A well worn topic here is the idea of commenting on blogs as a form of blogging itself (tagged blogmenting), writing in the spaces of other people’s blogs. Twenty blog years ago I reflected on the idea of Francois the Comment Blogger (actually spotted back in 2003 as Blogging in the Margins) who, in a weird twist of accidents, I actually “met” last year, in, as expected, the comments space of a post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Rather epic, I thought!

All of this leading up to an idea in 2007 where it was a major thing to give up, of “muzzling” posting on my own blog for a whole week (can you imagine) and spending that week reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. I repeated this in 2008, 2009, 2010,… and took 15 years off before picking it in 2025.

I had usually done this in February, and had “plans” to return this year, so hey, here I am two months late.

Now of course, given that like 94.6% of people who previously blogged (made up statistic) do not any more, what is the bog sacrifice? The whole space of connecting through comments has pretty music been desiccating by taking that energy and effort into external places of social media, severed from our blogs. And of those remaining blogs, like 68.2% (made up too) have removed comments as even an option.

I thought about this reading danah boyd’s post Where has Social Media gone? (a great read). She closes at the end with “And if you have feels, push back! I’d love to hear your thoughts!!!” but how? Her original blog has no means to do that. The Ghost version of her blog as Made Not Found even if I log in, does not have a place to respond?

It seems telling to me.

Alas, so just giving up my own blogging for a week does not seem much, so here’s my only partly thought out idea- I will also [mostly] muzzle by usual outputs in Mastodon, now that is something to give up. I wil take that time to read a lot of blog posts, where I can comment, and slip in to my comment the text #CogDogCommentBlogging26 and then I will just post to Mastodon a link to where I am commenting tagged same.

As part of the past efforts here, I generate some stats for my own blog activity, using some special MySQL queries to pull out per year, total number of posts, number of comments, number of unique commenters into a google sheet of all CogDogBlog stats Back to the Beginning of Blog Time – look charted data!

Now hold the dog bus, you might say- look at the huge spike of comments in 2025, where’s the problem? That’s an artifcact of enabling the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on the site, those record numbers include all the likes, boosts that get fed into the comments table. I might have to wrangle a new query to filter them out. A task for another day.

At least for posts, I had a positive blip from the declining trend in 2025 and 4 months into the year, I’m at more than half of that total. It’s a BULL market, folks! But wow, look at those peak blogging years of 2005. Crazy. Was I even working?

Lastly, I do have a query to retrieve the top commenters for the 2025 year

SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= '2025-01-01' AND comment_date < '2026-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC;

The results are again, with me at the top of my charts! I am the most active commenter (there is duplication from comments via Fedviserse reply and direct to blog). I am running out of time to make this a pretty table, so a screen shot of the text (I cut off the tail end at less than 5)

Well, that’s enough, I am supposed to muzzle the blog today, and get out there and comment. If you got blog or a post I should attend to, I ma taking suggestions, otherwise I rely on my usual RSS feeds and Mastodon reading (mostly reading this week).

See you on the other side, when the muzzle is removed…. if I remove it.

Keep on blogging! And be old school and give out some human direct comments, it feeds the bloggers soul.

Featured Image: Dog with party hat and muzzle at a loud event looking scared, crazed and helpless flickr photo by Ivan Radic shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license this is so how dignified I am in my withering intents!

But it was meant to be this past week was old school blogging the way I wrote them in say 2004. Short bits of anything. Everything. Mostly text. Where the “blogiverse” as it was called poured attention, into their own blogs, and into others to comment.

Before the so called “social” medias landed and para-took our attentions to them. Did they really “take”, how much did we cave in?

That’s another post out in the field.

Next week, no posts.

On purpose.

Stay tuned, zero one two blog readers.

featured image: Holding this Post Together flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I spot a few of my custom t-shirts , and yes snow and dogs on it, old wood, skies of northern and other lights, the usual wood patterns, even a cat. But let’s hand it over, as the world capitulates more each minute, to ChatGPT to see what kind of drippy summary it can conspire.

