Tag: generative ai
The Orange Scribble Problem
I’ve been rebuilding DUSK as a local-first application. DUSK is my attempt to make a practical lighting visualisation tool using generative AI. You upload an image, select an area and describe a lighting treatment: uplight the columns, wash the ceiling, turn the scene into night, add concealed light beneath a bench. The original version relied heavily on Google Gemini. That was useful for getting a prototype working quickly, especially as I am a lighting designer who has somehow wandered into so...
#oneaday Day 767: Why I continue to write in an age of AI
I read a good piece earlier that got me thinking: why do I continue to tap out words here, day after day, in an age where those odious "Generate with AI" buttons are ubiquitous, whether you want them or not? (Even here in my own self-hosted version of WordPress, I cannot escape the "Improve with...
#oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn
There is increasing talk of the video games industry staring down an honest-to-goodness crash -- and this time around, unlike the notorious Great Global Video Game Crash of North America from 1983, it looks very much like it could be one that will happen across the world. All this said, I feel like, at this...
Mo’ Code, Mo’ Problems
One of the truisms I learned early in my career is that every line of code you write is a liability as much as it is an asset. Every line of code you (or your team) writes is a line of code that must be maintained, a line of code that potentially exposes a security...
My Guidelines for Writing About AI
Grokked & Pilfered
Elon Musk’s new Wikipedia clone has been criticized for nicking Wikipedia. Something else it also does: Aggressively cite the Tedium archive.
Explaining The Vibes
AI gets a lot of hate these days, and it often frustrates me too, but let’s be clear about what it can realistically do. Here’s my attempt to explain by example.
A Clarifying Moment
In case you were on the fence about whether OpenAI was a positive force in the world, they sort of revealed their hand this week by leaning into a meme.
Quadruple-Booked
The latest artificial intelligence use cases, like Windows’ Recall and Zoom’s digital twins, appear to be built specifically for managers and executives, and literally nobody else. That’s a problem.
Does One Line Fix Google?
Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add \"udm=14\" to the search URL.
Missing The Human Touch
Tech and creativity once had a symbiotic relationship in the push towards innovation. As generative content matures, it feels like they’re starting to diverge. And that’s bad for creative people.
When Stewards Go Astray
A pair of recent controversies around the tech-publishing giant Automattic raise an important question in my mind: Do we have to worry about the future of WordPress?
Once More With Feeling
That AI-generated pop song sounds terrible, but it reflects a long legacy of letting machines manipulate or even generate our musical output.
Art Fights Back
A comic artist took a journalistic dive into the knotty debates around generative AI—and found artists worried about the people even more than the tech.
A Seismic Stock Shift
Stock photo services like Shutterstock or Getty Images helped source the models used by tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. But stock photos are not perfect—and if the two models can’t work together, one could disrupt the other.
The Artist and the Amiga
Andy Warhol was enamored with the first computer he ever owned—and he didn’t seem all that worried about the risks of disruption.