The New York Times shakes down the story of artificial-intelligence-training database service MegaFace, and how photos of more than 672,000 people on photo sharing site Flickr were used to populate it. The article doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
The MegaFace founders say they used only photos that were designated as Creative Commons by their photographers. Creative Commons (CC) has a few different designations, though, and “able to be used for massive face-recognition development” is not one of them. It’s a distinction that needs to be made clear going forward. Letting a lone blogger use your image for their blog post without charging them is the main use for CC. But even if it isn’t the main use, then the general understanding in the Flickr and larger culture is still that CC is used in this way. This article comes as a shock to a lot of media creators; Surveillance, government-led or otherwise, is not something we had in mind when we clicked off our CC boxes. I have posted tech events here in Philly and although I did tell people I was planning to post to Flickr, I did not tell them that China, the NSA, Microsoft and every university lab across the USA and overseas would have a copy of their face in their databases.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I’ll be deleting stuff off Flickr. I’ve been a pro member for a long time but going forward, I don’t see how sharing any photo online is safe. Sure, you probably won’t experience any disruption to your everyday life if the government develops artificial intelligence that now knows your face. In the long game that we’re all playing, though, this is a tool that can be easily used for mass oppression. I realize I sound wack. I get it. My security friends and I joke about how crazy we sound to non-techie people. Non-techie people want to post their family reunion pics on Facebook and they don’t want to pay for the privilege. They disregard any warnings we send. But even I wasn’t paying attention to this MegaFace development, and it all happened between the early days of the social web, when I was active at Flickr.com, and now, when I am not. Still, I should have known better. I put very few pics of family and friends on Facebook or Twitter. I paid for Flickr pro but I simply never thought about it. I don’t have family on there much if at all but I have hundreds of photos of Philadelphians gathering at tech events. It all has to go now.
We can’t possibly know now where all of this is going, but we can guess. And like I said, it ain’t a pretty picture.
On his website, artist Jake Parker has a big heading that says:
ANYONE CAN DO INKTOBER,
JUST PICK UP A PEN AND START DRAWING.
-JAKE PARKER
Mr. Parker started a “31 Days, 31 Drawings” campaign in October of 2009 to encourage him to develop “healthy drawing habits” (as per his website). I’m assuming that means drawing every day. Many writers believe in the myth that one must write every day to have good writing skills/habits. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron asks participants to commit to writing 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing daily for 90 days, long enough to form a habit of doing it. That actually worked for me; I did the 90 days and kept going. Eventually the 3 pages morphed into 1 large page, but the daily ritual stands. The habit is so ingrained that if I skip a day, it doesn’t toss me off the treadmill. I pick up the pen (and paper – it’s handwritten, an Artist’s Way strong suggestion) and get right back into it.
Perhaps that is the kind of habit kick-start Parker was after. Perhaps the drawing skills get rusty, like a foreign language, if you don’t use them. Parker invited others to participate. It grew a large following. Now thousands of people around the world follow Parker’s daily prompts by drawing a related ink-and-paper sketch and posting it to social media channels (Instagram being the most popular). Check out the hashtag #Inktober2019 for this years’ crop.
What originally was for ink, cartoon and graphic artists, soon grew to welcome any person with any level of skill. Indeed, the “most recent” column of an #Inktober hashtag search will undoubtedly bring up hysterically rudimentary drawings (but the “top” posts column can product break-taking images that hardly look done by human hands).
My drawing began in childhood, improved slightly by my teen years, and then just froze. I didn’t work on drawing as a skill or a craft again. Other pursuits grabbed my interest, like photography, sewing, papermaking, knitting and crochet. My time was spent in classes and reading books on those skills, never on drawing.
When I pick up the pen, I produce images that look exactly like my doodles in high school. This is what I mean by my skills bring frozen. It’s like a day hasn’t passed. I make the same lines, the same curves, and I always produce the same wacky proportions that drive me crazy.
