The Braindump Blog

Recently learned that I’m just one degree of separation from one of those accidental Bitcoin millionaires.

A acquaintance of a friend mined BTC to a wallet stored on a SD card years ago. After recently re-finding the card, he’s now got a new house with a few million $ left over.

Finished reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 📚.

This one is a real classic, perhaps the archetype of magical realism . That’s a style most associated with Latin American authors where things are going along just like we might ourselves expect to happen in real life. But occasionally something unquestionably fantastical happens. People fly, ghosts appear, spells are cast - whatever you can imagine. But to the characters in the book it’s perfectly normal, not even worth remarking on. Their world just works that way.

This book tells the story of many generations of a family in a beautiful, sometimes poetic, manner. In some parts it felt like hearing someone’s dream experience, other times more like a myth or legend from times long past.

Parts were somewhat disorientating to me, not least because many of the characters have similar names to each other; a fact remarked on within the book. It should be noted that there are some ‘uncomfortable’ scenes, and took me a good amount of focus to get through it. But it was an entirely worthwhile effort to make.

Watched The Power of the Doctor Doctor Who special 📺.

So I liked it, but I love Daleks and Cybermen enough as sci-fi enemies that you could even put them in Matt Hancock’s episode of “I’m a Celebrity” and I’d say it was good. Add in the master, UNIT and the actual companions and various previous incarnations of the eponymous hero themselves from decades-old episodes and it can’t disappoint.

It might be fairly said that the story itself was rather chaotic and incoherent at times, so I don’t blame anyone who thought it was too messy to follow. But if you have any nostalgia for Dr W then you’ll probably like it.

Also a great ending. I often regret seeing all the early “the next Doctor will be played by X” stories as it naturally spoils the when and who of the relevant episode’s grand finale. But this one still managed to surprise me.

Matt Hancock, the former Conservative Health Secretary who previously had to resign that position due to having a Covid-rule-breaking affair with a member of his staff, has now had the whip fully withdrawn from him.

It turns out that rather than going to the effort of doing his day job representing his constituents he’s signed up to take part on the “I’m a Celebrity…Get me out of here!” reality show due to start in November.

Update:

Andy Drummond, deputy chairman of the West Suffolk Conservative Association, said he was looking forward to seeing Mr Hancock “eating a kangaroo’s penis”.

Aren’t we all? Thanks for that, BBC.

Happy Halloween!

My current favourite recently-learned spooky fact is that the infamous film The Exorcist - the one that originally induced audiences to faint, vomit and maybe even have heart attacks - is in fact based on a true story. It’s the story of Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, although his name wasn’t widely known until last year, after he had died the year before.

From the age of 14 it was reported that he had been possessed by something menacing. People around him heard strange noise, and things flew around the house. Red scratches appeared on his body, spelling out various words. He had violent outbursts and spoke Latin phrases in a strange voice. Walls shook and furniture slid. All of which you may have seen in the film’s recreation, albeit featuring a younger girl.

It’s not clear that the infamous head-spinning scene actually happened in Ronald’s case though. Which is shown below, but perhaps don’t click on it if you don’t like scary things or bad language.

In later life, Ronald became a NASA engineer. His work was used in the 1960s Apollo space missions and, more recently, for space shuttle materials. He apparently went out of his way to ensure people didn’t know of his exorcist related history, unfortunately going through his life always afraid of people figuring it out.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s now a matter of debate how true the true story was. The fact that The Exorcist is based on Ronald and what people around him reported is true. But whether the original events concerned were of paranormal origin or were in fact deliberate trickery done by the kid has been questioned at some length. But even if it was an act, it sounds like it was an unusually convincing and long-lasting one from a likely troubled child.

A descendent of Captain William Humphries has finally returned “Red Deer” - a book by Richard Jefferies that he borrowed in 1938 to a library in Coventry.

It’s in good condition apparently, which is kind of amazing when most likely it was kept in a house that was bombed in the Blitz.

