So this is what the branch of the Manitowoc river near here looked like last year.
And this is what it looks like now.
Here’s how another stream I cross over regularly on the bike looked like last year.
And here’s the same stream now.
As you can tell we’re no longer under drought conditions here in Wisconsin. Finally. We’ve had enough rain now to pretty much replenish everything and make up for the months long drought we had up through this past winter. Everyone around here, especially the famers, were afraid that the drought was going to continue.
Rainfall has been a bit above average and weather has been relatively cool, but growing conditions have been pretty good.
So, Cat…
I ordered one of those walking harnesses for Cat One because, well, why not, right? You don’t really take cats for walks of course, cats take you for a walk. They go where they want to go and if they don’t want to go where you want, they’ll just sort of lay there and your cat walk turns into a cat drag, I suppose.
But if you’re the patient and willing to follow where the cat wants to go, it can be fun.
Sort of, I guess? Or so they tell me.
I don’t think she’s ever seen grass before.
We got to the bottom of the stairs of the front porch and she smelled something that really got her interested and there we stood for a while as she smelled, and smelled and smelled. And then, of course, started eating grass. Then she went over into the hosta bed and tried eating one of the hostas. Fortunately one nibble was enough and she swore off those for life.
Then a truck came down the street and the next thing I knew I was holding an empty harness. She was just gone. I mean like instantly gone, and instantly, without occupying the intervening space, she was up on the table on the front porch trying to get in the window.
How the hell did she even do that? The harness is one of those ones that has a collar around the neck, and a strap that runs around the chest right behind the front legs, and it hadn’t been loose. It had actually been a bit snug. All the straps and buckles were intact. She was just instantly gone and up on the porch.
Apparently cats can teleport now? Why didn’t someone warn me about this?
I’m a photographer and artist (well, sort of an artist), among other things. While I am strictly an amateur at both, I’ve been using Photoshop for something like 20 years for editing photos, sketching, cartooning, etc. And I have some concerns about what’s going on in the world of photography and art. Let me give you an example.
Look at the photo over there on the left. It’s a fairly generic looking and pleasant image of an attractive young woman. A woman who doesn’t actually exist. That image was created a few minutes ago using Photoshop Beta with Adobe’s generative AI technology. As you can see, generative AI has become very, very good. Scary good, really.
Well okay there are still some “issues”, as they say. Let me who you the entire image that Photoshop came up with when I told it to generate a photograph of two women in a coffee shop.
See the problem? The young lady must really, really like her coffee. Or look at this one, which is another image generated using the same text description.
Generative AI may be very, very good, but it isn’t actually all that smart.
Let me show you another image. This one was generated with the exact same text description but this time I told it to produce a black and white line drawing. This is what it came up with.
Not the best artwork in the world but perfectly acceptable for a simple drawing. I’ve seen a heck of a lot worst human created artwork. And better still, no weird glitches with cups or hands. I got this one when I tried generating another line drawing with the same text description.
I’m sure you see the problem there. Adobe’s AI, and in fact almost all of the ones I’ve experimented with, all seem to have trouble dealing with hands for some reason.
Now, did you notice something else interesting about those images? All four images depict young Black women even though I did not specify a particular ethnicity in the description I typed in. I found this rather curious so I continued. Eventually I generated 20 different images using the same text description. Of those 20 images, 10 depicted Black women, 3 depicted women of Middle Eastern ethnicity, 4 were Asian, one was Indian and 3 were caucasian.
I found this rather curious. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, when I generated images of men. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset. In fact I find this rather refreshing because often we’re bombarded with images of nothing but white people in a lot of the videos, advertising, stock photography, etc. that we’re forced to endure every day.
But sometimes the images are a bit – well a bit disturbing. I asked it to come up with a line drawing of a couple sitting in a pub having a beer and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear… Yeah, seriously. This is what it thinks a young couple in a pub looks like.
Just for the heck of it I added a specification that it should generate an image of a white couple and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear again. Why does she have a pepper grinder glued to her head? Why is he dipping spaghetti in his beer?
But it also comes up with some stuff that is surprisingly good. I told it to generate an image of a grouchy old farmer leaning on a split rail fence watching a herd of grazing cows and it came up with this.
Not bad, really. Well, if you don’t look at his left had too closely.
For the heck of it I switched from photography to painting and it came up with this from the same prompt.
I actually like that one, to be honest. I would print that out in large format, put it in one of those overpriced tourists shops up in Door County and someone would probably pay actual money for that.
Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, and that is how AI generated artwork is going to effect society in general. We are already starting to see fundamental changes.
First, we’re going to see the end of stock photo providers ike Getty. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Why would anyone bother to license stock images from companies like Getty when with a few words of description and Photoshop or one of the other AIs you can generate a generic illustration for your story or article? Let’s say you’re writing an article about vacations and you want to use a nice beach scene to illustrate it. So why go to a stock image company and buy the rights to use one when you can do this below with a few words and Photoshop?
Took all of about 15 seconds to generate that image from a one sentence prompt.
