Skyscript Astrology Forum

thanks ouranos

so much of our world is about money... i pray that in the future we will be free of this concern and preoccupation with money.... it seems to ruin so much of our world or maybe a better description is that it stifles it in such a way that our lives are less rewarding as opposed to more... all of this doesn't hinge on money, but many have been led to believe that it does..

Here is an article from Tristan Péloquin from LaPresse
The art of copying without paying
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/enqu ... -payer.php
Google and free translation.
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In this article, the author says that 'If a picture is worth a thousand words, with artificial intelligence, it is now enough to write a short sentence in a dialog box to generate endless stunning images.'
Algorithms are being used to generate images that look like the 'real artist'. And applied to astrology, tomorrow a software will become an astrologer able to master the most complex systems like Indian astrology.

When the AI swallows the works without the knowledge of the artists

“The operation of the software is confusingly simple. Imagine a scene, mundane, fantastic or surreal, and type its description in a dialog box. Add the name of the great painter you want to imitate, then wait a few seconds.
If one of the four images that appear on the screen does not satisfy you, simply reformulate and start again. Again and again.???
Here is an example of 2,421 results of images of Marylin Monroe generated by Stable Diffusion, from the British company Stability AI and posted on lexica.art
https://lexica.art/?q=marylin+monroe

“For a little over a month, the result of this effortless operation, repeated hundreds of thousands of times by Internet users from all over the planet, has given birth to what is certainly one of the largest image galleries in art that humanity has been able to see to date. The directory, published on the Lexica.art site, already contains hundreds of improbable portraits of Justin Trudeau posing with an assault rifle, thousands of fantastic urban landscapes inspired by the real world, and gigabytes of images reconstructing as many exploits of phantasmagorical hockey players, illustrations of historic battles from the Vietnam War or drawings of Celine Dion as the heroine of the series The Walking Dead.???

“The artificial intelligence matrix behind this feat, Stable Diffusion, from the British company Stability AI, is not the only one to compete for the nascent market of art created by natural language (“ text-to-image art???) ) . Its competitors, Midjourney, launched in March, and Dall-E, which appeared in April, are also establishing themselves with funding rounds raising hundreds of millions in venture capital. Google promises a replica that will be called Imagen.
But there is a hitch.???

In order for them to be able to generate art on demand, the developers of this software first had to make them swallow millions of descriptive photos and existing works of art, in order to train their "neural network" to “understand??? and “interpret??? the world.
Stable Diffusion has revealed that the 2.3 million images that were used for its training come from a gigantic scrape passed on the web thanks to indexing robots ( web crawlers). The group of university researchers who carried out the operation never asked the slightest authorization from the tens of thousands of artists who hold the rights to these works.

“People thought the images came from public databases, but that's not the case. I thought it should be known to the population and the artists affected, ???says Andy Baio, influential technology blogger and former administrator of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, who put online, in early September, a search engine allowing you to search in the database of images thus gobbled up by Stable Diffusion. And they didn't ask for permission.
Nevertheless, the result is pleasing to the eye.
After a few tests with the software, you can create a piece of art that looks like Dali.

New "artists" dialog box

The Montreal Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, which is taking a close interest in the question, recognizes that the unprecedented “scale and pace??? at which these machines are capable of producing will shake up certain artistic professions.
“But that doesn't mean humans aren't involved. There is a new emerging field related to AI, which is called prompt engineering , which is in itself an art form,??? says Abhishek Gupta, Principal Investigator and Director of the Institute.
On the Reddit and Discord forums, these “natural language art artists??? share tips and key phrases for “creating??? ever more striking works with AI. “It will become a skill that can be learned and improved with practice,??? predicts Mr. Gupta. Eventually there will be a class of people who can be employable with these skills. »
But until then, it will first be necessary to settle the thorny issue of copyright, he recognizes.

Already, the major photo and creative image agencies Getty Images and Shutterstock, whose millions of protected images have been swallowed by Stable Diffusion, have announced that they are banning everything created by artificial intelligence from their catalogs. . Andy Baio expects one of the two companies to take legal action against Stable Diffusion. “They are the only ones with the resources to do it,??? he believes.

Too late to “unlearn???

For artists, on the other hand, legal recourse, which involves attacking a company established abroad, promises to be more difficult, estimates Karim Benyekhlef, director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory at the University of Montreal. “Whether their works end up in a database of 6 million, 600 million or 6 billion images has no bearing on the seriousness of the violation of intellectual property,??? he stresses.
But we are here in the Californian logic [of Silicon Valley]: these companies go for it, break the rules, and it is part of their calculation to tell themselves that in the end, there is only one hundreds of artists who will be strong enough to pursue them, so the game is worth the effort.

