The crapshoot of AI art
As much as it seems that AI art can be useful for creating artwork for illustrating blog posts and the like, and indeed I have used it and mocked it on this very blog, it seems to be sort-of reasonable for fairly generic pictures. However the more you specialise, the less likely the desired image will resemble what you asked for; for two reasons.
Firstly, it might be that the selected model is tuned to create a specific sort of picture. This isn't necessarily a user error as it seems to be extremely hit and miss trying to work out what a model is supposed to do - like what's the difference between Nijijourney and Dream Shaper? This is, of course, assuming that you can even select a model rather than simply giving hints like Cinematic versus Watercolour...
Secondly, AI seems to have some degree of making stuff up. Sometimes this can enhance the picture. For example if you ask for a picture of two cats fighting on a rooftop using katanas, it may well draw Asian style rooftops. You specified a particular type of sword, the AI assumed the rest.
Very dramatic, isn't it?
The problem is, some short and precise descriptions that don't allow leeway for inventing stuff can trip up AI art software. Some may throw in some unwanted things, while others may go completely gonzo.
I used the following prompt: A happy cartoon vacuum cleaner, white background. It's pretty obvious what I'm looking for, right? A vacuum cleaner with a smilie face on it somehow, drawn in a simplified cartoony style, with nothing else in the picture.
Yeah, about that.
Which part of 'white background' don't you understand?
Trying a different app, it offered this:
The lovechild of a Kärcher and a teletubby?
A regeneration and the same dumb adverts (but at least it isn't Temu for a change)...actually I like the quirkiness of this but I had to reject it because I think it would likely lead to questions. ☺
I would like to say "It totally knew what it was doing"
but it's an AI so it really didn't.
And the stand-out award winner was changing back to AniMagic with a model brought me this. What the hell is that background even supposed to be?
What the actual everloving f:-)k is this?
My last-ditch attempt was to wander over to ChatGPT and ask the same thing. I don't like using ChatGPT for artwork, not because it is bad, but because the free version of ChatGPT is extremely limited in what it will do. Discussions with artwork will only do maybe two or three pictures before shutting down the conversation entirely for something like 12 hours. Fair enough, I'm not paying anything, but I don't want to use my daily credits on things that aren't what I'm looking for.
Thankfully ChatGPT understood better than the rest.
Finally!
The background wasn't entirely white, but I was able to fix that with some post-processing to tweak the exposure and contrast. I needed to do that anyway to alter the image to look better when halftoned to a thermal printer that is only capable of printing largish black dots. Which meant that I was able to put together the following label for my vacuum cleaner at work.
The bitmap sent to the label printer.
The reason is because there are two vacuum cleaners at work that look almost identical (one is marginally larger than the other). One is mine, the other is used by my replacement, who would likely be extremely less than pleased and I don't want to hear it or deal with it.
Of course, what should have been a simple five minute job took all morning, three different AIs, and resulted in a blog article. That's sort of my experience of AI - it can help, but be prepared to spend ages getting sane results out of it.
For a more detailed dive into why generative AI makes stuff up, may I recommend Paolo Fabio Zaino's blog:
Backups
I make periodic backups of my software and source codes between my Pi devices. Not full backups as that's time consuming and requires the use of my XP box, but I do push stuff that's important to me around ShareFS.
For a week or so now, going to my private server would have resulted in the following:
Running a server on the Pi that was active.
This was a copy of WebJames on the 3B+. We shall, of course, skip over the multiple downloads and reading forum posts necessary in order to piece together a version of WebJames that actually runs on an ARMv8 processor - there's a patch on the riscosports.co.uk site, to patch the one that doesn't work on the same site. There are other, older, builds elsewhere that...don't work either.
I did, a long time ago, try to collect together the sources to build my own and make a few small changes, but sadly I never managed to find the right versions of the dependencies (if I recall, it was RegEx that didn't have necessary functions and after trying three (well, two, one seemed to be a different version of the same thing), I gave up.
I could have plugged the Pi2 in earlier in the week but I wanted to pop out the µSD card and make a full image of it. Which I did today; it's been forever and a day since I last booted my XP box. Only... catastrophe!