It took a whole (not) of prompt engeering to send

Here are 30 photos taken in April. This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in April. Write a one paragraph summary that captures themes, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add extra zest and exuberance to your writing.

Here is the prosaicness:

April arrives like a switch flipped with a grin, not fully spring yet, but definitely done pretending it’s winter. Snow retreats into scraps while grass and mud claim the middle ground, and the light gets theatrical: halos around the sun, a sudden aurora cameo, skies that can’t decide between steel and silk. The usual prairie artifacts are still here, splintered boards, rusted bolts, fence lines stretching like sentences without punctuation, but now they feel less like relics and more like props in a set being reset. Life pushes in from every angle: dogs in mid-romp and mid-thought, birds slicing the air in formation, a cat inspecting plumbing like it’s a personal project, even a soccer ball abandoned as if the game just paused itself. People step closer to the lens this month, smiling, holding up small finds, wearing their days a bit more openly. And then there are the delightful curveballs: a memory card like a tiny black monolith, a giant “house volume” knob that looks ready to turn the whole scene up, a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all. April feels curious, awake, slightly chaotic, and very alive, as if the world is stretching its limbs and saying, alright, let’s get on with it.

The poet loriat ChatGPT waxes on my 30 daily photos

Note that it missed complete the mockery of the ai;dr shirt with “a shirt declaring “ai;dr” like a wink at the act of documenting it all” – no I am casting share your way, ChatGPT.

May is already in gear, so no looking back now, heading for another perfect month of daily photos, that is north of fourth.

Featured Image: Go North flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

In yesterday’s early morning Mastodon scroll I saw a link to Anil Dash’s post that seemed to be, if you judged on title alone, an inquiry about NASA Artemis II photos.

I gave it the quick scan scroll, which spoke to wanting go read it in more detail. After the morning dog walk. By the time I had returned, my friend Gardner Campbell had emailed me asking, have you read this with the same said link.

I leave it as an exercise for the link clicker, if they do that anymore, to read it on their own. It’s a loving tribute to flickr which at 22 years old is earlly Cambrian era for a web site that is not oly still there, but still vital.

Even better is the link to the email interview conversation posted by Jessamyn West on the flickr blog (they have a real honest blog, reason enough for love) Anil Dash – using community to build power, for the rich observations, as well as a nice set of photos.

I had to add my flickr love to the pile.

Alan is @cogdog ??

@cogdog@cosocial.ca

@anildash Not enough characters here to be unhip to shout how much I love flickr

https://cogdogblog.com/2024/02/flickr-at-20/

Worth mentioning they never wrecked their public API, allowing amateurs like me to create my own tools/sites. And so early they were with tags when we swooned over "folksonomy". There's an almost infinite spiral of niche interest groups (e.g. for rusty mailboxes? Vegefitti?).

Note: Flickr Commons long preceded SmugMug

April 30, 2026, 2:51 pm 0 boosts 6 favorites

Not to toot my own post horn, but I stand by the 20 love reasons from 2024 (noting many more I could add if I was that OCD).

Instead, I will link share something that encompasses many of these love reasons. See if you can guess the tag represented by 10 random flickr photos in my pechaflickr web site.

It’s not hard.

Or just play with pechaflickr on your own. The whole idea was to maskup pechakucha with those fun Powerpoint Karaoke things people did long ago at conferences. It’s a vehicle for improv. It got good mentions in the Twitter era, I am not sure anyone really uses it any more besides me.

First of all, I web duct taped this together in 2011 — and it still works (there might be a few PHP worms to fix). It’s made possible because of flickr’s public API, which, unlike almost every other Big Powerful Web Platform, has not broken, changed, or removed since it started. I have been told by someone who knows APIs that its maybe a gold standard. Pechaflickr makes use of the freeform, web 2 hippie style joy of folksonomy of tags, the old school style before that got all hashed to virality. I have a mode where you can draw just images from Flickr Commons… because I can.