Being 84 years overdue it had accumulated quite a fine. Fortunately at 1 old penny a day it only worked out to £18.27 in today’s money. Embarrassingly, I’ve paid library fines bigger than that. Today the library charges 25p per day, so if someone pulls the same stunt again that’ll cost them £7673.

It was returned by the Captain’s grandson Paddy Riordan, who told the BBC that he wasn’t sure why it had taken so long to get returned, but “It really wasn’t that exciting a book”.

Believe it or not it’s by no means the most overdue return of a library book. That honour is held by the catchily named “Scriptores rerum Germanicarum septentrionalium, vicinorumque populorum diversi”. That translates to “Various historians of the Northern Germans and of neighbouring peoples”.

A copy of that book was returned to Sidney Sussex College 288 years after it had been borrowed in the year 1668.

This one had been borrowed by Colonel Robert Walpole, who was an MP in 1689, and the father of the confusingly similar named Sir Robert Walpole, who Wikipedia records as being the first Prime Minister of the UK.

In that case no fine was exacted.

Elsewhere I’ve recently written about Dries Depoorter’s creepy art project “The Follower” that takes non-consensual photos of you taking photos of yourself.

And for data analysts who find that their favourite R library was archived from CRAN, an easy way to install it anyway.

Everyone’s favourite group of Covid-19 lockdown defying goats are back at it again.

Originally sighted running rampage over the human-deserted lockdown streets of Llandudno, it’s apparently got out of control enough that a special taskforce has had to be convened.

They’re descended from some Kashmir mountain goats that Queen Victoria, forgetting that a goat is for life, not just for Christmas, gave to Llandudno a century ago (or perhaps actually regifted from the Shah of Persia, to be accurate). She may have been a big fan of cashemere, but somehow hadn’t foreseen that Covid restrictions 100 years later would mean that their descendants wouldn’t have access to contraception.

Consequently: welcome to the baby boom generation of the goat world. OK boomer.

Who amongst us hasn’t been caught running wild in streets, sleeping in bus shelters, fighting in the car park and snacking on people’s hedges? Nonetheless, the goats have seemingly been encouraged to return to their home, Great Orme.

It all seems very good natured, with positive sentiments about them abounding, from anyone who hasn’t had their houses eaten at least. I’d imagine their relocation has probably not been entirely devoid of controversy though.

Last year there were rumours that they’d end up on the set of “I’m a Celebrity…Get me out of here!” also known as Gwrych Castle, which naturally is already full of beasts of a more spectral persuasion. Some of the residents of Llandudno were not super pleased at this idea, with one ominously suggesting that “If they take more than a few goats then people are going to be very upset.”.

(Also: a special thank you to my friend for highlighting this story - in memoriam of a site I used to have many years ago, sadly no longer in existence, which went through a phase of sharing these kind of critical goat news updates.)

Another probable first: our new Prime Minister is substantially richer than the King.

The Sunak household is estimated to have a net worth of £730 million, most of which comes from his wife Akshata Murty’s stake in her father’s Indian company, Infosys. That’s about double the estimate for King Charles’s wealth.

The Information Commissioner has warned companies to avoid using AI-based emotion detection technology to make meaningful decisions on the basis that there’s no evidence yet that it’s anything much beyond an ‘expensive random number generator’.

Derek Thompson writes about Britain’s economic decline over the past few years. In the midst of decreasing living standards, we’re now one of the poorest and least productive countries in Western Europe by some measures, especially outside of London.

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth

There’s a recent tradition that each new Conservative Prime Minister gets to help design their own special lectern to deliver speeches from. They cost £2000-£4000 to make; a lucrative business in recent times I guess.

It seems like they’re usually supposed to convey a certain something the PM wants to project. David Cameron’s was supposed to look statesmanlike. Theresa May’s was designed to look feminine. Boris Johnson’s was a bit bulkier in order to cope with him thumping it during his more rousing speeches.

