#Merzwoch. Today: Bad Habits, AI, Censorship and Beautiful Music.

Last week it had happened again. I begun new series in my blog over at Medium.

MERZWOCH

Etymology is obvious: German word for Wednesday is “Mittwoch”. MERZ is a multimedial art movement (one-person-movement actually) by Kurt Schwitters, which can be perfectly applied to contemporary media. Combination of it is me.

So (hopefully) every Wednesday I (Merzmensch) will post a bundle of things I’ve stumbled upon last 7 days. Relevant kind of things, separated in (hopefully) reoccurring categories. Which should (hopefully) interest you.

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AI Experiment of the Week

In USSR they did it manually: retouching out people in photos. Here is a nice (and actually a cruel one) example for you: comrades of Stalin becoming public enemy and vanishing. One by one. (Read more about it in OpenCulture). Fake News of Old Days.

Well, I’m sure, that’s not only Soviet problem — every country let their people vanish (in real life and in media) or faked their beauty. Back to old days, you had to work with thinnest brush on the negatives or positives to remove people or things.

Recently you can use Photoshop (with content-sensitive removal tool), or After Effects, like famous James Fridman, who removes stuff and people on demand:

But you can also ask AI.

NVidia presented an amazing AI-experiment “Image Inpaiting”. You just mark objects/persons you want to get rid of — and here you are!

Well, I tried to experiment with this picture of mine:

In the canvas you can see the sunny holiday photo and text “Überall”, i.e. “Everywhere” in German. So I wanted to remove this canvas, making “Everywhere” to “Nowhere” and the corridor empty.

This time, AI creeped me out. It really did. Everything I did was just to mark the canvas and click “Apply Model”. This is what I’ve got:

Conclusion.

Don’t trust AI. It has its hidden agenda.

Music

Los Retros — Someone to Spend Time With.

Just a beautiful song, performed by beautiful people.

I love this ennui, this melancholic state of mind by young people (darn, haven’t I just said “young people” in third person, have I?)…

“Can it be, I’ve waited too long.”

You have your whole life before you. Be happy. Enjoy this goodness.

Art / Design of the Week

All-In-One Card Stamp by Ji Lee.

Fine irony with a BAM! Contemporary empathy.

Talking to transformer.

TalkToTransformer.com by Adam King.

So this time I’ve put on my scientific spectacles and wrote following idea:

The word “earth” had initially meaning of “heaven”.

And transformer answered.

Hey, dear linguists and historians out there. I’m lost on this.

See you — at latest — next Merzwoch (or actually, tomorrow). This issue was my last weeks one.

Expect more future in the next days.