Stock image companies aren’t the only things that are going to come to an end. Would Normal Rockwell have ever gotten a job doing magazine covers in today’s world? I doubt it. I think illustrators in general are already losing their jobs, their work being done by AI. I’m seeing scores of images illustrating articles, fiction, even news stories, that look suspiciously like they were done by AI.
AI is already making inroads into the world of computer programming. There’s a very good chance that AIs are also already making significant decisions about you health care, not actual real doctors. The customer support person you chatted with on that website? Quite possibly an AI.
You may not like it. I don’t. Isn’t going to matter in the sightest. That horse is already out of the barn. Corporations can and will use AIs to replace human beings every place they can.
This is what a typical corn planting operation looks like around here these days. It’s a far cry from the ancient 4 row John Deere planter I used to pull!
Today and yesterday were both absolutely glorious. Brilliant sunshine, warm temperatures, pleasant breezes. I couldn’t have asked for finer weather. So I was out biking around the countryside instead of hanging around the house doing chores because, well, the hell with chores when the weather is this nice!
The farmers have been out in full force planting corn and harvesting first crop hay. We’ve had almost perfect weather for farming so far this spring. It’s about time they get a break. Out at my brother-in-law’s place they put in something like 350 acres of beans and corn in one day.
The sheer size of the equipment they use still seems astonishing to me. Shouldn’t be, I suppose. People have been farming like this for decades now. When I was still actively farming the biggest tractor we had was an Oliver 1655 with a whopping 70 HP that we payed $6,500 for. That tracked CaseIH up there is probably around 400HP and I suspect would sell for well over a quarter of a million, used.
Even something as simple as making hay has turned into an industrial sized operation with massive self propelled forage harvesters and an endless stream of semi-trucks.
But I wasn’t all that interested in agriculture, I wanted to get off the roads and on the trails because of, well, things like this…
It’s spring, after all, and everything is growing, is lush, is in flower. There are flowers almost everywhere I looked and the air was heavy with the most intoxicating scent of a world in full blossom.
But let’s take a peek at the backyard. We have a lot going on out there too.
Every year we try to do something different. This year it’s celery. We’ve grown it before as an experiment a few years ago and it did reasonably well. Well enough that we’re willing to take a chance on planting a whole bed of it this year. Yes, I know celery is pretty cheap but it isn’t the cost, it’s the flavor. Store bought celery is a sad, insipid and flavorless thing when compared to the home grown varieties. The flavor can be so intense that people who are used to the stuff they pick up at the grocery store find it a bit overwhelming, really. Hopefully it does reasonably well. I’m looking forward to this.
We have lots of other stuff in the ground now. Lots of onions. We grow onions around the outside borders of all of the raised beds. A lot of them will get shaded out and won’t grow that large once the other plants get bigger. Don’t care. Even the small onions taste wonderful. The onions won’t last long. They’re almost big enough now to start pulling some. Usually we get enough to eat fresh all summer long. We put in a mix of red, yellow and white onions just for a bit of variety.
We put in lots of beets and carrots this year as well. Again, beets and carrots are pretty cheap to buy. For us the big incentive is the flavor. You don’t know what a really good carrot tastes like until you’ve grown your own.
This corner garden up there in the photo is all tomatoes this year. We make our own tomato sauces, chili sauces, tomato soup, etc. and we actually used all of the home grown stuff and had to resort to buying some the other day and dear lord it tasted horrible!
I don’t have photos but as usual we planted the whole south side “flower garden” along the edge of the living room with pepper plants. We thought we’d gone overboard with bell and banana peppers last year. We didn’t, it seems, because the freezer is empty. We put in a mix of sweet bell, banana, and a new variety of jalapeno this year that is supposed to have all of the flavor of a jalapeno but with less heat. We’ll see how those go.
And to wrap this up, how about a lilac?
The lilacs are in full bloom all over town and the fragrance is absolutely amazing. Damn it’s beautiful out there, so why am I sitting in the house writing this? I’m going out to smell the flowers.
Just a nice, simple promotional image, I told them. Farming related, grouchy old man, a farm animal or two, maybe a corn field. And this is what they come up with. Sigh…
Well spring has finally come to Wisconsin. I was wondering for a while if the weather was ever going to get nice. But it’s finally been warm enough and pleasant enough that I’ve been able to get back out on the bike again.
I’m fortunate to live near some wonderful wildlife and nature preserves with miles of hiking trails. Bikes, alas, are not permitted, although I do understand why. Bike tires can be extremely destructive and disruptive inside of nature preserves.
This is the time of year when flowers are popping up all over the place. Like an entirely unexpected cluster of flowering trees just appearing at random alongside the road. I wanted to go get a closer picture but I would have had to scramble down a steep ditch to get over there so I had to settle for taking photos from the road.
Then I ran into this on one of the trails around here and I was able to get in close for some photos.
I suppose a lot of people would have just blown past, but I’m in no hurry. I’d probably irritate a lot of bike riders if I were with a group because I always want to stop and look at something or take photos. People are in such a hurry these days that they miss much of the beauty this world has to offer.
I love my technology, my gadgets, my computers and all that. But I think we pay a steep price if we wander too far away from nature and lose our connection with the world around us.
grouchyfarmer 