GPT – An Echo That's Reversing

Generative energy

Updated 23 Sep 2024

I’ve stopped using ChatGPT.

Well, not entirely… but I haven’t hit it in several weeks after the month-or-so ago pledge that I made promising, personally, that I’ll only use it for absolute emergencies when search fails me. And I hesitate even in those situations. (The last time I used it was for a SQL query that confounded me. It answered perfectly and I now understand how to solve that particular RDB situation.) My Mastodon feed is full of LLM haters who arrived at their position primarily because they think it produces too much garbage. Of those haters, 99% just misunderstand or misrepresent the capabilities and limitations–likely because our society is the Wild West of over-promising new technology–and the haters have taken to quoting the most absurdly iconoclastic views. In a word: insincere. There is a reasonable approach to take to approach reasonably new tech that is out there.

Where was I?

First vacation of the year (then I had one two weeks later… Bad Planning) was to Fasano Italy and surrounding cities in southeast Italy: Martina Franca, Locorotondo, Sassi di Matera, Lecce, Monopoli, and Bari.

DALL-E and the re-creation of the artist

Updated 31 Aug 2024

It’s an almost mundane trope now that DALL-E will obviate the need for visual artists and illustrators.

The most relevant counter to this is to look back at the advent of photography and its positive affect on artists, acting as a force compelling countless new approaches to visual expression. The effortless realism of photography changed the game–even if it was, at the beginning, crude realism. Artists came up with responses such as “vision”-base styles (Impressionism, Pointillism), psychologically-influenced styles (Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism), and then progressively further away from realism throughout the 1900s. Realistic and photorealistic works were still being created (Chuck Close’s work, certain periods of Gerhard Richter), but realism was now a choice. Influenced by the level playing field that photography provided, most anyone could afford their own portrait.

Driven by or co-incident with photography, “manual” visual artists also moved to more pedestrian subjects. Subjects such as boxing matches, picnics, and street scenes were added to the more rarified choices of portraits of the wealthy, scenes from mythology or religion, and the royal exploits such as hunting and whatnot. There were similar influences of subject matter prior to photography, but making realism almost effortless accelerated the direction of creativity in these areas. Rather than destroying the visual arts, photography prompted a Cambrian explosion of creativity.