#Opposite Action Skill

[borderlinereminders]

Opposite Action Coping Skill

This is when we do the opposite of what we feel our emotions are telling us to do. Recognize your emotional response to a situation and the action you instinctively wish to take as a reaction to it, and instead do whatever is the opposite of that action. This is a skill that can be used when the emotion doesn’t fit the facts. For example, if you’re feeling afraid because you’re feeling unsafe in a situation (like for example, people are yelling or you’re approaching a dark alley) and your reaction is to leave, then by all means - do what is best for your safety and leave.

Some examples:

Anger

May cause us to lash out, storm off, etc.

The opposite of this may be: being kind, showing concern, or walking away briefly to take a break and come back to this when we feel more calm.

Sadness

May cause us to withdraw and isolate ourselves.

The opposite of this may be going out of our way to engage with our friends and reaching out.

Frustration

May make us want to give up.

The opposite of this may be pushing through (though taking a break if needed).

What are some pros to using this skill?

Using this skill can be empowering and give us a sense of control. It can also help with managing the emotion.

What are the cons to using this skill?

It takes time, and some trial and error to see results. It also requires the ability to identify your emotions. Sometimes we just feel an urge and aren’t sure what emotion is causing this. This skill may require learning how to identify emotions first.

Overall, this can be a very useful skill to learn. It can be effective in helping us learn not to act on emotional urges.

[cherryblossomshadow]

#Seriously let the authors write their characters in whatever way they need or they want #Sometimes they're just a reflection of their own healing process #And you'd be surprised to know how many people do come to the bed negotiating contracts in BDSM while having some form of #healthy communication kink #And/or how many adults wind up naturally expressing themselves like therapists wanting to heal themselves and the world #Whenever they are dealing with conflicts #The only people that will try to make you feel abnormal for using words like “I hear what you are saying and your emotions are valid…” #In everyday speech are those that are threatened by the idea of non-violent and empathetic communication becoming “mainstream” #That human beings might be able to truly listen and emotionally connect rather than fight for dominance and trying to constantly #win a freaking point and prove they are right! #Seriously you can write characters with different levels of communication skills even some with very dysfunctional ones that are #nevertheless amazing people with good intents #Characters that might need some guidance and support from those skilled at healthier and non-violent communication #It's a huge spectrum of human communication styles and abilities in the world! #Just because “you don't personally communicate a certain way IRL” doesn't mean that's not the usual IRL communication style #of another person. #“Pfft! No one really talks like that!” #Most of the times when I hear that I immediately go “Yes they do. Do you even notice how other people interact and talk or just because #YOU wouldn't feel comfortable or natural talking like that you assume no one else does? “ #Food for thought (tags courtesy of @thelostgirl21)

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Friendly reminder that if you're not being paid to write content a certain way then you can write what you want to write, the way you want it written, forever. Writing is an art form and everyone can be ordinary at it without guilt. If you want your characters to talk about feelings with enthusiasm and skill, then do that. It is free and no one is grading you or docking your pay. It costs everyone zero dollars to leave writers alone. We have enough stress and guilt as it is, thanks. (comment courtesy of @beautifulterriblequeen)

.

This is definitely true! It is frustrating! I guess one thing I've been thinking about a lot though is that for a couple of shows I've seen, I've actually been like yknow what I'll let this slide because… actually it's modelling how to have healthy conflict/talk about your emotions… and of course it's not the job of any piece of media to model healthy behaviour… but I'm hopeful that there are people who will see these shows and benefit from it in how they interact in the rest of their life… so yeah it totally does feel clunky sometimes and there's no need for everyone to be "therapy speak"ing all the time… but I can see one potential benefit to it too 😊 (comment courtesy of @yaay-feelings-fuck-feelings)

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Alternately, sometimes write a character who is entirely in tune with their emotions and can use therapy speak - and is still lying through their teeth about what they're feeling because it's really fucking entertaining. Bonus points if they deliberately use therapy speak to be misunderstood and make communication HARDER or to communicate a different problem than the one they are having ON PURPOSE. (this is really fun for manipulative villains, especially in stories that take place in the modern age) You can also do this with an extremely "intelligent" character who thinks they are in tune with their emotions but is not - who uses therapy speak to describe the wrong thing. Who thinks they are being honest but are wrong about it because they are on like 16 levels of repression because there's different types of intelligence and so many intellectual people think they can intellectual-brute-force their way to emotional intelligence. (comment courtesy of @baelpenrose)

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Sorry my rambles didnt fit in the tags!

"people just do not and often Can not tell the absolute truth about themselves all the time even during heated and climactic moments"

I love this dynamic. I also feel like I don't rly understand myself completely, so when I get to know/figure out something about the character that the character doesn't, yet i completely get why they can't understand themselves ... idk I just have a rly good time 🤷‍♀️

characters who "think they are being honest but are wrong about it,"

esp if its bc repression, are so special to me. Again, I just rly love that dynamic

Many intellectual people think they can intellectual-brute-force their way to emotional intelligence

This is A+ character work to me

"Oh! I had a terrible night because you accused me of this, and it's all your fault for having thrown these accusations without having understood my good intentions!"