I’m a big fan of the growth mindset. The growth mindset is the belief that one can improve their performance with education and practice. Instead of saying “I’m bad at math,” which is a strict dictum on the fate of one’s math ability, you would say, “I would like to practice at that, and with practice I will inevitably improve.” Time and effort leads to higher achievement. Simple concept. What makes it the growth mindset is applying it to any and all situations. When it comes to ability, hardly anything is fixed. My drawing ability can get better if I put effort into learning and practicing, just like I did with sewing or any other craft. The problem is, I’ve not been putting in that effort.
This is where Inktober and I (and embarrassment. Let’s not forget her) meet. You guys, most of my Inktober sketches are dreadful. I am haunted in particular of the drawing I did for the prompt “swing:”
This is not what I pictured in my head.
This is terrible. Why? Because it does not match AT ALL what I had in my head. Sure, it may be better than what you could do, but when you have an idea but you don’t have the skills to bring it to fruition, that is a failure. It stinks. But I had to post it anyway because that is all I had, and I couldn’t spend any more time on it.
I know I could have done better, but that’s the difference between people who have skills and people who don’t: Skilled people can produce something decent in a short amount of time. Unskilled people may be able to produce something decent, but it may take then 43 stops and starts and 3 days to do it. That’s where I am. If I produce something passable, you can be sure I’ve spent too much time doing it, AND it isn’t close to the vision I started with.
It is not like me to post my craft failures. But Inktober isn’t about perfection; in fact for me it is a lesson about imperfection. My growth mindset here is about learning to live with putting art out there that people will think is basic, dumb, pathetic or worse. It’s important that I keep drawing and posting, no matter how bad the drawings are, because I need to learn this lesson. My fiction writing is never going to be perfect, but I keep struggling with it, hoping to feel better about it before I send it out. (Maybe after this Blogtober I should post some flash fiction every day. The “every day” obligation precludes perfectionism).
If you want to follow along, find me on Instagram as purplecar_cc. With each post I try to tell a little story as to why I chose that particular interpretation of the prompt. It’s super embarrassing for me, but I’m doing it anyway. And with anything in life, probably that’s the point.
All forms of occult soothsaying are fake. If we could predict the future, we’d all be Nate Silver of 538 and as rich as Bill Gates. But if you believe tarot is helpful or evil, that’s up to you. I think the 78 cards in the deck are merely storytelling tools. Indeed, many different professionals, like psychotherapists and marketers, find them to be helpful for getting people past blocks and thinking more creatively. Although I have yet to use them regularly in my writing, I can see tarot’s potential to be a very helpful tool for fiction creators.
At some point in my writing life, I’d stumbled upon a book written exactly toward this use. Tarot for Writers by Corrine Kenner is a book that claims it will help you “explore your creative potential” by learning how to use tarot. From the blurb:
Tarot for Writers will guide you through each stage of the creative process, from fleshing out a premise to promoting a finished work. Enhance your storytelling technique through over 500 enjoyable writing prompts, exploratory games …, tarot journaling, and other idea-stimulating activities that call upon the archetypal imagery and multi-layered symbolism in the tarot.
-Tarot for Writers
I checked Tarot for Writers out of the library. When it came time to return it, I bought a copy. I’ve only perused the book and have completed only one or two of the exercises, but from what I’ve seen I can gather the concept is good: Tarot cards jump start brainstorming sessions. Many creatives use tarot in this (non-religious) way, including marketing professionals and artists.
Inspired by the book, I bought a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and took an adult school class on tarot. The class was centered around using tarot in more in line with its “occult” use of prediction and soothsaying. Nevertheless, I participated and tried to learn the art of reading tarot for others.
Psychology side note: Tarot and other things like palm-reading seem to work at guessing correctly at a seeker’s facts and circumstances. This is called “Illusory Correlation” and it is the result of the brain’s natural tendency to find connections and patterns.
