Artistic Lizards

Tim made a few good points about my AI art illustration from yesterday's post on frilled lizards with annoying pet peeves. Replying to him is actually worth a blog post, methinks.

Tim: it looks like the AI art has let you down again. I'm sure you specifically asked for a Frilled Lizard, but the one that it gave you is clearly an iguana. Well, at least it is giving you a fairly consistent "grumpy old man" these days (even if his hands do look like they were mangled in a horrible accident).

Tim made a larger point about the content of the post, illustrated with a link to a cartoon that is worthy of another blog post, perhaps tomorrow. 

Anyway, dealing with the issue of AI art, it certainly has come a long way in the year or so since I started using it. As long as I ask for no more than two characters, it does a fine job, giving me something I like on the first try almost every time these days. My "old Southern man and his cat" series is working really well.

However, AI art still can't handle any more than two characters. I tried a dozen or so variations on the image above with a prompt something like this: "an old southern man and his cat looking annoyed at a frilled lizard which is furiously exhibiting deimatic behavior." That was the best I got before I ran out of patience and went with it.

The cat is supposed to be a gray tabby. The lizard is supposed to be frilled. The old man's hands are indeed deformed, but at least he was brandishing a broom, giving the scene the appropriate comic feel. Each time I corrected the AI, it would introduce new errors. Usually, the cat's expression was completely out of place. Sometimes the lizard was unthreatening. It was really frustrating.

I keep experiencing this same limitation - 2 characters, no more. For Thanksgiving, I tried the old, Southern man with his cat and a happy family on the porch, but almost every time, the people in the background looked like mutants. I tried a scene from the Arthurian legends, but ended up with a knight fighting a lady while the characters in the background reacted with indifference or faced in the wrong direction.

If you want surreal scenes or goofy illustrations and you only care about the mood and general characteristics of the subject, AI art does fine. Ask for a panda floating through the air, hanging from a bouquet of balloons and you get what you wanted. Ask for a surreal scene of fiery destruction and you get a decent illustration of the SEC this year.

If you want to precisely illustrate something from a story or a multi-person event, forget it. Adobe Premiere's beta of their next version has the ability to use AI to extend a video a couple of seconds past its end point, but the results there have been disappointing as well. 

I don't see how this will change without the AI translating the still image or the video into 3D wireframes and applying biomechanics to them. At that point, it's not large language modeling any more, it's a modern video game.

First try: "an old southern man and his cat pondering life while drinking coffee in the morning." His pose is a bit stiff, but it's fine for what I wanted to illustrate given that I didn't want to spend any more than 60 seconds producing it. Had I added anyone or anything else into the scene, your guess is as good as mine as to what the result might have been.

Pet Peeves And Frilled Lizards

We all have them, you know.

Pet peeves, not frilled lizards. I mean some of us might have a frilled lizard or two running about the house, but most of us don't. Some of us might even have named one our lizards Peeve so we might have a Pet Peeve Frilled Lizard. It's hard to say.

Hmm. I seem to have lost my train of thought. Ah, there it is.

While each of us have peeves, pet or otherwise, we also have tics or habits that can be annoying. It dawned on me that when a pet peeve in one person meets an annoying tic in another, it turns into a frilled lizard.

Frilled lizards, if you didn't know, are reptiles that, when threatened, can puff up flaps of skin on their necks to make themselves appear much larger than they really are. If your peeve meets my tic then you react to an annoying behavior of mine that seems larger than it really is. You're reacting to a frilled lizard, as it were.

And who wants to spend their lives doing that?

Git! Go on! Git out of here, ya dadburned frilled lizard! I don't need to make nobody's annoying habits no bigger than they already is!

Why The Fine People Hoax Survives

I listened to the excellent Joe Rogan - Mark Andreesen conversation recently and heard Joe lament that President Obama had severely disappointed him by trying to perpetuate the Fine People Hoax.

If you're not familiar with it, the phrase refers to an out-of-context quote from President Trump about the Charlottesville protests over Confederate statues. Trump said there were fine people on both sides of the debate and the press clipped out that part and ran with it, asserting that President Trump was referring to the neo-Nazi opportunists who joined the protests as "fine people." If you listen to a couple of minutes of Trump's speech on either side of the "fine people" snippet, you can tell that he was talking about the statue supporters being fine people and clearly said that the Nazis were horrible.

As someone who would like to see all of the Confederate statues remain standing and the ones that were removed replaced, I would like to think that, despite my many flaws, I'm still a fine person. I don't support the statues and the rebel flag because I'm racist, but because I think they represent the distinct and beautiful cultural heritage of the South.

Going back to Rogan, he talked about how it was utterly dishonest for Obama to repeat the hoax over and over again in campaign speeches stumping for Kamala. He was disillusioned with Obama because Barack knew he was lying, but did it anyway. Joe Rogan was missing the point.

The Fine People Hoax is not about lying, it is an oath of allegiance to DEI and the racial groups the Democrats believe are the core of their constituency. All of the progs in the media, the academy, entertainment and politics thoroughly understand that it's a hoax. When they keep propping it up, they aren't lying to you so much as they are reciting a portion of their version of the Nicene Creed.

"I believe that everyone who supports Confederate symbols in any form is a white supremacist. I believe that blacks are held down by white supremacy. I believe that strident and united political action is the only solution to the scourge of white supremacy. I believe that white supremacy is everywhere, permeates our institutions and must be fought at all times without any reservations."

For the progs, even the slightest hesitation to recite this or missing an opportunity to refer to things like the Fine People Hoax is an unforgiveable act of apostasy and heresy. The progs have excommunicated former members of their tribe for such things. You cannot even hint that you are willing to give the slightest benefit of the doubt to those of us who like the Confederate monuments and symbols.

Obama and the rest of them aren't lying, they're signaling to their comrades that they are still walking on the razor's edge of proggy acceptance. To deviate even slightly is to be cast out of the group. That's why the Fine People Hoax will continue for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully, this statue was dropped into the fires of Mt. Doom.