If you can spot AI content today....

[Brad]

Bloomberg Market Minute podcast (on Alexa) yesterday said many streaming companies were moving into live events.  Some of these at smaller venues like dinner theater stuff.  They believe people are looking for the whole experience when they go out. 

It remains to be seen if this really catches on, but if it does it could be a good time for theater actors. 

[littleman]

>pics on request

Yes, please.

[ergophobe]

Sora video of corporal talking to troops
https://youtube.com/shorts/4-2lkaQyq1Y?si=et3yuItQWtUfusp8

I keep wondering if the next generation of deep fakes will be videos using real actors and scenery and saying they are AI

[ergophobe]

https://youtube.com/shorts/JaFiUNmZoGM?si=jzwKqLkeR6O3yiSc

Note how the bear and the moose merge into a bear-moose at the end. Still, the start is pretty convincing

[rcjordan]

The anti-ai creatives on bsky are howling at the moon constantly. So much so that I'm filtering.  This is not a future existential threat for the various arts. It's here and its already entrenched. No putting this one back in the bottle.

>arts

AI 3d models are showing up quite often.

[ergophobe]

> creatives

If you are a "code is poetry" type and think of coding as creative (which I do) Simon Willison has some interesting pull quotes

"[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we're going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away."
— Ben Werdmuller
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/2/ben-werdmuller/

"[...] The puzzle is still there. What's gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn't the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what's been removed."
— Armin Ronacher
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/30/armin-ronacher/

In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful material to context, and writes detailed specifications. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you won't enjoy it.

Think about it as if it is a junior developer that has read every textbook in the world but has 0 practical experience with your specific codebase, and is prone to forgetting anything but the most recent hour of things you've told it. What do you want to tell that intern to help them progress?

Eg you might put sticky notes on their desk to remind them of where your style guide lives, what the API documentation is for the APIs you use, some checklists of what is done and what is left to do, etc.

But the intern gets confused easily if it keeps accumulating sticky notes and there are now 100 sticky notes, so you have to periodically clear out irrelevant stickies and replace them with new stickies.
— Liz Fong-Jones, thread on Bluesky

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/30/liz-fong-jones/

Et cetera

[rcjordan]

Coding is a PITA.  Laying out the path to the end result is the art.

My bsky profile says "All my programming languages are dead" (to me). That's true.  But I still retain some knowledge of programming logic and some rough bits regarding html.  Combine the above with GPT-5 and a couple of million 1min fairy dollars and we can turn out some pretty awesome TM scripts.

[ergophobe]

New test...

Prompt - just typed it in. No tweaking or revising. First and only try.

Create a photographic image of a woman leading a crack climb in Yosemite. The figure should occupy about one third of the image, with Yosemite Valley and cliffs in the background. She should have at least one piece of protection in the crack and a full rack of quickdraws and cams.

The result is basically perfect (full-size versions in the footer - I just put the thumbnails here so there's no confusion... not that there could be).
You cannot view this attachment.


Compare that to the previous effort at a "Yosemite" photo from back in August. I don't have the prompts, but this image took lots of prompt tweaking and about 10 tries to get this.
You cannot view this attachment.

The differences are striking.

 - For starters, the image quality is vastly better. The rock texture is basically perfect.

 - it's the right gear. She has a full rack of cams that are clearly Black Diamond C4s, the most popular cam.

 - she is protected with a cam in the crack. One small quibble, nobody would hold a cam like that except perhaps a total beginner. The previous version clearly didn't "understand" crack climbing - it was using sport climbing bolts next to a crack. That kinda behavior can get you shot around these parts.

 - the body position feels right. As a general rule, in past attempts there was always something off with the position or the balance.  In the August image, the foot in the crack is just sort of pasted in there in an unlikely way and the foot on the face on tip toe also doesn't really make sense. In the new image, the feet are perfect and it looks like a climber trying to find a balanced resting position from which to place gear. Totally believable.

 - and that is most definitely Yosemite. So much so that I feel like I should be able to figure out where that climb is. The older image does its best to create something that vaguely feels like Yosemite, but doesn't quite know where it is.