-science to the rescue
For you fans of strange out there, I will say this: the major arcana cards dominate any spread done for me. These “face cards” come up more than I would predict is normal when I read tarot for others, but the major arcana cards were overwhelmingly present for any spreads done for me. The staid tarot class teacher, a seasoned professional who makes a living reading tarot for CEOs, Wall Street execs et al., was so moved by the phenomenon that she felt the need to make a comment. At the “tarot for marketers” event I attended last night, 2 of the 3 cards in the spread – deck held and owned by me but cards pulled at random by others – came out as major arcana cards. The major arcana cards, 21 of the 78 cards in the deck, are not rare but they hold much more clear and forceful significance, usually, than the regular deck cards. Imagine if, every time (or almost every time) someone asked you to draw a card from a players’ 52-card deck, you pulled a Jack, Queen or King. That would begin to strike you as odd, right? That’s where I am with the major arcana cards. So that’s a little tidbit for you tarot fans to chew on. Tweet me if you are struck with any insights about it.
Writers and artists of all kinds are challenged to generate new storylines. Each person has their own unique ways of coming up with ideas, e.g. a walk down city streets, numerous roller coaster rides, or cooking meals for strangers. Inspiration lurks in odd places. The tarot, with its ins and outs, ups and downs, weird juxtapositions and seemingly eerie coincidences, harbors all sorts of inspiration for any artist who is willing to look.
Content Strategist and Tarot enthusiast Jess Ryan broke us into groups to devise campaigns for different products. My group was tasked with coming up with a story line for a mindfulness app’s new landing page and newly-available lifetime subscription. We had a big group, so we didn’t get the whole campaign together, but the drawing of just three cards really got the ideas spinning.
As any content creator (or creative director) knows, coming up with ideas is HARD. When you do it day after day, sometimes your creativity abandons you. Your brain falls back on the same stories over and over. You begin to hear the same responses in the creative room, too.
“We did that topic two weeks ago.” “We already wrote a blog post on that in Dec. 2017.” “You always go straight for the harried mother trope.”
Ms. Ryan knows the grind. She’s a content creator herself. Right now I only write copy, but people like Ms. Ryan often work for an agency and are tasked with coming up with artwork, animation, taglines, logos, art direction, copy and more. After that’s all done, some are even responsible for finding placement in local and national advertising outlets.
All of these obligations can tax the already spread-thin creative brain. Enter Tarot, a card game (yes it started as just a card game), that is rich with character development, plot, challenges, emotions and any other part of a human’s story. Each card (of 78 cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the common deck used in Tarot readings) carries with it its own character, meaning and action. It also has an alternate interpretation in what are called “reversals” – different (not exactly opposite) meanings to be used when the card is drawn upside-down.
Sometimes one only needs a tiny bit of light to break the darkness. The Tarot offers thousands of idea sparks. Just pulling one card can chase away the dread of a blank page.
Our layout assigned to us for the mindfulness app campaign was a three-card spread: MIND BODY SPIRIT. 1 card would be pulled for each place in the spread. I brought out my deck (I have a deck. That’s a story for another time) and had 3 different team members pull a random card. We paid attention to how the card was oriented when it came out of the deck – upside right or upside down.
Ten of Wands
The first place on our spread was designated to “MIND.” The next card we pulled would be used to address our customer’s state of mind. We pulled the Ten of Wands. Ms. Ryan gave us an app called Mystic Mondays, a Tarot app that holds extended explanations of the cards and their reversals. We looked up the Ten of Wands. Mr. 10 0′ Sticks came up right-side-up, so we looked for his standard meaning. The app has a LOT of info. To make it short, we picked out two phrases we thought could help us design the story funnel for our mindfulness app customer: “unburden yourself” and “you’re not in this alone.”
The World
The second place in the spread was “BODY.” This would address the customer’s physical habits and behaviors. We pulled a “major arcana” card (the “face cards” of the Tarot deck), The World. Our bodies are our worlds, right? Or at least our bodies are how we see and interact with the world. The World card came out of the deck upside-down, so we looked up both the standard and the reverse meanings. Standard meaning for this card centers around wholeness and unity. The reversal meaning concentrates on taking action to make things happen, to not give up on one’s goals even though the goals are taking a long time. As a group, we thought the reversal meaning was pretty significant to someone who may want to make an entire life change, not just some silly New Year’s Resolution that might disappear by February. Notice, too, how the reversal defined the customer “problem” or “need to be filled” more closely than the standard meaning. I have a bit of experience with Tarot (which I’ll explain later) and I find this to be consistent. The reversals are where the “sales funnels” are. That is where you’ll find the challenges people face.
