Katherine Heartsong

Well done!!

Not my style, but love the edgy new look. Much less "pretty" and more serious? Nice.

Shiny!

Dupe post. Stupid fingers.

All us pale freckled redheads who like sailing and the beach appreciate your effort, thanks!

If that dress is LaraX available ... WANT!!!!!!

I'd love to buy the new Bille from Lelutka because of price alone. However, it's taken nearly two years of tweaking to get my face shape looking exactly like I want (still looking for a small cleft for the tip of my nose, but so close now) that I probably would never change*, but can you afford to miss that 50% sale on the new Leltuka head? Just to keep in your back pocket? I think not. *I'm so stuck in my look that I only rock two hair styles these days, despite a folder full of hairs.

Wandering around the Skin Fair this morning met this gorgeous forum denizen Finally met @Rowan Amore in world, made my day!

Fine then, so for accuracy, ahem ... the just a bit quicker and only slightly younger @Love Zhaoying.

Was going to ask if it was a PBR pony but sniped by the far quicker and younger @Love Zhaoying.

I want a tee shirt with that on it.

Love my current look given how long it too to tweak things, but happy Lel is evolving even more. Love their dedication.

As an artist, I wish this were true. Once you move into the "art world" and galleries etc, labour and skill have very very little to with how art is valued, or how an artist is perceived. The art world is a very insane, small clique of insular, paranoid, egotistical insiders and gatekeepers who believe they are the only ones who can "value" art. Anyone who has ever read a small piece of wall text/label explaining a piece on the wall beside a work of art is already in those people's snares. That's their interpretation they are selling you. Don't read it. Look at a work yourself and think your own thoughts.

As an artist of 40+ years, I have mixed feelings about the OPs question. Aside > It's not AI it's Machine Learning (ML) btw, there's no more intelligence to it than a mote of dust has intelligence. I despise that term, anyway ... I'm okay with "art" generated by things like Midjourney, DALL-E etc because I have yet to see anything produced by those algorithms that has moved me emotionally from a simple "meh". That's how I define "art", btw ... if a visual thing like a painting or sculpture or photograph moves me emotionally it becomes art, and the further it moves me from a neutral "meh" the better. Doesn't matter if it moves me towards tears of bliss or an angry rage, the more emotional the response the better the art because, as an artist, I can then engage a viewer and ask "Why?" Those art generating MLs don't have that affect on me. They can be well composed, mimicking, decent colours, sometimes even quite nice to look at etc, but they do not affect me emotionally. Furthermore, as artist Ai Weiwei recently said in an article, if your art is easily reproduced by a machine, it's not good art to begin with. (Remember, that most art is given economic values by a small clique of insiders who tell you what is great art. A pile of silver pins on a gallery floor may not seem like it's worth $150,000, but they think it is, and someone will buy it. Welcome to Art Basel Miami Beach!!!) One last aside > If there is a moral issue around these MLs, it's the fault of the companies that actually have gathered all the art up and store it in data sets for those MLs to analyze and reduce to simple mathematical algorithms. That's what most people fail to know about Midjourney et al ... they do not scrape and store the art themselves, they simply use datasets of art gathered by others to reduce an artist's oeuvre to a series of math formulas that in essence, mimic a style (and style can not be copyrighted, btw = problem). Back to the OP. (Yes, finally.) As an artist, I'm okay with ML generated art, as long as it's labeled as such. I like attribution. Once you are informed as a buyer about that, then you can make a better buying decision weighing pros and cons and the hidden costs of the associated externalities. In my own gallery I clearly state that while I do all of my abstract works exactly as if I was in my studio, I do use Pixelmator Pro in the end to sometimes adjust colours, heighten textures, or modify the saturation levels of my work. I don't use filters to create the pieces, it's all custom digital brushes laid down by hand one stroke at a time, but I fiddle with colour after the work is "done". Photographs will ruin art, digital art programs like Painter aren't really art (confusing the tool with the end product), digital photos will ruin film, 8K digital film making will kill 35mm and 70mm film cinema, etc. heard it all before. Art and how we create it changes, and that's good. But is "AI" art art? Not that I've seen yet. It mimicks and vaguely reproduces styles, but lacks emotion (so far).

Odd, maybe we define crowded differently. There are 20 here right now. No lag, 40fps on ultra, seems fine. I've hit dance places with 40+, and that's when it gets crowded. I find, for example, Fogbound far more laggy and crowded than Muddys. And Hotwife Hotel is a hot mess of non-rezzing avis and lag.

Me to Gen-A'ers: "When I was a kitten, people were landing on the moon, the green bakelite phone was attached to the kitchen wall, and we played kick-the-can outdoors! And we liked it!!"

I still roll my eyes at the use of the term "AI" at all. These things (the chats, the art generators etc) are no more intelligent that the pile of dusty cat hair under my desk. They are human coded, limited, frighteningly biased machine learning algorithms that spew out a garbled mess of stuff that vaguely strings itself together into what the programmers think is coherent and yes, tricks us a bit into thinking it's intelligent. Our brains are rather easily duped, either willingly like going to a Penn and Teller show (you'll never consciously notice the string that Teller uses in his floating red ball trick), or because we're just easily manipulated. A narrative NPC to fill in details/backstory of an RPG setting would be useful in world, but within a very limited silo of information and even then, it's not intelligent, merely following a very complex set of programming rules. ML, not AI.

In addition to @Cinnamon Mistwood's excellent suggestions, you might want to hang out a bit in the popular PG-rated music places like Muddy's and say hello in Nearby chat, be friendly, maybe say hello to someone whose avatar catches your eye, etc. But yes, follow your RL passions and there will be groups in SL that are centred around those.

A lot of shoes sold come with a small adjustment (that looks like a little pair of shoes in Firestorm) that you can add to the outfit you're wearing and voila, hover height adjusted. Using FS though, I just have my Quick Prefs panel handy and adjust hover height as needed from there because it's not just shoes, for example, it's every single dance on a single dance ball AO having slightly different heights and I hate floating off the floor one dance, then being two inches through the floor on the next one. (As an aside, this is also the basis of why I'm weirded out by male avatars taller than 6'4" in SL and am a realistic height fan.)

Several times! Always enjoyable, because I learn what it is about art in general that excites them. I'm always happy to take anyone to my gallery if they ask me and tour it, answering any questions they have. I have a few in world folks I'd call patrons who love chatting with me. As you say, really the best experiences we can have as merchants. I have also fan-girled when meeting a couple of my favourite clothing designers, and if I ever meet @Charlotte Bartlett of Scarlet Creative fame in world I just may die of giddy!

Friday morning blouse shopping.

Nice!

I suggest an unedited shot of the new Senra avatars a new user will encounter SL so people know exactly what they're getting here without spending about US$50 real money to get to the quality many of us like to look like, and a basic environment to boot. Managing user's expectations and all that. Yeah, grumpy today.

So far ... nope, nope, nope. I have a hard time unseeing things as an artist. Goodness knows, I'm still amused by the 2012 London Olympics logo.