And the whole mode where I can use it to make you guess a tag, came as a suggestion from a teacher in Alaska named Heather.

I am biased, and smitten, and others may have gripes with ther object of my affection, but I will say until the future grim day if the web blinks out… I love flickr.

Featured Image: Screenshot of search results for all my photos tagged flickr which works in 2026 as it always has done.

In ever so epically and humanly and Audrey-ly written, in her recent post Foolin’ Audrey Watters says:

I sometimes joke that my brain is full of all sorts of stuff like this — useless stuff, one could easily dismiss it as — which takes up the brain-space in which I could have, should have used to preserve other, more important information, such as everything I learned in math class in 1983, the year that Pyromania was released.

But — record scratch — that’s not how the brain works. Facts and memories are not files stored in a database, and there is no “storage full” warning when you hit capacity. There is no storage capacity. You don’t have to delete old knowledge — say, functions, which I’m certain that, at some point in eighth grade, I did know how to solve — in order to make room to stick new knowledge in your head.

The brain is not a computer. The computer is not a brain.

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/foolin/

And she lays this on the AI hucksters who want you to stick with the brain as computer broken record — “as the industry’s hustlers try to convince you that you don’t even need to stick new stuff in your own head anymore; you can just plop it into an LLM and magically, personal knowledge will emerge.”

Sure, this is how memory works, in the “memory game” which even as a kid I thought was a ridiculous kind of game. But go ahead and play, I needed an excuse to dust off my “memory” of how H5P content worked.

I bet you played, right? How many animal pairs did you store in your brain database?

Now that I think if it, I am not even quite sure why I tossed it in, other than to make use of my own little H5P cog shop (that’s another post).

But since Audrey started with a musical memory frame for her post, growing up rocking out to Def Leppard, at the top of my recent, non computer memory is also a beautiful framing of memory, that ironically comes from a podcast about rock music.

Indeed, my friend Gardner Campbell got me hooked a while ago on the podcast I told him at first I doubt I would listen much to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs — and I was wrong. I am totally in on a fan of the insane amount of research host Andrew Hickey does to put a rock song in historical context.

And naturally, because my memory rings very strong with my high school era when I got hooked on the music of The Who (it was the album the Kids Are Alright that was my gateway). So the recent 500 songs episode 183 on Pinball Wizard (essentially covering the whole Tommy album) had an opening bit of writing that just revved up my reading interest.

I will long quote this because it’s so damned good

One of the things that people often get wrong is how memory works. Thanks partly to our own intuitions, and partly to the work of Sigmund Freud (who of course attempted to get the study of the human mind onto something like a modern scientific basis, but whose work when compared to current psychology and neurology is roughly equivalent to pitting Aristotle’s conception of physics against the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider), we think and act as if our memories are accurate records of what’s happened to us — that when we remember things, it’s as if we’re looking over a video recording of the events that happened.

We now know, though, that this isn’t how memory works. You don’t store a recording of what happened and leave it there untouched until you come to think of it again. Rather, very quickly after a memory is formed, it starts to degrade — you lose details. But if you think of it again, you fill in the missing details as if you’re remembering them. Then, next time you remember the event, you remember those filled-in details as if they’re part of the original memory.

Every time you think of something, it reinforces both the original memory and whatever new details you’ve added in subsequent rememberings, so important, memorable, or traumatic events that you think about constantly get reinforced, and the original details stay stronger. But if you’re trying to remember something that happened decades ago that you haven’t thought about in the interim, you’ll get almost nothing right — but it’ll sometimes still *feel* like you’re remembering every detail as if it were happening right then.

