. Abandoned houses or shacks make ideal places.

The future was misplaced – like this object that has been confounding people.

Quotes Are Not What You Want Them To Be…

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I like looking into the background of quotes that I come across – I source just about everything I write, with the exception of what is imagination or opinion. In doing so this morning, I was thinking of using a quote by Musashi, and I thought to use:

“Truth is not what you want it to be, it is what it is, and must bend to it’s power or live a lie”.

I went to my copy of the Book of Five Rings, which is pretty much where all legitimate Musashi quotes come from. That quote wasn’t there. I check Project Gutenberg for the book, since they would likely have an older copy, but strangely they do not have that book – which should be in the public domain by now! – at all1.

No one who uses the quote cites a source. No one.

It seems that this was something added by D.E. Tarver in his rendition of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings”- but apparently it’s not in the original Japanese. No texts by Musashi seem to have this quotation.

This does not mean it doesn’t express some of his teachings, such as in the Dokkodo – accepting things the way they are, though extrapolating to living a lie does not seem to be something he actually did.

The fact that this quote circulates so much is pretty much the exact opposite of what his teaching would be.

これは翻訳者によって追加されたようです。(Kore wa hon’yaku-sha ni yotte tsuika sa reta yōdesu.)

  1. Someone should get on that. I have a translation that isn’t in the public domain, sadly. ↩︎

Opinion: AI Art in Blogs.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Years ago, I saw ‘This Space Intentionally Left Blank’ in a technical document in a company, and I laughed, because the sentence destroyed the ‘blankness’ of the page.

I don’t know where it came from, but I dutifully used it in that company when I wrote technical documentation, adding, “, with the exception of this sentence.” I do hope those documents still have it. The documentation was dry reading despite my best efforts.

I bring this up because some artists on Mastodon have been very vocally negative about the use of AI art in blog posts. I do not disagree with them, but I use AI art on my blog posts here and on KnowProSE.com and I also do want to support artists, as I would like artists to support writers. Writers are artists with words, after all, and with so much AI generated content, it’s a mess for anyone with an iota of creativity involved.

Having your work sucked into the intake manifold of a generative AI to be vomited out so that another company makes money from what they effectively stole is… dehumanizing to creative people. Effectively, those that do this and don’t compensate the people who created stuff in the first place are just taking their stuff and acting like they don’t matter.

There has been some criticism of using AI generated imagery in blog posts, and I think that’s appropriate – despite me using it. The reason I got into digital photography decades ago was so that I could have my own images. Over the years, I talked with some really great digital artists and gotten permission here and there to use their images – and sometimes I have, and sometimes by the time I got the permission the moment had passed.

When you have an idea in the moment, at the speed of blog, waiting for permission can be tiresome.

These days, a used image will still likely get stuck in the intake manifold of some generative AI anyway. There are things you can do to keep AI bots that follow ‘rules’ at bay, but that only works if the corporations respect boundaries and if you follow the history of AI with copyright lawsuits, you’ll find that the corporations involved are not very good at respecting boundaries. It’s not as simple as putting up a ‘Do Not Scrape’ sign on a website.

So, what to do? I side with the artists, but images help hold attention spans, and I am not an artist. If I use someone’s work without permission, I’m a thief – and I put their works at risk of getting sucked into the intake manifold of an AI.

I could go without using images completely, but people with short attention spans – the average time now is 47 seconds – should be encouraged to read longer if the topic is interesting enough – but “TL;DR” is a thing now.

So yes, I use AI generated images because at the least they can be topical and at worst they are terrible, get sucked into a generative AI intake manifold and make generative AI worse for it, which works to the advantage of digital artists who can do amazing things.

Some people will be angry about this. I can’t help that. I don’t use generative AI for writing other than for research and even then carefully so. I fully support people’s works not getting vomited out of a generative AI, but that involves a much larger discussion regarding the history of humanity and the works that we build upon.

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
View all responses

If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

The Culture of ‘Why?’

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

There are times when the world falls away to make way for a new one in my mind, where focusing on one train of thought can change the way I see the world. These are moments unscheduled or planned, usually starting with a question. A simple question. Why.

If you forget how to ask that question, listen to a child and their litany of ‘why?’. They want to know, they want to understand, they want to… well, unfortunately, they generally want to be adults. Poor things.

The asking of ‘Why?’ is so important, and so many people seem to forget it’s importance.

Richard Feynman illustrates the point pretty well with his response in the video below.

Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, asking ‘Why?’.

There’s a particular feeling that goes with it. A great example of expressing that feeling is by Nikola Tesla.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success … Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

‘Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication‘ (2008), Nikola Tesla, quoted by Tim O’Shei

I’ll sit sometimes with a cup of coffee, looking out onto the world, and just consider a question, or a problem, and in doing that I find other questions to answer, and before I know it the coffee will get cold, the sun may have moved significantly. In doing this, though, I update the world that is built in my mind, the reality that I exist in, and by changing the reality I exist in, I change.

When you’re younger, you try the bigger questions. Life, the Universe, Everything sort of questions. It’s a lot to contemplate to answer those big questions, and you end up asking lesser questions. Decades later, you might have made some progress on the big questions, but if you have you probably just borrowed someone else’s big questions and were fed their answers.

Then, you have to figure out why that answer isn’t right, or why it’s not good enough – why it’s not satisfying. And you start again.

From professional lives to the universe around us, there’s a daisy chain of ‘Why?’ that needs answers, if only we dare ask the questions and be rigorous about the answers.

