You Can Call Me Al Dept.

The recent bootleg Steve Miller Band release, live in '72, sports a colorful and attractive cover design. Until you look at it. How many strings are on that guitar? They need eight machine heads, anyway. And what about those neck inlays? Where is the tail-piece anchored? Why is it so big? Moving on - online AI programs won't use recognisable faces, so we have here a generic cowboy with a grotesquely elongated left thighbone. And a fucking huge guitar. And one of the biggest giveaways is the absence of words. AI is, at the moment, too dumb to handle convincing typography.

I can guess at the prompt that created this masterpiece: "colorful painting of space cowboy playing electric guitar against abstract design of planets and stars". That'd do it. Ten seconds to write, less to produce the artwork. At first glance it's pretty nice - the composition and colors are entirely successful. But it's put any contemporary George Hunters out there out of work.

And there's this, which should make your blood freeze in your veins like you'd OD'd in Andy Warhol's toilet:

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/ 

 

(The Intercept is one of my trusted news outlets.)