There is microplastic in Antarctica. Unless your well feeds on an ancient aquifer instead of groundwater it will still be contaminated.

The problem that I see is that you aren’t very present in the art.

Now that depends on how much agency you give yourself, doesn’t it? If you just give Midjourney a prompt and call it a day then yes. But the result won’t be very good, will it? Similar how you could just input random notes to a synthesizer and get shitty music in return.

The problem is that the majority of people does exactly that and then shares the resulting images online, making it appear that is all there is to it. You can however express yourself artistically by using prompt engineering to get something good and than working with that to further approach what you imagine by editing the result. There are many people out there who could not artistically express themselves as they lacked the ability to translate their vision to a canvas. With the help of image generating AI they can finally express themselves. I think this is something beautiful.

How are we going to develope [sic] new styles?

While I do agree with you that our current AI image generators won’t be very innovative, this is by design and not necessity.

This is what you would have gotten in let’s say 2017 when asking an AI what it thinks a dog looks like (s. DeepDream).

And a couple years later you can achieve this with Midjourney.

Things are developing very fast and in the end of the day, even if we would never get an AI that can innovate art there is nothing stopping humans from just doing it themselves as we have always done over millennia. You can already greatly increase the creativity of existing image generators by tweaking the randomness factors and those algorithms don’t just remix existing images, they are actually creating their own. You need the training set of existing labeled images to train the AI as it doesn’t know what a frog is, nor a tree or anything really.

AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes

This is indeed a concern. If you feed too much AI generated images into the training of an image generator it causes a sort of degenerative disease in the AI that results in inferior results. Some sort of AI incest so to speak. The prevalence of AI art on the internet and the inability to reliably differentiate it from human art is proving to be a challenge for making new training sets.

The entire point of generative AI is to generate things not present in the training set by teaching it to abstract the concept.

It’s a very fair comparison because in both cases you take the physical skill requirement that takes years to learn and even longer to master out of producing art. To make a good electronic song you need to compose, but you don’t need to know how to physically play the instruments. To make a good image you need to know how to compose it, but not how to physically draw it.

I am not a good illustrator though, but I’m good at working with AI and Photoshop. Using generated images as a base gives me the best quality in a reasonable time.

I’m pretty sure there are musicians who would roll in their graves at the thought of generating music in synthesizers, yet without we would have electronic music.

The contract for RWE to expand the mine there goes back decades and the wind farm operator knew it would be demolished before they build it. It’s at the end of its life cycle now and had to be demolished one way or another.

German government could either breach their contract with RWE and pay them compensation or allow the destruction of a derelict wind park in exchange of RWE stopping coal extraction 8 years earlier then planned. It’s a job well done by the government.

The wind turbines are already at the end of their lifespan and they knew RWE had the license to expand the mine there when the wind turbines where build.

Of course it’s economical for RWE, they are not building a new mine. Just continuing their mining operation there for another 7 years.

Yeah, you are right. Guess we used it wrong in school.

They can revoke the license whenever, but you can sue them for it. Whatever illegal garbage is written in the EULA won’t hold up in court.

That’s the funny part, they aren’t allowed to. But they know no one is gonna bother to sue then over it.

Those ridiculous terms of service are null and void when challenged in court.

The X isn’t kisses. The X stand for closes eyes and the O is an open mouth, hence XO = kiss emote and XOXO is the plural

If the Russian soldier wants to survive he can just surrender or go home (although he might get shot by their own men).

If the Ukrainian wants to survive, he has to drive the Russians out of his country.

And you are right, I do not care whether the invaders survive or not. They decide to invade their peaceful neighbour to murder and rape the civilian population. Have you all forgotten Bucha already? I have not, and there are hundreds of Buchas in the occupied territories.

Are you seriously telling Ukraine they should just let the Russians genocide and rape them in peace instead of fighting for their survival? That’s a sickening take.

More tanks are always good.

The sanctions are working. But in a sense of turning Russia into a bigger NK or Iran. They don’t have inflation because they immediately restricted capital exchanges preventing any capital flight. They also increased their federal fund rate by a lot, which will prevent inflation but still hurt their economy.

Russia is suffering from ammunition shortages, which is why they are firing much less compared to the start of the war.

Ukraine made more progress in the last two weeks than Russia did in the last 6 months. It was always gonna be hard. Unlike with the Kharkiw counteroffensive Russia expects it and is dug in having built up defence in depth. It was always gonna be hard, specially in the early days. More like how the Kherson counteroffensive went which took over a month of heavy fighting to get going.

I’m not aware of Ukrainians just surrendering and refusing to fight. To me it looks like they are fighting quite effectively so far.

Lastly, if you are actually worried about the loss of Ukrainian live (which I doubt tbh) than maybe, just maybe you should instead support your Biden administration and encourage them to send more material so that Ukrainians can better defend themselves.