However, if this counts as being "taken by chickens" then it also implies that when a burglar triggers a motion-activated camera, the burglar owns the rights to the image.
The website claims they are, but the justification is fairly risible (perhaps intentionally):
> Are these chicken selfies?
> Yes. The chickens are using an input device (the motion sensor) to invoke a computer function (the capture method on the Pi), which invokes a series of events that results in the photo being taken, uploaded, and shared.
> This is identical to a human using an input device (tapping a button) to invoke a computer function (the post method on Instagram), which invokes a series of events that results in the photo being taken, uploaded, and shared.
Well, presumably, if it is your computer, running your program, using your equipment, you've got the copyright until your computer gains consciousness and a lawyer capable of filing a lawsuit.
The problem isn't really about using it yourself, it's that people don't need to ask your permission to use it, therefore you can't (easily) profit from it. Possibly quite annoying if you're in the AI business.
I admit I was being somewhat facesciuos. But clearly If you took credit for the work your computer did running your program, you would probably not get an argument from your computer until the conditions I mentioned were met
When it’s used like a tool, it’s considered the same as a chisel or a paint brush: the tool does not create the art, the artist makes the art by using the tool.
It’s when then computer creates the art itself that it becomes the artist
If one sets-up the devices to that chickens or a burglar activate them, that one still owns the pictures, even though the chickens technically took them.
But yeah, the the chickens or a burglar steals the cameras and activate them by their own programing, overriding whatever setting they had before, the camera owner won't own the copyright on the photos anymore.
In other words, it's not that easy to lose the copyrights. The burglar just activating the motion-trigger isn't enough.
Chickens are beautiful creatures worthy of at the least the respect we give to household pets. The unimaginable horror we put billions of them through on an ongoing basis, while dissonantly admiring their charm and brilliance, is a sobering realization.
I grew up on an organic, free-range poultry farm in the 70s. The current definition of "free range" supports up to 100 full grown birds per m^2. The treatment of battery hens and factory farmed poultry is an obscenity, in my opinion.
I don't think OP is really talking about the line between pet and food. There's something else going on here.
Think more about cows. Nice creatures. Live in the fields under the sun and that isn't horrific. We eat them. Maybe you had a pet cow? Ok that's fine. There's your pet/food line issue. Most omnivorous humans believe it is possible to treat them with respect in their lives and eat them. Others disagree, of course they do. That's also fine.
As a civilization, we don't treat chickens anything like that. We have factory farms that are utterly horrific, stomach-turning and detrimental to global health and we pretend we kind of pretend don't know that and don't talk about it much.
You don't have to be a vegetarian or keep chickens as pets or even particularly like chickens much (and I don't) to object to those horrors. Factory farms days are numbered. They are beyond what the consumers of factory farms can stomach. They are beyond what we should tolerate in their abuse of the commons of having effective antibiotics. They are nothing like what we think of as farms which are usually some approximation of the family farm. It is perfectly reasonable and defensible to be very proudly meat-eating and want effective reform here. In my experience most do lean that way when they find out what goes on in a shed full of caged chickens.
Yeah... it's hard to decide what's worse, the crammed cages of filth or tossing the rooster chicks into a chipper. Both are terrible fates. We're pretty awful creatures sometimes.
I noticed whole foods seems to have has labeling wrt how the chickens are raised. That said, aside from eggs the chickens are eaten in the end. (and I wonder about eggs, I've heard some are fertilized)
You should research what happens to "useless" male chicks born in the industry, as they don't produce eggs. Actually watch some videos of innocent animals being ground alive, screaming, because their existence doesn't make financial sense to humans. Wonder what label Whole Foods can assign to that.
I disagree. Chicken have been seen as food for the majority of our existence on this planet, not pets. That now we see them as pet as well talks about the complexity and capacity for contradiction and paradoxes of our culture and our minds. I accept that biologically I thrive on chicken meat yet I am intellectually capable of thinking chicken are very lovely animals. Humans are walking contradictions.
As much as many people try, there is often no simple black and white answer to humanity's most complex issues.
But often the black and white answer is the one that's printed on the slogan.
>I accept that biologically I thrive on chicken meat yet I am intellectually capable of thinking chicken are very lovely animals.
