Bye Twitter

I used to love Twitter. I used my account mainly to rant about politics and react to political comments. It was fun, but boy it was infuriating. It was an endless Internet debate. I was constantly trying to one-up or outsmart one commenter or another, constantly reacting to the news, constantly correcting other people’s bad takes. But then I got banned. I tried to get my account reinstated, but then I noticed how stress-free I was. It was like a weight has been lifted. I don’t have to fight anyone online nor do I have to constantly broadcast my point of view about everything. And for the record, I was banned for overstepping my bounds arguing with Laura Ingraham over the death of George Floyd.

Anyway, I didn’t feel like I was missing out the minute I stopped looking at Twitter every hour. I figure I am busy enough dealing with my Instagram account and Reddit, that I don’t need the negativity that is Twitter. And really, the vibe on those other platforms are very different compared to Twitter. On Instagram, everyone is being positive and supportive of my art. On Reddit, I get to read and give constructive advice on many things, or go on a wormhole and educate myself about a subject. On Twitter, it’s like being in the middle of a playground fight all of the time.

So when Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter, I really didn’t care that much. I already wasn’t a big fan of Elon Musk. For someone so rich, he seemed to be so thirsty for approval, so needy in proving his macho, edgelodrd Tony Stark vision of himself. The man is not Tony Stark. Also, Tony Stark is an awful superhero, a lazily-written deus ex machina of a character. “Oh I know how to save the universe, I’ll just use uhm… nanobots! Yes, that’s it!” But back to Elon Musk. He’s not a genius. He was born rich, and turned that privilege into even more wealth. He didn’t invent the electric cars Tesla is pumping out. His engineers did. If anything, all of the ideas that come out of his head, and not from his engineers or any expert, seem to be totally dumb. Self-driving cars by 2023? Highly unlikely. Travelling in a hyperloop? More like a long, single-lane tunnel that’s heavily backed up. Buying twitter to make it more free for free-speech warriors. Well, that just sounds like a disaster.

And what do you know? The minute he buys it, more n-words start popping up, hate speech increases, and advertisers started fleeing. There are many other ways he’s messing up Twitter, but I’m sure you can find that in other places in the Internet, and by the time you’re reading this, I’m sure he’s already done much more than I could list. That is, if Twitter still exists.

Now I feel bad for many of the people he’s fired in the company, but not all of them. To save money, he’s fired about half of the company’s workforce and has let go of anyone questioning his intelligence or expertise in technology or running the company. I feel bad for those people, but hey, if you’re in Silicon Valley and have coding skills, you’re already more employable than I am. You’ll be fine. Or at least, I hope you’ll be fine. It’s really callous of Musk to fire people right before the holidays. But I suppose that’s him being edgy. Who I don’t feel bad for is the CEO and the other executives he fired the minute he bought Twitter. They were the same people who forced him to buy the company in the first place. I’m sure they expected to be fired. And being executives, I’m sure they all had golden parachutes and was more than happy to be fired rather than stick around and see first hand how Musk sinks Twitter.

I really wish the old Twitter would come back but I think it’s all far gone now. Everyone is gleefully watching Musk fail to run the company. He wanted to be the king of free speech and an edgelord, but now it seems like he’s the one in the middle of the school playground being egged on and teased by everybody. Within two weeks of buying the company, Musk is already hinting at bankruptcy. It’s even affecting the stock price of his other company, Tesla. Unless something dramatically miraculous happens, Twitter will soon be dead.

Goodbye, Twitter, my old friend. It was fun while it lasted. Sometime, I’ll sign up and try to learn Mastodon. Maybe that’s where I can get my old Twitter fix back.

No Artists Needed

Been reading about DALL-E 2 recently. For the uninitiated, it’s an AI tool that generates images based on text prompts. So for example, someone can type in, “Woman buys blue toilet paper in Walmart seen from behind” and the AI will generate an image that matches that description. The technology is still in its early stages, and many of the results look funny during experimentation that some news outlets have tried to sell it as a fun tool to create memes. But some results look quite good and it’s scary how accurate the AI can recreate text prompts into images.

The AI tool is being sold as a possible tool to help people quickly visualize images. This can be anything from helping people with physical disadvantages express themselves to production companies quickly storyboard ideas. That second scenario sounds like it’s bound to make some artists redundant.

What surprised me about the tool is how good some of the pieces it generates can be. They look like someone actually labored and made art. AI can already generate written words to simulate real people. They do this well enough with millions of bots posting messages on Twitter and writing spam e-mail that they convince thousands of people with their authenticity. But now this DALL-E 2 could be doing the same thing, only with digital art and photography. It can make images that can move the hearts and minds of some people.

There’s already a debate whether some conceptual artists are actual artists (*cough* Damien Hirst *cough*), but with AI, anyone can type out any of their wild ideas and it’s up to the AI to make art out of it. Forget talent, skill, or training… all you need is a good idea and a bit of wit. How long before we see a group of artists calling themselves AI artists who never lifted a brush or a pencil all of their life?

