There’s a photo of my Momma when she was a kid in a bathing suit. We’ve always made fun of the size of her feet. It’s a black and white photo that’s not only crooked, but also fuzzy.
I asked ChatGPT to straighten, colorize, and clarify the features.
It did a GREAT job!
While ChatGPT is great for images, Grok excels in video.
I head over to Grok to have AI create a video of my Momma from that colorized photo that was taken when she was maybe 8 or 9 years old in the 1930’s. Grok kicked it back saying it was rejected because of their content policy, and added something about suitable for ages 18+. 🙄
I tried uploading the black and white image and it was just fine. When I asked Grok to do the same thing ChatGPT did before the animation, it was awful. It was so bad that I didn’t even ask Grok to animate it. It does ok on cartoonish images (like the one from our recent family gathering), just not “real” photos.
But video clips are a different story if you start with a decent photo to begin with. The results can be pretty darned good… or at least funny. 😉
How often do you fall into the AI rabbit hole insofar as images & video?
I don’t fall in that often, but when I do it sure takes a long time for me to get out. 🙂
Now you know: 1940s–1950s — Color photography became more available to regular consumers, though black-and-white was still cheaper and more common. 1960s–1970s — Color photos largely overtook black-and-white for family snapshots and everyday use.
While I’ve never been a huge Facebook fan, the number of times I visit to scroll through posts has rapidly declined. I popped on this morning and was served up prom photos from people I don’t know — and who aren’t even friends of my friends. It’s bad enough that the percentage of ads shown has skyrocketed, now I get tons of recommended garbage thrown in there too.
People you follow VS everything else
So here’s how Facebook works now — these are approximated percentages that vary slightly according to your location and ad load testing — according to Grok:
15-17% pure ads
55-60% from unconnected sources (recommended by algorithm)
About 25% connected content
Facebook/Meta’s shift (heavily ramped up in recent years) means your friends list matters less than what AI thinks you’ll engage with. Organic reach for Pages — like for business — is dismal (often 1-6% of followers), so even followed content rarely shows up reliably.
Even popping on once a week is more than I can stomach.
The only thing I found interesting on my feed this morning was shared by Indiana State Rep, Jim Lucas. I don’t follow Jim Lucas, y’all. I have zero interest in anything that Jim Lucas has to say… EXCEPT this one shared image:
Sort of makes ya wonder how Facebook’s AI knew I’d been talking about property taxes, doesn’t it?
How’s your current Facebook/META experience?
Now you know: The Y chromosome can disappear with age. About 35% of men aged 70 years old are missing a Y chromosome in some of their cells, with the degree of loss ranging between 4% and 70%.
I have an account on X but I don’t follow anyone I know… not even my favorite brother. I’ve never posted a solitary thing. Although I don’t get to see what my classmate’s grandkids are doing like on Facebook, I get a whole lot of information there. I follow all the major media news sources and more.
It’s not often that Indiana comes up, but last night was different.
CNN’s headline, “Trump seeks revenge by ousting Indiana Republicans Who Defied Him,” goes on to say, “Republicans who have served for nearly 20 years, each one of them who lost, voted against the President’s redistricting plan last December.“
Other headlines read, “Bloodbath in Indiana: Trump-Endorsed Candidates Winning in LANDSLIDES.” Republican State Senators who refused to redistrict are losing in Indiana. Only SD 23 is a toss up.
The top trending topic on X now is titled, “Trump-Backed Challengers Topple Indiana Senate Incumbents in Primaries.” Even Google has “Indiana primary election 2026” trending.
Hugo likely knows more about the redistricting push than I do.
From my limited knowledge on the subject, redistricting is the process of redrawing district boundaries to reflect population changes. It’s usually done every 10 years after the census, and Indiana’s current maps were done in 2021. Indiana was the first Republican-led state to reject the mid-decade redistricting push, and that was a pretty big deal.
Districts 1 and 7 are the two Democratic-held seats
I can understand why more than 1/2 of the 40-member GOP Senate caucus voted against it.
If you’re a Hoosier — and even if you’re not — do you have an opinion?
Now you know: Only one dog has been to both the North and South poles: Bothie, owned by explorers Ranulph & Ginnie Fiennes. And since dogs are now banned from Antartica, it’s likely the feat will never be repeated.
I recently read claims by a high-profile Internet personality saying AI is regurgitating information about her that simply isn’t true. She has proof the data is untrue — and screenshots of an AI chatbot confirming the lie. If what she’s saying is true, it’s not unreasonable for her to want it stopped because it’s hurting her reputation.
To verify her claims, I asked Grok.
Come to find out, it IS possible for AI to output information that could qualify as defamatory even in the legal sense of the term. Large language models are trained on massive, imperfect datasets to begin with, then there are also other urgent safety concerns:
Data poisoning is a thing — there are coordinated efforts to flood public sources with false information.
There are state-linked (think Russia and China here) troll farms — they just churn out BS to manipulate the public all day every day.
Oh, and they use AI to manage their efforts!
A recent report published in the journal Science on March 26, 2026, by researchers at Stanford University found that AI chatbots are excessively agreeable and “sycophantic,” often validating user behavior even when it is harmful, unethical, or illegal. (Article is here if you want to read it.)
even pre-AI, tech challenges were hard to “fix”
100 years or so ago, someone stole my information to join dating sites… a BUNCH of dating sites. I contacted the cyber crimes division of the Indiana State Police, the person was eventually tracked down, and she was local to my small hometown. But in the meantime, I couldn’t cancel the accounts — it wasn’t me so I didn’t know the passwords — and it took FOREVER to rectify.
It’s not like you can pick up the phone and say, “Hey Internet App, fix this mistake.”
Crazy, but I never did find out WHY she did it. She didn’t do it to get MY inbox filled as a malicious act — so WHY? She’s younger than me, prettier than I am by far, and although I knew of her, we weren’t even acquaintances really. The only thing I have better are my amazing hound dogs — and even they weren’t around back when this happened.
Fast forward to today and this person is now my friend on Facebook. No charges were filed by the ISP so I wonder if she knows I know.
Now you know: A 2017 Freedom House report found 30 governments using “keyboard armies” for propaganda and harassment.
Have you heard of the Wonder-Boy X-100? Maybe you know it by a different name — the “Comfort Lawn Mower” or “Power Mower of the Future”? No?
Check it out…
The above is a real photo that appeared in Mechanix Illustrated magazine in March 1958. This mower of the future — with air-cooled luxury — was introduced by Simplicity Manufacturing Co. in 1957 as a futuristic prototype.
Wonder BOY — Lazy MAN…
I guess back in the day (before I was born, I might add), women didn’t mow grass. All that outside work was much too manly for the lady of the house. The Wonder-Boy (before being politically correct was a thing, obviously), featured a large clear plastic bubble dome — about 5 feet in diameter — over an air-foam-cushioned seat on a rear-engine riding mower, meant to evoke space-age luxury and keep the operator clean and comfortable.
The dome was never mass produced.
Maybe if it would have been, I wouldn’t be riding a mower in 2026! 😉
And the puppies wouldn’t be required to patiently wait for me to finish…
Now you know: Michael Corke, a Chicago man with fatal insomnia, was so sleep-deprived that he was fully awake for 6 months before he passed away in 1993. He was 42 years old.