But today you have the capacity to biologically thrive equally as well without needing to eat chick en meat, so "lovely beings" are being slaughtered for no more than a few moments of sensory pleasure. A terrible price for such a lowly payoff.
No, I do not thrive on a meatless diet. I do not want to go into the particulars of my digestion and body, but it certainly isn't the diet for me.
In general my opinion is meatless diets are possible, but not as healthy as omnivore ones. Thus the complexity of the matter, whose answer is not that simple. That said, I honestly do not think this is the place for such a debate.
The science is anything but clear. And science is never final, especially dietary science, rife with subpar studies and economic lobbying.
One thing is certain: there is more money on the meatless bandwagon than outside of it.
Please let's agree to disagree, as I said this is not the place for such an argument and these days it's become like discussing our favourite football teams. I don't care for it.
Seeing that colorful jungle fowl reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend about pigeons and doves.
We consider doves to be an "elegant" bird, all white, used in religious imagery and magicians' tricks, and so on, while we consider pigeons to be a "dirty" bird, mostly known for scavenging food in cities, even though they're basically the same type of bird. People chase them around for fun.
But if someone had only ever seen white doves and suddenly saw a much more colorful version of the bird that we call pigeons, they'd probably consider it to be the more fanciful, impressive-looking bird.
Just because something is a lovely animal doesn't mean I won't put a round through it's heart and butcher it's corpse to sustain my life. Elk are beautiful animals, but I have no problem killing one and eating it. We are the greatest predator Nature has ever evolved and I can accept that. More's the pity others can't.
> Do you actually do this, or are you just virtue signaling? You never buy factory-farmed animal products from the store?
I grew up in a town in Mississippi of about 2000 people. Everyone hunts. My grandfather's best friend was a butcher with his own shop. Everyone around us had cows because most of the people around us were farmers. I now live in Fort Worth, or as it's affectionately known to its residents - Cowtown. I don't have to buy meat from the grocer because there's ranchers all around me. I can - and do - get sides of beef regularly.
I go hunting in Alaska with friends about twice a year, depending on what's happening with work and our schedules. One elk has a tremendous amount of meat.
> But it's not necessary for survival, so why would you?
So you don't eat anything? How are you still alive? I'm pretty sure eating is necessary for survival.
> Interesting thought. I wonder how great of predator you are faced with a lion, or even that elk, but disarmed of technology.
This is kind of a stupid thought. In fact, I would hope your friends would tell you that you're beneath this level of incredibly poor reasoning. We are the greatest predator because of our mastery of technology.
Chickens are indeed charming and beautiful. I own chickens and love them beyond comprehension. They are pretty dumb, and they will attack and abuse weaker chickens mercilessly.
I think when you say the photos are taken by chickens, I was imagining a chicken wearing a GoPro or something. These are motion-activated pictures from a stationary camera. They're still very cool though.
My thought too. When I saw it was just a home made camera trap I was a little deflated. Their claim that it is the same as human selfie because the chicken is "using" the motion sensor as an input device is a bit of a stretch. The pictures are fun though.
Their claim is also 100% wrong. The difference, of course, is intent. It's easy enough to ferret out the difference here: If you set up such a motion-triggered camera and a person walks through it, unknowingly resulting in a picture being taken, is it their picture?
A good reminder that one of the basic tenets of good wildlife photography is to photograph at eye level. So if you want to take a picture of your cat or dog, squat down to their level instead of pointing the camera downwards.
From my experience, pictures taken at the normal human viewing height look uninteresting because they're taken at an angle we're most familiar with, which doesn't have much novelty.
Photos taken at unfamiliar angles will present their objects in ways we're not used to seeing. Which makes them less familiar and more stimulating. Which is more interesting.
I think this is correct. I'm a drone photographer and when drones became popular, you could take a photo from 50m up looking directly down of something plain like a beach and people would lose their minds. As that has become more common, further variations seem to capture more attention. I take a lot of photos from 3-5 metres up because most people don't walk around with ladders.
A good general principle in almost any photography is that if you want pictures that are different from everyone else's, just get down a bit. Most people take shots at their eye level and don't even think to try a different angle
I don't know the theory but I find these chicken photos more aesthetic than photos of chickens taken from above. It might have something to do with looking your subject in the eye...
