Exactly. There’s a market for that tech. Laptop ain’t it.

Enough value to respond though. Interesting.

Be that as it may: considering your involvement you should have known the differences between random copy and paste and pixel prediction. I’m afraid I doubt your claims. Your views on art were pretty polarized - I’m pleased to have provided contrast to them.

Closest thing we have is end to end encryption mixed with services like tor to obfuscate our positions. Privacy is no longer opt out and is increasingly harder to achieve.

The greatest malware ever installed was the idea that we shouldn’t fear our governments and should trust them implicitly.

I know I expressed this already but the wind analogy doesn’t work here. It isn’t random nor undirected.

As far as copying goes - considering your staunch stance on what is and isn’t art I think it’s fair to say you have some involvement with it.

Regardless of the medium we all start the same way. Imitation. In traditional art we are trained by observing what the masses find pleasing. When we observe most artists work we can identify these roots. Very few artists art is not based in the works of those before them.

This article does a fine job of expressing the above.

AI assisted (generative) art is a tool that provides a user access to a compendium of learned styles. It lowers the barrier of entry to express yourself through art.

I posit that this is such a divisive topic because there is so little difference between how we learn and how these models do. It garners a lot of the same negativity that a prodigy might. “Why is it so easy for them when I worked so hard. They don’t appreciate it as much as me.”

In the end art belongs to nobody and everybody. Art is amorphous; formless. Art and artistic expression can exist anywhere- even here. I personally am not so high minded to gatekeep such a broad field.

Let’s see if we can keep this civil, shall we?

First and foremost the model isn’t compositing bits and pieces of other pictures - it’s predicting what the next pixel should look like based on its training data. It is generating the image. In laymans terms: it’s drawing based on what it has ‘learned’ by looking at other art. It’s pretty interesting honestly.

I do have a background in art, though it is not my profession. Regardless of that- there are no requirements to create nor appreciate art.

A few good excerpts from wikipedia:

There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art, and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures.

Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy or depth. Art can be defined as an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions. Ours seem to differ- and that’s fine. My views are simple: if someone can express themselves through a medium- it is a form of art.

If the wind blows, cut up pieces of art magazines around and then land in a pile. That isn’t art. It’s just cut-up pieces of someone else’s art.

I can’t really agree with this example. I think you’re suggesting the AI is completely independent of human expression and is completely random in its application of its training data (the cut up pieces I suppose?)

Generative AI is driven by a human prompt (description) and refined by further prompts which pushes the result in the direction of the prompters vision.

If a person cuts up a magazine and pieces the parts together with intention and meaning. That can be art.

This is in essence what is occuring above. I view this process as someone being provided a chisel and a block of stone:

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

-Michelangelo

As I suggested above AI is a tool that makes accessing art and expression available to anyone. The Ai is the chisel. They cut the stone with words… It isn’t just random clipart being thrown around either: The ‘stone’ is the culmination of all of the art the model has ‘seen.’ It has taken that data and found the patterns that different styles contain. You might describe this as the distillation of human expression into something new.

The source is art - human expression The prompt gives it form - human expression Further prompts drive the form to fit the users vision - human expression

There is intent and meaning.

Is it art in the traditional sense? Perhaps not in the same vein as ink and canvas but … I believe, while it is certainly rough and unrefined, it can still be considered a tool to create art.

Without question. Early tablets and digital art couldn’t hold a candle to traditional mediums. Even if the same artist created content for both. The tools are certainly rough… but considering how young the technology is, and how far it has already come, I think we may soon arrive at a point where people may have issues distinguishing between the two.

Either way it’s a fun topic to discuss. It’s deeply interesting to see the variety of responses to it.

I understand where you are coming from but to be fair the wind isn’t using art as a reference. This is why I suggested it was a complex issue… and provided the examples that I did. There are quite a few similarities between ai models producing art and artists. Surely there are differences - but objectively speaking they do have quite a few similarities.

