Tag Archives: AI

The smudge that was 2024

2024 is over, and that’s a good thing. It was not a good year. 2024 was, for all intents and purposes, a long blurry smudge of monotony mired in many minor personal disasters and distractions. Playing about with AI-tools and participating in numerous webinars on the topic ate into so much of my time that most projects I had planned for the year remain handwritten bullet points on a piece of paper. I also had a serious flu that may or may not have been covid, a broken tooth, a parking ticket, a speeding ticket, and a nasty case of lumbago. These are white people’s problems that don’t normally happen to me. Continue reading

Posted in History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review: 2023

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. As of 2023 I’ve officially stopped giving a shit. Continue reading

Posted in History | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Photo restoration through AI? Nope!

Despite the recent incredible developments in artificial intelligence and image generation, I remain steadfast that AI still has no role in the workflow for digitising personal snapshots on prints, slides or negatives. While I obviously made basic edits like cropping, or adjusting brightness, contrast, white balance and colours so that the viewer can actually see what’s going on in a photo, my experiences with AI services (read: face enhancing) have done nothing but confirm a phenomenon that’s already been termed “identity shift”. Continue reading

Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

AI Photo Enhancement: Boon or Bust for Old Photos?

Digitizing old family photos is a great way to preserve family history and memories for future generations. But let’s face it: old photos can be faded, scratched, and just plain old-looking. That’s where AI-powered photo enhancement software comes in. But is it really the panacea it’s cracked up to be? Continue reading

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blade Runner 2019

It is November 2019. This is when the classic 1982 film Blade Runner takes place. For over three decades I’ve wondered what the year 2019 would really be like. Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Matrix remembered

2019 rings in yet another anniversary. The Matrix movie is twenty years old. Had the film been released now, in 2019, it would still be a terrific actioner and perhaps even more relevant than it was then: the matrix will be instantly recognised as an obvious allegory to the always-connected, domesticated, utilitarian social media of today. Surveillance by machines is a pervasive theme, and much of the computer jargon that would have befuddled viewers two decades ago has since entered mainstream speak. Continue reading

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cyberia 13: Superstition

Why do we always assume that machines, however intelligent and efficient they may become, have some sort of hidden and nasty agenda? Continue reading

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Cyberia 13: Superstition