Oh wow. Damn. Complaining about how my behavior affected his day is actually something dad used to do all the time. Like if we were out together as a family, whenever I would get mouthy or something at the end of the day (looking back, we were probably all tired!!!), he would sigh dramatically and complain, "And we were having such a nice day. Don't ruin it." And, tbf he's still doing it now. *chipper voice* But it's got a new and upgraded flavor to it!

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Unrelated but I've been researching emotional regulation strategies to try to help someone else, but I'm seeing all these strategies that I've just been unknowingly using, like Opposite Action Skill. When someone pisses me off, I (sometimes) get nicer. (Yes i get pissed off often enough that the "sometimes" is statistically significant). But yeah, until I read the DBT book I got from the library, I had no idea that was a Thing™

That post that's like "stop writing characters who talk like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy" really blew the door wide open for me about how common it's become for a character's emotional intelligence to not be taken into consideration when writing conflict. I remember the first time I went to therapy I had such a hard time even identifying what I was feeling, let alone had the language to explain it to someone else. Of course there are plenty of people who've never been to therapy a day in their life who are in tune to their emotions. But even they would have some trouble expressing themselves sometimes. You have to take into account there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable expressing themselves and people who think they're not allowed to feel certain ways. It also makes for more interesting conflict to have characters with different levels of understanding.

[finnitesimal]

Need to break up so Takiishi can realize something if he realizes something at all ghffhgdss

Divorce Wins Again

[raccooninapartyhat]

Coming to the abrupt realisation that I do actually experience jealousy and quite a lot more intensely than I ever thought I would. Not sure if I genuinely didn't experience much jealousy before but have managed to unearth this emotion or if I have always experienced it but mistook it for something else

[sammygender]

a lot of my thoughts about dean winchester come down to the fact that he really is just eternally about fourteen years old. and not a well-adjusted 14 year old, either, but a traumatised and abused 14 year old with intense attachment and abandonment issues. he was that 14 year old! and hes never grown past it. hes probably more like it now and more controlled by it than he WAS when he was 14 years old. so i cant help but feel unbearably sad for him. but sadly, he is not 14 years old. he is an adult man in positions of power reenacting abusive behaviours. idk how to fix him. hed have to really and genuinely want to change idk what it would take. he should do dbt though

[wheelercore]

Constantly thinking abour karen wheeler btw but in a way that makes everyone here super madsies

[thousandheadeddolphin]

An overly detailed analysis of the scp foundations adopted son, the backrooms

Due to the fact that I have no control over my interests, ive decided that im gonna post cringe and start writing a minimum 100 word (50 for subrooms) review of every single backrooms level (or at least as many as I can get through before the hyperfixation burns out). And before we can actually get to the meat and potatoes, we gonna discuss the universal quality cap contained within the very premise of the modern backrooms (more under the cut)

The history of backrooms is like, pretty simple, and actually kind of similar to how scp started. Some guy posted an imagine with the caption:

"If your not careful and noclip out if reality in wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and endless backround noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hindered million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"

The concept very quickly caught on, because even retrospectively, the concept is really good, and then people started to write about. And at this point, it varies very, very heavily from scp. Because scp-173s whole premise doesnt crumble like a sandcastle upon any elaboration.

Ill blaze through this part simply because its by far the most common criticism of the backrooms and im not getting ad revenue from puffing up a video about it. You cant add entities or other humans because the vagueness of the final line and also ruins the isolation inherent to the original passage. You cant add more levels because that gives the person somewhere to go and makes the person less trapped, you cant make your levels death traps because thats just not scary, and you sure as hell cant make them safe because that removes the looming threat of death (this last point also applies to lucky o' milk and almond water). But personally, I dont think that talking about this helps the writers, or even gives us a better feel for what these writers are doing wrong, so instead im gonna focus on the main problem with the backrooms

The writing style is contradictory with the material presented

Since the backrooms popularity boom happened congruently with the one for liminal spaces (which ill just use interchangably with "eerily empty nostalgic space, even though the original definition just describes one thats transitional) even the most recent levels try to invoke this sort of setting. This within itself, is great. Theres a lot of room for very personal, intimate horror, especially when combined with isolation. Guess what they tried to do with it?

They jacked scps writing style, which for those not in the know, is intentionally written from a dry, neutral voice. To describe a setting meant to invoke one of the most personal emotions one can have.

Beyond this, articles, as evidenced by their often dubious writing quality, are written by teens who are far too young to have experienced that kind of nostalgia, so a lot of the articles end up not being able to fully capture the feeling, even if they werent written like a courtroom report.

To summarize, the premise is just kind of limiting within itself, even detached from any disloyalty to the original premise of the backrooms.

anyhow Im releasing the first review tomorrow

[passionfruitmango]

Today I kind of want to hole up and not be perceived but I am practicing opposite action by being present and heard

[joelletwo]

starts pacing circles around my room to imagine it animated

[insert-cool-themesong-here]

I can confirm this is exactly how it happened for me. You look back one day and you see you’ve spiraled up further than you ever thought you could.

