

I recently had to digitize dozens of photos from family scrapbooks, many of which had annoying novelty pattern borders cut out of the edges. Sure, I could have just cropped the photos more to hide the stupid zigzagged missing portions. But I had the beta version of Photoshop installed with the generative fill function, so I tried it. Half the time it was garbage, but the other half it filled in a bit of grass or sky convincingly enough that you couldn’t tell the photo was damaged. +1 acceptable use case for generative AI, I guess.
I know way more people who would at least attempt to save my life in an emergency than I think are genuinely good people. But I do actually think that’s part of identifying a decent person. Empathizing with someone suffering in front of you and wanting to help is such a low standard for empathy that even untrained animals sometimes pass this bar. Empathizing with living things more broadly and outside of your personal bubble is a task that’s apparently too much to ask of most people I’ve met. Good way to gauge this is to get someone talking for a bit about the unhoused population of their hometown.