If you're looking for literary criticism and exploration that's a bit more leftfield and nuanced, highly recommend Sam Pulham's video essays https://www.youtube.com/@SherdsTube - I've discovered some brilliant writers through him that I would otherwise never have encountered.

Tangential, but I've been exploring gaussian splatting as a photographic/artistic medium for a while, and love the expressionistic quality of the model output when deprived of data.

https://bayardrandel.com/gaussographs/

A very cool aesthetic and application of technology, thank you for sharing.

thank you!

Loving this; great work! Do you talk about the process anywhere in more depth?

Thanks! I'm using the KIRI Engine in Blender to render splats from my photos (https://github.com/Kiri-Innovation/3dgs-render-blender-addon) and then process the image as I would my photography in Lightroom. There are lots of different photogrammetry tools for generating plys (the point cloud) like PolyCam (https://poly.cam).

Cool aesthetic!

Very cool!

https://bayardrandel.com My photography, gaussography, and video art

I met my wife on IRC and migrated to New Zealand as a result. Worked out pretty well for me/us, well over twenty years later.

Frustrating that Photos is really not suitable for anything other than editing snaps. I'd love to ditch Adobe, but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws, and there really aren't that many great commercial alternatives to Lightroom that don't also have a subscription model.

> but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws

darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.

I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.

> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.

Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.

Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them?

Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!

If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong

The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)

You should read Blood Meridian.

> a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does

Only if your goal is photorealism, which is one of the least interesting forms of art.

Agree entirely - creativity emerges through the process of work, or is "discovered" through work. If AI does the work, it fundamentally can not be a creative process.

Painters don't imagine something and through shear technical skills translate what is in their head to a canvas. Their style emerges through constant, repetitive work and iteration. The work itself creates the art, not an idea. An idea is just fuel.