#[ feel free to reply reblog or send an ask! ]

[the-kipsabian]

i stole this from twitter shhhh they dont need to know

[ghosts-and-blue-sweaters]

How is everyone doing!! How are the friends & strangers in my phone doing? :)

[ask-alf-oddworld]

Things I would love to see in the Soulstorm sequel:

-Abe meeting Sam and it’s emotional

-Baby Abe

-Munch

-Buddy, he’s a Khanzumer so he’d be perfect in the next game (also in dear Alfs Buddy seemed to be really good friends with Alf so I’d love to see that bond)

What would you guys like to see?

[incorrectpnatquotes]

I’m considering making a new version of the “Why You Should Read Paranatural” PowerPoint I made a few years ago since Paranatural has changed a lot since then. SO I’m crowdsourcing for things to put in the updated PP.

What would you guys tell someone about Paranatural to make them read it?

What are your favorite things about Paranatural?

-Mod Ani

[vampiricsheep]

question for my fellow mordrem-havers:

what was it like for them under the dragon's influence? if they weren't 'born' mordrem, what was their corruption experience? how are they handling life without the dragon?

[greatdecaygreatrenewal]

hey guys just to bring some positivity into this blog, i wanna hear how yall came to know and love our beloved tomura.

[nohomobutactuallyyes]

If you are a lesbian or sapphic, I would be curious to know how you define attractiveness.

My girlfriend and I have been discussing straight v. lesbian attraction and how they differ. So I would be curious to know what others think like defines a stereotypically attractive person in the sapphic world

[matchboxbed]

hello autism website does anyone else have a really hard time controlling/hearing your own tone of voice and have u found anything that helps. i accidentally hurt ppls feelings sometimes bc i can’t hear how harsh i sound when i’m overstimulated and i do not want to continue this way bc i feel like i have no control over it

[praetorqueenreyna]

LISTEN UP TAMLIN STANS

[marrissacooper]

daxton girlies... how do we feel??

[a-dragons-journal]

hi im politely asking for you to take down your response to my post, i do not want the kind of attention i am receiving. thank you

*sigh* I was going to draft a response to your first response to my reblog yesterday, but it's been a weird and stressful couple of days for me and I didn't want to accidentally snap at you because I didn't have the brain space to give the conversation the respect and attention it deserves, so I delayed it to today, and it appears that may have come off as me being rude and ignoring you. For that I apologize; that was not my intent.

I'm sorry that a couple of people have been rude to you in the tags on that post. I also apologize if my response came off as harsh or hostile in any way; as I noted in that initial reblog, I've been seeing a lot of people saying with their whole chest that alterhuman just means nonhuman, and the frequency is getting frustrating, but that's not your fault and the frustration might have unfairly spilled over into my tone. It seems from some of your more recent reblogs like it might've just been a misphrase, but it's hard to tell, so I didn't want to assume it was - and in any case, the explanation and example list was for anon as much as it was for you. I wasn't trying to attack or "rag on" you at all, and I don't think most of the people leaving tags agreeing with me were either, though obviously I can't speak for them. I was just trying to prevent misinformation from spreading - because even if you didn't mean "alterhuman = nonhuman," if that's how it read to me, it's probably how it read to an anon who has no way of knowing better, and that's how people come away actually thinking that's what the word means.

With that being said, I'm going to politely decline to delete my reblog of that post. I won't answer in further reblogs (unless you address me directly, of course) and thus won't bump it any further up my blog, but the existing reblog has already been up for two days and reblogged by multiple people; anyone who was going to see it on their dashboard from my blog has probably already seen it, so deleting it won't actually accomplish decreasing the people responding in your notes. All it will do is get rid of the clarification of potential misunderstanding, which I honestly don't really want to do when it won't do any good. If the post keeps causing you problems, turning off reblogs would probably do more to get rid of that problem than my deleting my response would; you should be able to do that in the edit interface on any post, at least on desktop (I'm never sure how mobile works exactly lol). (And that's a reversible change where deletions are not, to boot.)

[kvothbloodless]

As someone who’s followed you for a long time, and a fellow writer….do you genuinely support chatGPT? Even if it has been proven to scrape people’s writings without their consent? And the fact that its a soulless husk of what actual writing is?

So Ive done my best to avoid AI discourse, but I am bad at it. So to put it clearly.

