Notices by Steve Troughton-Smith (stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social)

@Mastodon Europe came back? *yoink!*

Journalists are massively misunderstanding what the 'Threads API' actually is.

It's not for third-party clients, it's for automation & marketing. You can’t access a timeline via the API, or do search, or anything like that. It's for posting, reading replies, and replying to replies of a post. Bots and CRMs

"You may use the Threads API to enable people to create and publish content on a person’s behalf on Threads, and to display those posts within your app solely to the person who created it.”

The Helldivers 2 furore is bonkers. If you missed it, Sony, seemingly against wishes of the dev studio, pushed to add a mandatory PSN Network sign-in months after launch on one of their biggest, most popular games on PC, and not only did the community revolt (dropping review score into the teens), but the game is now pulled from 177 storefronts and Steam are issuing refunds (as PSN only works in certain countries). The studio has told players to make their voices heard

https://www.eurogamer.net/helldivers-2-has-been-pulled-from-sale-in-177-countries-as-its-psn-linking-requirement-rolls-out

@Gargron that's not what's happening here — this is showing for every post for people who don’t do it intentionally

Anybody know what the ‘phantom boost’ situation is on Mastodon? I’m seeing phantom boosts showing up for any/most posts federated from specific servers — a 1 to the boost counter with no actual boosts listed, and those boosts are not visible on the originating server. Is this a quirk of federation, or some Mastodon fork interop thing or something?

@Gargron

@Gargron *strongly* disagree with that last one, when full disclosure is provided. Cuts off all kinds of interesting use cases and bots (like automated support for apps), and means if you do talk about generative art you can’t post it to a secondary profile to spare your main feed followers. Like it or not, mastodon.social *is* Mastodon to an awful lot of people, and this effectively becomes a blanket ban. I certainly wouldn't be posting here if I had to be on another instance

@Gargron if you want to base them, this vid from GW designer & ex-Eavy Metal painter is my favorite tutorial and the way I do all mine these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXmvQS50Z8w

@Gargron now I know I'm on the right network 🥹

I do wish polls on Mastodon could run for 7 days — 24 hours is way too short for the kind of polls I like to run (@Gargron) — but it looks pretty much like a 50/50 split as to whether developers here are going to offer their iOS apps on visionOS through compatibility mode. It sounds like it's going to be much closer to iOS-on-Mac app availability than iPhone-on-iPad, at the very least

The level of photorealism is kinda incredible. You have to really start pixel-peeping to try and figure out whether this is a real image or not

(It's not)

Midjourney v6’s new text feature is kinda fun — it does a much better job of integrating readable text into generated images

#midjourney

That famous Pixar scene where the ChatGPT guy stares in disbelief at the Siri guy failing to toggle the light switch.

…maybe a bit of a stretch, but the image looked too good to not post. These characters and their personalities feel like they could go straight into production; how could you not include AI generation in your concept art process or mood boards?

The next Jurassic Park movie? No, just AI…

It's also got a whole lot better at generating pixel art, or at least what could pass for pixel art at a glance

Midjourney v6 is much better at producing comic panels, and can even insert things like speech bubbles with the text you provide

One thing that's very evident now is that if you are a famous creative your voice, your likeness, your art style and more are all going to live on for public use looong after you’re gone. Donated to the gestalt. Digital ‘resurrections’ used to be the realm of high end visual effects studios, but now anybody can make Freddie Mercury sing All I Want For Christmas Is You. When AI-generated video catches up to this level of fidelity, we're in danger 😂

Meanwhile, here's a Dinotopia-inspired scene

Finding the magic keywords and phrases for compelling AI-generated art is incredibly satisfying. Every piece is like discovering something that nobody else in the world has seen before. You can easily spend hours crafting and iterating on a prompt to get the effect you're looking for; it seems silly to maintain that there's no effort or creative skill involved

Midjourney is so much better at generating fake album art than it was a year ago, when I did all my marketing images

I guess we've taught the AIs that we really frickin like heavy depth of field, huh? It’s almost difficult to get Midjourney to not output something like this 😂

Midjourney can be pretty consistent in style between runs, which makes it easier to see it as a useful tool in creative work. I’d love to see what comes out of a game jam that really embraces AI art