Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

They're commies in spirit only, they're looking to get paid MORE, but don't dare to call it capitalism. For example, "depends on paying artists a pittance" and "just put it online for free", so apparently they like getting paid. I can sympathize that streaming music decimated album sales, I get it, but that old model is gone, and it's not coming back. If someone is looking to make a living playing music, they'd better learn to write music a LOT of people want. Is that selling out? Yes, of course it is. If nobody is being coerced into buying music, and nobody wants their music, they’re going to hit the bottle of the barrel pretty fast. To make a living in music, they have to either write music others need (eg. soundtracks) or they need to play the popularity contest. Bands don't get popular sitting in their garage playing music, they need to let people know about their music and pray that it resonates with people. Today, streaming services are the way people discover music, it's the current game, they don't have to play the game, but they'd better make sure music is their hobby and not their job if they don't.

If you travel back a couple of centuries, your 6 jigowatts will only be worth about 8 million horses.

Cow tittie milk should be labeled "cow tittie milk" to remind people where the product comes from. It's natural for mammals to drink the tittie milk of their own species when they're young, but drinking tittie milk (a) when you're grown up and (b) from another species seems downright perverse. Likewise, people could use a good reminder how the meat they eat is produced.

Remember when 1.21 gigawatts was a lot of power? Now we're talking about 6!

What's the difference? We also posted web articles and had lengthy, sometimes heated discussions about it. People were a lot nastier back in the days, angry RTFM nerds were abindant. On IRC people would crash your computer for fun. We had cybersex and warez and all the good things that are technically inappropriate for a 15 year old.
Now we have censorship all over the place. Nobody stopped you from posting porn on USENET, we had specific newsgroups just for that. Try posting porn on social media nowadays. Nobody cared what you had on your F-Serve on IRC.

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Doesn't removing the artist's signature usually reduce the value of a work?

That this isn't the case for Sora 2, tells me something about Sora 2's reputation.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

What profits? Last I checked nobody had climbed out of the red in the space yet.

"More people leaving New Zealand than entering as young flee high cost of living ... with departures accelerating and labour shortage feared"

I see, so the problem is definitely not that jobs in NZ are underpaying, nope, it's that the cost of living is too high. Since we're tossing all economic theory out the window, I would like to complain about the lack of workers willing to work for $1 a year for my company. It's obvious that we have a severe labor shortage rather than the fact that I'm not offering anything near a living wage.

Yeah, for what they're charging, they can afford to go the extra mile and have the wifi offer a default route to the internet!