This is, of course, why in so many of the stories I tell in this podcast people give radically different versions of events from each other, none of which match documentary evidence. They’re not lying (usually) — they’re just telling everyone else the story that they’ve told themselves. Because that’s all memories are, really, stories we tell ourselves. And if we don’t get reminded of them frequently, they drift from reality.

https://500songs.com/podcast/song-183-pinball-wizard-by-the-who-part-1-always-playing-clean/ emphasis added by me

Hickey shoots down the memory as writing to disk storage concept, but even better gets to the notion that the retelling, the re-remembering of experiences we’ve lived, is not only what reinforces it, but also creates the memory we construct, not stored as a perfect series of “facts”.

It’s why I love the blog as the place I write memories first in the time they happen, but then regenerate tem if I link back or stumble over them, and as well whey I ended up mopping up messes in opld posts, or fixing links, or adding details I missed the first time.

I am at work making memories of the stories I blog myself.

This will come into play when/if I write more on my memories of working with storytelling.

But sure, make memory as good as clicking cards with pictures of the same animals, I have the memory stories I have told myself about each of those animals. Ain’t no LLM that can touch that, because I have lived the memories, felt the pains and joys.

I remember what I retell or heck, I can even change it up.

Memories… serve them up on a platter.

Featured Image: Data Served on a Platter flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

404 Media is sizzling with coverage these days, with today’s spotlight where I spent much time 1987-1992, Arizona State University (though I di not think the 404 folks are zeroing in on the Geology department or whatever they call it now).

But holy chili peppers, ASU Atomic is hot like Phoenix asphalt in late June (I recall those TV station contests for food cooked / baked on automobile dashboards).

Arizona State University rolled out a platform called Atomic that creates AI-generated modules based on lectures taken from ASU faculty by cutting long videos down to very short clips then generating text and sections based on those clips. 

Faculty and scholars I spoke to whose lectures are included in Atomic are disturbed by their lectures being used in this way—as out-of-context, extremely short clips some cases—and several said they felt blindsided or angered by the launch. Most say they weren’t notified by the school and found out through word of mouth. And the testing I and others did on Atomic showed academically weak and even inaccurate content. Not only did ASU allegedly not communicate to its academic community that their lectures would be spliced up and cannibalized by an AI platform, but the resulting modules are just bad. 

https://www.404media.co/asu-atomic-ai-modules-arizona-state-university/

Through different mechanisms, and maybe “better” / “fancier” AI, it sounds to me not too far from the machination of Webinar TV that, without asking, grabs recordings your zoom recordings and as a ‘service” creates “podcasts” out of them. Or

It hardly seems much different, except ASU is “taking” the videos from its Canvas learning platforms.

And in a similar fashion, naturally, ASU profs are not quite excited about this “service”, which looks like right now you can only sign up for information, it’s i beta. I fished around as I do still have an ASU university ID, even an asu.edu email alias, but I could not find a way into Atomic.

Whether these things fly or fizzle, arent we seeing the rip the lid off of the box of Pandora precedent set by OpenAI et al, that “content” they can grab, regardless of any creators issues or interests, and is free game to churn through the GenAI sausage machines. Why? because they can?

Yet on the other side, you have to start thinking, or wondering, about the things we consider as “content”, fixed assets- books, courses, OERs, blog posts, they are all maybe going by the wayside, or they are just the raw material, for these new kind of entities.

That’s where David Wiley has been scratching out for a while, whether you like it or not, how GenAI rips apart the “traditional” conception of OER into something we are not all quite familiar with. Now the “book” on Pedagogy is a Promptbook.

Can’t say I like it, but who am I to get in the way of the train flying downhill? Who is driving this train?

Maybe I can get a customized on the fly set of videos plucked from lectured videos by ASU Atomic.

Our assembly engine recommends a custom learning module with content, practical assignments, and knowledge checks related to your goal. Atom can also update the module based on your feedback to the preview – before you buy.

https://atomic.asu.edu/ emphasis added by me

So let’s see if I understand Atomic energy – it hoovers video from different ASU courses without the knowledge of the professors who create and teach with them, wraps them in a package of a magical module, then sells them to customers.

How could I not miss the altruistic beauty of this machinery?

