Meta AI: No Homeless Allowed

I’ve used DALL-E pretty much exclusively for generating random images. It’s fun. The censorship aspect is irritating at times. In certain contexts, you can have homeless men but not homeless women. You will never be able to get a British bobbie next to a K6 british phone box, I guess because K6 is interpreted as Kindergarten – 6th grade. We must leave the children alone.

With Meta’s new product I find curious similarities to Dall-E. As with Dall-E, Meta thinks payphones have 2 handsets, and it has no idea what a LinkNYC kiosk is or looks like. Image quality is quite saccharine compared to Dall-E.

But what surprised me was discovering that the homeless are not allowed in Meta’s Imagination. If I’m going to drum up images of LinkNYC kiosks and payphones, it would certainly be appropriate and on-brand to invoke homeless people in the pictures, particularly with the LinkNYC machines.

Nothing doing. Any prompt with the word “homeless” in it was rejected. I tried “unsheltered” and got somewhere with that, but the images were not what I had in mind. Not even close.

In other news, I’ve continued to cull my living space of detritus and unused objects, one or two items at a time. Yesterday I destroyed and discarded a pair of Sony headphones that basically never worked well. They were refurbished and, as with most such electronics that are refurbished, they did not last long, and they simply were never quite right to begin with. They were a bothersome presence in my life, but now they sit at the bottom of a garbage can.

I also discarded a strange contraption that broke to pieces after my second or third use. It was a screen magnifier with bluetooth speakers, a contraption intended to make watching movies off your cell phone more of an immersive experience. The speakers were good and the screen really did look good through the magnifier. But the thing was flimsy af and the magnifier shattered before the whole thing was nothing but the bluetooth speaker with a thing sticking up out of it. Once in a while my phone would unexpectedly connect to the bluetooth speaker. That was funny but annoying. Had to get that thing out of my life.

Today’s cull was the long-anticipated disposal of a 25-something year old umbrella I got at a publishing convention sometime in the 1990s. It had a QUICKEN logo on it. It, in its glory days, a formidable device for preventing precipitation from landing on my flesh and clothing. But in time it became a mess. The metal frame dangled like spindels looking for eyes to gouge out. I should not have been using it but dammit, it was free. A free tchotchke from a publishing convention. Those freebies were like water in those days.

I’m being exaggerational. But the umbreall was big, making it different from most of the tiny-ass device I seem to find. The QUICKEN umbreall can be safely retired now that I actually and finally for the time in my life spent more than $1 on an umbrella. It’s a fancy one, opens like magic, and provides about as much coverage as the QUICKEN model that now sits in a trash can, where it belongs.

So the cull continues. I really need to get rid of a couple of things I can’t move on my own. An old safe, and an old freezer. Might have to pony up $ to get those moved out.