3×44: The Loch Dustbinness Monster

Explicit content warning

04/14/22 • 59 min

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which intelligence is artificial, snaps are un-ned, and art is what you make it:

[00:04:00] popey’s latest tool is unsnap, which helps you “quickly and easily migrate from using snap for applications to flatpak”, and we’ll get into how it works and why it exists
[] AI-generated artwork. Aza Raskin made a very cool AI-generated video for Zia Cora’s song “submarines”, where he put together a list of text queries and then used AI algorithm Disco Diffusion to generate images as video frames. This sort of AI-generated imagery and art is increasingly common, whether This Person Does Not Exist or This Bench Does Not Exist or National Novel Generation Month or whatever. But what are the wider ramifications of this, for ownership, collaboration, and open source? What are your intuitions in this: is a list of text descriptions of an image really the “source code” for that image? If someone uses the same queries that you did, is their work a derivative work of yours? Would you feel delighted or ripped off if that happened? This is all a new area, and it’s evolving very fast: where are the precedents for this sort of collaborative art creation and where should we be drawing inspiration and understanding?

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×44-the-loch-dustbinness-monster/12454

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which intelligence is artificial, snaps are un-ned, and art is what you make it:

[00:04:00] popey’s latest tool is unsnap, which helps you “quickly and easily migrate from using snap for applications to flatpak”, and we’ll get into how it works and why it exists
[] AI-generated artwork. Aza Raskin made a very cool AI-generated video for Zia Cora’s song “submarines”, where he put together a list of text queries and then used AI algorithm Disco Diffusion to generate images as video frames. This sort of AI-generated imagery and art is increasingly common, whether This Person Does Not Exist or This Bench Does Not Exist or National Novel Generation Month or whatever. But what are the wider ramifications of this, for ownership, collaboration, and open source? What are your intuitions in this: is a list of text descriptions of an image really the “source code” for that image? If someone uses the same queries that you did, is their work a derivative work of yours? Would you feel delighted or ripped off if that happened? This is all a new area, and it’s evolving very fast: where are the precedents for this sort of collaborative art creation and where should we be drawing inspiration and understanding?

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×44-the-loch-dustbinness-monster/12454

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

Previous Episode

3×43: Self Assembly

Stuart Langridge, Jeremy Garcia, and special guest star Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which we in theory want to talk about loads of news but actually we spend all our discussion time on one topic:

[00:02:00] Jorge is into Flatpak. And there’s quite a lot to talk about here. This is very much about the Linux desktop, distribution of applications, and how things have changed; stuff has certainly happened since the last time we looked at this, and it’s worth getting into. Let’s talk about what flatpak means today.

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×43-self-assembly/12449

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

Next Episode

3×45: Natural Musk

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Times Square is a much better example, it is Stuart’s turn to seemingly sound like he recorded this at the bottom of a coal mine (sorry about that), and:

[00:01:50] Elon Musk is buying Twitter. We have thoughts, and quite a few of them. There’s a question as to whether it’ll even happen, there are questions about what he plans to do, and there are questions (many, many questions) about what Twitter will look like after it’s been Elonified. Let’s dig into it

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×45-natural-musk/12455

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!