And some seasons you spiral downwards again, you don’t play with your dog, you let dishes pile up, you don’t touch your hobbies anymore.

But then one day you notice your dog sitting on the floor and realize you can play with him, a couple weeks later you realize the dishes are days old and not weeks old. You start noticing your camera roll has photos of things you’d like to start crafting again.

And spiraling up starts to become a habit and a go to, just like spiraling down once was

And after a while you just stop. You stop watering your plants. You stop watching netflix. You stop reading. You stop replying to your friends as fast as you used to. You stop buying yourself nice things. You stop putting an effort into how you look. You stop taking care of yourself like you used to. You stop sleeping. You stop eating healthy foods. You stop petting your dog. You stop socializing.

You stop with everything. You find yourself sitting in your room for hours on end, without doing a single thing. Days feel like years. And you think you can’t do it for much longer.

[goinggoats]

Oh my distress tolerance is WAY down

[therapythoughtstogether]

I feel so many of us can benefit from reading this.

Sending love!

how do i deal with crippling jealousy? the type triggered by your fp having a fun time without you.

Jealousy can be a very difficult emotion to deal with even for most people, with or without BPD (though the intensity or duration of that intensity is much more extreme for people who have BPD). In DBT, we’re taught to deal with unwanted emotions in a variety of ways, but the “best way” in the eyes of many therapists (and many patients who have mastered the skill I’m about to talk about) is through an Emotion Regulation Skill called Opposite Action. 

1. What is Opposite Action?

Opposite Action, at its core, is pretty much just what it sounds like.  You use the Opposite Action Skill when your emotions do not fit the facts (see Check the Facts post, and well as Method 1 and Method 2 to help determine if your emotion–or its intensity or duration–fits the facts).  You also use Opposite Action when your emotion does fit the facts but it would be ineffective to act on it. 

By acting opposite of what your emotions are urging you to do, you are able to change your emotional reactions and possibly your emotional state in the process.

You usually use Opposite Action after first using Check the Facts, a skill that helps you determine whether your problem emotion is justified or not. If your jealousy isn’t warranted or is ineffective (which is what it sounds like in your ask) then you would use the Opposite Action Skill.  If your jealous is warranted, then you would use the Problem Solving Skill (link coming soon).

Opposite Action is a fairly straightforward skill but most DBT therapists consider it to be the most difficult skill to master because it requires you to do the exact opposite of what your feelings or thoughts are telling you to do, which often feels unnatural, not genuine/dishonest, or uncomfortable.  It’s not always easy, so sometimes it’s best to start small.

2. When does Jealousy “Fit the Facts”?

So, just to let everyone know, the Manual says that Jealousy “fits the facts” of a situation when:

Someone is threatening to take away a very important and desired relationship or object away from you.

An important and desired relationship is in danger of being damaged or lost

(Honestly there are a lot more legitimate feelings for jealousy, but these are the ones DBT focuses on.)

If feelings of jealousy are not justified by the facts or are not effective, you would then use Opposite Action.

3. Opposite Actions for Jealousy

Opposite Actions for Jealousy can include (but are not limited to) the following:

Do the opposite of your jealous action urges (usually specific to the situation causing your jealousy)

Let go of feeling the need to control others’ actions (such as wanting to control who your FP has fun with)

Share the things and people you have in your life.

Distract yourself from your jealousy by doing something you enjoy (even with other people) and allow yourself to have fun without your FP as well, hopefully teaching yourself that you both can have fun without needing to be together for that fun to be positive.  Remember, don’t do this to make your FP jealous in response. This involves letting go of pettiness or vengeful feelings.

4. Opposite Action “All the Way”

There’s another “level” of sorts when it comes to Opposite Action (you can look at it like “leveling up”).  The following kinds of Opposite Action are called “All The Way Opposite Action”:

Suppress your need to ask your FP (or whoever is the subject of your jealousy) where they were, who they were with, if they like those people better than they like you, etc.  That kind of behaviour can get controlling very quickly, so completely resist the urge to do so.  (Remember, this applies ONLY IF YOUR JEALOUSY DOES NOT FIT THE FACTS!  If you have a valid reason to be jealous, it makes sense to ask these sorts of questions because you’re accurately assessing a threat.)

No avoiding.  If you’re with the people who make you feel jealous, rather than withdrawing, you should engage while keeping your eyes open and be Mindfully Observing while Participating in the moment.  Observing will help you hopefully see the interaction Non-Judgmentally rather than viewing things with jealousy-tinted lenses. 

Change your posture.  Jealousy can make us feel very tense and sometimes nervous and sometimes aggressive so to the following things to change your posture: a) Unclench your hands and adopt a Willing Hands posture, b) Relax chest and stomach muscles through Progressive Muscle Relaxation, c) Unclench teeth, d) Relax facial muscles and adopt a Half-Smile

Change your body chemistry by using TIP, especially the Tempterature part to bring down emotional intensity and the Paced Breathing part, to control your breathing and feel calmer and less threatened.

