Rick's b.log - entry 2025/01/24

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Destroying a childhood hero

Mainly, that Wallace is a massive arsehole, and quite possibly not a good person.

As everybody ought to know by now, Wallace is a hare-brained "inventor", and Gromit is his long-suffering canine sidekick. Together they have had many adventures over many years, since 1989 in fact, to the point where you must surely have been living under a rock if you've never heard of them.
On the technical side, they are painstakingly created using models, miniatures, and lots of modelling clay. Every so often Aardman branches out into other things, like tall tales of wandering chickens. You can spot one of their productions miles off, it's a very distinctive look.

A screenshot from Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

As expected, the story hinges around Wallace's latest invention. This time a weird little robot gnome. In order to demonstrate it's usefulness, it "tidies" up the garden, mowing right through the plant Gromit just took so much care over, and creating this monstrosity.

Casting his sidekick aside in favour of his new invention, clearly the greatest thing since sliced Wensleydale, the long-suffering Austin A35 van gets a "Norbot" makeover (note the text on the side), which must surely be the ultimate slap in the face to Gromit.

Now, given that this is a Wallace and Gromit film, clearly things are going to go horribly wrong. Like, this amount of wrong.

Now, the plot is that the annoying penguin criminal mastermind manages to devise his own contraption to remotely "hack" into Wallace's Norbot. Hack isn't quite the right word. He guesses the password on the third attempt. After trying complicated stuff like "Inv3nt0r", he just settles on "cheese" and, yup, that's the password. There's even a "welcome to my files" jingle.
From that point on, all the penguin needs to do is access the Norbot's core programming and change its default "GOOD" behavior to "EVIL".
I have half-arsedly pasted together two screenshots to show the available Norbot options.

What the actual hell Wallace? Why does your Norbot have an EVIL setting? What were you thinking? If Wallace hadn't programmed anything beyond "Mildly Annoying", either the bird would have had to do some actual hacking, or the entire plot simply wouldn't have happened.
Wallace exhonerated? Please, this one is entirely on him.

And, of course, as usual, it's Gromit that saves the day. Though I don't think anybody would be too angry at Gromit if he said "you dug your own grave, mate" and walked away to star in his own film somewhere else.

I only hope that a future W&G film, once they find a new supplier of clay, addresses this point. That Wallace clearly has a dark side. This particular film, on the other hand, could be seen as a massive (and, given it's British, extremely snarky) parable about the dangers of AI.

AI is anything but intelligent

Kier Starmer wants to turbocharge the development of a British AI system, to "mainline" AI into the British economy. He thinks big, but may not be entirely aware of the ridiculous amounts of money (and megawatt-hours) being poured into AI stateside. So, no, Britain won't be an AI "superpower".

Meanwhile Ursula von der Leyen said pretty much the same sorts of things about Europe getting into the AI game, and the shiny new EU AI Act - which is going to be a complete waste of time given the experience of the GDPR (that can be used against local companies but is damn-near impotent faced with vast amounts of data crossing to regimes that lack the basic privacy rights that Europeans take for granted, just ask Max Schrems) and the whole cookie thing (not only self-defeated by "Legitimate interest", but now by focussing on advertising rather than tracking, numerous countries (including France, I'm sad to say) have gone on board with the "accept everything or pay us" wheeze).
So, not, I don't think the EU AI Act will be taken at all seriously, not when there's money to be made.

And, of course Trump said something... actually who gives a crap what Trump said, his strings are being pulled by his techbro overlords and of course they're on board the AI wagon. Those three techbros standing alongside Trump hold more wealth than something like the bottom 20% of American society (that's something like sixty seven million people). Just to, you know, give Starmer an idea what he is up against.

Right now LLMs are interesting toys. They can, sort of, be helpful. Sort of. You may have noticed that I have been dropping in some AI artwork as illustrations to go alongside what I write about. I do this not because I'm enamoured with AI technology, but because I'm a very visual person and I find that a good picture helps to set a mood. Whether it be Trump as an angry pumpkin, or a nurse wading through a flooded corridor of a dilapidated hospital lined with cadavers as a blunt force metaphor for what's going on in the NHS.

The pumpkin one was my third attempt. The first attempt wasn't bad but I wanted eyes, hair, and fire behind. The second attempt was a weird shape, needed more fire. The third one was used.

The proto-nurses - you can see what I mean about the hats.

So to this article. I tried the following prompt: Wallace and Gromit, only Wallace is a Bond villain in a secret underground lair. That's the one on the left.
Then: A claymation man like Wallace, only he is a Bond villain in a vast secret underground lair. That's the one on the right.

As you can see, the AI sort of knows that it's a kind of plasticine-ish creation and it sort of knows there's a dog involved, but that's about as far as it gets.

So I try to be a little more descriptive and abstract: A bald men made of modelling clay. He is a Bond villain in a vast underground lair. In the background is a tank containing sharks that have lasers for eyes.

Here the AI has rather spectacularly taken some of the description and merged it with other bits of the description to create an image that is memorable, but not what was asked for. There might be a heap of special cue words to get what I want, but I would need to subscribe to a service as the free twenty-a-day that CreArt offers doesn't allow for much in the way of refinement and experimentation.
Don't think I'm complaining, I think it's great that I can start an app on my phone and get it to generate a selection of artwork based upon whatever weird ideas cross my mind. Sure, the resolution isn't amazing and I'm stuck with 1:1 or 4:5 aspect rather than 16:9 or 4:3 (though I do crop to better fit when I can), but I can't complain, it's not like I'm paying for this.
Anyway, the problem isn't one of CreArt in particular, it is one of AI in general - the fact that LLMs, given some input, don't necessary understand what was being asked, invent a lot of details that may or may not be correct, and will assure you of the verity of this made up stuff. This turns up more in the likes of ChatGPT, but you can see from the above that it was like "lasers" "eyes" and completely ignored that it was the sharks being discussed. And, of course, if you've noticed the recent "Summary" nonsense that has started to blight both Google results and Amazon's customer reviews, you'll know that these summaries are... best ignored.

All of that being said, I did expect CreArt to not want to generate an image of Donald Trump, but, well... I think it did a nice job here. All of you who think we're going to die in some AI apocalypse involving paperclips? No, this is how we're going to go out...

Bonus Brownie Points if you can name the movie this references.

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