Post

the one thing i like about generative ai is when it is wrong. because it is always very, very funny. it is so confident and so enthusiastic while failing, like the very best clown. so, i'm here to tell you that there MAY be NOTHING FUNNIER than asking ai to do ASCII drawings. here's donald duck:

fred flintstone. ("Here's our favorite prehistoric everyman!" hahahah my god)

realistic fred flintstone. ("Big nose, thick eyebrows, stubbly chin and that signature goofy grin!")

fred flintstone and barney rubble. ("Fred taller, broader, with his tie. Barney shorter and rounder with his cheerful grin.")

Still thinking about this

The fun party is I think I know why they look like this: piracy. And I don't mean just the plagiarism LLMs are built on, I mean that a major surviving source of ASCII art is readme files from pirated media releases, which they no doubt scraped for training data. The theft here is *nested*.