Live Satire | AI Copyright Laundering | The Floor is Water
Come see me do live comedy and help pay for our watery floor
When we tell tradespeople what kind of pipe our house has they all make the same face. It’s the sort of expression you’d expect to see when explaining to someone at your hotel that:
You’ve never been potty trained properly (or at all) and…
You have done quite a lot of business in the bottom drawer of the bedside table.
This week, the world’s greatest wife and I learned why people make that face about our pipe and I’ll tell you all about it… butt first.
Come See Satire Slides at Dynamic Eldorado
I will be performing an hour or so of comedy slideshows inspired by this very newsletter at a sanctioned comedy arena known as Dynamic Eldorado (tickets here) in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Pickles1
Presentations will include, but are not limited to:
Starbucks Drops Pumpkin Spice Latte Because Mix of Flavors Feels, “Too Much Like a Union”
We Are Sorry Our Facial Recognition Software Identified You as a Horse
Suburban Atlanta Castle Defenses: Flanking Towers
In This Fiefdom We Are Family Except Those of You Whom I Sired
In preparation for the show, I’ve been collecting images and, now that AI images are a thing, well…
Generative Images are Copyright Laundering
Here’s the thing, I love the look of some of these images. The one above perfectly captures the visual feel of working in a tech-related job back when I was doing it in the late 90s. I love that they keyboard area is just a mess of tiny pebble things, but it still reads as a keyboard.
If I had the cash, I’d hire an artist to work on images for my satires slides show and they’d probably look a lot like what the AI image generators spit out.
But the thing is, the generators are spitting out those great images because they learned how to make images using existing art. Anyone who uses the AI images is stealing, without possibility of redress, from the artists whose work was used to train the AI.
John Oliver gets into the subject fairly deeply here.
This is yet another area — just like mp3s did to bands, like Amazon did to authors, like social media did to democracy — where the tech is interesting and will certainly make a few people absurdly wealthy but also will very likely redound to the injury of first creatives and then everyone else.
It would be different if the generators were “copyright organic,” to coin a phrase, but they’re not.
And that’s why there won’t be any in my satire slides show. But you should still come.
It’s 10:00. Do you know where your pipes are?
So, as I was saying above, at some point in the last few weeks, one of our pipes thought, “You know what? To hell with it. I’m crackin’.” Water seeped through that crack, ruined our cabinets, and then ran under the floor. This last part caused the floorboards to bubble up like pizza dough.
The result was a wooden mountain range of raised floor, and, while we normally enjoy time spent in the mountains, we are not pleased. A number of professionals have come to eyeball the damage and perform various tasks.
Here they are, so far:
The Dehumidifier Monger
This guy’s job is to drop off dehumidifiers and give instructions on what to do if the machine fails or makes a lot of loud noises. The moment he leaves the premises, his machines immediately fail and begin making loud noises.
He will return at a later time if requested and swap out the machine, whereupon that new machine will wait for him to depart then begin making a hellish clatter.
He has assured us that if we think these machines are loud we should just wait until we hear the fans he’ll bring later.
Our cat, who is never particularly friendly, or trusting, or quiet, is currently waging a cold war on the dehumidifiers. Whether the machines are aware or not is of no apparent concern to her.
The Leak Whisperer
This man has a device with various attachments and a set of headphones that allow him to tell where the leak might be. He has listened to all our floors the way a doctor might listen to one’s lungs through their body. He sawed a hole in our cabinets and located the leak then departed without picking up his saw.
But, via text, he asked that he had his saw over to…
The Plumbers
These men abide by quantum rules. If you measure their velocity, it’s impossible to know their position. The only certainty is, like any high energy physics, the whole thing is expensive.
On the plus side, it appears that they’ve fixed the leak and the water is back on. But the floor mountain range, despite the grinding and bonking of the humidifiers, remains.
I believe the next step will be for the dehumidifier monger to return and tear up the boards and God knows what else. We shall see.
Pray for us. We’re not religious and I’m not sure who or what the god of plumbing or home repair might be though, so… Look, just do it.
On the plus side, I’ve been listening to this song on repeat and it’s making me feel a lot better.
That’s our universe’s name, I think.