I would count on the dynamic duo of Phil and Amy over at Webinar TV beaming with pride. Atomic is a chip off the block.

Featured Image: ASU Atomic web page screenshot with an overlay of my photo I Really Gotta Get a New ASU Cap flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) along with the WebinarTV logo.

More spiral.

My sister’s card came timed exactly right offering wishes of mailing Baltimore steamed crabs. And I missed the call with my little big sister (will catch you tomorrow).

A perfect evening was ramen and sushi at Mitsu cafe in Moose Jaw with my darling Cori. Laughs and coffee and plans for camping and tree planting and just reveling in our portable universe. And then we got a surprise call, singing and talks of a summer visit from the Laramie cousins.

Also gifted today was a shot of cortisone in each wrist courtesy of Dr Hand and waiting now for Pain to take a vacation. What more does a person need?

I’d been pondering some kind of spreadsheet with a place to enter mine and my Dad’s birthdays so I could calculate for say for my age now how old was I when Dad was my current age, etc. I guess I should just vibe code it, but I refuse. I will mull the idea more before giving it a try. Or not.

I don’t know if there is a name for this number but now I have done the same number of solar revolutions as the 2 digit year I started.

The best gift is just being here to write and remember and make plans and keep on going, and for ***** sake be careful near cliff edges Jim and everyone else I care about.

I’m here to keep playing Twister, thanks Judy for this backyard memory. I spot dad observing from his lawn chair.

I’m here for me all the loops I can swing, here on this weird planet with my true love.

63 and out. Not.

Featured Image: 2014/365/18 Lunar Orbit flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

And it was more for the rich or cool kids who would travel all the way to the Poconos in Pennsylvania to ski, and return to wear for weeks their lift tickets dandling from coat zippers, like some kind of badge of honor. Compared to alpine peaks I’d later hike as an adult in Colorado, New Mexico, California, northern Arizone, the Poconos I bet were a pimple of a hill.

Snowshoes? That was something for movie characters like Jeremiah Johnson. Or cartoons, where te characters wore things strapped to their feet that looked more like extended tennis rackets.

But indeed, it was December 8, 2014 (exact date I know with the help of flickr) when I literally did strap them a pair of brand new red showshoes, during the 5 month stint I had as on a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC.

Noe here is where I lack notes or photo captions to fill in the memory gap. I thought maybe it was my friend Brian Lamb (who engineered the fellowship) who suggested getting a pair. Off I went to the local Canadian Tire store, what was for me a whole new cultural experience (and still has an aura) to buy an inexpensive pair of snowshoes, complete with matching telescoping poles.

I still own them.

I can guess from geolocation data on the first photo of the red snowshoes on snow a first outing was on the hill right next to the high rise residence hall I lived in. I do recall that over the next two months I dod remember getting in my truck and driving out to nearby places to tromp around in the snow. It fit my style to be out in the snow at a walking pace, not some race pace on downhill skis.

Then again, I will check my story again, because photos shpw a week later maybe I was snow shoeing with Jason Toal on Cypress Mountain in Vancouver, along with his friends dog, Bert.

Jason was then based at SFU but came out a few times to TRU, we hung out often, and I would bet he would have urged me to try snow shoeing. I had gone to Vancouver to spend holiday break with my cousin Jane and Jason invited me to try a walk up on Cypress Mountain.

The red shoes went home with me to Strawberry Arizona. I would drive the 20 minutes up Highway 260 to the top of the Mogollon Rim for treks into the Coconino National Forest. I remember once I got myself turned around on direction, not able to find the edge, and the only way I got back was tracing my own steps.

So yes, the red snow shoes were in the truck when I moved to Saskatchewan in 2018. The thing was, with all my outings (like a whopping 20 or so) they involved getting in the truck and driving to a place to start “shoeing”

This all changed when Cori and I bought our 16 acre rural property. We can literally, in winter, snowshoe out our back door. No cars needed. And indeed the “prairies are just all flat”, but the edging of our shelterbelt of caragana amd chokecherry shrubs, especially on the north side, captures a huge amount of snow.

