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RE: https://mastodon.scot/@Wen/116255252453377471
Also note the very foreign road layout, mail carrier, foreign cop, non-Scottish suburb and buildings, and all the rest of the imagery. That illustration exemplified American cultural imperialism from top to bottom. (And looking at the shadows, the sun NEVER gets that high overhead—when you can see it at all, that is!)
@cstross I'm less concerned about where the cop is from and more about the fact he is emerging through his car's windscreen...
The full horror is only revealed by the non-cropped version that isn't what was posted to social media or shown by The National.
It is supposed to be #Huntly in #Aberdeenshire.
https://glowconnect.org.uk/use-gemini-to-create-illustrated-storybooks/
#AIslop #Scots #Gaelic #Scotland #EducationScotland #GoogleGemini #Glow
Ah interesting. I got most of the 4AD catalogue I was into back then (DCD, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Bauhaus) from smaller indie record stores here in Melbourne, where stock seemed to go in and out of availability according to the movement of the planets or something anyway. 😉
@cstross
Why do you hate our FREEDOM?
(Red tailed hawk sounds)
Seriously, though: Good tools let your control them, rather than hallucinate from scratch. Upload a couple of street pictures from Edinburgh and use that as reference. We have a massive tool-teaching challenge ahead of us, just like with the Internet.
@StompyRobot And what about the linguistic usage? (American training texts in LLMs outnumber all other English language dialects massively, let alone Scots, which is *not* the same as English-English by a long way, even before we get into stuff like Doric and Highland Gaelic …)
@cstross @StompyRobot on the other hand, if one can create a language model which reliably produces Gaelic, hey, you could use that to preserve and spread the language. Of course, you'd have to decide which dialect…
@cstross
Again, the big models will do better when provided the right reference.
FWIW the models actually have a significant Nigerian English bias, because a lot of data was created there for cost reasons.
Also, the user has to guide the model on the actual plot and character, or you'll get a very "dice table" vibe in the output.
I don't agree with humans who just let the slop machine do what it wants. I also don't agree with humans who refuse to use the tool at all. We're at the beginning.
@cstross I for one had never realised that American cop cars had no windscreens!
@cstross As someone who lives part of the year near a storybook small town that’s a tourist destination, and travels the rest of the year in the US, there’s a lot of Disneyfication in this image. Even our vacation destination town in the mountains isn’t as ludicrous as this picture. It’s cribbed from Disneyland. (Who should sue for brand infringement.)
@slott56 I've spent enough time in the US to know that. (Probably 1-2 years on visits there, over three decades.) Even so, it's utterly disgraceful for a Scottish educational organization to promote this sort of imagery (without a very specific framing, "this is a picture of America").
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