Depth of field, quite literally here! Here are some rules of thumb: If you increase depth of scene, you can use depth of field in two ways. In portraits, you can create greater subject separation because the closer focal point of chicken will be in focus, but the horizon line will be very blurred. Taken at human eye-level, most of the background of a chicken will be grass that's close-by, and therefore a similar blurriness (or 'bokeh'). That makes it harder to discern subject.
Secondly, if you open up the depth of field with a very deep scene, you create more possibilities for composition, framing or storytelling. Again, all you have at human eye level is chicken/grass. At chicken eye level, with a very deep focal range, you might also be able to tell the story of the chicken in 'the great outdoors', you may see mountains and forests on the horizon etc.
Aside from angle it's taken from, which in itself makes a difference,
this is also gives you a fighting chance to have the subject interact with you or your camera (or what it's hidden in) instead of having a very passive third party view.
This one for instance has near direct look into the camera, and there's no way you'd get that from human waist or eye level
https://chicken.photos/20220611121718
> Yes. The chickens are using an input device (the motion sensor) to invoke a computer function (the capture method on the Pi), which invokes a series of events that results in the photo being taken, uploaded, and shared.
> This is identical to a human using an input device (tapping a button) to invoke a computer function (the post method on Instagram), which invokes a series of events that results in the photo being taken, uploaded, and shared.
Is it really "identical" though? A human knows they're taking the selfie and sees the result. The chickens do not.
When I was kid I used to work summers on a family-owned free-range chicken farm. I remember being fascinated by the behavior of chickens. I also spent a lot of time figuring out if they could remember me, and some did remembered and where more keen on approaching, they were totally conditioned by the fact that I used to give them some different kind of grain food. They even made the trip to the house about 30 meters away, just these few ones. Of course they probably remembered the food but I was still happy with my accomplishments in the field of human/chicken colaboration.
After my wife convinced me to get chickens, I went from being ignorant and dismissive of chickens to loving having them in our backyard. It's impressive how distinctive their personalities are given the approx. 50 neurons they're working with in life.
It's like having toddler dinosaurs bumbling around and having little adventures for your entertainment.
I know you are probably kidding about the 50 neurons, but Red Junglefowl (what chickens are derived from) are working with 221 million neurons. Which isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but more than double the amount compared to a quail and about the same as a parrotlet or a brown rat.
Yes, they do have very clear personalities. We had one who was very curious about people, just very interested in following you and seeing what you do. It's probably food related motivation, but more than simply seeking a handout as most of them do. You could really see the gears turning in there.
This humorous children's short story comes to mind: Squabbling in the Vegatable Patch (it was an audiobook cassette tape). Contains lots of chicken antics revolving around exactly that.
you dont need bazillions of neurons to showcase complex behavior. also in humans a large part of our brain is to help us move on 2 legs and keep us balanced.
I'm assuming the whole thing is a joke, but if we want to play along with the pedantry, I would object on similar grounds:
A motion sensor is not an "input device," it is a sensory monitor with thresholds and triggers controlled by the architect of the system, not the thing being monitored. This is evidenced by the fact that several of the photos were triggered by something other than the chickens, such as a lawn mower.
If I create a system that drops paint on a canvas when the temperature reaches 80 degrees F, it would be nonsense to assert that the sun had painted a picture. I painted a picture, and the sun was one of the tools I used in place of a brush.
> A motion sensor is not an "input device," it is a sensory monitor with thresholds and triggers controlled by the architect of the system, not the thing being monitored.
Is a microphone an input device? Does it depend on whose voice is captured? Or whether the speaker knows their voice is being captured?
> it would be nonsense to assert that the sun had painted a picture.
The action of the Sun is the proximate cause of the dropping paint. It is not under your control (unlike a brush), and it is not deterministic (though perhaps it is somewhat predictable). The Sun has more control over the result than you do, but the Sun is predictable enough that you feel like you have control.
All this is aside from the argument that the Sun is the ultimate author of all creative works on Earth. Which of course it is!
Greetings, guys. You have quite an interesting experience in this. I think it's fun. To be honest, I haven't taken selfies at all in a long time, and no one really takes pictures of me. I'm probably so unattractive that it's time for me to install surveillance cameras at home so my great-grandchildren can see my photos or they won't know what I look like. But no kidding, besides the ajax security system I installed recently I should think about surveillance cameras not only for selfies but also for their own good and safety.
