Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

RT @babiejenks@twitter.com

Photos of Britney Spears on magazine covers are literally how I realized Americans couldn't tell the difference between a rictus and a smile.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/babiejenks/status/1442996955257479168

RT @ICFJ@twitter.com

Journalist @nameesarnous@twitter.com founded a magazine about, for, & from women in the Arab world. But her outlet was struggling financially. So she joined Elevate, ICFJ’s news business hub. Through her mentorship, she decided to develop 2 new revenue streams: https://buff.ly/3neLpVG

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/ICFJ/status/1643101087623176194

RT @PopovaProf@twitter.com

Stumbled upon this 2003 quote from Ukr president Kuchma. Ru had just tried to take over the Ukr island of Tuzla in the Kerch Straight and build a dam to connect it to Ru mainland. Perhaps Pu was already planning his Kerch Bridge, which indeed passes over and is anchored in Tuzla.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/PopovaProf/status/1642737144866172928

Изборите в България бяха проведени успешно. Мнозинството избра още от същото негласувайки. Гласуващите също ги подкрепиха

RT @timnitGebru@twitter.com

Since we've been looking for more things to do, @emilymbender@twitter.com @mmitchell_ai@twitter.com @mcmillan_majora@twitter.com and I wrote a statement about the horrible "letter" on the AI apocalypse, the very first citation of which, was our #StochasticParrots paper.
https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1641893027492020224

RT @mapto@twitter.com

Not long ago I presented my experiments on illustrating famous fairy tales with #Midjourney v4 at the #IRCDL23 (http://lacam.di.uniba.it/IRCDL23/) This experimentation is part of the VAST project https://www.vast-project.eu/ that studies values present in different… https://qoto.org/@mapto/110111252142814403

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/mapto/status/1641354595329875968

Another encountered issue was that it was extremely difficult to force the generator to draw 7 dwarfs. Notoriously, 5 fingers of a hand are also difficult, but the larger the number the smaller hope to get it by chance. A third difficulty I found was the impossibility to generate impossible scenes, typical for fairy tales, such as #RedCap popping out happily from the wolf's belly or #Gretel shoving the witch into the oven. A quick comparison with #dallE showed that @openai's model handles somewhat better two of the above challenges (other than quantities). Yet, it struggles with unwanted #artefacts

The 4-step process is not to be seen as something strict. Rather, it is a suggestion that it would bring little benefit to proceed to a subsequent step, without getting the one before at least approximately right. Moving backwards in the process is not ruled out, yet again, before moving back, try consolidating your progress so far. Although it allowed me to generate the intended number of illustrations, while doing this I also confirmed that specific scenes are close to impossible to generate. For example, trying to illustrate how Cinderella plants a tree at her mother's grave, I couldn't find a way to make #Midjourney generate the scene without a grown tree already present - something that makes the scene absurd

The final fourth step, once we have a roughly satisfactory result, is to try variations that might just fix the remaining issues through randomisation

Once composition is at least roughly right, the third stage to choose a style that helps the efficiency. One that possibly reduces hallucinations, yet eases interpretability by the viewer. For fairytales, "book illustration" is a possibility

In the second stage, considering the outcome of the first step, I aimed to isolate parts of the prompt to be removed, added or replaced to improve the composition of the image, aiming to add important elements and to remove unwanted ones.

The first stage of the process is converting the intended text to a prompt, without deviating from the original vocabulary. This means condensing content into a single phrase, removing words that are not meant to be visualised, e.g. this, here, he, and substituting them with what they refer to.

To initiate such a process, I engaged with an investigation following the principles of action research (https://sonyaterborg.com/2016/02/17/action-research/) - an iterative methodology where research and practice go hand in hand. While a task is being completed, in parallel a reproducible process is being developed, lessons learned are being collected.

Not long ago I presented my experiments on illustrating famous fairy tales with #Midjourney v4 at the #IRCDL23 (http://lacam.di.uniba.it/IRCDL23/) This experimentation is part of the VAST project https://www.vast-project.eu/ that studies values present in different texts, including some fairy tales recorded by the Grimm brothers. My generations were an aside activity, and I attempted to generate 5 illustrations for each of 5 fairy tales: #LittleRedRidingHood, #Cinderella, #LittleSnowWhite, #HanselAndGretel, and #FaithfulJohannes

RT @george__mack@twitter.com

2. The Rise Of Negative Media

Since 2010, the media massively increased headlines that use fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.

It's no surprise the media isn't covering this 😅

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/george__mack/status/1640010316468858880

България официално е полудяла. Видях само едно заглавие, което още на първо четене не ми изглежда абсолютно безумно. Ще успеете ли да го откриете?

RT @ZelenskyyUa@twitter.com

Zaporizhzhia. Right now, residential areas where ordinary people and children live are being fired at.
This must not become "just another day" in 🇺🇦 or anywhere else in the world. The world needs greater unity and determination to defeat Russian terror faster and protect lives.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1638498087051116545

RT @emilymbender@twitter.com

Apropos #openai refusing to disclose any information about the training data for #GPT4 and #Google being similarly cagey about #Bard...

From the Stochastic Parrots paper, written in late 2020 and published in March 2021:

w/@timnitGebru @mmitchell_ai@twitter.com @mcmillan_majora@twitter.com

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1638569048274513922

RT @AlexRuane@twitter.com

Very proud to have led team developing #IPCC SYR Figure SPM.1, released today, which shows how current and future generations have different experiences with climate change. 1/4

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/AlexRuane/status/1637810764411961344

RT @AlexRuane@twitter.com

Very proud to have led team developing #IPCC SYR Figure SPM.1, released today, which shows how current and future generations have different experiences with climate change. 1/4

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/AlexRuane/status/1637810764411961344