Hey everyone! Welcome back to a little update on what’s going on around here and what you should focus your attention on. Firstly, the DAM PODCAST is back and you’ll be seeing new episodes coming out with some incredible guests, so you should keep an eye out for that.
Secondly, the other OTG lads and I have been making gaming and discussion content together which includes playing Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, Valorant and other games on stream together in varying groups.
As well as that, we’re in the early stages of creating a Manga/Anime discussion podcast (Only The Gaijin) with myself, OTG Spoons, Silver and OTG Batchee as the members that took part in the first episode. You’ll be able to find these livestreamed over at any one of our channels and in the near future on YouTube and other platforms too! The tester episode we did was a dope discussion about the recent One Piece chapters but we do intend to touch on other shows too!
I found out that some of the actual courses from Harvard are completely free if you don’t intend to get a qualification from them, so I signed up for a Harvard CS50 course in order to brush my knowledge up when it comes to all this stuff I’ve been doing on and off for about 20 years now.
I’m the type of neuro-divergent that really needs to be passionately interested in something in order to retain a lot of information about it. I didn’t expect to watch a lecture from a Harvard professor about exponentiation and really be so enthused by it, but here we are!
What with the recent rise of the scourge that is “AI art” I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little worried. I’m not worried that it’s going to do better work than me or that it’s going to replace what I’m able to do, but I am worried that a large portion of the world is going to think that it is. What tends to happen with new technologies is that the vast majority of people have a massive misunderstanding as to how it actually works.
Because of that, you get a lot of people acting as if Stable Diffusion is simply working from inspiration in the same way that a human would be after seeing an inspiring piece of work. Sadly that’s just not the case. Instead, what’s happening is that these rich tech companies are stealing data from artists that never consented in the first place and when a user types a prompt it tries to mash that data together in a way that looks like something new.
Is it new, though? No. It’s not. It also takes away the creation aspect of art and design, which is one of the fundamental points of both.. especially the former. After looking at the debates on social media around this topic I realise that a lot of people get very offended when hearing this, but typing a prompt into a text box and iterating until it gives you something vaguely like what was in your mind is not creating, and if you feel like you have to do this to create you should honestly have more faith in yourself.
You could very well be an extremely creative person and maybe you even think typing your prompts is as creative as another creative thing you do, but let’s be honest.. it’s not. Me saying that is not a personal attack on any one person, but people that are similarly worried for their jobs or even the sanctity of artistic expression itself are being lambasted and mocked all over social media for being concerned about this.
This isn’t like when cameras came out. It isn’t like when digital art software came out. It isn’t like any tool you can think of in recent memory, because it’s not a tool. A tool would be something you use to create, but you aren’t doing that by typing a prompt. You’re letting something else pretend to do the work that thousands of other artists did in order to shit out a trash version of all of those artists’ work mashed together in some way or another.
I’m in the process of writing a much bigger post about this with a lot more information and citations, so if you’re interested in this conversation do let me know and I’ll get that done. I might even do a DAM PODCAST episode about it with someone, if there’s anyone that wants to debate.
Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now. I’ve been streaming FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE over at twitch.tv/konrrr at differing times and you should come check it out some time and have a chat if you so wish!
Thanks for reading! Connor ‘konr’ Baron