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Subtlety
is a delight
but
sledgehammers
win the fight.
There's much to be said for subtlety in writing. English teachers love lecturing on metaphor and theme. Readers who are able to detect these hidden undercurrents of meaning draw more enjoyment from works of fiction and are able to disarm manipulative language in ad copy and political essays.
But the sledgehammer approach is blunt and to the point.
I fed this poem into the AI image generator and got back some variation of "cute girl with a mallet" eight times in a row. You'll notice no "cute girl" in the prompt. A "cute girl" motif seems to have been baked into this particular implementation of the LLM by its programmers, through their choice of data sets and training. It's an automated sledgehammer.
Sledgehammers in the data are easy to spot, but I wonder about the more subtle messaging that slipped into the algorithm.
There's a sledgehammer mentioned in today's poem, so I wanted to find something thematically appropriate. I do have a sledgehammer in the basement, along with a rubber mallet and any number of claw hammers, but for scale and practicality, I went to the kitchen drawer for a meat tenderizer.
Instead, I discovered two of these colorful eye-gougers in the kitchen drawer.
Any guess about their intended use?
More Tomorrow.
It wasn't entirely accurate to say the LLM generated eight "cute girl with a mallet" images in eight attempts with a prompt that didn't call for such. The LLM actually generated seven "cute girl with a mallet" images and one "two cute girls fighting over a mallet" image. I chose the one with the best composition and attitude.
I tried to fix the six-fingered hand glitch with inpainting, but the results were unimpressive. One had five fingers but with an extended pinky like she was drinking a cup of tea. Another had five fingers but a weirdly angled wrist that looked pretty painful. It's probably useful to have an extra finger when you're holding a mallet of that size, so the physics of that world are suitably conserved.
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❤️ I don't know what the eye-gouger-looking things are for. The mention of sledgehammers reminded me of the only time i've ever used one - to crush aluminum cans as a pre-teen, back when the kid down the street and I would collect them and bring them into the recycling center in a huge plastic bag. you can fit a lot more cans into the bag by crushing them, and the act of crushing itself was one of the most satisfying things - i'd lift the heavy sledgehammer by the wooden handle, with the head downwards, and then just let gravity drop it onto the upright can. we collected tons of those walking home from elementary school; there was lots of litter on the street back then.
Sledgehammers are fun, aren’t they?