No, I didn't write some random junk from my harddisc over top of RISC OS. The backup chugged along into it reached the halfway point, then it choked with an error about not enough space on the disc.
There was 660GB free.
Turns out the file created was exactly 4GB, half the size of the µSD card. And the destination drive was formatted FAT32 so everything could read it.
You see where this is going, right?
I think I'm going to have to buy a 32GB USB key, format it NTFS, and then backup onto that, and then see if it's possible to split the file into 4GB pieces onto the intended drive.
Oh, and you're probably thinking "dude, there's probably some shell script you can run on Linux that'll do that" (actually, I think dd has skip and count options to tell it how much to read and how far into the device to start), but the target harddisc is rather power hungry and this Asus portable isn't really up to outputting a lot of power to the USB ports. I've not tried it with an optical drive, I'm expecting it to be an abject failure.
Oh, and with only 32GB internally, there isn't enough free space to drop the file onto the local drive to split it.
I did a draggy-drop copying stuff over to a FileCore format USB key. Thankfully it's RISC OS we're talking about, so there's no weirdness like hidden files or mount points. It's basically just a huge floppy disc as far as the OS cares, with bits of it being copied to another one; and since most apps are self-contained, copying them is usually all it needs. Adding !Boot for Choices and Resources and it's pretty much a complete snapshot.
The day the music died
I found again my old MPMan MP3 player and plugged it in to see what was on it. It opened a window listing all of the folders, and then immediately died.
[11296.380656] usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[11296.509051] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=066f, idProduct=8000, bcdDevice=10.01
[11296.509188] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[11296.509217] usb 1-2: Product: <USB PRODUCT>
[11296.509234] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: <USB MF>
[11296.509249] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: F03A090B38C8CB17
[11296.514894] usb-storage 1-2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[11296.517191] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-2:1.0
[11297.563295] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access SigmaTel MSCN 0100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[11297.565319] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[11297.567747] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 484096 2048-byte logical blocks: (991 MB/946 MiB)
[11297.568293] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[11297.568305] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 3e 00 00 00
[11297.568724] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[11297.568732] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[11297.579901] sda: sda1
[11297.581298] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI removable disk
[11301.707385] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 4
[11301.945166] FAT-fs (sda1): unable to read boot sector to mark fs as dirty
I have the stuff copied onto CD-R somewhere, plus the stuff I listened to the most copied onto my phone... It's just weird how it started up and then was like "nope, I'm done with life".
On the other hand, I also found my old Creative Zen media player (with an ARM9 inside). The battery was dead, obviously, so I left it plugged in to charge for a while. Then I had to rummage around for a mini-USB (no, not a micro) lead that was fully wired. Personally, I think "charge only" leads should, by penalty of immediate flaying, not carry the USB logo, or some other clear visual indication that it's a non-functional USB lead due to only having the power pins connected.
Eventually, I found one, but a dodgy one that had to be plugged in "just right". When I say just right, I mean to stop this level of annoying.
[17072.691353] usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 86 using xhci_hcd
[17072.818981] usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=041e, idProduct=4157, bcdDevice= 1.00
[17072.819002] usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[17072.819009] usb 1-4: Product: Creative ZEN
[17072.819014] usb 1-4: Manufacturer: Creative Technology Ltd
[17072.819019] usb 1-4: SerialNumber: 2BF90000DA66914A0002D8F517D1914A
[17074.693416] usb 1-4: USB disconnect, device number 86
[17075.195459] usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 87 using xhci_hcd
[17075.310513] usb 1-4: device descriptor read/64, error -71
Eventually I got a position that it was happy with and while XP gave me issues because it was almost, but not quite, an MTP device; Linux happily accepted it. Not only that, it was equally happy to play media straight from the device. It was a little bit quirky as MTP doesn't seem able to deal with more than one file at a time, but it worked.
It's like a time capsule to a younger Rick.
I copied all of the music from there over to a folder on a regular µSD card, so I can play stuff without the wonky cable. It was happy managing four and a half megabytes per second. That's only marginally slower than this thing's WiFi runs at (around 5½MiB/sec).