I’m not sure of the intent behind Liz Truss' twisty one, but it’s often described as looking like a game of Jenga. Based on Wikipedia’s description of that game as involving “creating a progressively more unstable structure” this seems apt.

The version of it that was used for speeches in the Conservative HQ is predictably covered in Union Jack designs.

Poor Rishi Sunak was appointed in such a hurry that there wasn’t time for him to design his own one. He’s ended up with a straight edition of Liz Truss’s one that had been created “just in case”. In case of exactly what I’m not sure, but, hey, it turned out to be useful after all.

I’m not a member of any political party at the time of writing. This is the UK norm, with only around 850k people being affiliated to any party in that way, out of an electorate of around 47 million.

For years I’ve felt uneasy about so directly supporting a party when all of them usually have some policy or other I firmly disagree with, especially without feeling like I’ve had enough resources at hand to work towards enacting change from within.

In more recent times I’ve also not felt I’ve understood what any of the parties not in currently in power even really stand for. I’ve ended up voting for various left-leaning parties over the years depending on the situation at the time.

However, in the present time of a truly dangerous and chaotic government, my previous rationales have started to feel potentially like weak excuses to me personally. I decided to try and figure out what the only other party that realistically at this point could win a national election, Labour, stands for to see if I could feel comfortable more directly supporting them. If recent polling carried forth into actual votes they’d in fact have a landslide victory

I don’t love the Labour website. The first thing you see is a form requesting your contact details on top of a somewhat nausea-inducing background video sequence. Then, inevitably, a cookies popup that as far as I can see you can’t actually decline, along with a donation popup.

But get through all of that and there’s a link to “Labour’s vision for Britain”.

It looks like right now their number one priority is a plan for economic growth. This is understandable given the recent devastation of the economy by the present government and the impact this has had, and will have in future, on British citizens, even if I’m not convinced that economic growth is the necessarily the measure a good society should optimise for. Historically though it has at least correlated with a lot of good things, but perhaps only up to a point.

As to what they plan to do to fix the situation, much of the plan seems to be based on British job creation and industrial strategy.

At a glance I am good with the idea of altering business rates to promote investment, fairer competition and creating a council to inject a sense of long-term strategic thinking. I’m nowhere near expert enough to know whether these are plausible approaches to the problems at hand, but at least there’s an intuitive reasonableness we can later determine if there’s any evidence to back it up.

Obviously it’s easy to say “we want more fair and good green jobs”- so as always the devil will be in the detail, but it’s a reasonable vision to have.

In former days it’d be one of those annoying generic slogans that it’s hard to really imagine any mainstream party being against. But it actually doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the top of the list of Conservative priorities - quite the opposite. At times the Conservatives seem desperate to inject culture-war topics into the UK political sphere which isn’t going to help on anything environmental.

What other concrete policies are Labour pursuing these days? To get a sense of their current priorities I checked out their campaigns page. Here’s roughly what I gathered from a trawl of the various sections.

Employment

• Boost people’s income - better pay will improve the economy as well as tackle the cost of living crisis.
• Ban zero hours contracts and “bogus” self-employment.
• End the “qualifying periods” some jobs have that mean people have to wait up to 2 years to realise certain rights, including unfair dismissal, sick pay and parental leave.
• Update trade union legislation for the modern era, removing certain restrictions.

Energy

• Stop the energy price cap rising, by taxing high oil and gas profits.
• Ensure people who have prepayment meters don’t pay more for energy than everyone else.
• Insulate all homes that need it.
• Invest in sustainable British energy (wind, tidal, solar) and back nuclear energy.
• Create a publicly owned energy company that delivers energy independence and security with 100% clean power by 2030.

Economy

• Build industries in every region of the UK.
• Invest in electric car batteries, green steel, renewable ready ports.
• Create a national wealth fund.

Security

• Recruit 13,000 extra police / PCSO officers to rebuild neighbourhood policing
• Improve training, vetting and misconduct procedures.
• Introduce rules on strip-searching children.
• Address the epidemic of violence against women/girls, including introducing domestic abuse experts.
• Crack down on the criminal gangs who trade in people.