5. Jealousy Vs. Envy

Now, Jealousy and Envy are often confused, so while it sounds to me like you’re experiencing jealousy, it might be beneficial for other followers to give a short breakdown of what Envy is:

Envy fits the facts when another person or group has what you want or need but don’t have.

The Opposite Actions for Envy is based around on “counting your blessings” and doing things to stop you from feeling resentful or bitter towards people who have what you want or need, as well as Checking the Facts to see if they really have so much more than you. (They might.  There are lots of cases where certain people might have much more than you and that’s part of living in an inherently unequal society.)

6. What to do When Opposite Action Takes Too Many Spoons or Doesn’t Work for You

Back, to Jealousy, if Opposite Action is takes up too many spoons, or you’re just not in the right psychological place to try working against your jealousy, or the examples of Opposite Action for jealousy don’t really help you (which is totally possible, I feel that way about most of the Opposite Action pages of the DBT Manual), then I have one more skill I can suggest:

Radical Acceptance/Reality Acknowledgement

Reality Acknowledgement, as I like to call it, is a Distress Tolerance Skill that you use when you cannot change your feeling/situation/consequences/etc yet fighting against that reality is ineffective and may just cause you more suffering.

This is especially useful when you’re dealing with overwhelming jealousy and the situation you’re jealous about is not one that you can change.  Ultimately, if Opposite Action doesn’t work, you’ll have to learn how to live with your jealousy–which is not an easy thing.  Learning to live with an emotion that you don’t like but you have no ability to make it go away is very tough, but Radical Acceptance/Reality Acknowledgement can help you come to terms with these emotions that might be inspiring feelings of self-depreciation or self-hatred inside you for feeling them at all.

Here are some links of posts I’ve previously written about Reality Acknowledgement:

What is Radical Acceptance/Reality Acknowledgement?

How to Practice Reality Acknowledgement

Turning the Mind

It also helps to be Mindful when practicing Reality Acknowledgement.  Use your Wise Mind: is it Effective to feel jealous over this? Is this jealousy helping you in any way? You can use Mindfulness Skills to help you to Observe and Describe the situation in a Non-Judgmental way, thereby hopefully removing a lot of the assumptions and/or judgements you might be making about the situation or people who are making you jealous.  Try to focus on the present moment that you’re in, rather than get sucked into “What if” thinking that focuses on the future or on events that you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of.

(Such as “What if my FP is having so much fun without me because my FP is venting about how terrible I am and they’re having fun laughing at me.”  That’s an example of catastrophic thinking–not saying this is something you personally are thinking–and the reason it’s catastrophic thinking is because you have no proof that anything like that is happening at all, but it’s a thought that would absolutely make you feel worse if you were thinking it.)

While being Mindful and accessing your Wise Mind, you can experience the emotion of jealousy like a wave, a wave that comes over you, peaks, and then recedes.  (This is called “Mindfulness of Current Emotions” and is a component of Emotion Regulation.)  Experience the jealousy you feel as an undeniable part of the present moment, but not a permanent one, and not an emotion you need to push away.  Just allow yourself to experience it and let the emotion run its course without clinging to it or pushing it away–because not allowing your emotions to run their natural course often makes them worse.

7. When all Else Fails:

a) Communicate.  Communicate with your FP that you feel jealous and why.  All healthy relationships are founded on solid and honest communication.  Just be honest, not with any intention of coercing them to change their behaviour or stop doing what’s making you jealous, but be honest with the hope of having a conversation where both of you can clarify how you feel and result in reassurance or even a compromise.  It’s always important to be open with special people in our lives about our emotional states–this helps mitigate splitting and withdrawal/isolation and fear of abandonment.

b) The other thing you can do after opening up about feeling jealous and after working to accept that your FP’s actions are their own choices that you can’t control, you can look into Distress Tolerance Skills.  Jealousy can be an awful emotion to feel.  It can also use up a lot of spoons, which you may not have had a lot of in the first place.  To replenish spoons as well as mitigate the effects the worst of your jealousy, Distress Tolerance Skills are the best skills for this.  Some DBT Distress Tolerance Skills that might be relevant are:

STOP: Stop, Take a step back, Observe, Proceed Mindfully

TIP: Temperature, Intense Exercise, Paced Breathing/Paired Muscle Relaxation/Progressive Muscle Relaxation (used to change your level of distress quickly)

Distract using Wise Mind ACCEPTS: Distract yourself with Activities, Contributing, Comparisons, Emotions, Pushing away, Thoughts, Sensations

Self-Soothe: Use the senses (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch) to soothe your physical self in order to make your emotions less painful. (Big List of Self-Soothe Ideas here)

IMPROVE the Moment: Improve the moment with Imagery, Meaning, Prayer, Relaxation, One thing in the moment, Vacations, Encouragement

Radical Acceptance/Reality Acknowledgement: Acknowledge what is, let go of fighting or denying reality.  Use TURNING THE MIND to commit to acknowledgement over and over again.

