An ominous blood moon lunar eclipse will hang in the sky as ballots are set to be tallied for the Nov. 8 general election.
The Election Day eclipse, NASA says, is the last total lunar eclipse the Earth will see for the next three years.
So you think you are the same as you were a few years ago!? Think again!
New research published in PLOS One reported that American adults experienced changes in their personalities over the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes were small but equivalent to around a decade’s worth of personality changes in only two years.
Here are the details of just how abrupt of an about face most people had–did you too?
The researchers analyzed data from 7,109 adults, aged 18 to 109, enrolled in the Understanding America Study.
The participants took personality tests that assessed the traits in the widely-accepted five-factor model of personality—neuroticism (managing stress), extroversion (connecting with others), openness (creative thinking), agreeableness (trusting others), and conscientiousness (being disciplined and responsible).
The researchers examined test results from before the pandemic, early in the pandemic (March to December 2020, according to the researchers), and later in the pandemic (January 2021 to February 2022). In the latter part of the study, researchers reported declines in extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness in the subjects—personality traits that help people navigate social situations, trust others, and act responsibly.
Particularly susceptible to these changes were young adults, who also showed an increase in neuroticism later in the pandemic.
Even more.. younger people were affected differently..
“Younger adults became moodier and more prone to stress, less cooperative and trusting, and less restrained and responsible,” the authors of the study toldThe Guardian.
Whether it was the pandemic, or just something else that coincided with the global upheaval, something certainly did seem to change. Something seemed to alter.. what was normal has turned upside down. What was accepted has become widely denounced.. something, for sure, has changed..
In a victory for Kevin Spacey, a New York jury on Thursday afternoon found him not liable for battery on allegations he picked up actor Anthony Rapp and briefly laid on top of him in a bed after a party in 1986..
Jurors deliberated for about an hour, and concluded Rapp did not prove that Spacey “touched a sexual or intimate part” of Rapp.
Judge Lewis Kaplan formally dismissed the case. Attorneys seated on either side of Spacey immediately put their hands on his back when the verdict was read.
If you have been paying attention to pop culture and the Internet(s) lately, you’ll understand that there has been a flourishing new series of weird content .. There are various sources out there providing us some amazing artificial intelligence artwork. The type of art that enters your brain and is so vivid you wince, you look perplexed.. you get creeped out.
So let’s explain..
It is everywhere!! AI art! It is abundant.. it is booming fast. And so often it is dark, creepy.. obscure and weird..
People have embraced the weirdness..
John Oliver got fun and self-deprecating about AI art on his show..
We also got into the act several weeks ago and made our own AI art by asking a computer to create “Coal Speaker.” It was pretty odd, as evidenced by our favorite picture:
YOU HAVE OPTIONS..
Starryai.. Wombo.. Dall-E.. DreamStudio.. Midjourney.. You have options. AI is creating art for people on multiple platforms. As we have seen, the art normally gets dark and macabre quickly.. It is changing the world of art as well. Big time..
Think of it.. your imagination is contained to what it can conjure, what your brain can create.. but AI art can take it all in.. create something from nothing, or collect images and thoughts from various ‘Internets’ to bring a strange and bizarre sentence to life.
Search for “lima beans hunting aliens on the planet Poptart” .. and AI art will create it for you. Just for fun, we did that exact thing, and we came up with this (DreamStudio didn’t know quite what to do with it)
It all started with DALL·E … it made major waves since it was first revealed back in April 2022 because it was the most advanced AI art generator that we has been introduced..
Some artists are concerned. Other artists are just going hog wild creating images that are made in rapid fire by computers, based on random sentences.. random thoughts..
There is a huge new trend on TikTok of people search for each line of song lyrics to create an array of beautiful videos to famous songs..
All created in seconds.. All created with AI–no humans painting or drawing.. just artificial intelligence quickly changing our world…
BUT AI GETS CREEPY
So often, it appears that AI art goes down a rabbit hole of high strangeness.. For example, we asked for a series of images of “Pope Francis” and eventually AI art created what appears to be the Pope fighting off a double-demon version of himself..
Thought AI art was weird? Here is where things get … really strange.
Meet Loab. The woman, or creation from AI art, of your nightmare..
Let’s try to unpack ..
It all started back in September as we entered into the autumnal season.
An artist on Twitter under the handle @supercomposite used a technique called “negative prompt weights.” That means the user attempts to force an artificial intelligence system to generate the opposite of what they enter in the prompt.
Different terms can be “weighted” in a data set to determine how likely they are to appear in the results. You are simply telling AI to “Generate what you think is the opposite of this prompt.”
There is actually some coding that goes into this procedure..
So using this negative-weight prompt on the word Brando–with supercomposite referring to Marlon Brando–it created a logo image with a city panorama and the words “DIGITA PNTICS”.
At this point, supercomposite figured using using negative weights for the words DIGITA PNTICS it may see Marlon Brando..
No. Wrong. Instead, Loab was born.