Health

Expand the NHS workforce by:

• doubling the number of medical school places and district nurses qualifying per year.
• creating an additional 10,000 nursing/midwifery placements per year.
• training 5000 new health visitors.

Education

Primary school education: “Build a Britain where children come first” - this one was extremely vague.

Home ownership

• Target 70% home ownership.
• Build high quality affordable homes
• Reform the private rented sector

Some of the things I liked in what I saw:

An emphasis on not just creating jobs, but ensuring they are secure, decent and paid well enough to provide a decent life. The fact that even under the current highly stigmatising welfare regime a whole lot of people claiming benefits, or even needing to make use of food banks, need to do so despite the fact they they have paid jobs is absurd.

Banning zero hours contact and fake self-employment feels like a good sentiment in general to reduce the abuse of folk in for example the gig economy. It is plausible to me that zero hours contracts could be used in a way beneficial to all in some limited cases so I don’t know if a full ban is the correct answer. However they’re right to identify that, surprise surprise, that’s not what actually happens at present so it might be a good policy in net terms.

The green stuff: targeting of jobs and industry towards green industries, insulating homes, investing in green energy et al. The environment is the disaster-in-progress that may finally ruin the quality of or even end some of our lives if nothing else gets us first. Actually it already is doing so. Mitigating climate change should be a priority for every party, particularly as we already know a lot of what needs to be done - it’s a case of actually doing it.

Expanding the NHS workforce, assuming this comes with investment. After the Covid pandemic and chronic mismanagement on the part of the Conservatives, the NHS is in a quite precarious state with huge waiting lists to catch up on - including 6 million people waiting to start hospital treatment. Whether this expansion can happen fast enough to be the only major change needed I don’t know - I would assume not - but it’s clearly a necessary step for the future.

A focus on domestic abuse and other violence against women, areas of crime that are unfortunately common and also very rarely prosecuted in many cases.

Creating of a publicly owned energy company - to facilitate the shift towards green energy, but also to create jobs, reduce dependence on countries such as Russia, build resilience and in the end lower fuel bills. I’m happy Labour aren’t scared to introduce policies that might be seen as being at least in the direction of nationalising parts of some critical industries, even if they have gone out of their way to make it clear that we’re not talking about nationalising existing companies.

Taxing the vast profits of fossil fuel energy providers. This might prove somewhat impossible many cases when a lot of them are not British-situated companies. For those that are within the appropriate jurisdiction then it seems right to me to windfall-tax the profits of the energy producers which have been incredible at a time when the cost of energy to consumers has created a real crisis.

Reforming the private rental sector - rents have never been higher. A few years ago the Conservative MPs, many of whom are themselves landlords in addition to their day job(s), voted against requiring landlords to make their homes be ‘fit for human habitation’. Reforming could mean many things, but I expect most of them would be better than today’s situation.

Some of the things I felt wary about:

A lot of the security section. “Crack down on human traffickers” is the sort of detail-free statement that always worries me on this topic.

It could mean creating compassionate policies to ensure people who want or need to get to the UK can do so in a safe and humane way to the benefit of us all. Or it could mean going full Farage and inventing wave machines to literally push boats full of some of the most vulnerable people in the world back into the sea.

To be fair the latter idea was dreamt up (and thankfully discarded) under a Conservative administration - but I imagine Farage would also be into it. At least Labour’s plans do specifically include cancelling the ridiculous and awful plan to ship asylum seekers off to Rwanda, which is a very good thing.

But, outside of that specific point, my fear is that is this ‘cracking down’ will be more in the latter direction. Starmer has specifically said that there’s very little substantive difference between his party’s thinking on immigration and that of the Conservative Party. In a time where the official policy is to create a ‘hostile environment’ in a way that may not even actually be legal, this is the kind of thing that I find abhorrent enough to be extremely off-putting. I couldn’t defend it.

