Deepfake penmanship

People have been talking about "Deepfake" pictures and video for years now - artificially created media based on publicly available source media that shows something entirely made up.  ChatGPT adds the ability for AI to write documents on arbitrary subjects.

The problem for people passing these off is that the fonts used to print them don't look handwritten.  They're too perfect, to regular.  Real people have subtle variations in their handwriting so you can catch this sort of thing out.

Until now:

Like other machines, this starts with asking ChatGPT to write an essay based on the assignment prompt. That generates a chunk of text, which would normally be stylized with a script-style font and then output as g-code for a pen plotter. But instead, Devadeth created custom software that records examples of the user's own handwriting. The software then uses that as a font, with small random variations, to create a document image that looks like it was actually handwritten.

It uses a pen plotter to write the document, so it could be written in a spiral notebook.  The future is stupid, and entirely untrustworthy.

(via) 

Begun, the AI wars are

ChatGPT bots are now auto-generating lawsuits against robo-caller bots.  The Future is stupid.

Hat tip: A Large Regular.

When culture collapses

This is perhaps 2300 years old:

ambisinistral describes it well:

The Boxer at Rest is a bronze Hellenistic sculpture dating from somewhere between 330 - 50 B.C. Rather than showing a heroic figure, it shows a battered boxer. His nose is broken, his lip is split and he has cauliflower ears as well as numerous cuts. The statue also has copper inlaid to represent splattered blood.

There are more photos at his place, and I strongly encourage you to go look.  The anonymous artist knew well how to represent a timeless subject, these two millennia ago.

We've lost this.  The so-called "art community" not only lacks the talent to produce a work as timeless this, it doesn't have any interest in doing so.  Here are a few examples of the wasteland that is modern sculpture.

Alberto Giacometti, Cat

Henry Moore, Double Oval

David Smith, CUBI VI 

Lest you think that I'm being unfair to the "art community", these are all from the Wikipedia page on Modern Sculpture.  These are the sculptures highlighted by people who are jazzed by the subject, and this is the best they can come up with.

It reminds me of this:

The Golden Madonna, ca. 980 AD

This was made after the "Carolingian Renaissance" of Charlemagne, an age where the civilization of the post-Roman barbarian kingdoms had recovered enough to explicitly model itself on the Roman Empire.  It has been said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor and empire, but it was marketed that way at the time.  And this was the best that they could do, 1300 years after The Boxer At Rest.  It wasn't nearly as technically proficient, but they were trying.

The Holy Roman Emperors at least wanted to restore art to its former glory, but it would be another 500 years before Michelangelo actually pulled that off.

Today's "art community" doesn't even want to do this.  The people who preen as a "cultural elite" are not even up to the level of Dark Ages barbarians.  At least the barbarians aspired to standards.