If we can spot these trends while working 9-5, then an idiot can probably spot them if they spend 40 hours a week on it.

PieDock

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

This is just obviously untrue. Not least because we did build lots of nuclear power plants. One significant reason why we didn’t build more was their high price compared to … coal and gas plants. But sure, it’s Greenpeace’s fault and not Exxon Mobil.

Yes, but he did have his gun out and the spokesperson effectively said “don’t worry, he didn’t mean to fire it - he was only planning to point it at people”.

You asked “you can … but why would you?”. You answered yourself.

Because he wasn’t in a situation where he was going to need to shoot anyone but he decided to proceed as if he was. And accidents happen, as he demonstrated.

You can say this is SOP, but that’s worse, isn’t it?

Thank you. I hadn’t checked what they’re issued with.

So then I’m wondering why he didn’t demount the flashlight. I guess he was worried that he might accidentally fire the gun into his foot while doing so. He’s obviously a little bit prone to that kind of thing. Safer to leave it on the rail, I guess.

So he was trying to work the flashlight when he accidentally pulled the trigger. Is there no safety on these guns, or did he disengage that when he was trying to use his radio?