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AI Image Prompts - Or-ca(r)

What would an Orca look like as a car? You can use images as a prompt , and combine them with text.
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AI Landscapes - Views of Mt Fuji

Mixing image generators, image prompts, and weird problems. Google's Gemini does a pretty good job of imagining Mt Fuji as Vincent Van Gogh ... ... and Caspar David Friedrich ... but it flat out refuses to imagine them on display in a museum. I tried both inputting the image, as well as rewriting the prompt. Nope. Can't do it. So I use Fooocus, a Stable Diffusion-based generator to get around these restrictions. Straight-up using these images as prompts causes a re-imagining of the painting. Not what I want. Easiest is just to outpaint and expand the borders. Hmm. A bit too modern-art-gallery. After some fiddling, I could get exhibit label ... ... or a fancy period frame ... ... but somehow, not both. Anyway, not a bad result after 1 hour fiddling, including generation time.

AI Landscapes - Through Fresh Eyes

What if Hokusai toured America? What if a master of luminism, like Bierstadt, went to China?

AI Lunar New Year

What better time to try out AI art than Lunar/Chinese New Year (LNY)? A lot of LNY art is understandably done in Asian art styles. Nothing against that, but it can be overbearingly chipper ...

Fashionable Austerity

Economic justice is so last season. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez called the International Monetary Fund ("IMF") a tool of US imperialism. Tanzania's president John Magufuli, accused the World Bank of interfering in his country's affairs. That's a novel way to treat one's creditors. Applicants for home loans don't call their banks neo-colonial oppressors as a matter of course.

Profits over People

Capitalism as a response to Humanism. Representative democracy promised ... representation. Neo-Confucianism promised stability through progress. Both seem to have stalled. Gloom now surrounds these humanist ideologies from the East and the West. Capital markets are like, "number go up". What gives?

Housing is a Human Right

 ... not a human guarantee. When someone sanctimoniously claims something is a "Human Right", they often mean that they should get it for free. So what does it mean that housing is a human right?