zifnab25 [he/him, any]

Certainly possible that elements were AI generated. However, this image feels like it had someone putting polish on it. The symmetry - both in the setting and in the focal point of the image - plus the sharper color contrast particularly between the red of Mt. Doom and the blue of the mountains and the way that you get a real sense of light coming directly from the volcano and radiating out into the rest of the image. Someone definitely had their hands on this in a material way, even if it was just moving clip-art onto a canvas and tweaking the colors a bit.

No microphone

Its funny, because I’d love to have a sound setup that accepts audio. I do FoundryVTT games regularly from my couch, and being able to talk at my TV, rather than setting up a bluetooth headset, would be great for hybrid home/remote games.

I know my TV has a built in mic, because it occasionally goes into “Did You Say Something?” mode based on keywords I never bothered to figure out. But I can’t get it to sync with the server I’ve set it up against.

Damned near everything has a mic in it, but nobody wants to let you use it for what you want.

staring at my Microsoft DevOps certification, dejectedly

yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.

The original problem was posited… 60 years ago?

It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.