Further Reading: You might be interested in looking at our resources that address the “fear of abandonment” symptom that might be an underlying factor of your jealousy, which there are many links in the FAQ on that subject.  You can also read all our previous posts pertaining to jealousy here.  You might find that reassurance from your FP might help ease your jealousy (or perhaps your potentially underlying fear of abandonment) so here is a post about how to ask for reassurance.

TL;DR:  Jealousy, like all emotions, may or may not fit the facts of a situation.  If jealousy doesn’t fit the facts of a situation or it would be ineffective to act on the urges associated with the feelings of jealousy.  When jealousy does not fit the facts or is ineffective, use the DBT Skill Opposite Action.  Opposite Action is a skill you use for a situation like this, where you act in the opposite way than your emotion wants you to.  Doing this can change your body chemistry and thus your emotional state.

If Opposite Action doesn’t work, try Reality Acknowledgement, be Mindful, and use Distress Tolerance Skills to diminish the intensity of your jealousy.  And, fundamental to any relationship, have an open conversation about your feelings without any intent to control the outcome.

-Pandora

[inbarfink]

One common Undertale misconception that really frustrates me is when Sans is portrayed with a strong innate sense for RESETs and alternative timelines. Like, that he remembers the RESET timelines better than the other characters who only have occasional feelings of deja vu or even that he can sense when a timeline is RESET.

And that’s, like, almost the opposite of the actual text of the game. While pretty much every main character can have slightly-different dialogue in a Not-True-RESET, especially if the Player had previously befriended them, based on the idea that they have lingering memories/feelings from before the RESET - 

Sans has no real dialogue changes based on this conceit. All of his changes are based around noticing Frisk has different reactions based on their memories of the precious timelines. 

Other characters do also make observations like that about Frisk, like Mettaton and Toriel. But Sans is distinctive because this is the only way his comments change between RESETs and there are a lot of them from him.

Because that is what really frustrates me about this misconception. People mention it as one more thing that makes Sans cool - but the actual truth is far more badass. Sans is one of the people in the Underground who remembers RESETs the least. I think memory-resistance to RESETs is probably tied to Determination. Flowey, the second-most Determined person in the Underground after Frisk, can remember everything perfectly.

Everyone else has some vague feelings and deja vus. And Sans, he’s the least motivated person in the Underground - both in the sense he’s lazy and in the sense he’s fucking depressed.

That probably means he has very little Determination. Thus, he doesn’t remember anything that happens between RESETs.

And yet, he is still the character most aware of them. Because he has the technological know-how to read and analyze timelines.

And because he has the observation and analytical skill to notice a RESET from other people’s reactions and behavior. Whatever it’s Papyrus thinking he recognizes someone or Frisk’s behavior implying that they know something they shouldn’t have. Sans main RESET-related skill is just being able to identify these moments and come to the correct conclusion about them. And with that he manages to be the most aware character in the entire Underground.

Like, the one point where it might seem like Sans remembers something from a previous Timeline is the Fake Spare scene during his boss battle. 

But it’s all pretend. Unlike the previous lines from other characters that I mentioned, this dialogue plays even if the Murder Route is the first time the player touched the game. Sans isn’t remembering anything in this scene. But he makes an educated guess that the Immoral Time God probably tried using their powers for good at first, so they were likely ‘friends’ in a previous timeline. And in most cases, his guess is right on the money - tricking many players into thinking this is another case of the game actually reacting to their past actions.

And as always, Sans can only tell if his lil’ trick worked or not based on the expression of the Player Character.

Arguably, Sans even uses his lack of Determination and cross-RESET memory to his advantage in his boss battle. After all, the whole point of this fight isn’t to kill the Player - Sans understands this is impossible. This is a war of attrition, trying to get the Player so frustrated and annoyed with the unfair fight that they just ragequit or RESET the Timeline. And this war of the Player’s patience versus Sans’ stamina and will is infinitely easier for him when he doesn’t actually perceive all the Player’s previous attempts against him.

Like, for the Player this might be the billion time they go up against him, they’re aware of some of his patterns and tricks now but they’re probably also frustrated and angry and exhausted. Meanwhile, from Sans’ POV, this is still the first time this is happening. He knows it’s not from the Player’s behavior and Frisk’s expression - but he doesn’t feel it like the Player does. 

He doesn’t feel the frustration and repetition of the endless stalemate. So he’s always as fresh as a daisy no matter how rugged the Player is getting.

And that’s part of why Sans is so cool in the first place, like, in general. He’s technically the weakest person in the Underground, lacking in every standard evaluation of power in the setting - no ATK, no DEF, no HP, no DETERMINATION. But he’s darn clever enough to overcome these weaknesses and even use them in ways that make them into strengths, enough to be one of the most dangerous and most aware guys in this whole setting.

Sans can’t remember anything, and that makes him awesome.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

How can you consider yourself any sort of leftist when you defend AI art bullshit? You literally simp for AI techbros and have the gall to pretend you're against big corporations?? Get fucked

I don't "defend" AI art. I think a particular old post of mine that a lot of people tend to read in bad faith must be making the rounds again lmao.

