To think I nearly wrote an article about Dwayne Wade today.  Really, you don’t know him?  He used to be a basketball player.  Still doesn’t ring a bell?

See what I mean?

This is my review of Campanology Coffee Peanut Butter Cup Porter (Trader Joe’s):

As we enter this brave new world where everyone can hook up their Metaverse console, don their vibrating underwear and watch that scene from Requiem for a Dream—you know which one. They even have it on a loop now.  …Right.  Who is to say what ideas are yours to claim?  I ran into this issue myself recently with the Halloween Costume memes that’s been going around.  I could complain the internet stole my gag, but my problem is I can’t really prove I came up with the idea nor would it be meaningful if I could.  The joke is out and chances are I saw it somewhere else and just applied a dry, mildly autistic form of humor to it.

Which brings up this article about AI driven artwork.  An artist named Hollie Mengert had a problem being identified in the AI prompts from a stylistic standpoint.

“For me, personally, it feels like someone’s taking work that I’ve done, you know, things that I’ve learned — I’ve been a working artist since I graduated art school in 2011 — and is using it to create art that that I didn’t consent to and didn’t give permission for,” she said. “I think the biggest thing for me is just that my name is attached to it. Because it’s one thing to be like, this is a stylized image creator. Then if people make something weird with it, something that doesn’t look like me, then I have some distance from it. But to have my name on it is ultimately very uncomfortable and invasive for me.”

Cry more, pussy.

Even without getting into the moral issues associated with IP (personally I think once an idea leaves your skull it cannot be truly yours anymore), she is missing something fundamental:  the machine learned “her style” and emulated it. That is, if you want to call it “her style”.  For her as an art student to learn, she had to view images herself.  She had to create based off previous images she “saved” in her head and learn how to produce it.  The AI is doing the same thing.  The fact a programmer needs to enter a series of prompts is no different than a client like Disney handing her a list of things they would like to see in work they ask her to produce.  To argue the AI is infringing on IP rights is arbitrary because it is producing it the same way she did.

Ironically, the poster child for IP absolutism for the past century even teaches the public how to produce their IP.  At the California Adventure park, they host animation tutorials explaining step by step in sketching Disney characters.  By her logic, my daughter is going to get sued by Disney.

 

🚨 🚨 🚨 White Girl Beer Alert 🚨 🚨 🚨

Laundry list of flavors backed by dark roasted coffee tend to be my thing if it isn’t sickeningly sweet.  Unfortunately, this one crosses that line by a wide margin.  Its like eating one if those peanut butter buckets at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory, where too much is in fact too much.  A damn shame if you ask me because at 9% abv, this is otherwise a bargain. Campanology Coffee Peanut Butter Cup Porter (Trader Joe’s): 2.4/5

H/T:  Heroic Mulatto for the featured image.