The US Capitol building is full of incredible historical art, including a number of brilliant frescoes painted by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. Fresco, generally associated with Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, is an art form in which dry pigments are worked into wet plaster. It is a very demanding artform because the artist must ( Read more... )

There's a new vignette challenge at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is at Shepardsport, as a Shep gets told off. (And while I was writing it, someone else based theirs on the same words).

marycatelli has a new vignette challenge on her Dreamwidth blog. My effort is also from Shepardsport, as Ken Redmond goes down memory lane.

There's also a new writing ( Read more... )

As I follow the ongoing controversy over AI art bots, I'm wondering whether, once the legal issues are resolved (by the development of systems that license all copyrighted IP, by definitive legal rulings or legislation that generative AI does not copy the training data, but rather analyzes it and thus does not infringe, or both solutions in tandem ( Read more... )

Of late I've been thinking about the problem with the argument that even an ethically sourced Large Language Model generative system is still thefty. In particular, how to explain the problem with the idea that payments to artists licensing their work are "a mere pittance," and therefore still effectively stealing from them ( Read more... )

When the first lawsuits about AI became public knowledge and people began to say that all generative AI was theft, I said that this would probably be less the death knell of generative AI than an opportunity for any company that could move into that market space with a bot that had been trained only on either public domain materials or materials ( Read more... )

We've been hearing a lot about the various lawsuits by writers and artists, on the grounds that the learning process of Large Language Models (what's commonly called AI right now) involves copying their works, and therefore infringing on their copyrights. However, there's another AI-related matter in the courts, related to the ability to copyright ( Read more... )

The fascinating history of Mad Magazine -- including how it changed from a comic book to a magazine to escape the 1950's moral panic about comics, particularly the horror comics that were very popular at the time.

Until recently a still life by Vincent Van Gogh was known as "Red Cabbages and Onions." However, recently the museum has re-evaluated that title, after the painting attracted the interest of a chef who is also a painter on the side. He noted that the items that have always been identified as onions didn't quite look right for them, and instead ( Read more... )

In the modern industrial world, cheap coal tar dyes have given us a world of cheap, brilliant colors. But for much of history, pigments and dyestuffs have been so rare and precious that often they were legally restricted to the highest ranks of society: in the west the Tyrean Purple was synonymous with kingship, while in East Asia the Imperial ( Read more... )

Ever had to deal with the tedious process of using the lasso tool to cut a figure out of an image, then having to carefully erase all the extraneous little bits of background that got carried along with it?

Meta (the parent company of Facebook) has just announced an AI model that allows you to do those tasks quickly and easily, instead of having ( Read more... )