Took me a good while to reply to this because you know what? I decided to make something positive out of this and use this as an opportunity to outline what I ACTUALLY believe about AI art. If anyone seeing this decides to read it in good or bad faith... Welp, your choice I guess.

I have several criticisms of the way the proliferation of AI art generators and LLMs is making a lot of things worse. Some of these are things I have voiced in the past, some of these are things I haven't until now:

Most image and text AI generators are fine-tuned to produce nothing but the most agreeable, generically pretty content slop, pretty much immediately squandering their potential to be used as genuinely interesting artistic tools with anything to offer in terms of a unique aesthetic experience (AI video still manages to look bizarre and interesting but it's getting there too)

In the entertainment industry and a lot of other fields, AI image generation is getting incorporated into production pipelines in ways that lead to the immiseration of working artists, being used to justify either lower wages or straight-up layoffs, and this is something that needs to be fought against. That's why I unconditionally supported the SAG-AFTRA strikes last year and will unconditionally support any collective action to address AI art as a concrete labor issue

In most fields where it's being integrated, AI art is vastly inferior to human artists in any use case where you need anything other than to make a superficially pretty picture really fast. If you need to do anything like ask for revisions or minor corrections, give very specific descriptions of how objects and people are interacting with each other, or just like. generate several pictures of the same thing and have them stay consistent with each other, you NEED human artists and it's preposterous to think they can be replaced by AI.

There is a lot of art on the internet that consists of the most generically pretty, cookie-cutter anime waifu-adjacent slop that has zero artistic or emotional value to either the people seeing it or the person churning it out, and while this certainly was A Thing before the advent of AI art generators, generative AI has made it extremely easy to become the kind of person who churns it out and floods online art spaces with it.

Similarly, LLMs make it extremely easy to generate massive volumes of texts, pages, articles, listicles and what have you that are generic vapid SEO-friendly pap at best and bizzarre nonsense misinformation at worst, drowning useful information in a sea of vapid noise and rendering internet searches increasingly useless.

The way LLMs are being incorporated into customer service and similar services not only, again, encourages further immiseration of customer service workers, but it's also completely useless for most customers.

A very annoyingly vocal part the population of AI art enthusiasts, fanatics and promoters do tend to talk about it in a way that directly or indirectly demeans the merit and skill of human artists and implies that they think of anyone who sees anything worthwile in the process of creation itself rather than the end product as stupid or deluded.

So you can probably tell by now that I don't hold AI art or writing in very high regard. However (and here's the part that'll get me called an AI techbro, or get people telling me that I'm just jealous of REAL artists because I lack the drive to create art of my own, or whatever else) I do have some criticisms of the way people have been responding to it, and have voiced such criticisms in the past.

I think a lot of the opposition to AI art has critstallized around unexamined gut reactions, whipping up a moral panic, and pressure to outwardly display an acceptable level of disdain for it. And in particular I think this climate has made a lot of people very prone to either uncritically entertain and adopt regressive ideas about Intellectual Propety, OR reveal previously held regressive ideas about Intellectual Property that are now suddenly more socially acceptable to express:

(I wanna preface this section by stating that I'm a staunch intellectual property abolitionist for the same reason I'm a private property abolitionist. If you think the existence of intellectual property is a good thing, a lot of my ideas about a lot of stuff are gonna be unpalatable to you. Not much I can do about it.)

A lot of people are suddenly throwing their support behind any proposal that promises stricter copyright regulations to combat AI art, when a lot of these also have the potential to severely udnermine fair use laws and fuck over a lot of independent artist for the benefit of big companies.

It was very worrying to see a lot of fanfic authors in particular clap for the George R R Martin OpenAI lawsuit because well... a lot of them don't realize that fanfic is a hobby that's in a position that's VERY legally precarious at best, that legally speaking using someone else's characters in your fanfic is as much of a violation of copyright law as straight up stealing entire passages, and that any regulation that can be used against the latter can be extended against the former.

Similarly, a lot of artists were cheering for the lawsuit against AI art models trained to mimic the style of specific artists. Which I agree is an extremely scummy thing to do (just like a human artist making a living from ripping off someone else's work is also extremely scummy), but I don't think every scummy act necessarily needs to be punishable by law, and some of them would in fact leave people worse off if they were. All this to say: If you are an artist, and ESPECIALLY a fan artist, trust me. You DON'T wanna live in a world where there's precedent for people's artstyles to be considered intellectual property in any legally enforceable way. I know you wanna hurt AI art people but this is one avenue that's not worth it.

Especially worrying to me as an indie musician has been to see people mention the strict copyright laws of the music industry as a positive thing that they wanna emulate. "this would never happen in the music industry because they value their artists copyright" idk maybe this is a the grass is greener type of situation but I'm telling you, you DON'T wanna live in a world where copyright law in the visual arts world works the way it does in the music industry. It's not worth it.

I've seen at least one person compare AI art model training to music sampling and say "there's a reason why they cracked down on sampling" as if the death of sampling due to stricter copyright laws was a good thing and not literally one of the worst things to happen in the history of music which nearly destroyed several primarily black music genres. Of course this is anecdotal because it's just One Guy I Saw Once, but you can see what I mean about how uncritical support for copyright law as a tool against AI can lead people to adopt increasingly regressive ideas about copyright.