MEET LOAB
The AI generator has not been named, but some have speculated that due to its quality it MidJourney or Stable Diffusion.
From the Tweet back in September:
I'll explain negative prompt weights, in case you don't know. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. This logo was the result of the negatively weighted prompt "Brando::-1". pic.twitter.com/c1XfkN23hu
This is what supercomposite went on to say about Loab, in a series of Tweets:
Since Loab was discovered using negative prompt weights, her gestalt is made from a collection of traits that are equally far away from something. But her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab.
…
The angel hallway + Loab also produced art with such copious gore that probably very few people want to see them, but here are two. I don’t feel comfortable posting the most disturbing ones, borderline snuff images of dismembered, screaming children.
..
There is something moving to me about these grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic, and sadness that they convey. Again, these are produced with other images as inputs, and no text. They are the result of “cross-breeding” images of Loab with images of other things.
…
The images that result from crossing Loab with other images can in turn be crossbred with other images. The AI can latch onto the idea of Loab so well that she can persist through generations of this type of crossbreeding, without using the original image.
..
Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the “Loabness” of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.
AND MUCH MORE..
So it can go from Loab:
To these other versions:
And this..
At this point, as she gets more famous, Loab could be potentially new “creepypasta” of the internet, but in the other side it could be a grotesque source of inspiration for making horror movies..
One of our favorite YouTube accounts, NEXPO, featured Loab in a recent video, and it is worth the viewing:
Matthew Skala, a computer scientist, tried to explain how Loab was created..
Okay: yes the pictures are freaky but the phenomenon is not really as surprising as it may first seem. When you think of it in high-dimensional geometric terms it's understandable why there would be *some* image that tends to soak up negative-prompt queries. https://t.co/dr2VA8uoNT
But why so dark.. Why does AI keep taking us to the abyss?
The AI generated images, derived from the original Loab image, go straight away into the realm of horror, graphic violence, and gore. But no matter how many variations have been made, the images all seem to depict the same horrifying woman.
They don’t change.. Loab stays.. She continues persisting through that weird and dark tunnel of AI art..
In the end, AI programs generate images using models that are trained on billions of images and are too complex to understand why a certain result is achieved.. So you will not really know why or how Loab, or any other oddity, was created. It just was..
Loab is haunting.
Will she replace Momo and Huggy Wuggy? She sure could..
….yes….AI art continues to be just be glum and dire.. distraught and dark.
Until you ask AI itself to create “Happy AI creating AI Art” … and we get this:
But before you get overjoyed by the colorful and happy image of AI showcasing itself, don’t forget what else it creates. Images of the vast unknown.. the sad. The tired. The horror.
And Loab…
Yes indeed… remember that before you embrace AI art..
Halloween ENDS has become even more controversial that Busta Rhyme’s cameo.. But could it have been even MORE controversial with an alternate ending that some speculate was possible?
Now that we have all witnessed this weekend’s atrocity (sure many of you may still like it) of a HALLOWEEN ENDS, we need to refocus..
The original ending MAY have been different–and quite frankly would have even been MORE divisive than what HALLOWEEN ENDS already did..
From the YouTuber CRITICAL OVERLORD, this video talks about how the potential ending could have been–Laurie would have looked at ‘the Shape’ SHE would have become the new evil.. Much more controversial, no?
At least it would have been interesting!
What we got was.. certainly not what many expected. Wanted.. or deserved?
But really.. what movie since Halloween 1 and 2 were what we expected or deserved, right?
If Art Bell was alive today he would absolutely love the idea of artificial intelligence creating artwork. It deserves a lot of attention and a lot of questions as well.
What is this art? Why is it so dark? We may explore more about this ..
In the meantime enjoy what Coast to Coast a.m.’s website showcased: a listener to the program asked AI to come up with what it perceived Art Bell as being ..
A Coast listener going back nearly 25 years, James writes, “What I have found is AI art can be very realistic…to prophetic…to simply creepy. I feel the spirit of Art coming through in some of these AI-prompted creations.” “The AI images I create are done through the AI program Midjourney. To create an image, you need to input a prompt into the AI. This can be as simple as, “Create an image of a wolf”…or, you can get more complicated and give the AI exact details such as; style, influence, lens/camera used, rendering style etc.”
Perhaps our favorite image of all from the collection presented:
The burst of gamma-rays — the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation — was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists across the world.
Astrophysicist Brendan O’Connor told AFP that gamma-ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as occurred on Sunday, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our Sun.
Robbie Coltrane, the Scottish actor known for bringing Hagrid to life in the “Harry Potter” film franchise, has died, TheWrap has confirmed. He was 72.
Coltrane is perhaps best known for his role in all eight “Harry Potter” films as Rubeus Hagrid, spending a decade bringing the gentle giant to life on the big screen.
Coltrane also starred as Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky in the James Bond films “GoldenEye” and “The World Is Not Enough.” His filmography also includes “Nuns on the Run,” “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Mona Lisa.”
