where the machines fail

 I think it may just be my social algorithm, but so many articles coming through my feed on AI and the dangers, like strange apocalyptic dangers and just creative dangers. Yesterday, a discussion of an artist who won a photo contest with an AI-generated pic and withdrew from the contest. Photography does seem like it may be the most difficult to identify, though some types of writing, like articles and essays, if you don't peer too closely to see the cracks, could masquerade as human results. Tonight, I watched a hilarious video of a writer trying to do a writing routine created by Chat-GPT, proving that AI may be the worst boss ever and seemed to forget that humans need water and food and sunlight in our sorry little biological states. It was productive for her in a machine-like precision, but good lord...

I started a series of collages tonight while thinking of the TECHNOGROTESQUE poems, but the results above were too old-world and maybe I need something more modern. Still fun and kind of pretty. Those poems sort of wrestled from some of those headlines and things I was reading the first half of April. Earlier today, I played around with the text-to-image generator and nothing was anything remotely what I wanted. This afternoon, it was much the same trying to source photos for an article for HD on vintage milk glass in Shutterstock. I got a lot of glasses and a lot of milk, but not a single incidence of what I was actually looking for, as Shutterstock sometimes quite often fails me. I am usually more likely to find exactly what I want accidentally while looking for something else. Luckily, Instagram hashtags came through for me where the primitive search engine available to me could not. Writing and researching the article took less than hour. The image sourcing, another good 40 minutes. 

I love playing with the graphics and stock images available in various cache's, and there's a lot there, but finding the exact search terms to find them takes some work. The more specific, the more difficult. I think what people forget is the machines only work as good as humans can speak to them, tell them what to do, and set parameters. Communication with the robots is a whole lot more difficult than making them do things.