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I had a few requests to repost this as its own rebloggable post, so here you go. The original person I was responding to deactivated their reblogs, presumably because they got a lot of unpleasantness in the notes. This is practising healthy online boundaries, and I'd appreciate it if people don't give them any sh** for it.

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Hm, there are at least three major problems to consider, I think. This is going to be a bit long, so bear with me, but I promise that I will not at any point argue in favor of copyright, argue on the grounds of human ability, and I will not at any point appeal to concepts of "soul" or "spirit."

1: Environmental impact

It's fairly well documented at this point that the sheer power requirements to run AI data centers and computation have caused the major tech companies betting the farm on this technology to invest in a huge expansion of data centers, which in turn both require huge amounts of additional power (which tends to be drawn from fossil fuel sources) and huge amounts of water for cooling.

For reasons unrelated to AI as a technology as such, but related to the capitalist mode of production which produces "AI" as a product and service, the burdens and costs of creating this new infrastructure falls disproportionately on the poor, the marginalized and upon the global south, as it always does. It is of course to be noted that these tech companies are likely to also be using generative AI as an excuse to backslide on their environmental commitments and massively expand their infrastructure with government and venture capital money, but generative AI is a not-insignificant part of the problem.

2: Economic impact

The primary stated purpose of generative AI as a business is to replace workers. It is a form of automation, and generative AI specifically targets jobs requiring language and visual media skills - whether that be translation, copywriting, creative writing, coding, drawing, painting or graphic design, or any of a thousand other related skills.

The express purpose of adopting the technology widely is to replace hundreds of thousands of workers, who upon losing their jobs will be thrust into precarity, and the industries affected will experience an enormous downwards pressure on wages and an enormous negative impact on processes of unionization and collective bargaining.

One might argue that this is a problem of capitalism more than a problem of generative AI as a technology, which, okay, sure, but capitalism is the system we live under and the value and ethical status of any technology is always evaluated in the context of the system that deploys it. If we lived under Luxury Gay Space Communism, I am sure I would feel different about generative AI; but we don't, so I judge it accordingly. Under the capitalist economic mode of production, generative AI is a fundamental threat to the economic and social well-being of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of workers in hundreds of fields of labor.

3: Freedom of expression

Generative AI as a tool imposes harsh restrictions on freedom of expression, and in a worst-case scenario (i.e. the exact scenario that the developers of these AI tools are trying to make happen), will put huge swaths of artistic expression under the control and economic exploitation of enormous corporations unaccountable to any democratic power.

No generative AI tool can generate any output except that which is allowed for

by its programming as defined by its owners and creators

by its dataset, which must be built and maintained by an organized group

With every single major generative model currently firmly under the control of corporate or national interests, those groups have the ability to exert profound control over which outputs are or are not possible from the most powerful and most capable AI models. The Chinese DeepSeek model, for example, will refuse to answer questions about Tianamen Square, and similar censorship can and will be implemented by other state actors when it suits their purposes.

No generative model can output a picture of a motorcycle unless the database for the model is trained on pictures of motorcycles, and even if it IS trained on pictures of motorcycles, it can and will only ever output motorcycles identical to whatever necessarily limited set of motorcycles are represented in its data. And if a corporation (or government) decides that a model is not allowed to output images of motorcycles, they can implement profound censorship of the concept of motorcycles in their models.

Replace "motorcycle" with "sexual education material," "political literature" or "information about or depictions of queer people or minorities" and you start to see the problem.

One might argue that "users would simply circumvent that restriction," but to say so is to miss the point entirely: savvy power users with an agenda would circumvent the system. Your grandma using the system casually would not, especially if (or when) circumventing the system is made illegal.

Similarly, one might argue that a band of dedicated, democratically minded individuals could simply band together to train and create their own independent models, free of all censorship - but again, the ability to access the infrastructure necessary to build such a project would be contingent on the assent of either corporations or national governments, and both of those groups would inevitably see a completely unbound, democratically governed AI infrastructure as a direct competitor or a political threat, and act accordingly.

Generative AI, logistically and structurally, is a tool of expression which is privileges power. Whoever holds power in a given society has undue ability to influence what it is possible to express via generative AI and who has access to the ability to express it.

Generative AI has been magnanimously made available for "free" thus far, by speculative corporations backed by oceans of venture capital, but they are all expected to turn a profit at some point, and once those screws come down, not only will they silo and closed-source their technology, they will aggressively pursue hostile action towards competitors, and limit access to their Revolutionary™ technology to whoever is most able to either pay or coerce access through force.

In short, whoever has the most money or political power will have access to the greatest degree of freedom of expression from generative AI.

3b: Freedom of expression on the purely aesthetic level

This is a less important objection than point 3 above, but it also needs to be noted that generative AI as a technology is fundamentally based upon and limited by probability.

