Friendly Faces
I've got a request for you readers: look at the photo montage above. Then look at the one from last week. Compare the two and tell me what you liked and didn't like about them. I have a reason for asking this. It's research.
I made last week's montage by hand. In Paint. Not Paint 3D, just plain old garden-variety Paint. It took me about 15 minutes. I was satisfied with it, although I made a mental note to do something better with the text placement next time.
The very next day, I got an email from Microsoft. It seems I'm on their list (list? What list? They have lists? This is ominous) to beta test their new Office product, which is called Designer. Okay, I'm a long-time Office user, so I'll give it a go. Designer's got an AI in, of course it has, and it wants to know what I want to make – a cute Insta post, mayhap?
You can see where this is going.
This week's montage was made by the Designer AI. With some help from me. Loading the photos and telling it what to do took about 4 minutes: 2 for me to find the photos and words and 2 for the AI to ruminate. (It chews its cud: I can just hear it.). The AI threw up some suggestions, of which one was actually usable if I changed the text and explored the image-editing features, etc. In all, it took about 20 minutes, but that could be speeded up with practice.
So what do you think? Do we give the AI a passing grade, as long as it's under adult (well, okay: not exactly 'adult') supervision?
Whether handmade or AI-fiddled-with, the montage is there to give you a glimpse into this week's issue of the Post. We've got an incredible variety of things to show you: wildlife, domestic creatures, creatures that have domesticated us. Plus humour, cinema, thoughts of the stray variety, comics, cartoons, and…fiction, of course. These stories are surging on towards their endings. If this were television, we'd tell you they were in their final seasons. (Of course, there may be sequels…) So pay attention. If you need to catch up, we have archives. I worked hard on those archives due to the cyberattack fiasco, so I expect you to appreciate. Who am I kidding? No, I don't expect you to appreciate, but it would be nice.
So read, already. Think about the Create topic and send me something: photos, stories, essays, videos, whatever you've got. And have a great week out there!
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Quote of the Week: Yf ye evir feele bad about makinge mistakes, remembir that we all say "Pandora's Box" by cause supposed scholerlye genius Desiderius Erasmus mistranslatid the Ancient Greeke worde for "jar.".
– Chaucer Doth Tweet
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