In 2022 we had drifts maybe 18 feet high.

We ended up buying a matching pair of shoes (again from Canadian Tire), but the red ones are there for guests.

And just today, of all things in the last week of April, when thoughts are turning to gardening and tree planting and summer swimming, today, April 26, Cori and I went out our back door, strapped on our snoeshoes, for a walk around our own place.

I have no idea what that kid in the Baltimore burbs would have to say about this guy out there snowshoeing in Canada. He’d probably have something sarcastic to say.

These stories are the paths we go from and on.

Featured Image: New Shoes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license dated December 8, 2014 with a caption “I picked up some (inexpensive) snowshoes this weekend. Ready to give them a tromp”

So I standup, go downstairs. Stretch. Drink an unfinished pop left on the counter. Pop Alleve pills. Read news on the phone. Grab ice. Maybe I can sit on the couch in the right position for a few hours, even 1 of sleep.

Pain. It’s just part of complain.

I‘m writing this for no reason to read, but for me to note. I have spouted out posts I felt important. Interesting. To what end? It does feel good. So I am thinking of something new. Writing just notes of the mundane, to put more ticks on my timelined self. This, the start, maybe the end, of a new category of Life Notes.

I’m remembering a newspaper cartoon, one of those single pane New Yorker style ones (no not the “On the Internet nobody knows you are a dog”). This one was pretty much a line drawing, the curve of what would be a tropical beach. Two figures walk the beach, a male figure talking talking talking, and a female who’s line in the caption is something like “Frankly, Bob, I don’t find your medical ailments that fascinating.”

No web search ever found it, so I did my worst to sketch it out in 5 minutes.

I cant say why I needed it, but again, this is my blog, get off my lawn.

The Pain had disappeared so completely since the last doctor visit in December, it disappeared. It did not exist.

Until maybe 3 weeks ago. Slight, then intense, but pretty much every night it has woken me up. Throbbed during the day. It goes away mostly, but never completely. This time around its nearly always the right wrist, elbow.

The Pain is carpal tunnel. It first visited 12 or more years ago when I lived in Arizona. The likely suspect is all the time on the computer keyboard, my lousy posture, lack of proper typewriter skills. I think not. The first time it flared up, it was painting.

I had decided to paint my small bathroom. The day after I finished the job, I felt the shooting jabs in my elbow and the wrist pain. After a doctor visit, possibilities of nerve issues, and a visit to a specialist in Flagstaff for a nerve conduction test, that was the diagnosis.

Ok.

I returned and got a shot of cortisone. Pain went away almost instantly, and actually never returned.

I forgot about Pain.

But Pain followed me after my move to Canada, showing up again, maybe after some intense yard work with pick and shovel. Pain went to a doctor. Then Pain went to a hand specialist, who discussed either surgery or trying cortisone shots to relieve. I opted for the latter, and got another referral to a neurologist in Regina.

I call him Dr. Hand. The routine every few months is taping the electrodes to my wrist, upper arm, pressing a button that issue small shocks. We silently watch the squiggle on the screen. It’s nerve conduction. I can surmise the idea of measuring how fast electricity travels a lenght of nerve but cant sy for sure I understand. At the end, he presses a button, reads a report, and says something like, “It’s pretty bad on the right, do you want a shot?” I say yes, and even if the left is bad, he’s willing to give me shot in both. “Come back in six months.”

Dr Hand is quirky. Sometimes chatty, sometimes all business. He makes quiet jokes, asks me about work, shares just a bit of his last travel to India. One visit, after the shot, he returned with a large fruit, an Asian pear. He gave one to his staff, I had seen him handing them out while in the waiting room. I thought he was handing out chocolate, “I have an extra one, do you want it?” Why not.