That Which Connects Reality Fragments.

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I found myself communicating with a lawyer yesterday, about information I had that would be of use to their client, and I found the conversation driving me back into memories that I had happily forgotten for some time.

It wasn’t that big of a deal, the questions and answers themselves. It was what they were attached to. There were nuanced emotions from that period of my life, hopes and dreams that were drowned as my faith in those around me was becoming so demonstrable that I could no longer deny the reality.

There wasn’t anything particularly bad or good about it, in retrospect. I did what I generally do, thinking the best of people until they demonstrate otherwise, and I got quite a few people wrong in that regard. Ties were cut, bridges were burned and danced on, and I remembered them from a distance of time and a bit of wisdom.

Sometimes things need time to bake. You don’t just throw the ingredients of a cake together and eat them. No, after you get all the ingredients together in whatever way that you have to, then you have to go stick it in the oven and forget about it for a while. Sure, you might smell it, but if you want the cake you have to do something society frowns upon these days.

You need to wait.

In our lives, we accumulate these fragments of reality, some of which we may even deny – but the reality is there underneath even if we don’t experience it in the moment. Under that reality, there may be a deeper reality, a different perspective of the same reality, or even something that was weaved as reality when it wasn’t. We spend our days trying to make sense of it all.

Little bits of reality and unreality floating around.

Something connects them, though.

We do. We are the common thing that they all attach to, as individuals or as groups.

AI is Not A Muse(d).

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Image generated by Inspirobot.me

There’s been a lot said, written, and shoved in learning models without the permission of authors and artists to train artificial intelligence models.

Of course, artificial intelligence investors don’t want to pay for using copyrighted works. I’d wager in a legal sense one could make a case about fair use, and I must admit a bit of amusement at the conundrum that has been created in that regard.

Yet, when I’m stuck about writing something, I generally don’t turn to those AI models, which despite being accused of creative just have more access to data to draw a nexus from. What most people consider to be creative is almost always that. It’s how I like connecting seemingly unrelated topics.

AI is not a muse.

No, when I’m writing and I hit some kind of block, I generally go check out Inspirobot.me. It’s reminiscent of a silly program I wrote on an Apple IIe that simply spliced words and phrases together to form insults. As a teenager without many friends, I found this very amusing. When it began to get stale, I’d add more words and phrases.

Inspirobot does something similar in a technical sense, with some great imagery in the background – as above. Literature is a creation.

AI investors are trying to change that, as if all humanity has had to offer has already happened.

Silly investors.

Decorating A Piece of Time

Quote ~ ~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 7 Comments

Frank ZappaSticking this here because I may be referring to it multiple times, and the full quote is a bit wordy.

In an interview in 1984, Frank Zappa responded to a question in a way that fits all of this very well:

“Well, I’m specialized. What I do on a guitar has very little to do with what other people do on a guitar. Most of the other guitar solos that you hear performed on stage have been practiced over and over and over again. they go out there and they play the same one every night and it’s really, just, spotless.

My theory is this – I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument and I got an imagination. and when the time comes up in the song to play a solo, it’s me against the laws of nature. I don’t know what I’m going to play, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I know roughly how long I have to do it, and it’s a game where you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it and, depending on how intuitive the rhythm section is that’s backing you up, you can do things that are literally impossible to imagine – sitting here – but you can see them performed before your very eyes in a live performance situation…”

We are all just decorating time. Some do the same things over and over – some don’t.

Connecting Coherence

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flickr svklimkin publicdomain aug 8 2017There are two main ways that I know of to connect things: science, and art. Science tends towards linear connections, where one question leads to another and connects them. Art is not so constrained, allowing the mixing of things that aren’t necessarily the same but have some coherence. The image on the left that is titled ‘Neurons’ but is actually a picture of dandelion seeds, disconnected unlike neurons.

Scientifically, the two are not connected, but the representation allows us to ‘fill a gap’, to intuit something that is not there. While it’s wrong here – an important thing to note, since the dandelion seeds are not connected in the same way that neurons are – there is some coherence in how we perceive a flat image.  It also does something else. It opens our minds to the possibilities.

This is sort of like being comfortable or uncomfortable around people of the same skin color, culture, religion, gender and geography, regardless of how differently they view the world. Movements, even now, clash over these ‘meta’ commonalities allows us to settle into a false sense of coherence with people. The desire to fit in clashes with the desire to be an individual, and people sometimes prefer to simply ‘go with the flow’ rather than find others who are actually more coherent to who they are.

Consider this article on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “Inside the Battle On The Eastern Front“, by David Patrikarakos (contributing editor to Unherd). A very great article that he ties together at the very end – I won’t quote it because to get the full effect you need to read the article – is a matter of coherence, of what connects humanity in a way that makes the entire invasion of Ukraine by Russia look incoherent in a new way. Humanity disconnected where it shouldn’t be.

Yet the article itself is based in fact, in linearity, scientific to a great degree in reporting the subjective while being objective. It’s a story in that regard, from the guy toting around an image of Jesus Christ (go on, read the article) to… well, Kit Kats? Little touches of the world, however surreal, that connect in ways that we may not have seen all because the right person with the right observation skills and the right ability to describe them coherently was there. 

This is the way we connect islands of coherence in this world of chaos. These connections are important in understanding and connecting our worlds and making them less worlds, closer to one world of perception. That’s the challenge of our time.

Making sense of babel.