I believe it was Picasso who said, “good artists copy; great artists steal.” TS Elliott similarly said, “the immature poet imitates; the mature poet plagiarizes.” The DALL-E 2 and what it will eventually become is the ultimate thief. It will copy style and technique and appropriate it to whatever the user whims it to. I know someone who currently creates abstract digital paintings. He sells prints of his works. Now how similar would the works be if I used DALL-E 2 and entered “Swishy digital painting with soft pastel tones”? How safe are my works? “Busy ink drawing filling the page with an octopus hidden somewhere”?

Now, the makers of the program claim that there are safeguards which prevent people from making counterfeit images, using political figures, generating pornography, etc. But really, at some point this is all going to get duplicated or someone is going to find some sort of workaround. Next thing you know, we’ll have a convincing picture of “President Biden at a nude resort” floating around the Internet.

It’s simply too rife for potential abuse.

Inktober

There is such a thing as too much vacation, too much spare time that your mind gets bored and frustrated that you start seeing all the negativity and unhappiness that you usually block from your mind with work. The things that you’ve drown out with bits and pieces of your soul start to resurface again. You start creating small dramas to entertain yourself. Maybe you set small fires here and there just to test the waters and see that you’re still alive. It’s not to be mean or anything, but the mind just needs a bit of stimulus for no other reason that it needs it. Unfortunately, you end up going too far and that small fire has burst into a barn fire, then to a raging conflagration. Then you’re no longer bored but exponentially more miserable and unhappy, and you still have a few vacation days left, a few more days to make things worse.

God bless work. God bless keeping busy.

…

And speaking of keeping busy, God bless Inktober. I recently saw an NHK video on Hayao Miyazaki struggling to make his last film, ‘Boro the Caterpillar.’ He was obsessing with animating a furry caterpillar using traditional hand-drawn techniques. Though people were constantly pushing to him new computerized ways of streamlining the process, even showing him an AI that would make its own animations, he insisted that CGI removes the human element, and many things that the artist and the audience sees in nature in terms of light, motion, and life itself, are lost in the computerized environment, and totally missing the signature look of what makes Ghibli films what they are. Things got so heated at one point, that he almost saw it as an insult to have AIs animate what amounted to monstrous figures.

In many ways, I agree with Miyazaki. There’s just something about hand-drawn work that makes it more compelling than ones generated with the aid of computers. The viewer can feel the hand of the artist, the effort. We can see with the artist’s eyes and there is evidence to where his attention lingered. Now these can also be true with CGI images, but they’re often crisp to the point that it feels cold and alien. It can easily be mistaken that I am seeing an interesting image made by a computer instead of me seeing an interesting image made in an interesting manner by an artist. An artist. The art in the process is more apparent with hand-drawn works.

This is why, despite me not being active with Inktober, I appreciate that it celebrates and encourages hand-drawn works. It is very tempting to do things via the computer, with drawing tablets getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, and web comics and digital paintings being more popular. But in my opinion, the computer filters out the human touch in creating images. Perhaps it’s the ease in the process of cleaning images up, but it could also be the process of making images on the PC itself.

Coincidentally, the 10^th item on the Inktober prompt list is gigantic. This is my interpretation of the Greek giant Typhon.

Perils of French Realism

After years of holding on to my old iPhone 4, I finally upgraded to an iPhone 6. I had the option to get the iPhone 6S but found it a little too big to be called a phone. It seemed more like a tablet and I feel like the bigger a phone gets, the more unwieldy it is, and the likelier I am to drop it.

I’m quite happy with the upgrade. It’s big enough to be able to read pdfs of magazines and comic books. I was quite an avid comic reader when I was younger, and this might get me back to reading graphic novels again. The screen is gorgeous, and pictures and artwork look great on it.

Unfortunately, last Friday, I was admiring the phone and testing it out on the bus. I happen to be looking at some historic paintings to set as my wallpaper, browsing through masterpieces with heavy contrasts, works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, then BOOM!… Gustave Courbet. For the uninitiated, Courbet was a French realist, most known for a particularly unorthodox and intimate portrait of Joanna Hifferman entitled, L’Origine du Monde. I will let you find that painting yourself.

Now stumbling on the masterpiece wouldn’t be so bad in itself. Unfortunately, a lady standing next to me saw the image as quickly as it appeared on my phone. Our eyes met for a moment by the reflection on the window. And as innocent an accident as it was, I felt as if I was caught committing a crime. She looked away, and I quickly put the phone in my coat pocket. That’s enough art browsing for now. What am I to do? I can’t explain myself to a stranger. That would make me appear more guilty. Of course, quickly hiding my phone makes me look guilty as well.

Two stops later, she gets off. I just gave that woman a story to tell her friends.