I know for a fact you're not doing it on purpose, and I strongly suspect it's nothing more than an artifact of the datasets your algorithm was trained on, but it strikes me as a little weird that all these robots have caucasoid-shaped facial features and all the humans you see in the crowds and occasionally jamming along are all lily-white when the art form they're participating in was pioneered by African-American musicians (and actively suppressed by authorities until it was appropriated and popularized by white musicians who got rich and famous by ripping off poor black folk). Maybe I'm infected by the "woke mind virus," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean beyond having empathy for people beyond my own social circle, but this thought has been unarticulated at the back of my mind since you started this channel and I just now put my finger on why it bugs me: as unintentional as I know it to be on your part, these videos carry on the long and ignoble American tradition of erasure of black folk from public consciousness in art forms _they_ pioneered. Please, feel free to delete this comment after you've read it, I don't want to cause unnecessary controversy over what I know for an absolute fact is not intentional on your part, but all of these robots look like Christopher Lloyd and NONE of them look like Leadbelly. To be clear, I know this isn't a "you" problem, this is a "limited dataset" problem, but you might want to consider engineering your prompts so that the robots and crowds that appear in your videos actually reflect the people who invented the blues, because once seen, it cannot be unseen. Also to be clear, I'm not suggesting "white erasure," either, I'm just saying robots that all look like Christopher Lloyd and crowds that are unbroken seas of white skin feel a little off for a blues project.
Just a little insight into the prompting process, The robots were described to the system as "Metal skin robot blues musicians with necks made of wires wearing cheap suits", And the crowds were described as "A crowd gathers to watch". I suspect that due to the timeline as blues progressed from the status of roots music to everybody music in the 70s, cameras were drastically cheaper in the later parts of the timeline. Basically the model is refining the Perlin noise base strictly on the ratio of photographs it had available. Those datasets are so large that in most cases they are not curated, Hundreds of millions of images. To the extent that my curation process allows I've actually leaned towards robots that looked like more authentic early blues players, But at the end of the day I can't imagine that people would take robots playing guitar as an attempt to convey historically accurate information. As to the crowd, The current model has difficulty in creating diverse crowds. Sure it has trouble making racially diverse crowds, But that's only because it has trouble making crowds that aren't actually all just variations on one face, with many outputs appearing to be a literal clone army of one guy. As the technology progresses we'll have greater capabilities in terms of nuance and accuracy, But it's important to delineate between live action documentaries and fictional cartoons which have and should have no real expectation of realism. Music company executives in the olden days did famously rob African Americans of a vast majority of their profits, virtually everything. In the present day that continues, except that now record company executives do that to anyone who can't afford an expensive lawyer before they sign their first contract to get paid for the first time. Lastly I note that blues music itself is built entirely on the pentatonic scale originally popularized for several hundred years in mainland China well before becoming ingratiated into any of the prevalent American cultures. I guess I don't see robots as having any specific race or needing to, and as far as the crowd I would certainly have made them a lot more diverse if the code made it easier to do so, simply because I think it would make a better art. In an attempt at both impartiality and brevity I typically do not specify racial characteristics of characters in the system, outside of human main characters, who you can see in the film "Death March", and originate from a variety of cultures. In 2024 when more photographs were taken than probably any other year in history, I don't think nearly as many photographs are taken of blues players, Mainly because it's now an extremely unprofitable art form that doesn't draw big crowds. Blues music has become popular in some new countries this decade including France, Italy, and Brazil. If you want to understand the true origin of blues music, search "black myth wukong song chapter 2". In an interesting twist, this game was attacked as an example of cultural appropriation because people thought that people in 16th century China had stolen blues music from African Americans in the early 19th century.
I know for a fact you're not doing it on purpose, and I strongly suspect it's nothing more than an artifact of the datasets your algorithm was trained on, but it strikes me as a little weird that all these robots have caucasoid-shaped facial features and all the humans you see in the crowds and occasionally jamming along are all lily-white when the art form they're participating in was pioneered by African-American musicians (and actively suppressed by authorities until it was appropriated and popularized by white musicians who got rich and famous by ripping off poor black folk). Maybe I'm infected by the "woke mind virus," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean beyond having empathy for people beyond my own social circle, but this thought has been unarticulated at the back of my mind since you started this channel and I just now put my finger on why it bugs me: as unintentional as I know it to be on your part, these videos carry on the long and ignoble American tradition of erasure of black folk from public consciousness in art forms _they_ pioneered. Please, feel free to delete this comment after you've read it, I don't want to cause unnecessary controversy over what I know for an absolute fact is not intentional on your part, but all of these robots look like Christopher Lloyd and NONE of them look like Leadbelly. To be clear, I know this isn't a "you" problem, this is a "limited dataset" problem, but you might want to consider engineering your prompts so that the robots and crowds that appear in your videos actually reflect the people who invented the blues, because once seen, it cannot be unseen. Also to be clear, I'm not suggesting "white erasure," either, I'm just saying robots that all look like Christopher Lloyd and crowds that are unbroken seas of white skin feel a little off for a blues project.
Just a little insight into the prompting process, The robots were described to the system as "Metal skin robot blues musicians with necks made of wires wearing cheap suits", And the crowds were described as "A crowd gathers to watch". I suspect that due to the timeline as blues progressed from the status of roots music to everybody music in the 70s, cameras were drastically cheaper in the later parts of the timeline. Basically the model is refining the Perlin noise base strictly on the ratio of photographs it had available. Those datasets are so large that in most cases they are not curated, Hundreds of millions of images. To the extent that my curation process allows I've actually leaned towards robots that looked like more authentic early blues players, But at the end of the day I can't imagine that people would take robots playing guitar as an attempt to convey historically accurate information. As to the crowd, The current model has difficulty in creating diverse crowds. Sure it has trouble making racially diverse crowds, But that's only because it has trouble making crowds that aren't actually all just variations on one face, with many outputs appearing to be a literal clone army of one guy. As the technology progresses we'll have greater capabilities in terms of nuance and accuracy, But it's important to delineate between live action documentaries and fictional cartoons which have and should have no real expectation of realism. Music company executives in the olden days did famously rob African Americans of a vast majority of their profits, virtually everything. In the present day that continues, except that now record company executives do that to anyone who can't afford an expensive lawyer before they sign their first contract to get paid for the first time. Lastly I note that blues music itself is built entirely on the pentatonic scale originally popularized for several hundred years in mainland China well before becoming ingratiated into any of the prevalent American cultures. I guess I don't see robots as having any specific race or needing to, and as far as the crowd I would certainly have made them a lot more diverse if the code made it easier to do so, simply because I think it would make a better art. In an attempt at both impartiality and brevity I typically do not specify racial characteristics of characters in the system, outside of human main characters, who you can see in the film "Death March", and originate from a variety of cultures. In 2024 when more photographs were taken than probably any other year in history, I don't think nearly as many photographs are taken of blues players, Mainly because it's now an extremely unprofitable art form that doesn't draw big crowds. Blues music has become popular in some new countries this decade including France, Italy, and Brazil. If you want to understand the true origin of blues music, search "black myth wukong song chapter 2". In an interesting twist, this game was attacked as an example of cultural appropriation because people thought that people in 16th century China had stolen blues music from African Americans in the early 19th century.