Similarly, I've seen at least one person go "you know what? Collages should be considered art theft too, fuck you" over an argument where someone else compared AI art to collages. Again, same point as above.

Similarly, I take issue with the way a lot of people seem EXTREMELY personally invested in proving AI art is Not Real Art. I not only find this discussion unproductive, but also similarly dangerously prone to validating very reactionary ideas about The Nature Of Art that shouldn't really be entertained. Also it's a discussion rife with intellectual dishonesty and unevenly applied definition and standards.

When a lot of people present the argument of AI art not being art because the definition of art is this and that, they try to pretend that this is the definition of art the've always operated under and believed in, even when a lot of the time it's blatantly obvious that they're constructing their definition on the spot and deliberately trying to do so in such a way that it doesn't include AI art.

They never succeed at it, btw. I've seen several dozen different "AI art isn't art because art is [definition]". I've seen exactly zero of those where trying to seriously apply that definition in any context outside of trying to prove AI art isn't art doesn't end up in it accidentally excluding one or more non-AI artforms, usually reflecting the author's blindspots with regard to the different forms of artistic expression.

(However, this is moot because, again, these are rarely definitions that these people actually believe in or adhere to outside of trying to win "Is AI art real art?" discussions.)

Especially worrying when the definition they construct is built around stuff like Effort or Skill or Dedication or The Divine Human Spirit. You would not be happy about the kinds of art that have traditionally been excluded from Real Art using similar definitions.

Seriously when everyone was celebrating that the Catholic Church came out to say AI art isn't real art and sharing it as if it was validating and not Extremely Worrying that the arguments they'd been using against AI art sounded nearly identical to things TradCaths believe I was like. Well alright :T You can make all the "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a catholic" legolas and gimli memes you want, but it won't change the fact that the argument being made by the catholic church was a profoundly conservative one and nearly identical to arguments used to dismiss the artistic merit of certain forms of "degenerate" art and everyone was just uncritically sharing it, completely unconcerned with what kind of worldview they were lending validity to by sharing it.

Remember when the discourse about the Gay Sex cats pic was going on? One of the things I remember the most from that time was when someone went "Tell me a definition of art that excludes this picture without also excluding Fountain by Duchamp" and how just. Literally no one was able to do it. A LOT of people tried to argue some variation of "Well, Fountain is art and this image isn't because what turns fountain into art is Intent. Duchamp's choice to show a urinal at an art gallery as if it was art confers it an element of artistic intent that this image lacks" when like. Didn't by that same logic OP's choice to post the image on tumblr as if it was art also confer it artistic intent in the same way? Didn't that argument actually kinda end up accidentally validating the artistic status of every piece of AI art ever posted on social media? That moment it clicked for me that a lot of these definitions require applying certain concepts extremely selectively in order to make sense for the people using them.

A lot of people also try to argue it isn't Real Art based on the fact that most AI art is vapid but like. If being vapid definitionally excludes something from being art you're going to have to exclude a whooole lot of stuff along with it. AI art is vapid. A lot of art is too, I don't think this argument works either.

Like, look, I'm not really invested in trying to argue in favor of The Artistic Merits of AI art but I also find it extremely hard to ignore how trying to categorically define AI art as Not Real Art not only is unproductive but also requires either a) applying certain parts of your definition of art extremely selectively, b) constructing a definition of art so convoluted and full of weird caveats as to be functionally useless, or c) validating extremely reactionary conservative ideas about what Real Art is.

Some stray thoughts that don't fit any of the above sections.

I've occassionally seen people respond to AI art being used for shitposts like "A lot of people have affordable commissions, you could have paid someone like $30 to draw this for you instead of using the plagiarism algorithm and exploiting the work of real artists" and sorry but if you consider paying an artist a rate that amounts to like $5 for several hours of work a LESS exploitative alternative I think you've got something fucked up going on with your priorities.

Also it's kinda funny when people comment on the aforementioned shitposts with some variation of "see, the usage of AI art robs it of all humor because the thing that makes shitposts funny is when you consider the fact that someone would spend so much time and effort in something so stupid" because like. Yeah that is part of the humor SOMETIMES but also people share and laugh at low effort shitposts all the time. Again you're constructing a definition that you don't actually believe in anywhere outside of this type of conversations. Just say you don't like that it's AI art because you think it's morally wrong and stop being disingenuous.

So yeah, this is pretty much everything I believe about the topic.

I don't "defend" AI art, but my opposition to it is firmly rooted in my principles, and that means I refuse to uncritically accept any anti-AI art argument that goes against those same principles.

If you think not accepting and parroting every Anti-AI art argument I encounter because some of them are ideologically rooted in things I disagree with makes me indistinguishable from "AI techbros" you're working under a fucked up dichotomy.

