I followed the instructions on this post to Fediverse-enable my longtime WordPress blog. Unlike with the ActivityPub integration on the BICP site, this has no customizable settings at all, so I have no idea how this is going to look. But it’ll be out there!
Here’s the incredibly-clunky username to search for from your own Fediverse account: erinptah.wordpress.com@erinptah.wordpress.com
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Welsh photographer runs a shot of a waterfall through Google’s “Magic Editor”, shows us the side-by-side. Well worth checking out.
It’s absolutely fascinating, taking a close look at which changes the “AI” makes. It puts a decent Rock Texture on the rocks, but, does it not have data on Moss Textures? Or has it been trained to detect and erase moss as not “aesthetic”?
Similar with the trees — it replaces them with something you’d describe as “trees” in its data set, but not the species from the original. Zooming in on the real forest reveals a whole variety of branches and leaves, even. The bot’s forest all looks the same.
…The big ferns in the foreground just got turned into rocks. And, at the lowest level of waterfall, half of the water is now a grey rock too.
If someone’s goal was to make generic Pretty Nature Images that would look nice as a wallpaper, this is great! If their goal was anything like “sharing the beauty of a specific location” or “capturing a special experience to remember it later” or “getting a reference you can use to realistically draw this kind of tree,” it’s amazingly useless.
(The other day I had my first encounter with one of those in the wild. Was looking for information on what happens to rose bushes when you over-water them! Got a long-winded SEO-bait article that was interspersed with MidJourney-esque rose paintings. Even as art pieces, they were pretty muddy and underwhelming. As visuals to help you evaluate whether your IRL roses show signs of over-watering, they’re garbage.)
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Leif & Thorn hit its 8th anniversary yesterday!
And just this afternoon, the campaign to print Volume 6 smashed through its goal.
Speaking of the Fediverse, the BackerKit campaign data says I got over 800 visits through Mastodon back on the 16th. No extra backers out of it (those are mostly coming from my website, my mailing list, and BK’s own promos), but most days I don’t get that many visits from every source put together. And there’s no way my own posts on Mastodon are getting that many views.
Some kind of glitch? A shoutout from somebody else in the Fediverse? A fan copying the Mastodon referral link onto a whole other platform?
It’s very possible this is just…not find-out-able. But I wish I knew!
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