As a Father’s Day treat, we attended A Year With Frog and Toad at the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis. It was a fantastic performance of the Arnold Lobel classic. If I could have only one children’s author with me on my desert island, it would be Lobel.
This week marked Griffin’s first time as an official, paid employee. He worked as a counselor at one of the Lego robotics camps that he used to attend. After a full week, he says he’s “ready to retire.”
As I was prepping Maggie’s graduation posts for publication, I noticed a new WordPress sidebar called the “AI Assistant.” (It actually comes with Jetpack, a set of add-on tools that help optimize WordPress. Basic tools are free; more advanced usage comes with subscription fees.)
It looks like I initially got 20 “requests” for free. Improving the title or getting feedback on the post take one request each. Generating a featured image costs 10 requests. The feedback is pretty basic, but not entirely useless. It’s a bit like an advanced Grammarly analysis where it checks spelling and grammar but also gives tips on tone and style.
The featured image tool seems like it will be a direct threat to stock art companies. I ran it on my previous post about Maggie’s graduation slideshow. I thought it might create a collage or something from the gallery of images on the page. Nope. Instead, it appears to have generated an image based on an analysis of the title and text. Here’s what it came up with:
Definitely not going to use it. Far too corporate for my style. But I could see someone else using it and could easily see it as a generic graphic on an article about graduation in a print magazine or on-line zine. I can’t imagine how this sort of thing won’t cost real people their jobs.
Each student at Maggie’s graduation ceremony had a series of slides that showed them at different points during their years at Cornerstone. I’ve extracted the pictures from Maggie’s slideshow as a gallery below, or you can see the slides as they were originally presented at this link.
Maggie’s graduated today from Cornerstone Montessori Elementary School which she has attended since kindergarten. It was a beautiful ceremony on a perfect day. Next year, she will attend SPA (where Daddy teaches) as a seventh grader. She will be on the same campus with Griffin (entering 10th grade) but most of their classes are in different buildings. We are enormously proud of her!
Our new house came with an ancient “dishwasher.” The quotes are intentional because it was really more of a loud dish rinser that couldn’t handle much. There was a sale. Sarah texted me. I said “DO IT NOW.” Or something like that.
We opted to install it ourselves which turned out to be more of an ordeal than expected. But after discovering that the shutoff valve didn’t actually work (fountains of water!) and replacing a bunch of old hardware, we now have a quiet, modern, dishwasher that seems to hold twice as many dishes as our old one. More importantly, it actually cleans them. I find this more satisfying than I should.
Sarah has been meaning to tackle some of the invasives in our yard, starting with these two sprawling Japanese Barberry bushes. They came out more easily than expected and opened up a bunch of space near the side deck and sun room.
Sarah and I received a mysterious email recently that included the following:
We followed the instructions and said nothing to Griffin. He and the rest of his upper school classmates dutifully arrived in the Huss Auditorium for the awards assembly, having no idea who might win an award. Griffin noticed that we were in the audience, didn’t catch on.
To our delight, and Griffin’s complete surprise, Griffin won the “Science Magazine Award” in recognition of “a passion and Love of Science as well as an Exceptional Class Citizen.” I’m especially pleased that this award focuses on his level of interest in the subject and his citizenship in the classroom, two elements that are given short shrift in the typical grades-are-everything paradigm.
Griffin has been taking music lessons for a few years—first piano and then trombone. He plays in the jazz band at school and is improving rapidly. Along the way, he has become interested in composing music. With easy, free electronic tools like BeepBox, he is able to develop electronic compositions pretty easily. Sarah and I have been quite impressed with what he’s been working on. This summer, he’s hoping to enroll in a music theory class at the Saint Paul Conservatory of Music.
This is his most recent composition, completed this morning:
And here are links to a bunch of other pieces he’s been working on over the past few months, at various levels of completion. Some of them are just for fun. Others were composed to fill particular needs in his video game coding projects.
AI art is controversial. Some would say the phrase is an oxymoron. Or it’s more like AI Art Theft. I follow these discussions with interest and think that there is a lot to be concerned about. With that said, I also have a MidJourney account that I’ve been using for the past six months to play with the technology. I mostly use it for role-playing game material, particularly for illustrations of the fictional characters that inhabit the milieu.
While preparing for a birthday game session for Griffin and some of his friends, I needed to whip up a bunch of modern-day characters for the adventure (wherein a mundane plane flight would go horribly awry). Here’s the cast, giving you a sense of what MidJourney can produce these days.
Note that for each image, I gave a very simple prompt. Whiskey Sour’s prompt, for example, was “middle-aged drag queen.” I never specified an art style, so it’s interesting that four of them are photo-realistic while Cindi and Duke are stylized. (Ms. Bankemper’s prompt was “science teacher middle-aged red-head glasses.”)
In a comical turn, on my first attempt at Greg Stamour, I typed in this prompt, “hot surfer dude paramedic.” MidJourney always produces four possibilities for each prompt. You can then choose one, add variations, or modify your prompt. One of the first four pics for Greg was this one:
Note the three pairs of sunglasses! Apparently MidJourney’s algorithm associates copious sunglasses with hot surfer dudes. If you zoom in, you can also see that the logo on his shirt is nonsense squiggles. Text-like artifacts are a common issue with generative AI.
I don’t know how all the ethical considerations will shake out in the coming years, but from a tech-geek standpoint, it is fun technology to play with.