Thank you for sharing that excerpt! Definitely a concept I had not thought about, makes perfect sense, and is seen demonstrated in the gentrification process.

I believe the intent discussed in the article is that the U.S. would choose to enter in reparations. The argument being, beyond ethics, that as climate change displaces more and more people the walled gardens of the U.S. will be be beset by humans seeking refuge as well as climate change (catastrophe, crisis, choose your version). Therefore the practical answer is to gird vulnerable nations to survive well on their own for the sheer fact that it’s less work in the end. And account for potential serious action to curb their own emissions as reparations could/should be weighted for potential future emissions.

Your comment does speak to a chilling line of thought that crossed my mind as a dystopian alternative; where the U.S. would rather violently oppose change while the land dies and, those who can, fall back to closed shelters mimicking their nation’s stance. I don’t see how that is a preferable alternative to doing what we can to ensure fair survival for everyone. Surely engaging in war on a dying planet is more costly than providing aid with the justification of historic and future damages.

Check out Chaos Magick perhaps. The centerpiece is: what you believe in doesn’t matter, belief itself is the power. It encourages changing your belief structures so it doesn’t become rote dogma. Fun to play with at any rate; pray to Minerva, sink an offering for Cthulhu, get into established religion systems and then switch for another.

I replied to a previous comment about the “assistance” part which is sorta an abridged version of my workflow (“workflow” is also a term used in Comfy UI, a visual layout that processes the image sequentially through modules). It’s super fun I highly recommend it! Feel free to PM me anytime I’d be glad to help!

Really it was looking up terms and areas of Automatic 1111 I was unsure of and finding various sites and guides. Civitai has LOTS of guides often written by model makers or people with lots of hours in the field - it’s also my main resource for LoRAs and Models. But there’s tons of info on there. The most helpful ones where settings and workflows on actual image generation (I can definitely find some links for you there) to get quality results without too much “and if I change this, what happens?” But honestly I love poking around like that so I still spend hours tweaking just to see what happens xD

For sure! Often I’ll come in with a visual idea already, or will iterate on some with the AI giving inspiration. If I have the idea strongly I’ll sketch out the composition and elements I know I want - sometimes on real tricky poses like fingers I’ll take a photo of myself doing them. Throw that into stable diffusion with img-2-img to generate images based on my sketch/photograph to something more full featured or something I hadn’t thought of but really like (you can also set how “dreamy” the AI should be, how much it should vary from the input material).

There’s a lot of detail I could get into but the “assistance” is fleshing out a composition -> I go in and correct anatomical mistakes or elements I want to change specifically -> run it through again if it needs it.

I hear you, when this stuff was blowing up I couldn’t shake that it was trained off artists’ work that they didn’t consent to having in the datasets. Sure it’s similar to how human artists work (for music and art the prevailing recommendations for me, or any artist, was to consume material relevant to your art. For visual art they really just wanted you to constantly keep your head open for shapes and form) but it felt closer to plagiarism than inspiration. Some generations can be very close to an individual style (especially if the model was trained specifically off that) but I found that generations that omitted an artist ended up creating something compelling but not tied to one artist specifically - still undoubtedly a conglomeration of the multitudes it was trained on (including photography). It’s muddy water for sure, and the angle of AI replacing workers in general is still relevant - but I also think it empowers people like me who have the visual ideas but can use the help making them fully fleshed out.

The crux, for me, feels like “when you can see whatever you want, what do you want to see?” A lot of our AI woes are reflections of questionable human behavior (racist chat models, AI for war, deepfakes and dishonesty).

How do you feel about it?

Like, technology is cool. Engineering is cool. Building better weapons to kill each other and strike enough fear to garner compliance has never solved the impetus for their creation: the fear that a human will kill you, so you attempt to kill them first.

It’d be tight if a “rising china” or “rising anyone” meant that we as a global society would benefit from new helpful tech that gave people more choice and autonomy to improve their lives and the ones around them.