It's interesting looking at the music selection here. It's definitely softer than what I listen to these days: Dido, Enya, Pet Shop Boys, Laura Pausini... ye gods there's even some Hayley Westenra in there - but note that in those days there used to be a lot of this sort of thing on a satellite TV channel called "ClassicFM TV" which was extremely peaceful to listen to.
Even so there are some nods to my current ambience, from an early Evanescence to Sarah McLachlan. Okay, that's leaning more into the dark gothy side, but hey, all I've really done is take the sort of stuff I listen to and add metal.
For those unfamiliar, that means up the tempo a bit, make it sound a little more raw and emotional, and pluck the low D string of an electric guitar with the string palm-muted so it makes a sort of chugging sound rather than playing a note.
Wait, wait, you say, guitars are tuned so the low string is an E. Yeah, welcome to metal where a lot of the time the guitar is turned to eleven by having the low string tuned down a note. Because D is just more epic than E. Try it for yourself. If you have an (electric) piano, press the E2 key a few times. Now bang the white key immediately to the left of it, the D. Quickly. See how much more epic that is? ☺
Since I don't have a lot of this on my phone, as my tastes have changed since, when was this, 2009 or so?, it's good to toss it at Clementine and say "shuffle-play this lot" just to mix things up a bit - as I write this I'm listening to Huáng Hūn by Steve Chou (in Mandarin) which I haven't heard in easily a decade.
I installed Clementine (sudo apt install clementine) because I got fed up with the default RhythmBox playing what it damn well wants rather than what you tell it to play. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but I've tried different ways to play stuff both with and without adding to the queue and when shuffling, it just plays whatever it wants.
A new chair
Ever since I got a new desk a little over a year ago, I had been fitting on a picnic chair with a nice cushion. It was okay for use with the Pi, but now that I'm using a notebook PC the position is wrong and it gives me neck pains. I did, for a while, move the PC to the other table as it is slightly lower, but really the problem is the chair.
My previous chair.
So I picked up a dirt cheap office chair from the supermarket at the end of the new-school-year promotions. My back now hurts lower down, but that may be because this chair is forcing me to sit up rather than slouching. I just have a year of bad habits to work around.
My new chair.
Illicit game cards
My local supermarket is running a promotion where you can win 50 months of shopping from a little paper coupon that they give you for spending €30 and/or buying a partner product. It's not entirely correct, as the first change is for an instant win with prizes like €2, €5, and €50 (as coupons) along with various other things (espresso machine, watch, turntable...).
For the 50 months of shopping, you need to install the supermarket's app and give the magic code to the app. There are more things to be won, culminating in the 50 months of shopping that is actually a pretty generous €500 a month credited to their loyalty card. I can see that this is an effort to push everybody to installing and using the app. I guess the information that it collects is pretty lucrative if they can offer twenty people €25,000 in credit. Actually, that's six grand a year - does that need a tax declaration? ☺
I went into the shop on Friday saying to myself "Don't forget butter". Guess what I had to go back and get.
I went through the automatic checkout and asked for my habitual receipt. It printed it out and I pulled it from the machine. There were two bits of paper already there, so I pulled them off and handed it to the woman managing the self service tills in case it was somebody's card receipt and started to walk away.
"Hang on!", she called. I stopped.
She looked at the coupons, then at my single solitary €2,22 lump of butter.
I could see two thoughts go through her head.
The first was "how the hell did it give him two coupons for buying ONE bit of butter?".
That was quickly replaced with a "I don't care". She gave a very faint shrug and handed over the two tickets.
In a word: Nope.
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| C Ferris, 14th September 2025, 09:43 |
Wouldn't it been quicker / easier to use Draw+ ? |
| Rick, 14th September 2025, 13:30 |
If I had any talent, probably...
Well, most likely ArtWorks, but same difference. The thing is there's the expectation that the tool does what one wants and as you can see, that's not necessarily the case. Images are good examples as it is quite clear at a glance when the AI makes up additional details. |
| jgh, 14th September 2025, 21:25 |
Ah, I see why it was so dangerous for Covid hospitals to order aspiraters from France. :D
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