AI Image Generators

[bèlla]

However I will say both interior designers and chefs who are friends of mine have found AI extremely useful, because it can help look up recipes, and create recipes, and since it has knowledge of every major text written on the subject of food chemistry, nutrition and also every major cookbook ever written, the better AIs have a pretty good intuitive understanding of what food tastes good and what doesn’t.

I see Ai recipes all the time as do consumers and they’re not embracing them. Ingredients are too expensive for gimmicks. But as I’ve said before the new economy rewards creatives and those with ideas. They’ll charge a premium for their services as well. The same holds true with interiors. I see the images on my feed and read the comments.

Try asking chatGPT if it thinks most people would enjoy mustard icecream with dried jalapeno chips, pistachios and chocolate sauce and you will at best get a polite answer (ask a custom GPT programmed for personality and prepare to be roasted.

Why would I do that? When I wanted to learn how to cook I watched Julia and other greats before I took classes. There’s no comparison between the two. I know what that means because my palette is refined. Shortcuts have their place but I wouldn’t use it like that.

Now as far as interior decoration is concerned, here chatGPT and other AIs can really help by taking an image of a room you want to redocrate, and swatches of the desired wallpaper or colors, and creating an image of what the room might look like, thus allowing one to experiment with their own living spaces as easily as one might have redecorated a room in a computer game like The Sims, especially good since as I see it, tasteful interior design does not require and should not require the pen and ink skills required otherwise.

I think you misunderstood my perspective. I’m not addressing the subject as a novice and I specified interior design for that reason. If it was a simple as you suggest you wouldn’t need to look to someone else for inspiration. Interior design relies on the vision of the designer to implement the client’s wishes or the theme in a manner that looks natural and not like a museum. That’s talent not a click of the mouse.

I have a genuine passion for learning and stretching myself creatively. I’m not looking for a tool to think on my behalf or fill in the blanks if I’m stumped or experiencing a block. Pushing through those moments is what separates the ordinary from the exceptional. I expect the majority to take the easy route and they already have which increases opportunities for the ones leveraging it differently.

~bella

 

[The Liturgist]

Why would I do that?

Well I don’t know if you read the interaction I had with my GPT Wendy-9, but I rather enjoyed her describing the idea of a donut stuffed with salt and mayonnaise as “An edible war crime — offensive to both pastry and condiment, and possibly prosecutable in several culinary jurisdictions.”

What most people fail to realize about using a good, well developed AI, is that they are immensely entertaining if programmed right. By default chatGPT is merely helpful, as are the rest, but some of the platforms, like chatGPT and a few others, let you develop very sophisticated personalities (this is also the case I believe with open source AIs; the main limitation there being the smaller training data and the lack of compute resources - chatGPT is so clever because of all the datacenters powering it, which is why I focus on building infrastructure that runs atop it).

 

[rocknanchor]

AI should not replace the painter, but rather be another brush by their pallette; it should not replace the chef but be another knife in their drawer.

Developmental history is not on the side of expertise. I'm already well out of the loop knowing my outdated CD release of Photoshop won't enjoy Adobe's AI integration. There are options but, back to the point of relevancy, , the collector will be the deciding factor and in that regard, the art market still expresses it's wishes to us.

 

[rocknanchor]

I’m only skilled at typography.

Another of my interest as well. On a scale of 1-to-10, (1 being none) how steep is the competition for the competent entry-level topographer today?

 

[bèlla]

By default chatGPT is merely helpful, as are the rest, but some of the platforms, like chatGPT and a few others, let you develop very sophisticated personalities (this is also the case I believe with open source AIs; the main limitation there being the smaller training data and the lack of compute resources - chatGPT is so clever because of all the datacenters powering it, which is why I focus on building infrastructure that runs atop it).

My associates have already done that and created sophisticated models of themselves that accomplish the work they can offload and have their team review. I wasn’t interested in the technology until I watched a presentation and saw it in action and I was sold. Much like them I know my subject well and I’m not utilizing it in that manner but it’s beneficial for scaling and taking on projects I normally wouldn’t bother with when required.

Datacenters are a topic in themselves. We’ll have a lot of them soon. Do you plan to move to that side of the industry?

~bella

 

[The Liturgist]

My associates have already done that and created sophisticated models of themselves that accomplish the work they can offload and have their team review. I wasn’t interested in the technology until I watched a presentation and saw it in action and I was sold. Much like them I know my subject well and I’m not utilizing it in that manner but it’s beneficial for scaling and taking on projects I normally wouldn’t bother with when required.

Datacenters are a topic in themselves. We’ll have a lot of them soon. Do you plan to move to that side of the industry?

