
'AI Generated Art Scene Explodes as Hackers Create Groundbreaking New Tools
[...] modifying an OpenAI model to make astonishing image generation tools.
All you have to do to guide these systems is to prompt them with the image you want. For example, you might prompt them with the text: 'a fantasy world.' [...] that prompt[...] generated the image that you see above.
The crisp, coherent, and high-resolution quality of the images that these tools create differentiate them from AI art tools that have come before. The tools are highly iterative—in the video below, you can see the generation of an image based on the words "a man being tortured to death by a demon."
[...] "These systems are the first ones that actually sort of meet 'the promise of text-to-image.'"
[...]
The new tools are readily available to anyone who wants to use them. [...] Following the instructions, a savvy user can run the system in a matter of minutes from a web-based programming notebook.
"The results are so shocking that for many they seem to defy belief," Crowson said in an email. "CLIP is trained on 400 million image/text pairs," she continued. "At that scale we begin to see abilities we had previously only seen in human artists such as abstraction and analogies."
[...] beautiful images of abstract sunsets[...] idyllic countryside houses and giant cities[...] weapons depicted with an unsettling animosity[...] Escher-type structures that reel away into themselves'
https://www.vice.com...aking-new-tools

'A Giant Chalk Figure Is Finally Starting to Make Some Sense
And we have snails to thank for that.
[...] traveled to a hilltop in Dorset, England, to bag a giant. They sliced into his elbows and feet, then took bits of him back to their labs in bags and metal tubes. No actual behemoth was harmed in the process, because the Cerne Abbas Giant is a geoglyph—a large artwork emblazoned into the landscape. The 180-foot-tall figure was created by scouring away grass to reveal the white chalk beneath, then packing the trenches with more chalk quarried nearby. Thanks largely to his 26-foot phallus, the giant has become a beloved fertility icon. According to folklore, couples who couple on his crotch will successfully conceive.
[...] using a combination of laser beams and snails, scientists have established that the giant was born between A.D. 700 and A.D. 1100 in the late Saxon or early medieval period. The results were totally unexpected because no other chalk figures date from that time[...] “We were all wrong … and that’s tremendously exciting.”
[...] most other geoglyphs[...] generally date from the 1500s or later. [...]
“During that period [1500s], there was a big mythology about the role of giants in Britain’s origin myth,” [...] “That led to giants being depicted in other [chalk] hill figures, which are described in historical documents but which have now vanished.” According to these legends, giants were the original rulers of Albion—an ancient name for Britain that may mean “white land” and refer to the chalky geology.
[...]
The new dates have sparked research efforts to uncover who the giant represents. Some researchers think the nearby Cerne Abbey was established in A.D. 987 to convert locals who worshipped a pagan god named Heil or Helith. So the figure might depict that Anglo-Saxon deity[...]
Interestingly, historic documents from Cerne Abbey don’t mention the giant until 1694. [...] hypothesize that the geoglyph was forgotten and grassed over for hundreds of years before people saw a shadowy shape on the hillside and decided to reawaken the giant.
[...]
People have been chalking, rechalking, and changing the giant for centuries[...] the figure may have once held a cloak and a severed head, and was emasculated and remasculated in Victorian times. More recently, it received a COVID-appropriate face mask.'
https://www.theatlan...s-giant/619406/
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 11 July 2021 - 11:07 PM