I was disappointed there was almost nothing about education. My understanding is that the education workforce is depleted, of low morale and struggling with workload in an environment of damaging low budgets in a similar way to the NHS workforce. A poll suggested half of the teachers in England plan to quit within the next 5 years. Most experience various degrees of poor mental health due to their work. There’s also the impact of the disruption to normal schooling practices on all concerned - students, teachers and parents - that the pandemic triggered.

I’d actually have liked to see a specific mention of mental health in general. It’s estimated that an astonishing 10 million people in England would benefit from new or extra mental health support.

I also wished I’d seen something about international aid or other policies that support the wellbeing of people in other countries. Britain does not exist in isolation. Despite the frantic and damaging chaos resulting from recent UK political decisions, there remain countries that are in far worse states with their populations suffering solvable trauma. In some cases Britain may even have played an unfortunate part in creating the harms that they suffer. In all cases we should show them compassion.

Another day, another British Prime Minister.

Now the UK is to be led by Rishi Sunak who was selected as Conservative Party leader without contest after his primary competitors dropped out.

Demographically, he’s the first person of Hindu faith elected to the office, so perhaps it’s somehow fitting that his selection on occurred on the main day of the Diwali Festival of Lights.

Of Punjabi Indian descent, he’s also the first British Prime Minister of colour (at least by many definitions, although back in 1868 PM Benjamin Disraeli was of Jewish heritage).

He’s also the youngest prime minister in over 200 years, being 42 years old.

Watched season 2 of The Capture 📺.

Another pretty gripping season of this thriller, following DI Carey now she’s been promoted into the shadowy S015 organisation she fought against in the first season.

I didn’t love it quite as much as that season - perhaps because it felt even more implausible and confusing at times. A part of that might also be that some of the ethical issues it raises are less novel to me.

I did enjoy the extremely blatant references to Cambridge Analytica (but in reality I think this stuff is far less effective than portrayed here - thankfully!) and tech companies like Huawei, alongside a reinforcement of the idea that modern-day politics is so much about presenting an “acceptable” image.

Listening to The Unraveling of PUPTheBand by PUP 🎶.

One of my favourite albums of 2022 so far, from the Canadian punk rock band PUP.

I think I read somewhere that the piano interludes were added just because they might annoy their fans, although I can’t find the source for that any more. That sense of just having a fun time doing whatever nonsense you feel like doing makes the album extra compelling to me. I mean, how can you not love any album that contains a love song written from the point of view of a robot?

I went back and listened to their other 3 albums - PUP, The Dream Is Over and Morbid Stuff. Each one was a good time.

Watched No Time To Die 📽.

2021’s James Bond film, containing most of the classic Bond tropes enacted in big fun implausible style, still managing to surprise here and there. The sexism has been dialled down vs some of the older films, but not in “preachy” way. I enjoyed it.

It’s long enough that I ended up having to watch it in parts, which often spoils a film experience - but this one worked just fine.

Incredible to imagine that if the Lib Dem motion to disallow anyone from becoming Prime Minister if they’ve been found guilty of breaking the law whilst in government gets through then the 2 current favourites for next UK PM - Johnson and Sunak - would both be disqualified.

So the lettuce won.

Liz Truss finally decided to quit as Prime Minister, after 45 days in office, acknowledging she can’t deliver what she promised (thankfully).

She’ll likely be the shortest ever serving PM. The next shortest is 1827’s George Canning. He died of tuberculosis 119 days in.

I was curious what % of the UK electorate is a member of a political party. Turns out just 1.5% of us are members of 1 the big 3 - Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem. This is actually ~2x the 2013 figure of 0.8%.

The SNP attracts a mammoth 2.5% of its potential Scottish voters.

And here’s the figures in terms of the number of people involved. This adds up to a total of around 850k party members.

So the UK has yet another new chancellor - Jeremy Hunt - thanks to Liz Truss' latest enforced u-turn.

