What is Art in the Age of AI?

AI is making a lot of people nervous. Sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons.

What are some right reasons to be nervous about AI? Being nervous about the ability of self-driving cars to safely handle new situations is valid since lives are at stake. Wondering if advancing AI tech will make the rich richer and the poor poorer is also something worth pondering. Will AI-generated deepfakes destroy society? Maybe it sounds alarmist, but it is also a question worth asking. Is facial recognition a tool for good or evil? There are good uses, but do we know how to use facial recognition properly?

I will not tell you how I answer those questions in this post. I’m focusing instead on a question I think should not cause anyone to worry about anything and why some of the responses to the question are harmful. It is a philosophical question: Are AI-generated images actually art?

Acronym Soup

This time around, I will be providing a little writing advice. You are probably thinking, “That’s rich, coming from you.” Annnnyyyyywaaayyy…

We all love our acronyms and initialisms. They are part of the modern world, and we can’t escape them even if we wanted to. We even have an initialism for them: TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). Unfortunately, they are often confusing. Did you mean Mobile Device Management (MDM), Master Data Management (MDM), Multidimensional Data Modeling (MDM), or Miniature Dwarf Mice (MDM)? This time around, I discuss some good practices for defining acronyms that will help us avoid feeling like we’re drowning in Acronym Soup.

Moving off of GitHub Pages. Back to Azure

After less than a month, I just cut the site back over to Azure. I am using a new approach that wasn’t available way back in 2017 when I first set up the site: Azure Static Web Apps. GitHub Pages was a nice experiment, but Azure Static Web Apps are more flexible. It’s still really simple to set up and publish. Read on for a little more info.

Rule article published: Good Leaders are Good People

About 15 years ago, I read somewhere that people who make good leaders tend to look favorably own their own leaders. (I liked it so much that it is now Rule 39.) The opposite is also true: people who will be bad bosses tend to see their own bosses as bad bosses until proven otherwise. It seemed like a revelation at the time. The more I thought about it and the more I observed people around me, the more I realized it made perfect sense. The way a person looks at their boss tends to also be the way they look at everyone around them. I discuss it in a new post “Good Leaders are Good People” along with why it matters. I even throw in some research this time!

Rule article published: How Incentives Backfire

A new article discussing Jim’s Rules has been published. Read about how incentives backfire and how that relates to Rules 41 and 53. I’m a bit long winded this time (this time?), but I hope you find my pseudo-history of how obtaining money went from a task to an objective is at least mildly entertaining. More importantly, I hope I’ve started to introduce those two rules in a way that helps you in your day to day.

I also hope you enjoy my dabbling around with AI generated art. I created the image “Climbing a Treasure Pile” with much tweaking using NightCafe. See my other experiments at https://creator.nightcafe.studio/my-creations