The High Priestess
The third and last place in the spread was “SPIRIT.” Like the rock-n-roll creative DIVAS that we are, we pulled The High Priestess. Here is where some controversy struck – we had some disagreement on whether or not the card came up in reverse. But because the reversal meanings are where all the “tea” resides, we looked up both the standard and reverse meanings of this awesome, female energy card. The upside phrases we picked out are “inner voice,” “serenity” and “Look inside you” for “expanding intuition.” The reversal, and where the problems for the customer really hide, had phrases like “imbalance,” “2nd guessing,” and you’re never “too busy” for “wisdom.” A big meaning that came from The High Priestess card was “get in touch with your higher self.”
All in all, I think our spread ROCKED. It is chock full of ideas for a mindfulness app’s storyline. There were tons of “pain points” a marketer could use to sell a lifetime subscription to the app in these three cards alone.
The night wrapped up quickly but the lessons lingered. I downloaded the Mystic Mondays app today. It may prove very useful indeed. At a later date I’ll expand a bit on what I know about Tarot and how the major arcana cards tend to follow me around (including last night: 2 out of 3 cards Major Arcana). In the meantime, check out Tarot for sparking some creativity in your work. Sometimes all it takes to light a fire is a tiny spark, and with each Tarot card comes a bright world of story.
I started both PokémonGo and Wizards Unite with enthusiasm. I play daily for weeks. I primp my avatar. I collect treasures. I meet with fellow players to take down bosses and I join related groups online.
Weeks can turn into months. In PG I got to Level 33 and in WU, Level 28.
But then something happens. Some mysterious malaise sets in and my interest falls off a cliff. PG still has a place on my phone but I don’t use it, and my WU is officially active all but abandoned.
I have to say, it isn’t always a mystery as to why I stop playing. With PG, I know exactly when and why I quit. I’d been meeting up with raid groups to take down some big bosses. Afterward, I was not able to capture the boss pokémons for my collection like other raiders could. One day after yet another raid and yet another miss, I grew frustrated and quit. All the joy of the game disappeared and overnight, I was done. The people I’d been meeting were too random and varied for me to get to know any of them, so no-one missed my absence at the following raids.
With WU, boredom has been growing in the last several weeks. Then one day in September I got a warning that I was running out of allotted data for the month (rare). I shut down all unnecessary data usage. Those few days of not checking on WU while I was out and about was enough to break my habit. I’ve been stuck on Level 28 now for weeks. I’d usually progress through levels in a few days.
If I had friends nearby who played either game AND if those friends could make regular outings with me, perhaps I’d keep up. I just don’t have the identity investment to trudge through my boredom. Niantic (maker of both games) realizes players get bored and at times offer events to rekindle interest. A “Dark Magic” event is coming up in WU soon. I enjoyed previous events but as the days go by, I get further and further away from wanting to participate.
I’m sad about it. I delighted in both games when they were first released. I don’t know how to keep that enthusiasm. No friends are coming out of the PG or WU ether to play with. It’s just the same things to catch (in the game) and same lonely pursuit over and over. I do have solo hobbies, like sewing, knitting and paper crafts. But they contain actual human interaction on a regular basis. Almost all of my sewing projects have some sort of social tie. I’ve been going to a knitting group on Fridays, and I joined a pen pal group this year with whom I exchange paper crafts and fun letters, etc. The meaning of any pursuit, for me, is not found solely in personal satisfaction but also in connection with others. These games don’t really connect me to anyone.
It does seem that PG, since its reboot, has gathered a lot of new participants. I could dive in again but I don’t see the point. My interest will probably fade again because there will never be a solid community around the game.
PG I could leave easily, as I was never a PG fan, but WU I really like because I’ve been a Harry Potter fan since the first book came out. My interest is fading fast, and that is a bummer. I want to stay with it because I love the extended universe.
On the plus side, not playing the game will give me more time for other things. Maybe a few months’ distraction is the point of these types of games. Perhaps now I can move on, and eventually become distracted by the next shiny thing. We’ll see.
