I had a play yesterday with AI-generated art, but I very quickly got confused and concerned about, well, everything really. Within an hour or so of publishing them, I took the images down of the covers I’d created. (In case first you saw them and then you didn’t.) I’m married to an artist, he has a paid subscription to Adobe and I have a paid subscription to CanvaPro. Between us we should be able to source or create suitable images.
A few weeks ago I had a play with ChatGPT. It was a very quick play and I soon deleted it all as I suspected it keeps everything you ask for somewhere and no doubt stores the results as well. I won’t be playing with ChatGPT again and I won’t be feeding my own writing through it for a grammar or readability check. That’s what editors and beta readers are for.
I don’t think AI is going anywhere and I think it will get much better than it already is. But I also think it needs to be regulated.
I’m slowly learning how to do everything in Affinity. I already have the bookazine cover on there, the Monkey Dust posters, and a 5½” x 8½” book cover. Every time I come to something I don’t know how to do, I go and learn how to do it and hopefully remember it next time. I’ll still use Canva for basic design, then try and replicate it in Affinity. And I’ll still use everything within Canva that I can’t do in Affinity.
The Mac is causing me a few issues. For example, my inverted commas/speechmarks (“ “) are where the at sign (@) should be and vice versa, and I have no idea where my Alt keys are for Unicode special characters. Everywhere says ‘Use the Emoji and Special Characters option’, but all that does is bring up a load of smileys.
I don’t want smileys, I want smart fractions, en- and em-dashes, etc, and I don’t know where they are without copying and pasting them from somewhere. I used to know the keystrokes but now things like F11 don’t launch me into composition mode in Scrivener but push everything off my desktop, END used to take me to the end of a sentence. Now it takes me to the bottom of a document. And the Alt key doesn’t work.
And I don’t know how to turn off smart quotes! (Sigh!) I’m sure it’s all there somewhere, but I haven’t found half of it yet and it’s very annoying and time-consuming.
In other news, the pdf of the magazine is up for newsletter subscribers now, although I don’t know how to make it downloadable. And…(Fanfare!) Probate is finally completed! Yay!
Short and sweet today. I have a lot to do and I’ve been writing ‘today’s’ post ‘today’ instead of writing it as I go along ‘yesterday’, so I need to get back into that.
Today’s image is courtesy of DepositPhotos.
yeah, the keyboard shortcuts are a little different, and it’s hard to switch back and forth between the two systems.
There used to be a way to get the list through the help function with “keyboard shortcuts” and then save/print it. I don’t know if they kept it for the newer models.
It took me a month to switch from PC to Mac and feel comfortable. Once I did, I loved it, but there are weird little things that are different that suddenly come up and are annoying A.F.
I now also find that I can’t just not write to files stored on my external hard drive, I can’t back anything up to it either without erasing and reformatting. And I can’t reformat any of my memory sticks either! I might have to temporarily use the MacbookAir…