That is to say, when you prompt a generative AI model to generate a given output, the fundamental nature of the math it uses is a probabilistic attempt to approximate an acceptable answer.

In oversimplified terms, if you ask it for a picture of a motorcycle, it will attempt to output a semi-randomized mixture of all its data which is tagged with "motorcycle," weighted against training data and a history of user feedback, in order to probabilistically arrive at whatever output it calculates the end user is most likely to accept and validate as a "correct" output.

This has some consequences, specifically that generative AI is fundamentally bound as a technology to always and forever regress to the mean. It will always and forever default to and privilege lowest common denominators.

Thus, one of the things generative AI tends to have a lot of trouble with is ugliness. It struggles to generate images which do not conform to dominant standards of beauty and desirability. And I mean this not just in terms of human beauty and desirability, but beauty and desirability across all forms of expression. Generative AI severely struggles to output an ugly landscape image, for example. It struggles to output pictures of kittens that are not cute, it struggles to output pictures of Ferraris that don't look gorgeous or swords that don't look cool. It also struggles to output images of people along the same lines.

The first part of the problem is that the vast, overwhelming amount of input of images bias towards the aesthetically pleasing (because most images that get preserved and uploaded of anything bias towards the aesthetically pleasing). The second part is that, the vast, overwhelming amount of desired and validated outputs also bias towards the aesthetically pleasing, because that is what most users most of the time will inevitably and statistically want and prefer.

Because the vast, overwhelming majority of the model's feedback from users will validate and confirm the correctness of outputs that bias beauty and appeal, models will always be statistically required to generate outputs towards that standard.

The result is that generative AI is, technologically and irrevocably, bound to bias towards and reproduce the lowest common denominator, and it uncritically inherits every single cultural bias of the dominant culture that produces and uses it. Usually this means biases in favor of beauty and appeal, and biases against whatever is considered ugly or undesirable in a culture.

Even if you are the sort of profoundly shallow and unimaginative person who believes that "nobody would ever WANT images that aren't beautiful and appealing," you have to concede that any tool which does not allow you full and equal freedom to depict the ugly and the unconventional is imposing a severe restriction of the freedom of expression of its users.

In conclusion: generative AI is defined by mounting and catastrophic social, economic and environmental costs, and fundamentally and structurally biased in favor of power and capital. Even in the very best-case possible scenario in which all economic and political problems with the technology are solved, its fundamental nature is to regress to the mean and privilege the lowest common denominator, imposing inherent restrictions on freedom of expression. None of these problems are shared by a pencil, or by a typewriter.

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... Hey Kris, watch this.

Susie is voiced by @notnathalie and Kris is voiced by @randomjamj !! (Thank you to you both for providing such great voice acting again and on super short notice 😭🙏 aaa)

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new animation, this time deltarune!! i love this game so dearly, so this was super fun to make! :]

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A few dumb ideas I had for a bit hehe

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A Quick Visual Explanation of Deltarune's "Triple Trucies" Theory.

Plus my guess on what shape it would take if proven true, I guess.

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what a beautiful wedding!

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i swear to god chatgbt "therapy" is going to be my actual breaking point

"god forbid people need 24/7 access to therapy to-"

THAT'S NOT THERAPY

THAT IS A PROGRAM DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

IT CANNOT PROVIDE YOU WITH THERAPY

*UNEARTHLY SCREECH OF DESPAIR*

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queenie beanie and etc

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Ideas.

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animated a krusie moment... can't believe this is a real scene that happens

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Man, this is such an interesting exchange, cause, like… in most stories, when a character says they'd like things to go on forever, that they want something eternal, they're pretty much setting themselves up for a very rude awakening. You know, nothing lasts forever, sometimes you have to learn how to let go, sometimes you need to move on. I mean, that's one of the core themes of Undertale.

Flowey/Asriel's whole motivation in the Pacifist Route is to make the Game go on forever, to put the ending eternally out of reach, to trap Frisk in an infinite time loop because he just can't move on from Chara's death.

Part of the narrative is that if the Player RESETs a Pacifist Route then they are no better than he was, since now they are also yanking everyone away from their Happy Ending so that we can play with them again, because we can't accept the game has Ended. The Murder Route is less focused on that whole theme but you replay it over and over again Chara will basically call you a weirdo for your obsessive clinginess to this world.

Part of Undertale's themes is the importance of an Ending to a story. A True Pacifist Player's true and final act of selflessness is to let go of their desire have things keep going for forever, to give up on Eternity… for the sake of the happiness of every other character in this world, for the sake of their Happy Ending.

On the other hand, as a Wise Dog once said…

Both Undertale and Deltarune love exploring the ways in which the world of a game is different or similar to the real world, how the perspective of a Player is so different from the perspective of an actual character living in this world and... Real Life doesn't have a clear set ending.

