Back To… Normal?
Now that all of the “holiday fun” is behind me, hopefully I can settle back into a more normal routine. It’s not that I am a total Grinch, but at some point I begin to question getting tugged in 40 different directions in November and December. It’s nice to visit family, of course. But clients don’t really care if you’re trying to vacation and visit your grandkids. And of course playing with plastic toys takes a back seat to the “festivities”.
I always wish I could get more of the vacation part with a little less of the busy. Maybe one day.
But it’s now January. Boring, cold January. But the consistency is nice, I’ll admit.
Poor Kid…
We visited our grandkids and those people they live with this past Christmas. One of my grandsons, who is 6, likes drawing his favorite cartoon characters. My wife showed him how to pull up several YouTube “How To Draw…” videos, and he was having a good time with it.
So I told him that maybe one day he can build models, and watch granddaddy’s “how to” videos. He gave me a puzzled look, so I pulled up one of my videos on the big TV screen. He came and sat next to me on the couch, and I begin to talk about what I was doing on the screen. He watched the video, looked at me… then back to the video… back to me.
Of course, I rambled on a bit, as I oft do. I was thinking “man, this kid is hooked on it!” He just sat quietly, listening.
After I took a pause long enough to let him get in a word edgewise, he innocently said as only a kid can say “Thanks granddaddy. But can I be allowed to go do something fun now?”
I laughed out loud at that. I hugged him close and said “Sure, you go do something fun. You’ve earned it!” He laughed for no reason other than granddaddy gave him a playful hug, having no idea what he’d actually said.
It’s official. I’m boring. But I’m OK with that. My grandkids love me anyway.
AI Content
You can’t get away from AI. Especially in my job as a web developer. There are all sort of debates… is it good, is it bad… will the AI Death Robots take over the world? I can’t answer those questions with any great clarity or authority, but… I do know I have a fairly dim view of it long term.
But what I can talk about is the amount of AI modeling content I see hitting like a tidal wave. A LOT of it. Text and video. Right now it is generally easy to spot.
And it is impacting me a bit. I use WordPress for this blog, and it has something called a pingback. It notifies the original blog author that someone has linked back you you. I have seen it for years. For example, I get a lot of links to my video about replacements for Pledge. Every now and again I check them out, and it’s fairly innocuous. Someone asks “anyone know a replacement for Pledge?” on a forum, and someone else may provide a link back to my blog story. So that’s cool.
But more and more I am seeing blogs link back, and when I look at those… I know they are AI generated. It’s easy to spot.
Here’s one, for example, titled “How to Create Wet Fluid Leaks That Look Fresh on a Matte Model?” There is a link in the article that links back to an old blog post on my site.
Now, I know what happens with these. An AI “bot” scrapes the web for modeling related content, grabs text from multiple sources, and then rewrites it in a way that is “unique”. So it’s not plagiarizing… I guess. It’s doing what AI does… it “learns” from sources and regurgitates it.
And the article may be fairly good. But then again, because it is a Murder Robot of Death simply combining things… they have a way of just making stuff up to fill in gaps. And often the photos used are obviously AI generated. A few aren’t… but they’re likely snagged from existing photos.
Now… there is NO way I can stop this. Not realistically. And there’s no one I can complain to. Because I’m quite sure that “Elana Vance” at the bottom of that blog is not a real person. For one… that photo is AI generated. Now, I’m not saying that a lovely young lady won’t build models, or use an airbrush. But look at the airbrush – it’s just not real. And I’m not sure what anatomical shenanigans are going on with that hand… but just… no. And the background, those paint bottles? I recognize those, because I have tested AI generated images for thumbnails. They look OK as “generic AI” images, but it is obvious they aren’t real.
(Full disclosure: I switched to an AI generated image for the “Deep Thoughts” pieces to protect myself from copyright claims even though the image I had been using – which was real – was supposed to be “open”. Turns out… not so much.)
There is, in my view, legitimate use for AI. We use it in my job as a web developer. Most clients aren’t writers, so to ask them for a well written, SEO-tuned page of text for something, say “septic tank repair”… might be asking a bit much. But if they give me 8-10 words about their service, we use AI to write a full page of it, adding in the locations, specifics, etc. We then look at it from a human view, make it sound more natural, and send it to them. They look to over and approve it with any edits needed, and we go live. Saves time for everyone.
Or for pediatrician websites… it is really useful. To have a doctor examining a kid… the doc smiling, the mom sitting there, the kid grinning… was always a safety issue for a real kid. But an AI generated photo works perfect.
And it’s used in many of the security systems we rely on for web servers, detecting patterns and trends far faster than any software in the past.
So it has positive uses.
But in my mind… it falls short in modeling. Yes, it gives lists of things. And the content may be helpful to an extent. But a new modeler may not know when it crosses from “good collection of helpful stuff” to “totally departing from reality”.
Granted, I am from “the last century”. Not just by a few years either. Like “I recall seeing the first moon landing” old. Saw the original Star Wars in the theater, back when it was just “Star Wars”. Back when ILM built models… real scale models… a job I could aspire to by actually building models as a kid.
But I think our hobby loses out on things when suddenly a “model blog” is simply an AI bot scraping data, dumping it in a vectorized database, and some massive “computer” south of Memphis scrambles it, rewrites it, and “Elana Vance” posts a blog.
It’s fake. All fake. No sweat. No effort. No equity of effort built up over years. No accounting for actual wisdom gained from making thousands of mistakes to arrive at a few tested conclusions.
And no fun. None. Because it’s not human.
Helpful? Maybe. In doses.
But it saddens me. The simple joy of creating with your hands, of imagining, of learning… it may be all synthesized down to some fake videos and blogs.
And I think of my grandkids, in a world after I am long gone. No authenticity. No genuineness. Just the robots…
Sad.
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