“This is Florida! The whole goddamn state is shaped like a gun! You can’t walk to your mailbox without tripping over three of them. God forbid you sell one to a cop!”

Fair point.

I dunno man … assume a model trained on the complete corpus of arts leading up to the Renaissance. What kind of randomness lands you at Hieronymus Bosch? Would AI be able to come up with Gonzo Journalism or modal music?

A brief glance at the history of human ingenuity in the arts really puts generative AI in perspective.

I think AI in this case is doing exactly what it’s best at: Automating unbelievably boring chores on the basis of past “experiences”. In this case the boring chore was “Draw me [insert character name] just how I know him/her”.

Too many people mistakenly assume generative AI is originative or imaginative. It’s not. It certainly can seem that way because it can transform human ideas and words into a picture that has ideally never before existed and that notion is very powerful. But we have to accept that, until now, human creativity is unique to us, the humans. As far as I can tell, the authors were not trying to prove generative AI is unimaginative, they were showing just how blatant copyright infringement in the context of generative AI is happening. No more, no less.

Although this surely does not completely explain the situation, I also have a feeling these sorts of hires surely account for a substantial number of layoffs.

Yeah try searching for “star trek socialism” on YT or wherever, you’d be surprised.

But apart from the series specifically there is at least some theorizing that space exploration is only possible after capitalism has been abolished since the energy and cooperation alone required to make it work on a meaningful scale is not possible under capitalism. We need the unleashing of productive forces that only communism can provide.

Aaaaaaand of course there are the Posadists. Google them for a good chuckle!