💎 Friday Gems (AI Poisoning, Change your narrative, Version not age, super-soft pretzels, and much more!)
💎 Friday Gems (AI Poisoning, Change your narrative, Version not age, super-soft pretzels, and much more!)
Low Fidelity is a free weekly newsletter that provides Freshly squeezed insights on mindset, mindfulness, and resilience while empowering you to show up, thrive, and achieve your full creative potential.
This week, I continue exploring AI with a fascinating idea about how artists can fight back against the theft of their work by poisoning their images; it’s a must-read. The next two gems touch on the idea that the identities and labels we put on ourselves don’t need to define us, we have agency, and we can change the narrative of our lives to be anything we want to at any point in our lives.
Plus, yummy, super soft pretzels!
As always, feel free to share Low Fidelity with anyone who may find it helpful. 💜
Enjoy!
In this edition of Friday Gems:
☠️ This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
☕️ How An Average Starbucks Coffee Transformed My Mindset
🧠 You’re a version, not an age!
🍞 Recipe: The Super Soft Homemade Pretzel
🌟 Wisdom: On Getting Out of Your Head
🎵 Tune: Inner Peace by Jon Hopkins
Artificial Intelligence
💎 This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation.
Finally, there is a tool artists can use to fight back against the onslaught of GenAI training models that use artist’s work without their permission.
The tool is called Nightshade.
Nightshade lets artists add subtle changes to their art that are invisible to the human eye but can poison machine-learning models by interpreting the images as something completely different.
This results in the trained model to “break in chaotic and unpredictable ways” and the generated image being rendered useless.
What do the images look like once they have been poisoned?
The researchers tested the attack on Stable Diffusion’s latest models and on an AI model they trained themselves from scratch. When they fed Stable Diffusion just 50 poisoned images of dogs and then prompted it to create images of dogs itself, the output started looking weird—creatures with too many limbs and cartoonish faces. With 300 poisoned samples, an attacker can manipulate Stable Diffusion to generate images of dogs to look like cats.
This is amazing, but wait, there is more!
The Poison Spreads
Because GenAI models are great at making connections between words, by infecting a word such as “dog”, related words such as “puppy”, “husky”, and “wolf” are also infected. So the poison spreads rapidly to the related words and manipulates them to damage their output.
Until now the balance of power has been in favor of the GenAI tools scraping and stealing artist’s work without compensation. Now there is a tool to give back power to the artists so they can fight back and claim their art for themselves instead of corporations.
“It is going to make [AI companies] think twice, because they have the possibility of destroying their entire model by taking our work without our consent,”
- Eva Toorenent, Illustrator and artist
What are your thoughts on GenAI using artist’s work without permission? Share your voice in the comments.
Mindset
💎 How An Average Starbucks Coffee Transformed My Mindset
We have too many labels in our lives and then we let those labels define who we are, what we do, and how we think. Over time those labels box us in, constraining us and tightening their grip ever so slowly until we become pigeonholed by them and fall into ruts and life becomes a monotonous grind.
But there is a way to break free from the labels that we allow to define us and by changing the narrative in our heads. We can do this by having an open mind and being open to new experiences.
Yes, it takes courage and guts to get off the well-worn tracks of the labels we define ourselves by but as with any positive behavior change, we can start by taking tiny steps.
In his post,
shares the moment he realized he had agency and could change the story in his head of who he was. The moment came in a Starbucks as he was giving his name to the barista.Something shifted in me that day in Starbucks. It wasn’t the realisation that Starbucks coffee absolutely stinks. It was a realisation that I could start to shift the narrative in my own head. I could start to move away from the person who I had conformed to over all these years—a person who had grown but started to get stuck in a groove that had become a rut.
Being open to new experiences and actively seeking them out helps us build memories and break free from the labels we get stuck in.
Yes, the labels may be useful at times but the map is not the territory. The label is not who you are. A label can never define the awesomeness that is you in full color.
We have the power, agency, and ability to experience life on our terms and now is the time to take that power back and live our lives to the fullest.
✊🏽
Source: Never Stop Learning
Mindset
💎 You’re a version, not an age!
I recently shared an exercise to visualize your future self.
As I did the exercise, I imagined different aspects of myself, such as how I looked, the clothes I wore, where I lived, what I was doing, etc., trying to picture myself with as much detail as possible.
I enjoyed the exercise because it helped me get closer and connect with my future self instead of my future self being a distant dream and a stranger to me.
Studies show that connecting to our future selves motivates us to make better choices for our physical, mental, and financial health. It also helps us make ethical decisions and procrastinate less. These are just a few benefits gained, so the better we can visualize our future selves, the better decisions we can make in the present moment.
We all want to improve, grow, and change for the better. I believe this is a powerful tool for behavior change.
One idea I think has potential is to think of ourselves as versions that change over time. Instead of thinking of ourselves at a fixed age, what if we took inspiration from software versioning and used version numbers? So, being 50 years old, I would be in version 5.0. When visualizing myself at 51, I can refer to that version of myself as version 5.1 or at 60 as version 6.0.
Age is a social construct, so we can look at it in a way that helps us instead of being defined by it.
Instead of calling your future self 36 years old, what if you called them version 3.6 or 3.6.2 if you’re tracking months?
This is a slight shift in the way we look at ourselves. Referring to ourselves as versions instead of age puts the focus on the constant change we experience and our ever-evolving nature instead of being a fixed age.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this idea.
Recipe
💎 The Super Soft Homemade Pretzel
My kids are crazy for pretzels. Each time we go to the mall we have to get pretzel bites from Wetzel’s Pretzels even if we don’t buy anything else. Yes, it’s mall food but as a parent, you have to do what you have to do to get through the day.
So, after having successfully made some delicious, wood-fire-looking, puffy pizza at home using the 72-hour pizza dough recipe by Baking Steel, I figured I’d try out The Super Soft Homemade Pretzel recipe to give my pretzel-hungry kids a healthier and tastier option and let me tell you they were not disappointed.
You really don’t need a pizza steel for this and can make it with the tools you have.
Tip 1: You can speed things up by making pretzel buns instead of shaping them into pretzel shapes.
These pretzels were soft, chewy, and much more delicious than the mall pretzels, and that’s coming from my kids so this was a big success.
Tip 2: If you’re using pretzel salt, go lightly on it. I made the mistake of adding too much salt and had to take it off before I could eat them.
Let me know if you make them!
Source: Baking Steel
Wisdom
💎 On Getting Out of Your Head
Source: Waking Up app
Music
💎 Inner Peace by Jon Hopkins
You know that feeling of hope and inspiration at the start of the day where anything is possible?
Inner Peace by Jon Hopkins delivers that exact feeling.
Perfectly titled Inner Peace, this song is a good reminder that we can tap into our inner peace when the world around us takes us for a spin and overwhelms us. We can find the peace within us and find refuge there to rest and recover.
That’s it for this week’s gems. Let me know which gem resonated with you. Just hit reply and share, or DM me.
I’m thankful that you read this far.
Have a fantastic weekend!
