OH: they put a man on the moon with GOTO

$610 million is a pretty big number for a web browser

Review of Battlestar Galactica Season 1 - 2005

DragonCon is a long-running science fiction and nerd culture convention. Dane Ault of monkeyminion.com was at DragonCon as an artist. He broke the news on Bluesky about a suddenly empty booth in Artist’s Alley with a sign saying: [_Bluesky_] > VENDOR REMOVED FOR SELLING AI ART #ARTBYHUMANS The site was quickly enhanced by AI haters, including a sticker changing “AI ART” to “AI IMAGES”. And of course, an RIP BOZO. [_Bluesky_] DragonCon has a no-AI policy: [_Reddit_] > No AI artwork of any kind will be allowed to be sold or distributed in Comic and Pop Artist Alley. Failure to comply with our AI policy can lead to immediate removal from the show floor. So what happened? Dane watched it live from booth A-11, right next to the AI miscreants in A-10. [_Bluesky_] Dane says the art the AI guys put up on Thursday was “while not to my taste, clearly made by a person.” But on Friday, two different people came in with other stuff: [_Bluesky_] > The paintings were still there, but now so were new images of various anime characters & comic characters, monopoly man and snoopy, all bloomy and blurry with weird details and various numbers of fingers. I immediately clocked it as AI, but was too busy Friday to get away from my table. The AI image of the Monopoly Man playing a bass is striking in its way. Five fingers on one hand, four on the other, and a varying number of strings along the neck of the bass. My first thought was “this should be on an NFT.” [_Reddit_] On Saturday, Dane got onto the convention staff about the AI slop mongers. The staff running Artist’s Alley investigated over Saturday and Sunday. The AI guys apparently gave the staff a proof video of their artistic process — a time lapse of how they made the pictures — and the proof video was also AI-generated! [_Reddit_] Then Monday arrived: [_Bluesky_] > That morning, I got in at 9:45 & the AA folks (plus a few others and a cop) were already at the booth. The owners weren’t in yet. I got set up, the show opened and then the booth folks showed up, about 15-30 minutes late. At which point the AA staff descended upon them like avenging angels. They took up positions, creating a wall across the entrance to the booth, telling attendees who stopped that they were being removed and were no longer available, and the scammers took down their displays and angrily packed their gear and left. There’s video of the ejection as it was happening. [_Threads_] Another artist left a sign in the empty booth explaining that the vendors had been kicked out for AI. Dane posted a photo of that sign to Bluesky later that day. Spaces in Artist’s Alley are limited and under heavy demand. So the AI scammers took a space from a non-AI artist and they used it to push slop. How did these guys get into Artist’s Alley at all? They lied on their application: [_Bluesky_] > He told me that the people in that booth submitted the pop art paintings for their application and were approved for those. He had no idea they were going to offer AI garbage and started working on the process for deleting them from the show as soon as he learned about it. The booth was booked in the name of Oriana Gerez. She’s actually an artist, she can paint, she has a gallery! The AI slop was apparently made by her boyfriend and Gerez helped set up the booth. It looks like Gerez was fully on board with the scheme — she posted on her official Instagram bragging about their sales and calling everyone laughing at them broke losers. Her Instagram went private shortly after this. [_Bluesky_] I’ve heard that for next year, DragonCon will be banning vendors from selling AI-produced work anywhere in the convention. Other conventions are noticing the response from the fans, and there’s already a notice from GalaxyCon: [_Facebook_] > Effective immediately, AI-generated artwork is prohibited for any booth or table type. This applies to ALL merchandise, including, but not limited to, prints, posters, mugs, t-shirts/apparel, towels, etc. Failure to abide by this rule will result in ejection from the event with no refund given, as well as a ban from any future GalaxyCon, Animate!, SuperStar, or Nightmare Weekend event. * _Video version_ ### Share this post: * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_

I shouldn’t have to care about this. I don’t want to care about how someone’s code gets into the IDE. Whether you wrote it by hand, copied it from a forum…

A new article! And it's not explicitly political and probably safe to share with your boss, more or less. https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/notes_teaching_coding

Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home. How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple recipe authors spent hours, weeks, _years_ perfecting. Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul. Magic. I subscribe to a lot of recipe websites via RSS, and look forward to new posts from some of my favourites like Smitten Kitchen and Meera Sodha because I know they’re going to be excellent. I trust that the recipe is tried and tested, and the result will be delicious. ChatGPT will give you an approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they lack the personality of each individual recipe, which will be slightly different to reflect the experiences and tastes of the author. There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website? Well, I want you to visit my website. I want you to read an article from a search result, and then discover the other things I’ve written, the other people I link to, and explore the weird themes I’ve got. I want some of you to read my article then ask me to speak at your conferences. Many folks rely on ad impressions to support the high-quality content they’re putting out for free. I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them. I'd much rather people read the whole thing, take it in, digest it and have opinions right back at me. I love it when people connect with what I’m writing (and sometimes they email me to tell me that, which is really delightful). I _don’t_ write these posts for VC-funded LLMs to come along and gobble up and produce some shitty facsimile, or summarise what I’m saying with none of the nuance or context on someone else's website. This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.