And anyway, the genie is already out of the bottle. "Even if artists manage to have their artwork removed from the database, at this point, unless you recreate the machine's artificial intelligence from scratch, it cannot 'unlearn' what she has already learned,??? assures Andy Baio.???

Good topic Ouranos. Yes our purchasing behaviour is spied upon, and not just through internet buying. Supermarkets routinely churn your buying preferences, etc...Your lifestyle is known. How much chocolate you eat, how much alcool you drink. This info is sold and you are then targetted for suitable services, etc, on the basis of your age, consumer habits, etc - in the same way that sites know what you read and will offer you again and again... the book you have just bought. Oops, it does not always work.

It is curious that social media sites desinhibit people. They are no1 source of information for police and other agencies, they have to do a lot less work. Intelligence is given to them on a platter. Social media sites are also quite useful to thieves. Post photos of your house? What a good idea!

In the same way, it is possible to pry on people's weaknesses through astro sites.

There is no need to become paranoid, rather to become aware that for all the talk about 'data protection', we may not be as protected as all that.

Funnily, there is some advice on the net about how to tell whether you are talking to a bot or a 'real person'. It tells you to look for repetitions (well, people do that as well) - but apparently bots cannot cope with sudden changes of topic - what psychiatrists sometimes call 'knight's move' - so apparently this is a sure way of finding out. This is in the context of people having been manipulated by 'political' bots, acting as infiltrators and influencers. This activity is well organised.

It is more important than ever to know what we stand for.

There is no need to become paranoid, rather to become aware that for all the talk about 'data protection', we may not be as protected as all that.

Very true Sinbad.
All the indignation about Tik Tok spying on us and the Chinese behind while Facebook and Instagram have been doing the same thing for years.
It's not anymore who spies on us but what country do we want to spy on us.
A brave, very brave new world!

The Euclidean algorithm is the grandfather of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
In a recent article in Le Point, Giuliano da Empoli, who wrote 'The Engineers of Chaos', warns us that the intensive use of social networks "risks producing ever more unpredictable and irrational effects" in the political world. Facebook functions as a formidable multiplier, feeding on the most disparate ingredients to fuel an epidemic of anger that transferred from the virtual dimension to reality???.
“For the new Strangelove doctors of politics, writes da Empoli, the game no longer consists in uniting people around the lowest common denominator but, on the contrary, in inflaming the passions of as many small groups as possible in order to then add them up, even without their knowledge. To conquer a majority, they will not converge towards the center but join the extremes. »

*** 4 new faces have emerged in the last decades

'Among those is Britain's Dominic Cummings , who led the pro-Brexit campaign in 2016 and whose journalist Patrick Wintour had described as "either mad, or mean, or brilliant, and probably a bit of all three at the same time." It was he who endlessly broadcast, with the help of targeted advertisements, the erroneous message claiming that Brexit would make it possible to recover 380 million euros per week, relying on Victoria Woodcock, his IT expert. Cummings himself wrote that if the latter had been overthrown by a bus, the 2016 referendum would have ended in defeat for the "Brexiters".

There's also Milo Yiannopoulos , "by far the most colorful character in the chaos engineers gallery." A homosexual English thirty-something, born from a Jewish mother, married to an African-American, but close to American white supremacist circles, Yiannopoulous contributed greatly to the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election in the United States , alongside Steve Bannon who spoke of him as an "immoral nihilist".

Giuliano da Empoli, because he observed it closely, is fascinated when he deciphers the role played by the "engineers of chaos" in the triumph of the populists in the March 2018 elections in Italy . He explains that "what is being played out in Italy is not the re-edition of the 1920s and 1930s of the last century", but "the emergence of a new political form shaped by the Internet and by new technologies". It is illustrated by the activities of Davide Casaleggio, sole owner, via its commercial company and the ad hoc association Rousseau, of the personal data of millions of Italians collected thanks to the intense activity on the social networks of the 5 Star Movement (M5S) which won the 2018 elections. "The M5S, in line with its totalitarian aspiration, does not work like a traditional movement but like Google 's PageRank [algorithm] ," da Empoli writes. It has no vision, program or any positive content. It's a simple algorithm built to intercept consensus through working topics. »
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Some astrologers have explained this new paradigm with the discovery of Eris in Aries in 2005 on the exaltation degree of the Sun, but it seems wider than that, like a civilization shift. A cycle within a greater cycle. And the name 'social medias' has connections with Venus and Mercury functions. What exactly happened? I am still digging to find an answer.


Astrodatabank
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Source:
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/le-populis ... _24.php#11