Art & Good News 10-28-2023
Weekly roundup for October 28th, 2023 with art and uplifting stories
Starting with some art…
The radio was my favorite way to listen to music growing up. I feel like now we have all replaced this with streaming services. To me there is nothing greater than turning on the radio and you happen to hear your favorite song. It is also why I still prefer the radio when I am driving over plugging in one of the other services I use. I hope that you all have had a wonderful week, may the world find peace.
Now to the Good News…
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
Artists now have a real defense against the out right theft that is art-generating models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. The tool is called Nightshade and it is designed as a way to corrupt the training data that is gained when these programs steal artists work to train their models without even a thought to compensating them for their work. Nightshade ads pixel distortions that are imperceptible to the naked eye, however over time they corrupt the training model when fed into these art models. If enough of the subtilely changed art corrupts the data set, dogs can become cats, a purse can become a toaster, from a hat to a cake, so on and so forth. The program was designed by Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who hopes that by building this program he can tip the scale of power back to the artists. There are plans to integrate the program into Glaze which is an open source program that artists can use to mask their style from the AI models. As an artist who is constantly worried that my work can be stolen to train these AI models it makes me glad to know that there are people out there who are not blindly following a fad and see that this is theft without compensation for others hard work.
World shift to clean energy is unstoppable, IEA report says
The International Energy Agency has predicted that the trend towards renewable energy is on an accelerating and unstoppable trajectory. They predict that by 2030 clean energy sources will be providing 50% of all the world's electricity. This is wonderful news and a huge step in the right direction, we need to also be lowering our consumption of carbon heavy sources. The IEA also stressed that we are not reducing emissions enough at this point to keep the planet under the 1.5 degree celsius threshold set by the Paris Climate Agreement. What I got most out of this article is that we are headed in the right direction however we still need to continue to put pressure on our governments to do what is right for the planet and all life on it.
The summer of triumph for women’s sports: a new era unfolds
As a mother of a young female Soccer lover (Football for the rest of the world đŸ˜œ), this article means a lot to me. fro In 2010 sixty-four million people viewed the Fifa women's world cup. That figure rose to around two billion at this years Fifa Cup. Minimal investment women's football has had such an increase in popularity and that just shows the powerful potential of women atheletes. The hope is that the incresed popularity at the professional level will find its way down to the school aged levels. While this is not an easy progression and there is still a long way to go for girls to get more equal treatment in sports, this is an enormous step in the right direction.