I dont Support chatgpt specifically. Its a program made by a corporation because they can make a profit from it, and curtail its capabilities in line with their goals. I use it sometimes because its fun ans convenient, but I dont pay for it or anything. I think pretty much all legitimate concerns about AI are really just concerns about corporate ethics, at which point the AI specifically becomes irrelevant

I also dont really think the situation in general is one where "support" is the right word to use; its like asking if I support cameras.

I want to be clear im not trying to be vague though; i think in general AI is pretty cool, and that 99% of the arguments against it are factually incorrect, based on inconsistent or bad moral frameworks, or both. Im not going to get into all the reasons AIs are cool, since I dont feel up to doing a Big AI Post, but I do want to gesture vahuely in the direction of how much more accessible this makes artistic creation and experimentation, and all the insanely fun things people can use AI for. However, i do want to address the common arguments against it, especially since it feels like a lot of people are just misinformed and falling into the very easy tumblr trap.

1. Scraping fics without consent: if you post something on a public site for the public to read, and someone downloads it to read it, its not stealing. Tumblr is generally pretty firmly against strict copywrite laws, so its a bit weird that so many people are Very concerned about AIs "stealing" their work in a way thats even less direct than fanfiction. Like, "your writing is so in character" and "wow youre really good at imitating the authors writing style" are common compliments on fics.

To be clear, there are absolutely ways of interacting with free public content thats bad (like reposting). But AIs arent frankensteining stuff together, or copy pasting anything; they literally could not do that. The training/model files are so insanely tiny compared to the amount of training data that it would be impossible for them to be storing that sort of thing. An AI learning from your writing isnt really any different than a human reading your writing, going "oh I like that" subconsciously, and using that to inform their future writing.

Whats that quote about "to get better at writing, read more"? If you believe that statememt is accurate, then Im a bit confused how youd be upset about an AI "reading" your writing and learning from it?

All of the Actual ways this could be used badly (copying someones art style and then selling art cheaper, etc.) arent actually unique to AI (a person can also do that!), and also usually arent really a thing thats happening enough to be a problem (most people who want art from an artist enough to commission them, are going to want it to actually be done By that artist). Using AI to make an original work, or even to finish a fanfic someone else wrote, is no more theft than if you did it by yourself.

2. "Soulless Husk": im sorry im genuinely trying my best here to be gentle and respectful, but this talking point genuinely makes my blood boil a bit, so im not trying to get personal or insult anyone specifically. Claiming that art made by humans is automatically deeper, that art is all about Meaning and Struggle, comes off as extremely pretentious and just doesnt engage with the reality of art. Im having trouble articulating a good argument here, but like. Art doesnt have to be deep, it doesnt have to have a Message, and the necessity of struggling in order to learn about and create art is an unequivocable bad thing.

Many many people make art (visual, written, etc.) becuase they want to see or read something cool or because they think others will find it fun. Many many people who would like to create art do not do so because it requires talent/practice that they are not willing to put the time and effort into developing, and this is not a moral issue. As Ive said before, laziness is a virtue and self-indulgance is a goal we should aspire to. Using a tool to make the incredibly fun act of creating easier and more accessible is awesome.

Also, who gets to define what "actual art" is? Genuinely seems a bit arrogant and presumptuous to declare that something is or is not "actual art" based on your own preferences.

The posts that Really annoy me are the ones that are like "cant understand the people RPing or playing a TTRPG with AI becuz its soulless. I only ever RP with other people because the fun part is being social or collaberatively building story" or whatever. Cool. I rp and play tabletops because i like to have fun and I enjoy those activities. Im gonna be honest, i find it a bit offensive and kinda.. dumb, to act like its somehow morally superior to only enjoy oneself in a way that Builds Community or Has A Meaning. People do meaningless things because they enjoy doing them and so long as no one is being hurt, thats fine.

3. Replacing workers: This is the only argument that has Any weight, but its still a bad argument. Its absolutrly true that AI is gonna put people out of work. The fact that more people will be out of work and struggling is a bad thing. This is also what happens when literally any new technology is developed, dating all the way back to the industrial revolution (at the Very latest). Automation is almost always a massive net benefit to humanity (im aware this topic could be its own series of posts but You Know What I Mean, please dont start industrialization discourse here), and the fact that it puts people out of work isnt actually an argument against it. Lots of radio operators lost their job when telephones were invented, but that doesnt mean people should have never used the telephone and obstinately stuck with radios. When phone technology advanced, a lot of phone operators lost their jobs, but that doesnt mean people were Morally Wrong to use the new developments that made phones far more convenient.