[derinwrites]

Plotting a story -- inductive and deductive plotting

When it comes to plotting habits in writing fiction, there’s a scale. Most people label the ends of this scale ‘gardener’ and ‘architect’, although the terms ‘plotter’ and ‘pantser’ are also in use. If you’re a writer, you probably know this scale, but I’ll briefly explain for those who haven’t and then get into my model.

An architect, or plotter, is a writer who thrives with a lot of planning. Like an architect planning a house, they assess what story they’re telling in advance and what needs to happen to tell it. They assess the materials, plan and measure the acts (if they’re using an act structure), decide on the climax and how the characters will develop and map those onto the plan. Then, with a plan, they write.

A gardener, or pantser, by contrast, writes ‘by the seat of their pants’. Pantsers may or may not know where their story is going in broad terms, but they certainly don’t know in any detail beyond ‘this’ll be a cool scene if I can get it there’. To these people, writing is less like architecture and more like gardening – you can build your beds and plant your seeds, but a whole lot of what’s going to happen next depends on how the plants grow, and all you can do is keep an eye on them and prune or train them as necessary. You can dream about what your garden will look like in the spring, but you won’t know until you get there.

Plotters and pantsers are not two distinct categories of writers, but ends on a scale. The writer who ad libs sentence by sentence with no goal at all is extremely rare, as is the writer who starts from an overall view of the plot and cuts it down and down until they’re planning on the sentence level. Most writers tend towards one end of the scale to a greater or lesser degree, but very few write completely using one method and none of the other.

The plotter/pantser scale is one that many writers find incredibly useful to help them understand their own process. By knowing where you are on this scale, you can better understand how you write and better understand how the habits and advice of other writers may or may not be useful to you. (A pantser trying to meticulously plot their story in advance following some formula they found in a writing advice book is wasting their time.) However, this model has little utility beyond that, which is why I find it more useful to address the phenomenon not as a scale, but as the manifestation of two separate skills, that I like to call deductive and inductive plotting.

In logic, deductive reasoning is when you take broad rules or generalities and apply them to specific circumstances to predict things – you start big and go little. “Things fall when you drop them, therefore if I drop this rock it will fall” is deduction. Inductive reasoning is the opposite – you start with small observations and build them into a pattern to predict something bigger. “I dropped seventeen objects and they all fell; therefore, perhaps when you drop things, they fall” is induction. (There’s also abductive reasoning, but that doesn’t fit into our plotting skill metaphor.)

In my experience, these skills match to the habits of plotters and pantsers. Plotters, or architects, assemble a big picture of the story they want and then deduce their individual scenes and fill in the lines to map to their overall general picture. They are deductive plotters. If you ask a deductive plotter to start writing without an outline, they become lost and their output seems directionless and erratic – how can they know what to write if they don’t have an outline to break things down from? Deductive plotters tend to think of stories in terms of overall structures and themes that can be broken down into characters and events and put on the page.

Pantsers, or gardeners, are the opposite. They’re if-then writers, and build the plot upwards from the individual actions of their characters and create the story from the sum total of those interactions. They are inductive plotters. Brandon Sanderson often describes a pantser’s first draft as just a really thorough outline, and he’s not wrong; a pantser needs the scene-by-scene minutae to know what happens next. How are they supposed to build an outline if they don’t know what happens next? If you ask an inductive plotter to build and follow a thorough outline, their writing often comes out as wooden and arbitrary as they have to force the actions of the characters between the restrictive rails of predetermined plot. Inductive potters tend to think of stories in terms of characters and discrete events that build up into something bigger with a consistent mood or theme. Inductive plotters sometimes complain of their characters having a life of their own and defying the plot – this is the effect of their moment-by-moment if-then reasoning of the character’s next action not matching their initial predictions, and surprising them.

Again, the vast majority of writers have some rudimentary skill in both inductive and deductive plotting. A strong deductive plotter (architect) can usually sit down and infer line-by-line a scene that their outline lists as “the three characters meet in the coffee shop and share evidence, Rosemary sees Harold’s notes and realises where the gun went.” Similarly, a strong inductive plotter (gardener) usually has some idea of where their story is headed next even if they don’t know how long it’ll take to get there or what complications will pop up in the meantime. But I’ve never met a writer who is equally strong in both inductive and deductive plotting; most writers specialise heavily in one, and tend towards one end of the scale. I think this is because there’s such a huge overlap in utility; when we start learning to write, we start plotting in whatever way is easiest for us, and train that specific method over decades. There’s little reason to invest even more decades into getting just as good with the other method when your favoured method already achieves everything you want.

I find that viewing this scale as the result of two skills, inductive and deductive plotting, can be very helpful in understanding specifically how we write. Thinking of myself as a heavily inductive plotter with rudimentary deductive plotting skills has really helped me understand why some methods of writing work for me and others don’t, as well as help nail down specific weaknesses in my writing. I also find it useful to think of writing styles and strategies not as some unchangeable characteristic we were born with (as the plotter/pantser scale is frequently envisioned), but as skills that can be built. You don’t write the way you write because you happen to be a plotter or pantser – you write the way you write because that’s what you learned to do! And it was hard! And you did it! Be proud of your skill!