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im starting to approach ai-spotting as a fun pattern game, and i’ve found a couple good rules of thumb to follow!
look:

similarity smears: ais don’t really ‘know’ what anything ‘is’; the art generators easily conflate similarly shaped and colored things together, like clouds and lace, trees and grass, bark and skin, cloth and hair; in this case eggshells and flower petals, generating forms that are a dreamy, smeary mixture of both.

faux-patterns: ais seems to generate these intricate faux-pattern, which have a deceptively complex and organic appearance that seems rich and lovely at first glance, but on closer inspection you can see there’s no actual design. because the ai isn’t actually producing the kind of intentional work that a human would. humans produce geometric patterns by a creative and situational application of math that these ais just don’t employ.

forebackground: because the ais don’t ‘know’ what anything actually ‘is’, this ai that was trained on painted eggs and flowers can clearly reproduce a number of egg-shaped outlines, but has rendered the depth of any given flower-like object very haphazardly. some of the foliage is just abstract brush-strokes, some is in a crisp painterly style, some is photo-realistic–and all these styles are mixed together at random. because, again, the ai is generating eggs and flowers and paint and leaves all without knowing what any of them are.
anyway! it’s been interesting and fun to learn to spot AI images, and many of them are really lovely to observe closely! i hope this helps other people in their ai-spotting too.
Monster Energy sued the Dark Deception video game series over the title “Gods and Monsters,” and it won a settlement in which the series can never use the word “monster” in a game title again. This corporation sues over any use of this single normal word in any context it possibly can, has apparently been doing so for many years now, and judges keep siding with them?!?!?
They also sue over any use of a green glowy logo over a black background.
I think companies should be crushed with rocks
Here’s what’s actually going on, as far as I can tell:
Video game company puts
“Monster”
somewhere in the name of their game. Monster Energy sends them an agreement to sign under threat of suing them. Note that this agreement doesn’t tell them to change the game’s name, it basically just requires that they don’t try to duplicate the Monster Energy branding, albeit in an overly broad way. This basically exists so that if someone does decide to duplicate the Monster Energy branding, it will be an open-and-shut case.
Ubisoft decided that they didn’t want to sign that letter, because it’s too restrictive, and they don’t want to run every single game they make past legal to make sure it passes, and they didn’t want to take it to court, so they changed the name of their game instead. Other companies probably signed it and released their game that has “Monster” in the title.
Note that at no point is the court system actually involved here, and there’s no lawsuit, just a threat of one. Monster Energy finally found a company that is willing to call their bluff, which is not something that has happened before. I doubt the promised lawsuit even materializes, because there’s obviously no trademark confusion. Not even Monster Energy is claiming trademark confusion, it’s just putting out vague threats.
realizing that the doordash live cricket exploit which used to exist is not something that ever got coverage in a periodical at any point. history cannot be allowed to forget this.
basically, when doordash calculates pay for “shop and deliver” orders (ones where the delivery driver has to go into a store and pick out the items before delivering them to the customer) they base that calculation on how many items were in the order, which makes sense because the more items you have to find and carry, the more work you are doing. but what they failed to consider is that, at some pet stores (most notably petsmart) you can buy live crickets, and some reptile owners will buy them in the dozens or even hundreds at a time. and in the pay calculation, each live cricket counted as an individual item. so there was a time when you could get an order that took like half an hour of work total (including both shopping and delivery time) that paid $50 or more, when the customer paid doordash significantly less than that. this is something you would probably never hear about unless you worked doordash during this time, but it’s important. live crickets were once the bane of a billion dollar company.
Feb comic! I was thinking about how people get more attached to things the longer they keep them and how nice that is.
I just found my new favorite Kickstarter scam. It becomes more efficient by switching to the triangle.
"The Alternating Current (AC) produced in the generator is being rectified into Direct Current (DC) through the PCB. There, it becomes more efficient by switching to the Triangle*."
IT BECOMES MORE EFFICIENT BY SWITCHING TO THE TRIANGLE