Unfortunately the Conservative party continues to apparently be playing a game of randomly selecting economic strategies from a bag of policies totally unsuitable for the current economic situation, as we’re likely heading back into a time of deliberate austerity.

It should not be forgotten that not only do unfathomable cuts to public services cause misery for the population - think for example of the 7 million people currently on waitlists for hospital treatment - they also kill us.

Austerity policies naturally affect a lot more than healthcare expenditure, but it’s perhaps there that their deadly effects can most clearly be estimated.

Last year researchers did their best to quantify the causal impact of constraining expenditure on social care, public health and healthcare in the period of austerity between 2010/2011–2014/2015. Their mean estimate was that the decrease in expenditure when compared with the trend for the 8 years before led to an extra 57.550 deaths (albeit with a wide confidence interval - 3,075-111,195).

In modelling this, they concluded that an 1% increase in:

• healthcare expenditure reduces mortality by 0.532%;
• social care expenditure reduces mortality by 0.336%;
• local public health spending reduces mortality by 0.019%

A different paper from 5 years ago also attempted to look at the impact of us constraining healthcare and social care expenditure during 2011-2014. That group estimated an extra 45,368 people died (95% CI 34,530-56,206) compared to trends before 2010. They suggest that investment in care homes and nurses are two important factors that could mitigate this.

Ever since learning about the prevalence and progress of AI-generated art, mainly via such a piece having won an art competition, it’s not left my mind for too long. I was kind of confused how best to think about it then, and it’s only got worse as time goes on. Herein are some further ramblings.

As a reminder, these are systems where you type in a prompt, e.g. “Picture of a juggling elephant” and out pops a picture of whatever you asked for. Right now the results aren’t always great, hence the new vocation of “prompt engineer” - someone who knows what phrases to give to an AI for best result. But they’re often certainly good enough to be used commercially and beyond.

There exist several famous such systems, including DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Importantly, the way they work is dependent on them having processed vast arrays of existing, presumably human, art. This is typically sucked in from the internet without explicit permission from its creators. No-one really thinks computers just became innately artistic in the traditional sense; but rather that we developed algorithms that allow a computer to translate an arbitrary text string into an image output based on what it’s derived from all the art and contextual information it’s already seen.

This Guardian article gives a quick overview of roughly how these systems work. The below video goes through some slightly more mathy details.

Given the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see more and more usage of AI art over time. The systems are already perfectly usable by almost anyone who can use the web, and will only get cheaper and easier to use over time - for an individual end user even now it’s often free. If nothing else, we can be confident that the capitalism’s invisible hand typically pushes us towards the immediately cheapest - often meaning most generic and least human-skill-requiring - solution to any perceived need, no matter the external cost. You’d basically need some kind of world-wide usage ban to stop it, which isn’t going to happen.

Perhaps there’ll be a set of people who are dead against the technology. It may well never replace human artists in their entirety. But it’s going to - and perhaps already has - replace a good number of them. In doing so, it’ll inevitably change what the world looks like for the rest of us.

After all, even if it turns out that the very ‘best’ art is somehow only ever possible via human production, there’s a ton of current use cases where fairly mediocre art is acceptable to businesses and individuals. Particularly when it’s extremely cheap to produce.

Automation replacing people in jobs is very much not new, but it’s traditionally been seen un jobs with perhaps less visible output, considered more rote, and unfortunately probably thought of as being of lower status or worth than the typical romantic perception of the artist. Being an artist is aspirational, if sadly unobtainable, for many folk. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of unpleasant, tedious, ill-paid and abusive artistic jobs. Maybe it won’t be terrible if some of those disappear, as long as the people involved are cared for. But the trait of being “artistic” is often seen as a very human, and desirable trait. Those considered to be near the top of their game are widely admired and honoured.

