QUESTION EVERYTHING

The Guy Who Gave Mona Lisa Her Background, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'

The Guy Who Gave Mona Lisa Her Background, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'
A billionaire asking personal questions, a repeat character who's now obsessed with HOAs, a very rude food delivery patron, a basketball player with a question about natural milk and another AI guy who needs to step away from the screen.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week's characters include the billionaire sports team owner Mark "Narc" Cuban, a person who should be banned from food delivery apps, a basketball player who wants to know if it's ok to drink human milk and an AI artist who's helping great artists from the past reinvent their canvas.

Also, if you're looking for a fun game, Cooper kept it simple with a list of things her "dream bf" would have. What would yours?



Monday

Mark Cuban

The character: Mark Cuban, billionaire, sports team owner, part-time policeman

The plot: Cuban is a Shark and owns the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team. His team didn't qualify for the playoffs this year, and that freed up time for him to tweet during game seven of the Heat and Celtic series (which the Heat won) with a "personal question" about pirated streams. "I'm curious how prevalent it is."

I'm a fan of Cuban's long-range effort, but TBH even a Twitter poll would've been received with more kindness.


The repercussion: Cuban is an online maverick (sorry), so I want to think he knew what he was getting into with that dumb tweet. There's nothing more to see here than a few good jokes whose punchline is worth $6.5 billion.


Adwait Patil



Monday

Nick Huber

The character: Nick Huber, the human LinkedIn, multiple-time OMC entrant

The plot: Nick Huber. Does that name ring a bell? Well, he's been here before β€” not once but twice β€” for being Mr. Obtuse, and he's back to complete a hattrick. He fired off a tweet about HOAs, and how he hates people who don't abide by the law.

"I'll never live in a neighborhood without the rules," he tweeted after posting a picture of someone's home (rude), that had an abundance of natural greenery around it.

I can understand being a stickler for gardening and a lawn, but going out of your way to tweet pictures of a home that's not yours, and comment on something that doesn't affect your life is entering the boxing arena without gloves, a mouth-guard and coach. You're inviting everyone to knock you out.


The repercussion: Huber's been here before, so you know how this went down.


Adwait Patil



Wednesday

Exavier Pope

The character: Exavier Pope, stickler for rules, big tattletale

The plot: Pope ordered an Uber Eats delivery and the driver got stuck and asked if Pope could transfer some money to them for gas, so they could complete the delivery.

Pope went on to call his behavior "harassment" for trying to reach him by calling five times, tweeted pictures of his name, license plate and their chat and wasn't short of saying he was going to call the cops.

Now look, is this an annoying thing that happened to Pope? Heck yes, and I would be pissed as hell too. But Pope's reaction was bereft of any compassion, not even the slightest.


The repercussion: If there's one thing Twitter is going to do without fail, it's turn into one big hater on a person who unreasonably hates. Pope had no good reason to share that incident and netizens responded with the same energy to tell him how he was being a dunce.


Adwait Patil



Tuesday

Josh Hart

The character: Josh Hart, pro basketball player, man curious about trying breast milk

The plot: Wednesday, Josh Hart of the New York Knicks turned to Twitter with a burning question:

Sure, it’s a random thing to ask, and Hart gives absolutely zero context for why he’s asking it, but there are weirder things a person could do than try their partner's breast milk. Like, oh, I don’t know β€” regularly consume the breast milk of an entirely different species, maybe? (Yes, I am a vegan.)


The repercussion: Twitter's general response to Hart's question can be summarized as: WTF?


Darcy Jimenez



Friday

Kody Young

The character: Kody Young, AI guy, man who gave Mona Lisa a bigger background

The plot: The Mona Lisa by Da Vinci. The front cover album of β€œAbbey Road” by The Beatles. β€œThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly” by Sergio Leone. What do all of these works of art have in common? AI is trying to ruin them by "improving" them.

Kody Young, some sort of AI power user, decided to take things into his own hands and expand the horizons of art history using computers and software. He plugged into Adobe Firefly and asked it to "help fill out the background" on some famous paintings.

People keep using AI to zoom out of images and stills to see more of what is missing, even though the artist intentionally picked that framing. It's called mise en scene folks, look it up. Colloquially known as, "hey, stop misinterpreting my creative vision."


The repercussion: The AI bubble is slowly losing steam, but this one did break a lot of people, and it's easy to understand why. No one asked for this, and the people rightly tried to put an end to this plague.

So many of these popped up and people were just not having it. Clowning on the AI, questioning what the point was, and pointing out how completely against the ethics and morals of the artists it is to even do this. It's beyond adding color to black-and-white cinema, it's destroying the artist's intent, and is downright anti-human to think robots could do art better than people. Since, you know, art is about the human condition and an AI cannot have that perspective since right now it's just mimicking what we've already done but worse.


Jared Russo



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Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included a writer who wants us to be friends with machines, a very unfriendly neighbor, a Twitter post that should have been vetted better and a comment on relationship age gaps that took Twitter by storm.

Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

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