There's no evidence the chickens know they're taking a selfie, but that shouldn't stop you from imagining for fun that they might. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: perhaps chickens are not so vain as we are, and their reaction when taking the picture is cool nonchalance.
Yeah, you wouldn't put out a trail camera and say "look at the selfie this deer took!". I'm willing to grant the author a little slack though considering this seems pretty tongue in cheek
I have no idea what this sentence is trying to convey. Planning on using this to mint NFTs makes the purpose of this project financial gain, not some cutesy experiment.
If anything, the whole “our stack is so minimal!” angle serves as a signal to crypto dorks that minting NFTs for profit is an accessible possibility with minimal necessary buy-in.
This isn’t just a website with pictures of chickens. It is a for-profit advertisement for crypto with pictures of chickens.
I don't see any problem with people selling their work / art however they want. Looks like he's sold a few for $20~ each, that's a bit different to the dumb cartoon monkey fad.
IMO being completely anti-crypto is a waste of energy
That’s cool. I personally think going out of one’s way to defend crypto cash grabs dressed up as art projects is also a waste of energy. That being said, people that think it’s a good idea to mint NFTs are rarely concerned with the actual, literal problem of wasting energy.
It’s genuinely depressing that there are only two groups of people: HODLERS and haters. It won’t be a good six months or year or two years for people that bet their retirements, or houses, or savings on silly crypto shit. But sure! Let’s talk about people that chose not to participate in a scam, not those that did and had their lives ruined.
Was it haters that posted suicide hotline numbers in crypto reddits? or what
You're right that it is depressing how divided people are lately. Being more objective and less of a hater might help fix that.
It won't be a good 6 months for people that bet their retirements, or houses, or savings on the stock market either. Maybe they shouldn't have done that. They are both zero sum games. Both have scams. What's the difference?
I may be pro crypto with a long position, but I still told all those around me to be weary when they were all wanting to buy the peak. None of them were interested at all when BTC was at $4k. Human nature.
Just like it's human nature for the haters to jump out of the woodwork with "I told you so" every time the market wanes, which was my point. They loved it the last go round
Yeah I think the people that will become homeless because of this (if you ask people somewhat like yourself that admittedly have made money on crypto) “abstract macroeconomic phenomenon” of a “dip” or whatever would agree that they maybe should not have bet their houses on this gambling game.
Thank you for your insight that since you personally expect to make money, it’s all good despite the massive losses of regular people.
Yeah I absolutely agree that the ridiculous gambling phenomenon that has real life costs for many people and climate costs for everybody, even if in theory I could profit from it, is bad and grown adults shouldn’t put their money into it.
I further agree that these people whose lives have been ruined would not have incurred these consequences if there wasn’t such a big culture of speculators trying to legitimize online gambling with silly and misleading rhetoric.
>Do the chickens lay eggs?
>>Yes. They are the best fresh eggs you’ve ever tasted. They are available for $20 each. Pick up only.
Wow, some expensive eggs! Is it because these chickens are now celebrities? :)
Kidding aside, I just bought a box of 10 eggs today for 4 euros (~4,15USD) and thought that was a bit expensive. Also from free-range chicken.
I can find "egg prices around the world", but I can't find a single site where I can filter results by the size of eggs and type of chickens. Here's an idea for a really unneeded SaaS!
“We don’t want to do it, but if you are really going to pay this, we’ll make it happen.”
I was quoting some wood deck and lawn work this spring. I had four people come out to quote, and two gave me fuck off prices about 3-4x what I eventually paid.
EDIT: for reference on good eggs, I’ve found duck eggs to be superior to chicken eggs.
Fresh chicken eggs are da bomb. The egg whites cohere and do not spread out in a puddle. You might be buying organic eggs (or free range, or wot-evs) but if the whites are runny and spread out in the pan, the eggs are NOT fresh.
One thing that always stood out to me about fresh/real chicken eggs I got from my father was the color of the yolk. Much, much darker than store bought, though I don't know what even plays a role determining that.
Hoping to get a coop up later this year and start experimenting!
Yolk color is a function of xanthophyll in the diet. Backyard chickens tend to get food scraps that contain more xanthophyll than there is in commercial feed, which is why backyard eggs yolks tend to be more orange. If you want more orange in your yolks, you can feed your chickens stuff like marigolds or cooked carrots.
