Generative inpainting doesn’t typically employ an LLM. Only a few even use attention transformers. It costs in the range of $100,000 - $10 million to train a new diffusion or flow image model. Not cheap, but nothing crazy like training Opus or GPT 5.

The different uses of AI are not inexctricable.

Many generative inpainting models will run locally

Continuing to treat AI as a monolith is missing the point.

The different uses of AI are not inexctricable. This is the point of the post. We should be able to talk about the good and the bad.

I don’t see the relevance here. Inpainting saves artists from time-consuming and repetitive labor for (often) no additional cost. Many generative inpainting models will run locally, but they’re also just included with an Adobe sub.

Gish gallop

Spoilers: We will not

Generative inpainting/fill is enormously helpful in media production.

So more like “slut.”

trolls

When I’m on the phone with a real human being in customer service, I’m often actually talking to an egregore of the company. They’re reading scripts (written by AI?), being scored by an AI that’s listening in to the recorded conversation, and responding in ways that the conversation tree tells them to respond. Even in the call center jobs that aren’t so managed, there’s really only so far someone can go off script. So while I definitely want more genuine human interaction in the world, I dunno if this is the hill to fight on. All that said, we’re definitely headed for the cyberpunk future, cause everything’s run by a buncha gonks.

I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few AIs in my time.

The UK food laws may be partially to blame. But American junk food has also degraded over the decades. A twinkie from the 30’s-70’s didn’t taste the same as a modern twinkie, with some unknown portion of its sugar replaced by HFCS. But at least sugar is still the first ingredient in a twinkie. Plenty of other iconic junk food has been engineered into nonsense and just rides on the fumes of its former glory.

The USOC and IOC facilitate all sorts of heinous shit.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

100%

Palpatine and Dooku commissioned the clone army in secret, then revealed it as a solution to the robot army attacks, which they also funded. The Jedi/Republic accept the help begrudgingly. Unfortunately, I rewatched ep 1-3 recently.

I work with someone who never closes a tab. They’ll just keep plowing ahead until they literally have to reboot their computer for lack of resources. Physical clutter doesn’t bother me much, but I have to look away when they share their screen.

Wow, you pivot a lot. The power consumption of data centers as a whole in the US was ~5% of total in 2024. But they are definitely guzzling water, no doubt about that. It’d be nice if we still had environmental regulatory agencies with teeth to force better cooling methods. Doug Forcett comes to mind.

I don’t input anything that I care about them spying on. As for brain rot, we’re on social media, aren’t we?

If you’re using one of the LLMs to search, you can just twirl out the source list and click through to the pages it found relevant to your prompt. In my experience, it pulls a better list of links than DDG or Google. You can just ignore the summary it writes.