Gary Larson's "Cow Tools" reimagined for The Sphere (art roundup)

finally got my tickets to see cow tools at the sphere

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— cow tools daily (@cowtoolsdaily.bsky.social) August 4, 2025 at 6:48 AM

Disturbing print ad for a housekeeping service

New cleaning service in the neighborhood sent me a flyer. Might give them a shot

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— jam (@socialistboat.dad) February 8, 2025 at 5:14 PM

Musician charged "with using artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of songs that he streamed billions of times to collect over $10 million in royalty payments"

WRAL:

The indictment said that when a music distribution company in 2018 suggested that he might be engaged in fraud, he protested, writing: “This is absolutely wrong and crazy! ... There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever!”

Variety:

According to the indictment, [the musician] denied engaging in streaming fraud when confronted by the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which distributes streaming royalties. The MLC raised doubt in 2023 about how he could generate so much music so quickly without using AI.

Neal Stephenson has a substack

Mostly discussions of his experiments with LLMs and NFTs.

Attempting to create an image with ChatGPT and then asking for tiny revisions

"every time AI is asked to revise an image, it either starts over or makes it more and more of a disaster. People who work with AI-generated imagery have to adapt their creative vision to what comes out of the system - or go in with a mentality that anything that fits the brief is good enough."

Today's news and jokes

they charged $45 for this pic.twitter.com/0Nlk0IMJkj

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 26, 2024

they also printed some AI art on sheets and hung those up, perfect for the ‘gram you know pic.twitter.com/Sb261Mq68G

— Chris Alsikkan (@AlsikkanTV) February 26, 2024

(Glasgow, here's a write-up.)

Today's news and jokes

YA https://t.co/rOkyUuWtwd pic.twitter.com/whS2YAB49H

— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) February 19, 2024

Jaws...

Today's news and jokes

No, he doesn’t. He looks like he’s about to board a prison plane full of the most violent and dangerous criminals in the country. https://t.co/8tJhfmtzR4

— I saw Elon Musk eat a horse's ass once. (@DStapf63) February 20, 2024

(Matt Strahm I believe, other angles don't capture the likeness alas.)

Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter after being created with a Microsoft AI generator and shared in a Telegram group dedicated to the practice

(Has there ever been a study as to how much Google owed its success to making non-consensual images easily discoverable in Image search?)

 404 Media:

The Telegram group recommends that members use Microsoft’s AI image generator called Designer, and users often share prompts to help others circumvent the protections Microsoft has put in place. For example, 404 Media’s testing found that Designer will not generate an image of “Jennifer Aniston,” but we were able to generate suggestive images of the actress by using the phrase “ jennifer ‘actor’ aniston.” Prior to the Swift AI images going viral on Twitter, a user in the Telegram group recommended that members use the phrase “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift” to generate images. 404 Media was unable to recreate the type of images that were posted to Twitter, but we found that Microsoft’s Designer would not generate images of “Taylor Swift,” but did generate images of “Taylor ‘singer’ Swift.”

Related, and speaking of Google, the NY Times explores how "obituary pirates" flood search results with factually-erroneous, LLM-generated obituaries after a teenager died in an unfortunate accident:

In the hours after his death, friends and family scrambled to find out more about [the teen]’s death. Few details were available — no obituary, no news stories.

But as people searched Google for information, someone on the other side of the world was searching for exactly the kinds of reverberations that [his] death had caused.

[A]n internet marketer in India, knew nothing about [the teen]. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “[that name]” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that [the marketer] was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.

To [the marketer], the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.

Also:

getting gpt to draw a grandfather without a beard is, apparently, impossible pic.twitter.com/wxIZguuKTj

— rob (@rob_mcrobberson) January 24, 2024

The winner of Japan's "most prestigious literary award" says she used ChatGPT to help write the winning novel

AFP:

"I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book," she told a ceremony following the winner's announcement.

"I would say about five percent of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI."

...

ChatGPT's responses sometimes inspired dialogue in the novel, she added.

Master P's son Mercy Miller scored 68 for Notre Dame against Oakwood

LAT went with the headline:

Master P’s son Mercy Miller makes ’em say uhh with record-breaking 68-point game for Notre Dame

Master P posted this amongst other things in celebration: 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Master P (@masterp)

(Tuition at Oakwood is $49k+)

Today's news and jokes

For every 10 likes, I'll make this image of a well funded tax collection agency more epic pic.twitter.com/7bPsesEqd2

— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) November 29, 2023

"Here is the epic and grand-scale illustration depicting militarized IRS agents conducting a dramatic arrest of a wealthy tax cheat and generously distributing money to the poor." pic.twitter.com/JjHOd9h8nd

— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) November 29, 2023

"Here is an ultra-epic, cinematic illustration of IRS agents engaging in a colossal operation against a corporate skyscraper labeled 'Tax Cheats', complete with a breathtaking explosion and scenes of agents conducting a daring raid and distributing wealth" pic.twitter.com/5rKwqwABeG

— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) November 29, 2023

Today's news and jokes

"And then every player on the ice has a 10-minute misconduct" 😂🔊 pic.twitter.com/K3M78EdO29

— Brady Trettenero (@BradyTrett) November 28, 2023

An AI "cocreator" has been added to Microsoft Paint

The Verge from a few weeks ago:

Paint Cocreator should be available to all Windows 11 users in a few weeks, but for now, Microsoft is slowly rolling out the feature to Windows Insiders. Users must join a waitlist to gain access to the preview. They’ll then receive 50 credits, each of which will let them create a new set of images. This credit system might change after the preview period is over, and it seems that users may have to pay in the future.

Some tricks (it's indeed part of Paint on my computer, although I haven't tried it):

1. Remove background from an image

A new AI button in the top left-hand corner lets you remove the background from any image.

- Import your image into Paint (File → Import to canvas → From a file)

- Click on the Remove background button at top left

- Paint takes care of… pic.twitter.com/8EQvzvDqJu

— Paul Couvert (@itsPaulAi) November 5, 2023

3. Generate a character

As this is the full version of Dall-E 3, you can also generate characters.

You're not limited to backgrounds.

Here's the prompt used in the video:

"a cat looks in the mirror and its reflection is that of a tiger"

Don't forget to create a new layer… pic.twitter.com/YsRJUbknbo

— Paul Couvert (@itsPaulAi) November 5, 2023

Related:

Sir the AI has gone too far pic.twitter.com/gH8mnrOYJj

— John Potter 🌐🩸 e/acc (@jjohnpotter) November 5, 2023

"We asked AI to dress Brian Kelly like Kim Mulkey"

We asked AI to dress Brian Kelly like Kim Mulkey for tonight’s game pic.twitter.com/V0xkDJ9pCV

— NIT Stu (@nit_stu) September 3, 2023

This is who the LSU players will be hearing from at halftime. Gotta like those second half odds. pic.twitter.com/GSzwrI1qHq

— NIT Stu (@nit_stu) September 4, 2023

Brian Kelly answering what the game would have been like if LSU had converted those two fourth down tries early (artist’s depiction) pic.twitter.com/yCER8rTYE1

— NIT Stu (@nit_stu) September 4, 2023

Supposedly this Glaze will add a protective layer to your artwork to prevent harvesting by image generators

1/ This might be the most important oil painting I’ve made:

Musa Victoriosa

The first painting released to the world that utilizes Glaze, a protective tech against unethical AI/ML models, developed by the @UChicago team led by @ravenben. App out now 👇 https://t.co/cNIXNDHMBy pic.twitter.com/Y1MqVK7yvZ

— Karla Ortiz (@kortizart) March 15, 2023

Thanks to LLMs, we can now read the rest of Hemingway's story about the baby shoes that were never worn

1. Ever wonder what the rest of the "Baby Shoes" story was about?

Got ChatGPT to help fill out the tale with the power of AI.

Take that Hemingway, learn to write you big dummy. Lazy dweeb can't handle more than 6 words.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” pic.twitter.com/0j6QTkuGOU

— Wetterschneider (@Stretchedwiener) May 30, 2023

Thankfully, we can now see what was out of frame in other great works of art:

He used an AI to depict all the NFL mascots

More in the thread. The Raiders and Buccaneers are my favorite:

AFC West: pic.twitter.com/H7Wmg0gMFO

— GG (@GarryGates) May 1, 2023

NFC South: pic.twitter.com/NXnHMwTSz0

— GG (@GarryGates) May 1, 2023

Hacker llama in a hoodie, hacker Cortana in a hoodie

Announcing RedPajama — a project to create leading, fully open-source large language models, beginning with the release of a 1.2 trillion token dataset that follows the LLaMA recipe, available today!https://t.co/daoVIs706d
More in 🧵 … pic.twitter.com/foUNRx0fOW

— Together (@togethercompute) April 17, 2023

Okay, here me out - 'Microsoft Security Copilot' becomes

Microsoft Cortana for Defender pic.twitter.com/Pyb90leDEZ

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 17, 2023

RedPajamaLlama and causally-dressed Cortana were practically back to back in my feed today. Some solid attempts by the AI to spell Microsoft:

An AI draws Thinking Machines, in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright art glass

While #ai image generation nets improve, there's still a fundamentally mind-blowing capability to synthesize something new out of distinct concepts. pic.twitter.com/ucsNIuHoA4

— Gregory Wieber (@dreamwieber) March 31, 2023

*Previously: Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired poster show