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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


What AI thinks Thanksgiving looked like

The first Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris
The first Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris

Doug Ross did something truly fascinating today, to mark Thanksgiving:

“Please create a detailed painting of the first Thanksgiving in America”.

That was the prompt I gave ten of the most popular image-generating AI models. Let’s compare. And throw your reactions in the comments. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

#1 – Nano-Banana-Pro (Google):
#2 – GPT-Image-1 (OpenAI):
#3 – Imagen-4-Ultra (Google):
#4 – FLUX-2-Flex (Black Forest Labs):
#5 – Dreamina-3.1 (ByteDance – China):
#6 – Ideogram-v3 (FAL):
#7 – Qwen-Image-20B (China):
#8 – Amazon-Nova-Canvas (AWS):
#9 – Phoenix-1.0 (Leonardo Ai):
#10 – Flux-Kontext-Max (Black Forest Labs):

Go to the link and check them out. None of them are great art. All illustrate the vapidness of AI and its inability to be truly creative (all basically copy older paintings like Ferris’s to the right). But each tells you something about its AI. For example, though some of these AIs (Google’s) have largely corrected the DEI aspects of their AI, that insisted on making every Founding Father black, they haven’t all gotten it right.

Enjoy! This is one entertaining way to spend a few minutes on Thanksgiving while you wait for the turkey to cook.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • GeorgeC

    Number 2 is strange, looking like a scene of tribute being served to several men wearing turban headwear.. Not Pilgrim, not native American.

  • Dick Eagleson

    George C,

    Actually, compared to numbers 5 through 8, number two looks almost reasonable. At least number 2 has one pretty readily-identifiable American Indian in-frame. Numbers 5 – 8, not so much.

    The two items of PRC origin, 5 and 7, are the ones widest of the mark. Neither contains any readily identifiable Pilgrims or American Indians. Both look like uni-ethnic gatherings of late-Medieval or Early-Renaissance European peasants, number 5 from the Caucasus or perhaps the Eurasian steppe and number 7 from somewhere in Mittle-Europa.

    The food is ahistoric too, pretty much across the board. The corn looks like giant present-day hybrid types and the turkeys are also modern selectively-bred birds and not the much smaller and scrawnier wild birds of the actual era. And I have no idea what that main course in number 7 is. It is certainly no turkey. A giant bread loaf of some kind perhaps?

    As has proven frequently the case in recent years, these AI-generated tableaux prove that, while actual artificial intelligence still eludes us, the supply of artificial stupidity/cluelessness is very much in oversupply.

  • Jeff Wright

    No celebration here…I’ll be at work. Apart from distant relatives, all my people are dead.

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