Our first observation about her behavior: She’s very curious. Her neck can extend out several inches, and she has a bubblegum pink tongue that pokes out when she’s chowing down. Dotty is about a foot (30 centimeters) long, with scrappy legs made for digging. We met with Wolf on a recent sun-baked Arizona day when we picked up our desert tortoise, now named Dotty for the light brown spots on her shell. “And then they have 15 of them roaming their backyard.” They start out so small and then people don’t realize how big they get,” she said. “People are still breeding them in captivity. Tegan Wolf, who runs Arizona’s adoption program, says there are roughly 200 tortoises at her center, and about 150 of them are babies. So finding a reputable group to adopt from is important. The reptile pet trade can be fraught, with poaching a particular concern for certain turtles. Add to that a 50-plus-year lifespan and the result is hundreds of tortoises surrendered to the state every year. And backyard breeding, which is now illegal in Arizona, means more baby tortoises than adoptive families.

It’s unsafe for captive tortoises to be released into the wild, because they can spread diseases to dwindling native populations. So why does the Arizona Fish and Game Department have an adoption program? Because of the problem of overbreeding. “The funny thing about tortoises is they love people, but they don’t love each other,” said Sherri Graves of the nonprofit Tortoise Group, which helps people adopt and rehome tortoises. And you don’t need a second tortoise to keep your pet company. They also don’t need water daily, since they’re well-adapted to their desert homes. It wakes up in the spring and they have a brand-new pet,” she quips.ĭesert tortoises are herbivores and munch on Bermuda grass, weeds and many native plants. “The tortoise is awake, they play with it, they get tired of it, it goes to sleep. Human-made burrows can be built out of large PVC pipes, plastic garbage cans or some cinderblocks with WonderBoard as the roof.įor families with kids, there’s an extra benefit of the brumation process, says Lynda Misiak, who administers the desert tortoise permit process in California. They need a cozy den to keep them safe and warm. Tortoises sleep through the winter, a process known as brumation in the reptile world.

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However, it is an interesting example of how quickly AI continues to develop. With the DragGAN tool still being a demo for now, there is no telling what the quality of a readily available technology would be, or if it would even be possible, especially since the demos are based on low-resolution videos. However, you cannot edit the AI-generated image. For example, Microsoft’s Designer app allows you to generate AI images from a text prompt, and you can select your favorite from three results, then take it to the design studio where you can create a host of creativity and productivity-based projects, such as social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, or graphics with the image as the focal point. However, most do not go as far as allowing for the actual editing of images, but rather for aspects such as editing around images. There are many brands that are attempting to offer editing options for generative AI content. “Our approach can hallucinate occluded content, like the teeth inside a lion’s mouth, and can deform following the object’s rigidity, like the bending of a horse leg.”

The research team noted in its paper that new details can be added within the regeneration of the edited aspects of images that are beneficial to the update. With many AI tools currently available, users have to regenerate an image with a more specific prompt to get a more desirable result. Some demos that are a part of the research paper include adding height to a mountain, changing the positioning of a model and editing the length and shape of her clothes, opening or closing a lion’s mouth, and changing a person’s face from a plain look to a smile. So you can go back in afterward and make edits to an existing image, instead of automatically having to generate a new image. The potential of such a tool lies in the fact that text-to-image generative AI doesn’t always output what you might want. The Verge compared DragGAN to the Warp tool in Photoshop, adding that it is much more powerful since it doesn’t “smush pixels around,” but rather “re-generates the underlying object,” and can even rotate 3D images.

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