links/2024w12

in

links/2024w11

in

And we're back to the weekly list: Squarespace changed up their iPad editor and made it impossible to add links, so it's simpler to do it this way and put it together once a week on the Mac.

LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT ai

in

Been playing around with Perplexity.ai and, on a whim, asked it about LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Delivered the standard answers - lost, never found, frames etc etc - but it did include something I didn’t know: that there’s a full script out there (which I should've known, given the photo recreation of the film from 2002 but hey). Anyhow, got me to thinking: given that there’s a script and plenty of stills and fragments (and the 2002 reconstruction) extant, could AI be used to recreate the complete film as it was when it premiered? A search for the 2002 recreation yielded this bit of brilliance, from someone who made an amazing (though obviously not perfect) go at recreating a few minutes of the film with AI. Excited by the potential here and what it could mean for lost films as a whole.

pocket bunny overlord pre-ordered

in

Though a(nother) "pocket companion" is the last thing I need (NuHerbie will get jealous) – and I'm getting some late 90's PDA-meets-Tamagachi vibes (probably only since the thing's such an early entrant in the marketplace) – I pre-ordered a rabbit R1; IDK, I'm intrigued. Sixth batch, should arrive early summer and then I can decide whether to bow to my AI bunny overlords (and their unholy alliance with NuHerbie?) or resist.

mario voice prediction

in

With the morning's news that Charles Martinet is retiring / being retired from the voice of Mario, I can't shake a sense of deja vu with James Earl Jones selling the rights to his Vader voice so it can be created via AI. Prediction: because Nintendo has 30 years worth of Martinet's voice recordings, the next Mario will be an AI Martinet.

and i thought self-checkout was terrifying

in

The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.

When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.

“Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance,” it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death.

CURSED HEIDI or, generative nightmarish bemusement

in

Farm animals watching a film with effortless transitions to Tiki-bearing screaming rabble (or was it the other way 'round)? All that and more in Patrick Karpiczenko's profoundly disturbing AI-generated CURSED HEIDI trailer, sourced from this excellent Daily Beast piece, "AI Won't Just Replace TV and Movie Writers--It Will Make Pop Culture a Nightmare":