As in all things, el problema es capitalismo; AI isnt preventing anyone from doing art, its just reducing how many people can get paid to do their art. The correct solution to automation putting people out of work is not to stop the wheel of tech development, but to change society so that one doesnt have to slave away in order to survive.

This also raises the adjacent point, which is that halting tech development like this is impossible. Once the cat is out of the bag, its not going back in. AI tech is going to develop and become more widespread and theres literally nothing you can do to stop that. If you want to be upset about that, its your perogative ig, but im gonna be excitedly waiting for the dam to break and we get an open source LLM that I can use without worrying about data privacy or corporate filters, so I can have fun and RP however much I want and finally be able to write the stuff I want to write but cant do on my own because I have adhd and chronic fatigue, and Id kinda prefer if people stopped trying to rain on my parade because they think im not having fun or creating art in the "right way".

EDIT: I did want to add one more thing! A US court ruled that you cant copywrite something created completely by an AI, and i think thats an awesome move and I hope it gets expanded a bit and spreads elsewhere. This isnt a position based on whether something produced in this way counts as "real art" or is morally bad or whatever, I just think that reducing corporate and IP grasp on anything is good, and that AI specifically is going to be most enjoyable when its free and open source.

[cloud-somersault]

You know what: you guys ask me questions a lot. Let me ask one this time.

Besides the obvious, what are the differences between Wukong and Macaque's perspectives? Like, what do you notice in their way of thinking? Is their way of describing things different?

[marsti]

I'm actually kinda curious about this since people have taken to us becoming more openly plural on main surprisingly well:

And also going to use this post to make it clear once more we don't do or tolerate any of that gatekeeping shit in this house, we are vibing, so this is no matter what kind of plural you are.

[skydaemon]

Science Says People (Specifically Kids) Are Good, Actually

okay i just rediscovered the link to one of my favourite studies ever and i wanted to share it with the class.

Koomen, R., Grueneisen, S., & Herrmann, E. (2020). Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends. Psychological Science, 31(2), 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619894205

(it's behind a paywall, but if you can't access and you're interested i have the pdf)

This study modified the marshmallow test, where kids are asked to hold off on eating one marshmallow in order to get another one later. The study used children from Germany and Kenya, with localised treats that were familiar to the kids. 70 of the children were paired up interdependently - each pair would only get the second treat if they both held off eating the first. 69 (nice) were paired up dependently - they each thought that they were the only one of the two who had to avoid eating the treat, and 68 were doing the test as normal.

The interdependent kids were significantly better at the test than those doing the test normally - cooperation (the idea that they were doing this for AND with a friend) had a significant positive effect on their willpower ! The dependent kids were also better at the test than the solo ones - showing that children can delay gratification better when they're doing it for a friend - but not as much as the interdependent ones. Even though they knew that they were the only ones who had to hold out, the fact that they weren't doing it with a friend meant they didn't have that amazing boost of willpower. (there are small cultural differences here between the Kenyan and German children, but the overall interdependence effect holds.)

From the discussion: "Delaying gratification is often critical for cooperation to succeed. Here, 5- to 6-year-olds from two highly distinct cultures were more likely to delay gratification when their outcomes were interdependently linked than when they performed the same task alone, even though the interdependent context entailed additional risks. These findings support the notion that human cooperative relations, particularly social interdependence, critically shape cognitive performance from an early age."

i just find this study so heartening, because it's truly applicable throughout life. if you've ever done something for a friend that you couldn't do for yourself, that's this effect! our reliance on others (and their reliance on us) is hugely beneficial for ourselves and for society - how nice is that?

Similar studies:

this one again shows increased willpower in kids for the good of others !

this one shows how kids begin to give more to people that need it

this one found that kids as young as three show altruistic behaviour when it comes to the present, and by five they've developed altruism for future events !

this study found that by the age of 8, children will reject unfairness EVEN WHEN IT BENEFITS THEM !!

in summary i love people and i love children and we are all built kind it is our duty to make sure as many people as possible stay that way

[hatredcurse]

I think.... I got every Itachi that I know of. If I didn't, I'll do another sweep later.