Daily Tech News 6 September 2022

• So I took a little time to play with Midjourney, one of the new AI-powered art sites. I've been critical of AI often enough; it has little of practical use to show for decades of research apart from being able to destroy the last vestiges of privacy in an increasingly totalitarian world.
  
  But this... This is pretty neat.
  
  
  
  
  You just describe what you want to see, and the art style you want it drawn in - from anime to Boris Vallejo to photorealism - and it does it.
  
  

• Well, most of the time there are little details that aren't quite right - it's not great at bilateral symmetry, and fairly often the results are on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley, and while it's good on faces and clothes, including things like uniforms and armour:
  
  
  
  It has a very shaky grasp of the concept of holding something.
  
  It does well on landscapes and cities though:
  
  
  
  You can get a free trial but if you get interested you'll burn through the allowance very quickly. Monthly plans start at $10, or $30 for unlimited use. If you need a lot of illustrations for something but you don't need a particular scene or action precisely, it's an amazing tool.
  
  Just be prepared to occasionally see things that can't be unseen, like when it simply forgets to give someone a face.
  
  If you try to put two characters in a scene, it tends to lose its marbles. I can see why artists are upset, but they're certainly not out of a job yet.
  
  I also wondered if it's possible to get to images of recognisably the same character, given the amount of randomness involved. And I'll just say for now, yes. It takes patience, but if your prompt is specific enough, it's not that hard.
  
  
  

• QNAP. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• Email is broken. (Carlos Fenollosa)
  
  Broken deliberately by Big Tech, so that only emails sent by (or if you're luck, via) Big Tech can reach email servers operated by Big Tech.
  
  You can receive email on your own server just fine, but sending it is another matter entirely.
  
  
  
• Cheating at chess using computer shoes. (Incoherency)
  
  It seems like a rather roundabout approach, but if it gets results, who's to complain? I mean, the International Chess Federation, yes, but who listens to those nerds?
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:42 AM

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