R C-R

FWIW, in the U.S. "Kentucky Fried Colonel" is a commonly used slang term for Harland Sanders of KFC fame. He was awarded the honorific title "Kentucky Colonel" in the 1930's by the governor of Kentucky. It is not a military rank.

According to a DFW TV station's usually reliable weather people, you would need to drive up north to just south of Little Rock, Arkansas for the best chance of a clear sky during the eclipse. The quickest route would probably be to take I-30. Several weeks ago we bought a 6 pack of 'eclipse glasses' from Amazon that supposedly were NASA approved so we could give a few pair away. Then about 4 days ago we got a notice from Amazon that they were not safe & they were refunding out money, so we ordered a 12 pack of ones that were (because they did not have anything left in smaller quantities) which arrived late Saturday night. So now we have enough to give away a bunch of them, but I'm not sure anybody will be interested.

Same here in N. Texas; probably so overcast that we won't be able to see much of anything except a dark sky.

I think the general consensus is 8 GB is not enough RAM unless you don't mind the apps running very sluggishly for anything more than very lightweight work.

I found it interesting that it said its last training cut-off date was in 2021, implying that there may (or may not!) be more data gathering & training done in the future to improve its results. But much more interesting to me was it said it does not create original artwork (that word again). That makes me wonder how it would reply if you asked it who (or what?) is the originator of the images it produces.

I understand artwork as the tangible result of the creative process. Who or what created it, or by what process, is a different thing entirely. EDIT: I have to amend the above to say I do not really mean artwork has to be tangible in the sense of having a physical existence, even though almost all the references I could find to the definition of artwork say it refers only to physical objects. I think it is fairly obvious that these days some artwork, including much of the output of apps like Affinity, Photoshop, et all, has only a virtual existence yet is generally considered in one sense or another as artwork. If it really had to be limited to the physical then no photograph taken with a digital camera could never be considered to be artwork unless or until it was printed. That seems absurd to me.

FWIW, on my Mac I have not had any crashes related to using any of the color pickers in any of the Affinity apps, V1 or V2.

That file opens on my Mac in the Develop Persona. It takes about 8 seconds to do that.

Why would Canva abandon the Affinity brand name?

If you mean these files open in the Photo Persona then they are not RAW images. Can you post an example file from your camera that are opening into the Photo persona rather than directly into the Develop persona?

Can't you say the same for artwork created by people who have studied the genius of artists that have gone before them? So then what does it matter if the artist is human or artificial? Taken a step further, who's to say that some future human artists will not in part be inspired to greatness bythe work of non-human artists?

Why would an AI have to feel anything or be self aware to create art (good or bad by whatever standards one wants to use to judge that, objective or subjective) for that work to evoke strong emotional responses in humans that view it? Try a Google search on something like "examples of AI-generated art." Among the hits are items like this one about 'mind blowing' examples. I don't know about what others feel but for me some of them do evoke strong emotions in me very much like those I feel when viewing human-created artwork of similar subject matter. A bit off topic but my Google search turned up a lot of interesting stuff, one of which is this "Timeline of AI Art." While none of it directly addresses if AI's can or ever will be able to feel in the same sense that humans can, much of it suggests that is not necessary for them to create artwork that evokes strong feelings in humans.

If you are opening RAW files in AP they should automatically open in the Develop Persona. Are you saying that they are not opening in that persona so you have to select it from the application menu (or main Toolbar if it is configured as it is by default with buttons for 5 personas)? If so, this would indicate you are not opening a RAW format file, or at least not one that Affinity recognizes as such.

I think it would be safe to say if it is, you could replace "might" with "almost certainly."

From a very quick perusal of the Canva site, it would seem they support many different RTL languages, so it is possible this will help with adding RTL support to Affinity. I guess time will tell ....

I am talking about the emotions humans might feel from AI created content. it has nothing to do with what the AI can or cannot feel.

But who is to say that eventually sufficiently powerful neural networks cannot through the appropriate training learn these methods & techniques & use them to create something comparable in all significant aspects to what humans can achieve? It may not happen this year or the next but on a longer time scale it seems inevitable.

It is not the techniques used to create something that are subjective. It is the judgements about what makes something better, more beautiful, etc. based on them that is. So are you of the opinion that if someone does not attend art schools and/or spend decades studying documentation about such things then they cannot create beautiful or powerful, emotionally evocative artwork? If so, I cannot agree.

What you are describing is by definition subjective; IOW, it is on based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, prejudices, or opinions. See also among others https://languagetool.org/insights/post/subjective-vs-objective. for more about the difference between making subjective vs. objective judgements. In short, because subjective judgements are inherently not based on facts there is no general agreement about which criteria to use when deciding if art is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, etc., just opinions about which criteria should be used to judge art, if creating something different by breaking an established rule automatically means it cannot convey emotion as well as something that follows those rules, & so on.

It all still remains entirely subjective, including what criteria must be adhered to for something to be considered good vs. bad.

What is & is not good art is entirely subjective. Consider for example the art on display in comics, animations, & many impressionistic or abstract styles. Some consider none of them good compared to the old masters, others good in their own right.

But as you say that does not mean that they will never be able to create true to life images, including ones depicting human anatomy, & there already is evidence that they are rapidly getting better at it. They are dumb only to the extent they cannot currently process as much relevant data as some (but far from all) humans can, but there is no good reason to think they will require decades of training like the humans you speak of to eventually match & then exceed their skills. In fact, while it is not specifically about human anatomy, AI powered neural networks have already become an indispensable tool in modern medicine.

Do you mean something other than https://on1help.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics?

Interesting that realtime biometric identification like face recognition systems are deemed as unacceptable risks & apparently will be banned. So I guess that means about a zillion iPhones will have to be confiscated from EU residents?

If you are referring to generative AI algorithms, that is not what they do. They analyze existing works for training purposes so they can create original work that share some of the same or similar characteristics -- IOW, to create something that is like something else, but not a direct copy in whole or in part. This is why there is so much discussion about the material used for training & who has the rights to use it for that. John von Neumann was a brilliant polymath whose work is the basis for an amazingly wide range of theories & methods of analysis that shape modern thinking & fueled innovation in many different fields, computer science among them. But that aside, he is far from the only one predicting the inevitability of some form of technological singularity, all of which is based in one way or another on the idea that the only necessary & sufficient requirement for intelligence is sufficient neural network capacity & that unlike for humans there are no practical limits on how large artificial neural networks can become. As for understanding, in strictly objective terms, what is it other than the ability to form useful associations from what is perceived? If so, then how does this differ from what generative AI algorithms do when they are trained? Aside from that, do any of us have to have any deep understanding of how something works for it to be useful to us? Consider how many people drive a car, use a computer or microwave oven, watch TV, or do any of many other things without knowing much about how they work. So perhaps it is indeed something we will have to agree to disagree about, but I do think all these issues intrinsically & inescapably revolve around defining a clear legal unambiguous definition of what intelligence is & how to quantify it.