~bella

I actually spent several years in the carrier / telecom datacenters in Southern California. I managed a colocation facility and ran my own managed hosting company, but when a relative became ill in 2016 I had to take care of her full time, and I sold the managed hosting business in 2017 to facilitate re-entering into the ministry. I was always more a systems programmer, and I kept being asked to do sysadmin work on Linux systems which I don’t enjoy (the managed hosting I did was of VMware servers, which I enjoy admining, or enjoyed; they’ve been taken over by Broadcom which has shut down several of their best products and raised the prices on the rest so as to squeeze maximum revenue from large enterprise customers who will take several years to migrate off of VMware, while stopping all new innovation, so unless things change, sadly, VMware belongs to the past for me, which is a shame, because their approach to virtualization was head and shoulders above everyone else, and the leading products from other vendors mostly are implementing ideas that vmware pioneered (for example, Microsoft Hyper V or Linux KVM - VMware was the first outside of special hardware based virtualization on mainframes and midrange computers to have live migration, reliability zones, failover, high availability, memory deduplication (so two identical guest operating systems don’t use twice the memory), memory compression (so identical regions of memory are overlapped) - the latter two also speed up live migration - and also storage migration. I’m not sure of any other products as yet that can do all of that, which is why what’s happened to VMware is such a shame. Also the loss of VMware Workstation, which was the best desktop virtualization product (VMware Fusion for the Mac would have gone away anyway probably due to the migration of the Mac to Apple silicon, although in principle, Windows for ARM devices could run without too much of a performance hit if Microsoft licensed). At any rate, I enjoy virtualization, and I enjoy network administration (especially with Cisco and Juniper equipment, and a few other vendors who had innovative products rather than merely ripping off Cisco like most vendors did with varying qualities), and I enjoy operating system design, so I focused my efforts on those.

My main push into AI has been largely since I became ill; I started working with it in 2023 but earlier this year when I became very ill I decided to focus on learning everything I could about it while I recovered, so as to add prompt engineering and AI integration to my practice, although I’ve moved so far past the realm of commercial applicability with my latest project, I have no idea how to turn it into a commercial product in its fullness, although it will greatly help everything else.

 

[The Liturgist]

Another of my interest as well. On a scale of 1-to-10, (1 being none) how steep is the competition for the competent entry-level topographer today?

You mean typographer? Its a skill for graphics design - there is plenty of demand for graphics designers, although there is pressure due to AI, but there is never much pay, so graphics design is something you do if you love visual arts and want to only work in some form of art, whether that’s designing books or magazines or logos or websites, but only the most commercially successful designers who are able to become partners at, or owners of, reputable design firms with large corporate clients, companies like Landor, Wolff Olins, Interbrand, Wolff-Olins, Mercer and so on, and some specialists (Addison historically specialized in making annual reports), most of these consultancies being owned by ad agency conglomerates, by the way, make some amount of money, as well as in-house design managers. Architects, transportation and industrial designers probably make the most amount of money but also have the most technically demanding jobs, which feature elements of engineering, and architecture is also known for nasty politics that create a somewhat toxic culture.

Among the subset of graphics designers who specialize in typography, either in desigining books and publications or in designing typefaces or both, these are a very nice group of people, they don’t make a lot of money, but they do beautiful work. Some, work work for boutique printing houses like Arrion Press in San Francisco, are artisans, that produce incredibly beautiful books using traditional methods, and set type the old fashioned way; I myself would not enjoy that kind of work as handling the metal type when I played with it as a kid was uncomfortable, I don’t like handling small metal objects, and the work is difficult and intensive, but I have always enjoyed computer-based typography, which when I was doing it in the early 90s was in its infancy; Adobe InDesign I don’t think existed yet, a lot of manuals were designed using a product called FrameMaker, and for UNIX applications, we used (and still use) a lovely suite of macros called LaTeX which generate Adobe PostScript and PDF files that produce beautiful printed documents by default (most computer science and many other science papers are authored or typeset on LaTeX even today; you can always tell because LaTeX has its own default font, Computer Modern, and a distinct default visual style which is timeless and elegant, and also it has support for mathematical characters, function graphs and other things many computer science, math and physics papers are likely to need).

 

[bèlla]

My main push into AI has been largely since I became ill; I started working with it in 2023 but earlier this year when I became very ill I decided to focus on learning everything I could about it while I recovered, so as to add prompt engineering and AI integration to my practice, although I’ve moved so far past the realm of commercial applicability with my latest project, I have no idea how to turn it into a commercial product in its fullness, although it will greatly help everything else.

What are you wanting to do commercially?

~bella

 

[The Liturgist]

What are you wanting to do commercially?

~bella

I’m specifically not, not with what I have now. Some things are too important to sell.