Whilst access to AI art generators is somewhat restricted or at least niche at present, that’s inevitably not going be the case for long. Microsoft Office, that most unexciting and ubiquitous of workplace software, is gearing up to add a “Microsoft Designer” component that generates illustrations based on the sentences you type. Their promo video shows someone creating a poster for their bakery business based on typing “Cake with berries, bread and pastries for the fall”, no graphic designer needed. I guess this is the modern day version of clipart.

Stock photography as a business might also be on its way out, at least in terms of how it works today. Already there are stock photography sites that offer to generate you an AI-created image if they don’t already have something that meets your satisfaction. That’s one less human photographer or artist receiving credit and payment for their work. In fact one of that site’s dedicated tools reads your blog post text to create you an appropriate cover image. I might try that on this post just for fun when I’m done.

Update: I did just that. Here’s the image stockai.com generated when fed with the text from this post. It was free and took maybe 45 seconds.

That’s an example of how the technology could be additive rather than substitutional. There’s no way I would have commissioned an artist or even browsed stock photography sites for this humble blogpost. No-one lost out (at least not directly, certainly the consequences of participating in shifting norms are debatable). But it also seems very unlikely that many profit-focussed companies who currently invest in some kind of artistic output will keep spending the money they currently do if they get idea that they don’t need to into their heads.

The Atlantic magazine already got into some controversy over using an AI generated image to illustrate one of its newsletters. The Economist used an AI to design one of its covers. I’m sure there are many more examples, whether we know about them or not. Let’s also remember than an increasing number of the more mundane stories you read in certain publications are written by AIs - the automated journalism trend, so it’s not only visual creativity at play here.

But worrying about people losing jobs due to technology is seemingly not something society tends to do in earnest. The Luddites who literally battled the industrialisation of the textile business in 19th century England didn’t win; they became an insult.

Sentiments along the lines of “don’t worry about it, they’ll just get better jobs right away” or “but this will make things cheaper which will benefit everyone in the end” abound. Sometimes they might be true. Oftentimes probably the former isn’t, at least whilst many of us live in societies that tend to see unemployment as a problem that must be solved by the individual rather than the system that caused it, whilst appearing to have little respect for article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in theory we could deal humanely and generously with unemployment of all kinds.

What is less obvious to me is what a shift to most “art” we see day-to-day being generated by AI might do to harder-to-define concepts like creativity. The pictures that come out of these AI machines are “new” for sure, in that they never existed before. But they’re all based on some black-box manipulation of existing, human-powered art for now. Some of this is very clear, such as prompts that explicitly request the combination of 2 human artworks that haven’t previously been combined - such as “Kermit the Frog in Blade Runner 2049”

“A still of Kermit The Frog in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)” #dalle pic.twitter.com/CxyWFRJETc

— HeavensLastAngel (@HvnsLstAngel) May 31, 2022

In other, more abstract cases, it’s much less obvious.

But in any case, the machine needs feeding.

One might consider that human artists are also inspired by what they’ve seen. To what extent is a human’s art also a black box “generative process” based on all the artistic inputs they’ve seen in their life? There’s an way in which this has to be at least partly true within a certain scope, given “movements” exist in art - think Impressionism, Modernism, Neo-Classicism, that kind of thing.

But something starts those movements. What I don’t know is whether that’s something qualitatively different to the kind of generative process that the crop of AI art generators we might expect in the next few years could do. Or am I putting humanity on too much of a pedestal? Do we know that human creativity isn’t deep down based on a not dissimilar process? Disclaimer: I haven’t actually done any research into creativity really. There may exist very simple answers to these questions.

But if there is an insurmountable difference, or simply if market forces et. al. result in AIs being attuned towards a diminutive and limiting goal like “optimise your output to please the most amount of people today” then perhaps something will be lost, or at least delayed. Will future historians note a moment where the world got artistically stuck in some sense?

It’s of course possible I’ve gotten this the wrong way round. An AI playing the game of Go beat its human opponent with moves so novel and unexpected that they’ve been described as ‘alien’ and ‘from an alternate dimension’. Maybe one day AI art generators will show us something valuable we’d never otherwise have imagined.