Sometimes when Pain rears up early, I have been able to call the office and get to see Dr. Hand earlier. So 3 weeks ago, when Pain was stopping by every night, I called. The receptionist was able to slot me in April 27 from my scheduled appointment in June. It was still 2 weeks out, I called this week as my sleep has been terrible. I was able to go from 4:00PM on Monday to 9:30am.

Pain is not big Pain. Plenty of people deal with larger Pain. My Pain is more of the annoying, nagging, I’m gonna keep you up all night Pain so you can be a Zombie at work.

Pain, you came from Pain-ting and you have me inwardly ComP[l]ain-ing.

But come Monday, Dr Hand will slip in the magic shot, and we say Adios.

For a while.

Featured Image: Be Without It flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

This is a fascinating, legendary, and before it happened, likely improbable story. I leave it for the unfamiliar to revert that situation with its detailed Wikipedia summary. But this came forward again recently, with a BBC story of what was originally a stake into what could not be copyrighted into a huge legal implication for generative AI, This monkey selfie will protect you from AI slop.

If you read URLs you might notice that the original title would have been “The monkey selfie that predicted the ai age” (your slug is showing, BBC editors).

For you, all this means that anything you create, from photos to drawings and writing, carries a special legal protection that machines can’t claim. In a world of endless AI output, your creativity counts as something distinct. When AI helps you along the way, the rules aren’t clear.

These cases will keep coming, and the conversation will shift along with them. But the work you love still needs to be made by a person for now, and in part, you can thank an Indonesian monkey with a perfect smile.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age

Let’s give some credit to Naruto or Ella as the article suggests the exact monkey who took the photos is not certain, making the story that much more interesting.

All in all, this was something that whispered to my brain, which could have been doing something more productive, “This would make for a great Daily Create. Maybe something like a meme image?” I have trouble ignoring that call. I need help?

The photo credit in the BBC story seems to suggest the photographer who wanted to retain copyright still gets credit. Thus this becomes one of those rarer occasions for me I will reach for ChatGPT.

Now I proudly claim that I am amongst the worst (if there are ratings) or least proficient at so called “prompt engineering”. I do not want to be good at it! So I thought I might get some weird or cartoon style goofy image with this prompt (please ridicule my skills here).

Create a selfie style image graphic style of the full face of a black monkey with a huge grin on its face.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69e24015-6514-832b-b906-ac09b6cc9eb7

I had hope “graphic” style would get me something non-photographic style. I am sure someone will tell me the “right” way to do this. That’s not the point. By acting as a Lousy Prompter I am closer to what most ordinary people will toss in, not what some Prompt God does.

How interesting then, or maybe predictable, that ChatGPT would return something indistinguishable from the original photo.

I made this as a template image with this attribution for use in the Daily Create along with two examples.

Psss here is a secret, the most rewarding part of the Daily Create is actually creating them and seeing how people respond. You get to do one response as an example, and maybe di it again as a response when published! Truly Creating Daily Creates > Doing Daily Creates (and the latter ranks high)

All of this leads one to wonder about how the machines hoover up all that content, slice and dice it into those 256 dimensional arrays, yet style, with the barest simple of prompts, spit out something almost indistinguishable from the original? You’d have to be something lower on the chain of intelligent creatures, far below monkeys, to grant copyright to that stuff.

I definitely cannot weigh on research that suggests the LLM models include original content or if it is just what comes out of the wash in the largest averaging machine created.

As one more experiment, I wondered if the original could be re-spawned with the most simple of prompts to the ChatGPT image generator “monkey selfie”. Hmmm, no.

What if I bump one more word in the prompt to be “black monkey selfie”. Now that one likes like Naruto, eh?

I believe I have “monkeyed around” too much with this. Maybe someone else can find a 2-3 word prompt that returns something iconic, well known.

But also, look! I gave you now 4 full days to think of your own meme message for an AI Generated Monkey! Wednesday! Be there at https://daily.ds106.us/tdc5220

Featured Image: The two monkey meme images made with an AI generated image that cannot be copyrighted- DING DING public domain, atop a screen shot of a Google image search for “monkey face”