Art is specific to the beholder. Does what is before you evoke an emotional response? Was it produced for that purpose? If you provided paint and paper to an ape - would it be considered art? What about a child who has no concept of art?

From a non image perspective: music is art. Is a mashup music? What about other sample heavy music? Some people might argue that x genre isn’t really music.

Back to prompt driven ai generated art: what if someone spent 70 hours tuning and modifying a prompt until the art fit their vision? 200 hours? What if they lacked the ability to draw or paint?

I genuinely don’t believe this is a black and white issue. I do understand the implications of what ai tools have to the workforce - but that is a separate topic.

In some cases it fails to run properly which can and does flag users as cheaters. I’ve had a few long back and forths with a few different support teams to get accounts unbanned for exactly that.

Yes and no.

Currently you could say that ai is just efficiently guessing what we would want to see from pixel to pixel.

An artist may tune their style to be more similar to the art that they sold before in hopes of repeat buyers.

An AI looks at countless images and seeks out patterns which it refines. It mimics things and duplicates patterns.

An artists spends countless hours absorbed in the art of others to learn styles. Frequently they may mimic other works and iterate off of existing ideas.

Fan art, tracing, compositing - these are all things understood in the art community. If someone makes fan art of someone else’s character does that invalidate their work as art?

AI invokes a reaction because it’s getting “close.” AI is receiving a lot of the same criticism that digital artists got for not using traditional mediums back in that technology’s infancy.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. What defines art? Everything is relative. At present? AI is a tool. A bit unpolished and raw but so was CGI in the movie industry. Look how quickly that evolved.

Unironically?

Intel Arc GPU isn’t bad for a transcoding card: https://youtu.be/uShvhV2ZZCA

There are a variety of options available with near feature parity. Killing the free version effectively cut out lab users which may as well say: we sure would like people to start training on a new platform. People use what they are comfortable with… and tend to carry a hatchet for companies that burn them.

This was a short sighted play which ultimately will result in the platform dying slowly as the workforce changes. They cut off new blood: less people will be proficient with their platform and more will be pushing for a switch to the competition. In addition to the loss of the free version they massively ramped prices. They won’t last. Right now the companies that are too big to pivot are already starting to weigh the costs of transitioning vs the squeeze. The C-suite are idiots.

There is an advantage to advertising their existence: the sign itself may act as a deterrent and may motivate a thief to pick a softer target.

This of course is assuming you don’t need a sign for each camera with an arrow pointing to it… at that point perhaps just a big dog would be a better choice hah.

That would definitely be a good approach if you were stuck with the wireless option. Im sure some software may address those disconnections in just the way you describe.

My responses have been looking at the technology broadly - in the way I might if someone asked me for my opinion prior to investing in gear. People frequently overestimate the effort required to achieve a bypass of a security device. So my goal was to provide some core knowledge.

I do like the suggestion though- it may help somone improve their own existing setup 👍

Sure there may be a hard copy but that will only have value after the crime is committed. Deauth / jamming will prevent the more meaningful things like proximity alerts and notifications from informing the user (or security system) which could lead to intervention.

I’ve always viewed camera storage as a fallback in the event something fails. Don’t get me wrong I think redundancy is great and it’s a fine feature. It has value - just less so in this particular case.

I don’t suppose you have a link to said video? I’d be curious to see it in more detail.

I think you’re correct. I think this was likely min/maxing on the designers part. Assuming there were open / and ‘green’ spaces inside or within, say, a cluster of these I’m sure it would be generally acceptable for most people. My fear with designs such as these is vertical creep. What is nice and functional at 2-3 stories becomes a dystopian concrete labyrinth quite rapidly.

Shade is good - been in the south for 8ish years for work - It gets toasty down here.

A combination of artificial shade and greenery can have multiple benifits. (where applicable obviously - not all regions can support it nor should they try)

Shade can be functional too. There’s been some interesting research into panels/pigments that radiate infared light at the wavelength that can escape our atmosphere producing a cooler than ambient surface that could have a variety of uses. A ton of recent advances in solar technology as well.