Perhaps some of the more concerning “getting stuck” effect has already happened to some extent via a different algorithmic use case. Witness for instance how Netflix has changed its once acclaimed artistic output based on what it’s algorithms say will sell well. Look at the truly bizarre output that sometimes populates social media at present, where potentially artistic output gets optimised for engagement above anything. It might result in fascinating, important, meaningful new art forms. It can also result in a spate of videos of people eating out of toilets because at some point someone did it and the resulting video went viral.

It’s not clear how “new” this is; I’m sure art has always been driven by incentive. It may just be that accessibility and access to an audiences improved. It’s much easier for me to share a video of myself eating ice-cream out of a toilet on Facebook than it would be for me to paint some kind of Mona Lisa-beating painting and set up an internationally renowned art gallery to show it off.

It’s often easy to forget that just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s “better”. That sentiment is often a metaphorical barrier used to prohibit less privileged sections of society making inroads into whatever sphere the existing powers-that-be want to protect for their own selfish purposes.

A little less dramatically: should my blog go without illustration because I don’t have either the talent or resources needed to go to art school? But also, if I’m not prepared to pay or credit an artist then do I really have the right to use an illustration that was overtly non-consensually derived from work of many other people? As these systems work by ingesting incredible amounts of other people’s art, a whole set of rights issues exist.

Being popular with the current AI art community is not necessarily a blessing for a human artist. Greg Rutkowski is an artist known for fantasy landscapes. But his style is liked enough that his name has apparently become a common prompt for people using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to generate art, with tens of thousands of images being generated by typing in phrases including his name.

An example shown by the MIT Technology Review used the prompt “Wizard with sword and a glowing orb of magic fire fights a fierce dragon Greg Rutkowski" which produced this:

Now when Rutkowski Googles his name he gets art that isn’t his. And he has no rights over the AI-generated images. So if some entity wants to use some work that an AI explicitly created based on having ingested hundreds of his images without permission then they’re presumably free to do so. This has understandably left him with the opinion that “A.I. should exclude living artists from its database”. Which prompts me to additionally wonder about if there’s any ethical considerations of note surrounding the possible AI exploitation of a dead artist’s work.

For now though, if the artist’s images are on the internet then they’re considered fair game. These systems don’t ask artists to opt in to having their work included, and it’s not clear that they even have the ability to opt out them. Some tools that at might at least let you know if your work has been used to train these AI systems have started to appear, including Spawn’s Have I Been Trained?.

To what extent this is different from a human artist enjoying Rutkowski’s pictures and later creating something in a similar style is something that perhaps still needs to be thrashed out. After all, the ingested pictures were on the publicly accessible internet in the first place. But the big difference here is of course accessibility and scale. The new part is that is that a single person or business with no art knowledge or skill can generate hundreds of “original” Rutkowski style pictures a day with no artistic ability and little-to-no resources.

This opens up new possibilities for the masses, which could be a positive thing - see the optimistic possibility Wired presents of “dramatically expanding the number of people able to generate and experiment with art and illustration”. But left without consideration, it may also result in a pretty devastating exploitation of people’s hitherto highly valued work. And potentially a world where it feels like we’re immersed in some kind of Borges' style Library of Babel but for whichever genre of art is algorithmically popular or convenient, with a possible plot twist of any remaining human artists being accused of being AIs.

A friend informs me that the Daily Star is running a livestream of a lettuce to see whether it can outlast Liz Truss' premiership.

There’s an 8 days left until total lettuce decay. Hard to predict the outcome.

Current status:

Channel 4 created a show where they purchase artwork from “controversial” artists such as Pablo Picasso (misogynist), Rolf Harris (paedophile), Eric Gill (sex abuser) and umm…Hitler (I surely don’t need to explain this one). Then the audience gets to vote as to whether a comedian destroys their artistic output with a flame thrower.

I’m not convinced this is exactly a force for good. I guess it did teach me that Picasso had some pretty unpleasant views about women.