 - the woman is completely believable rather than... how shall I put this? When non-climbers create ad campaigns for climbing, they typically cast super attractive people who usually don't look like they know how to climb. Obviously, there are some super attractive people who are amazing climbers, but this woman seems like the sort of person you would be *likely* to find at a crag... Or put another way, I would say she is quite attractive, but she's presented as a climber, not as a model on a climbing photoshoot. At least that's how it feels to me.

It is stunning.

[ergophobe]

Okay... spoke too soon.

I asked for the following refinements

make the climb a little steeper, do it in portrait mode and make the rope come from below her, not to the side, with at least one piece of protection in the crack just below her feet

And got this.

Note that Gem changed the aspect ration just fine, but failed to move the rope as requested. The result that her protection is just hanging in space below her feet. The cams are the part that go in the crack. What's holding the camming device there is a mystery. On the plus side, it is noticeably the same climb with the same figure in the same place. In the past, I would lose all context and the climb and the model would change with every iteration.

So, big bump up, but still not ready to replace human models and photographers.

BTW, I choose climbing because unless they hire actual climbers and climbing rigger and climbing photographers, the images used in ad campaigns and movies are almost always ridiculous. So I figure it's a good test in that there are millions of climbing images out there now, but it's also not like basketball or golf that are utterly mainstream.

 

[rcjordan]

Well, uhh, wow!

>most definitely Yosemite. So much so that I feel like I should be able to figure out where that climb is.

I was going to ask if you could ID that bridge.

[rcjordan]

<+>

>human models

See #31
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-jobs-most-exposed-to-generative-ai-according-to-microsoft/

[Rupert]

customer-facing roles such as sales representatives, customer service agents, telemarketers, and concierges

Interesting combination, very tech-based view. Putting "Sales" with "concierges" feels off to me.

[ergophobe]

>  ID that bridge

So most features are immediately recognizable. It's basically a photo of the valley with a climbing put into the foreground - Half Dome (obviously), but also Royal Arches, Washington Column, North Dome, Cloud's Rest, Leidig Meadow, Ahwahnee Meadow, the lower toe of Lower Brother, and, to answer your question, Swinging Bridge (a footbridge).

On the Valley floor, it's not quite as flawless. Leidig Meadow does not have a prominent dirt road like that. I also *think* though I'm not sure, that the beach in the lower right is as large as shown, though again, I would have to look.

I do not think this is a *possible* view. If you're on Manure Pile Buttress, you're too low and and far to the right.
https://www.mountainproject.com/photo/114349553/yeeeeahhhh-topping-out-nutcracker

If you are on the East Buttress of El Cap, there's too much in your way to get that nice view of the meadows and the toe of Lower Brother. It might be possible.

In this image, I'm leading out to the right around that ridge. It's possible that when I get out there, I'm at the right elevation and would see all the things in that photo. I'll have to look next time I'm up there.

But it is *really* believable that that photo is taken from somewhere near the East Buttress of El Cap, though the route that I am on is the furthest route of any route on El Cap. So the climb is invented, but really artfully so. You have to know Yosemite quite well to say there is no route with that view and I'm still not 100% confident that I can say that.


>  Putting "Sales" with "concierges" feels off to me.

Not to me. The really good sales people and concierges are extremely hard to replace. The crappy ones are easy to replace. Most people in sales and concierge services are not experts in any way.

[ergophobe]

Here's someone just a bit further around the corner than the shot of me
https://www.mountainproject.com/photo/123086869/pitch-9-knobs

As you can see, you would still need to get quite a bit further around the corner and then have a photographer who had pre-rigged to be in the right spot with a decent telephoto to compress the depth of field. I still don't think you get that view.

Here's someone who has topped out El Cap and is coming down the East Ledges descent. You can see that by that point you're now too far left and too high for the view in the photo
https://www.lamountaineers.org/NAC/browserf/climbs/elcapnos/hi/11U05.jpg

Conclusion: that photo is impossible, but I have to research and look through photos and so forth to be sure.

I'm speaking of the landscape view. The portrait view has some subtle problems with the view (generally just way too compressed), and of course the obvious problems with the climber

[rcjordan]

> *really* believable that that photo is taken from somewhere near the East Buttress of El Cap

A photog with a drone assistant to 'lean out' perhaps?  Anyway, good enough for a non-climber mag.

>really good sales people and concierges are extremely hard to replace. The crappy ones are easy to replace

Same for receptionists ...which is another name for concierge, I guess