Google engineers mined the text adventure game “Zork” for AI image prompts

YouTube commenter Bob Hepple writes, “Two minds about this. On the one hand – wow! OTOH – my mental imagery (of the original 1977 Crowther and Woods Adventure game, I never played Zork as such) is so strong and precious that I kinda hate watching someone else’s version. Much like how I hate the LotR films. But then I’m so old that I came up with books and radio not TV, never mind the Internet. Perhaps kids today can’t visualise the way we do???”

Like the joyful dancing robot videos that are carefully designed to de-sensitize us to technology that will undoubtedly be used to wage wars and suppress political protests, this “cute” use of AI imaging software makes us go “Look at that!” and distracts us from the ethical, economic and copyright issues (as the image-generating bots were trained on artwork created by humans who did not consent and will not be compensated). 

 

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Dennis G. Jerz

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