Transmission #42: The AI-art Explosion, Eating Low Carbon, Energy Wobbles and Going on Holiday By Mistake
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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Design
Stable Diffusion: Is Video Coming Soon?
Martin Anderson,Metaphysic.ai
A good overview of the explosion of AI image making tools that have emerged in recent months. This was written September 1 and such is the speed of progress that somehow it already feels out of date.
Every single day I am seeing a new use of these tools that feels like impossible science-fiction coming to life before my eyes. I can't get over how quickly this is happening.
Creators are leveraging a bevvy of new AI image-creation, animation and video compositing tools to imagine and execute ideas that until now would have taken untold skill and hundreds of hours work. And they’re doing it all in a few hours, or even minutes.
Here’s a handful of examples that recently caught my eye, and in a few weeks will feel impossibly out-of-date:
As the saying goes: change happens slowly, then all at once.
A reasonable question to ask is what happens to the people such as artists, illustrators and animators, who have dedicated their lives to developing the skills to create these kinds of images, and not only now are facing the devaluation of their work (by a nearly free ecosystem), but also find that their aesthetic has been harvested without their consent in order to feed the AI beasts.
I don’t know, but I’m hoping that new paths emerge for them and quickly.
And that creativity doesn’t get reduced to this: a for-sale library of AI image prompts.
Ideas
Notes on Progress: An environmentalist gets lunch
Hannah Richie, Works In Progress
A note from the Our World In Data scientist about the maddening counter-intuitivity of trying to reduce one’s carbon footprint through food:
Watching me make a meal looks like an environmental travesty. I almost exclusively use the microwave. I don’t take time to savour the process: a meal that takes longer than ten minutes is one that’s not worth having. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and bananas transported from Angola. It’s rare that my food is produced locally.
…
[But] I know that my way of eating is low-carbon.
How Europe Stumbled Into an Energy Catastrophe
Benjamin Heart, New York Magazine
Slightly terrifying interview with the pseudonymous Doomberg, about what lies ahead over the coming months in Europe’s energy market, as it heads into a cold winter without all the Russian gas it has been so reliant on.
The vast majority of people with relevant industrial experience are too busy collecting stock options to spend much time getting into the arena of ideas. And the arena of ideas today is dominated by think-tank or university or professional types in government who have never actually worked in industry.
Quote of the Week
Over the past decade, the narrative has turned against Silicon Valley. Puff pieces have become hit jobs, and the visionaries inventing our future have been recast as the Machiavellians undermining our present. My frustration with these narratives, both then and now, is that they focus on people and companies, not technologies.
— Ezra Klein, I Didn’t Want It to Be True but The Medium Really Is The Message, NY Times
Chart of the Week
Other
🏏 The sounds of the Australian summer. Link
🏁 How QR codes work. Strangely fascinating. Link
🍷 A reflection on the glorious and shambolic Withnail & I. Link
🏠 How to build a home that lasts a thousand years. Sage advice for the ultra-long termers out there. Link
That’s it folks! See you in a few weeks!