The Player is the only one from whom the story just ended. Everyone else just kept living their stories of friendship together, although they probably never experienced something as high-stakes as the events of 'Undertale' ever again. And... when endings do seem to come, they're not going to be as clear-cut and satisfying and clearly communicated as the Game Ending is to the Player.

…But on the other other hand, it is still true that some things in life do end and we do have to accept that. Like… you know, the most famous Ending in life… is Death.

Gerson hears Susie talk about how she wants things to go on forever, but he already decided he has no interest in Eternity himself. He knows that the Three Heroes are here to seal the Fountains that revived him, he knows that when they succeed he'd go back to being a dust-covered hammer, probably never to be revived again and… he's perfectly at peace with that. He's an old man who died from natural causes, he had a long, full and satisfying life, he already had his ending. What's happening now is some weird glorified epilogue, but he knows it will end soon. And that's fine by him, because the time for his story has ended.

He does have one major regret in life, his failure to properly support his son's writing, and he spends all of the time the Dark has given him to try and make up for it. But it's really just a matter of asking Susie to deliver his message. He doesn't try to maintain or expand the Dark World so he could make up for his mistakes or try to pull Alvin in so he could meet him again or find a way to come back to life in the Light World somehow… I wonder if Someone was expecting him to do something like that and that's why they tried to give him that Shadow Crystal, but we all know that didn't work

In a way… we've already seen Susie's rude awakening for her desire for a 'forever'. She formed such a powerful bond with "the Old Man", she definitely would've wanted their time together to last longer, to last as long as it could, to last forever. But that's not possible.

And even his appearance in the Third Sanctuary was kind of a surprise stroke of luck that shouldn't be taken for granted.

The whole point of the Second Sanctuary is that Susie realized that Gerson was dead in the Light World, and trying to cope with this idea, went straight to a kind of denial.

Well, she can just pop over to the Dark World and, like, ask him what the Door Code is, right? No big deal! I mean, it's not exactly like Susie and Kris were really at a dead-end, there were plenty of areas in the Church they haven't checked thoroughly at all (not just the Fire Extinguisher)…

It wasn't because she HAD to do it for the Door Code, it's because she had to do it to reassure herself that her new friend isn't really gone, that maybe he'll be there waiting for her in his study if she just High-Key Stab Reality and Unleash the Flow of Pure Darkness Energy…

But it wasn't that simple. At best you can say his appearance in the Third Sanctuary means that he can manifest in any Church Dark World created by the Knight… but seeing how Susie's whole goal at the moment is to stop the Knight from making more Dark Fountains, that's not exactly increasing her chances to see the Old Man again.

When they go to seal the Fountain, Susie muses about her 'stupid dream' that things will just… stay the same. That she'll keep having fun Dark World adventures with her friends through eternity. But she knows that although Kris fully understands her, that's not what's going to happen. It's both about how the stakes and seriousness of the story have been so overtly raised for her, the Knight and the Titans aren't just an ominous background detail. She has fought them both. But it's also because she is already experiencing an Ending right now. She knows that when Kris seals this Fountain, she will probably never see Gerson again.

…But despite all of that, I don't think the narrative completely rebuke Susie's desire for Eternity. After all, Gerson heard her say that, fully knowing his own fate, and he mostly seemed intrigued? It doesn't seem to waver his belief that she's the one who should be writing the story, that he could count on her to defy fate in the name of Justice. Y'know, Susie wasn't really thinking of the Inevitability of Death at that moment, she was just thinking that… she would like to keep having fun adventures with her friends in perpetuity. And is that such a bad thing to wish for?

I mean, just because something was a theme in Undertale doesn't mean that Deltarune can't use Susie to drive home the point of 'well, yeah, you're not wrong, but it's a bit more nuanced than that", there's precedence, in fact.

I'm thinking about, like, the Tenna storyline in Chapter 3. That was also about someone who needs to move on, Tenna is clinging to his happier past in unhealthy way and wants the fun of his game show to last forever. He also wanted his own version of Eternity. But the game still draws a contrast between Ralsei, who just tells him to remember the happy times and accept that everything ends, including his use

And Susie, who is the one who rejects this mindset. Her solution still has some level of moving on and accepting that the Dreemurr-Holiday Family Unit has ended, but that doesn't mean he's just got to lay down and accept that his whole life is over. She comes up with a plan that ensures the continuation of his life and his dreams. It's an Ending of sorts, but an Ending that has a continuation attached to it. And it came specifically from Susie's distaste for endings, from her aggressive rejection of going gently into that good night.

There are certain things, certain endings, we all have to accept, but there is also so much that is worth rebelling against, that is worth fighting for. Susie's desire for an 'Eternity' might be a bit oversimplistic, but it is also the source of her rebellious spirit, out-of-the-box-thinking and the shining hope that Gerson sees in her. So I don't think the story will dismiss it outright, we really just have to wait and see just how much of that 'Eternity' Susie will manage to keep...