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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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That reminds me, I keep meaning to fuck around with the local AI assistant Nvidia released. I did fuck around with Easy Diffusion a while ago and was relatively satisfied with what I could make it do.

I guess I need to go backwards before I go forwards, so if I can digress for a moment.

I'm not an artist. My use case is to use Easy Diffusion to make art for a video game. It can make some pretty good pixel art for NPCs. I can even sometimes force it into making some dungeon artwork for a blobber with sufficient templates and prompts. This is still a work in progress on my part though, I may not quite get it across the finish line. However, the art I'm getting out of it, while sufficient, is all over the place stylistically and tonally. I'm not sure I'll even get it to spit out a coherent body of art assets for a video game. But I guess I'm OK with that. You get what you pay for, and I'm not paying anyone anything.

My problem with LLMs has been multifold. Putting aside the bias, they are so wildly prone to hallucinated information. As an assistant, you can't trust anything they tell you, and must continuously verify it. Which rather defeats the purpose of having an AI assistant. But circling back to my use case, supposedly they are good at digesting and reworking specific source documents. I wonder if I could have the local nvidia AI assistant work within some document templates to generate random RPG gibberish. We shall see.