I confused the iNaturalist identification AI with some random snapshots from a trip up into the mountains a few years back.
Normally it’s pretty good at narrowing things down to a family or genus. In this case, I was aiming for scenery and family snapshots at the time, so they weren’t exactly ideal for plant IDs even cropped. Still…
This is on the level of “A flock of sheep on a hill” for an empty landscape. I wanted to ask it how many giraffes were in the picture!
The Verge ponders: Has the internet been overtaken by the eldritch horror of Yog-Sothoth?
We’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
—Astercrash
It’s a joke, of course. And it would make for an interesting story. But it’s scarier that we’ve created the awfulness ourselves.
Update Feb 2023: With some of the AI-generated art and writing going around these days, the cosmic horror comparison seems even more apt.
