Delight
Subtlety
is a delight
but
sledgehammers
win the fight.
Musings
There's much to be said for subtlety in writing. English teachers love lecturing on metaphor and theme. Readers who are able to detect these hidden undercurrents of meaning draw more enjoyment from works of fiction and are able to disarm manipulative language in ad copy and political essays.
But the sledgehammer approach is blunt and to the point.
I fed this poem into the AI image generator and got back some variation of "cute girl with a mallet" eight times in a row. You'll notice no "cute girl" in the prompt. A "cute girl" motif seems to have been baked into this particular implementation of the LLM by its programmers, through their choice of data sets and training. It's an automated sledgehammer.
Sledgehammers in the data are easy to spot, but I wonder about the more subtle messaging that slipped into the algorithm.
Show & Tell
There's a sledgehammer mentioned in today's poem, so I wanted to find something thematically appropriate. I do have a sledgehammer in the basement, along with a rubber mallet and any number of claw hammers, but for scale and practicality, I went to the kitchen drawer for a meat tenderizer.
Instead, I discovered two of these colorful eye-gougers in the kitchen drawer.
Any guess about their intended use?
More Tomorrow.
Addendum
It wasn't entirely accurate to say the LLM generated eight "cute girl with a mallet" images in eight attempts with a prompt that didn't call for such. The LLM actually generated seven "cute girl with a mallet" images and one "two cute girls fighting over a mallet" image. I chose the one with the best composition and attitude.
I tried to fix the six-fingered hand glitch with inpainting, but the results were unimpressive. One had five fingers but with an extended pinky like she was drinking a cup of tea. Another had five fingers but a weirdly angled wrist that looked pretty painful. It's probably useful to have an extra finger when you're holding a mallet of that size, so the physics of that world are suitably conserved.
