Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

spronk said:

AI generated art, its no issue at all that AI seems to love Dark Souls vibe right

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Tuco said:

I've gotten into AI art the last year. Dalle, DiscoDiffusion, DeepDream etc, very cool stuff. There's something very other-worldly and frightening about it that is so fascinating, and the concept for a machine generating such ... contemplative looking structures via matrix multiplication is really thought provoking.

For whatever reason, getting into generating the art itself breaks down the allure of it in the opposite way that works for any other hobby I've picked up. Usually when you geti nto something you appreciate the details and depth more because you understand it. Instead of a hollandaise sauce "tasting good", you appreciate the balance of the spices, acidity and fat that can be difficult to produce without your ssauce breaking. Or whatever. Maybe I just haven't done it enough but once I pulled back the curtain all the interesting features I used to find transcendent just look like noise.

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wormie said:

When you look at human produced work you contemplate what the artist meant and what he is trying to convey and maybe try to get into his head in some way. When you look at AI art what’s there to contemplate? “Oh cool a computer reduced an error function”? Meh.

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Tuco said:

Yeah, exactly. And your nonchalance toward the produced work is likely tied to your deeper understanding of the computer science behind that error function reduction. You knew the wizard before it went behind the curtain.

When I first started getting into this and saw something like:

I was enthralled by the alien shapes, but now kind of see them as detritus and am more likely value the human-painted surreal painting like

Or the human element that goes into the process of AI art creation. Still, I find AI art very cool. I think a contemplative question it brings about is the relative value of artistry, especially surreal and postmodern art, if AI does it so well. Maybe your special snowflake painting with a can of soup growing on a long-necked giraffe doesn't convey a deeper message on society if an AI can do it better and with even more random gusto. Maybe I'm just a nerd who failed art class and this is my revenge.

I built a digital art frame in my workplace that just cycles through my "collection" of digital art I've saved since I got into it. I've always thought a cool product idea is something like that that cycles through stuff people made but also had a touch-screen interface that lets you select from different algorithms, configure params, add text prompts and then display the image as it's being formed on some cloud somewhere.

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MusicForFish said:

Ballooning in spiders using multiple silk threads

Spiders can float in the air using their silk threads as a kind of balloon. This paper presents detailed simulations of this behavior which show that electrostatic charges play an important role, both by providing a lift force and by determining the spatial arrangement of multiple threads.

journals.aps.org

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