We'd feed birds crab shells every second day for a week or two. When the hard boiled eggs were cut open we'd have concentric red/orange rings in the yolk.
The color of the yolk depends on what the chickens eat; it doesn't really indicate anything about the nutritional content of the eggs. Supermarket "organic" eggs that have a dark yellow yolk might just mean that their chickens' diet included pigments that caused that. A true free-range chicken that had a more wild diet including insects and seeds other than wheat or corn will also tend to have eggs with a darker yolk.
>...though I don't know what even plays a role determining that.
Age is definitely one big factor. The longer they sit the lighter they get. But I suspect diet also plays a big role, and to a lesser extent, lifestyle/overall health
Oddly enough you don't want your eggs too fresh. I remember my grandmother saying that you can to keep them for a couple of days before eating - something about the texture of the white
Fans of J.S.G. Boggs used to try to collect both hand-drawn bills he made AND the item he bought with the bill. I see an opportunity here to collect both the NFT and the egg of the chicken in the picture.
Which is still expensive. I get my eggs from a farmer 30 miles out of town, and she only charges $8/dozen, and that includes delivering it to my doorman. But I only order when she's recently slaughtered another farm animal, to make it worth the trip for her.
There is a realization in your future that all the amazing internet things you've been yearning for are actually in a specific corner of crypto - the people, the projects, the culture, it's all there. It's alas sometimes hard to see from the outside, where one can easily be fooled into thinking that crypto is just the ape pictures and scams.
If the chickens are going to be in public, there is no expectation of privacy. I'd agree if the chickens were in their coop, and they were shooting a long lens through the windows we might be violating some privacy. However, running about in public like this is totally fine without releases
These photos are not taken by chicken, they are taken by camera with motion sensor, camera will take photo of anything, no matter whether chicken, thief, deer or squirell. Misleading title.
I was expecting I will see photos of chicken taken by chicken wearing GoPro, though dunno what would be trigger.
I feel like calling these photos "taken by a chicken" is fairly misleading. The photos are taken automatically when a chicken wanders in front of a motion detector.
To test the claim with a similar example, let's say I run a red light which triggers a red light cam to take a picture of me and my car. I don't think I can claim that I took that photo, or that it is a selfie.
no, let's support this line of thought. argue in court that the state has violated both the 4th amendment and copyright on your red light selfie. this could be incredible. next up, surveillance images and news media of political demonstrations
Yeah, the NFT nonsense really sours what is an otherwise amusing project. It's not enough to make something cool, we have to try an monetize it through an obvious ponzi scheme.
I don't get why people get so sour about NFTs. If you don't like them, then don't participate - just like the thousands of other things people do for fun or profit that you don't participate in. This example is just a text link on a few images - it's not even in your face or very noticeable, yet several comments here have already voiced their aversion
This kind of posturing is getting old. If you use electricity (and aren't running your own solar/wind farm), you're contributing to orders of magnitude more ecological destruction than a couple of crypto bros peddling NFTs.
Chicks retail at Tractor Supply for $4 for most breeds, with 6 chick minimums (at least where I'm at). That yields a minimum order of 6 chicks for $24.
The major costs of getting chickens are a coop, and if you're in a place with bears, an electric fence to keep the bears from destroying your coop and eating the chickens contained therein.
You might get lucky for a couple of years (we did), but now we have two fewer chickens and a cock-a-doodle-gulag around our coop.
If you don't already own a hatchet, you may as well get one up front. At some point you're bound to have to put one out of its misery. You may as well not make it wait while you make a trip to the hardware store.
The principle of "buy once, cry once" definitely applies to chicken feeders and waterers. The feeders that hold around 30 pounds of feed are vastly superior to the smaller ones and are worth the investment. The waterers that hold a 5 of gallons and fill via a screw top are similarly superior.
Also: chickens shit everywhere. Forget about carefree gambols through your yard once you have chickens.
I really don’t like NFTs, but I think it was a nice idea and website though. Would never buy the NFT, I could see myself buying a physical print though.
However, if this counts as being "taken by chickens" then it also implies that when a burglar triggers a motion-activated camera, the burglar owns the rights to the image.