#Protected Profits bot

[genericpuff]

I've been griping about the normalization of identity outing via social media for a while now. To put it simply, it's become almost some weird societal requirement that if you don't have every detail listed about yourself in your Twitter/FB/etc. bio, then it means you have "something to hide" or that you're not as "verifiable" because your account looks indistinct from that of a bot.

But that societal norm has really only benefited the people who profit off of that information in some way, whether it's through selling user data or through weaponizing details about a person against them.

I know that a lot of us love to use the fun little labels and acronyms in our bio that help others like us identify us as a 'safe person' or as someone who's in the same social/racial/identity groups as them. We're humans, we love to categorize things, it's in our nature (and it's fun!)

But if there's any time to start regulating that habit and challenging the norm that you're obligated to include all your personal info online - it's now.

There was a time when sock puppet accounts were expected and typical, not "suspicious".

There was a time when even age-sex-location was considered "too much information", but once it became the norm, we only EVER gave our personal information beyond generic ASL to people who we knew both online and in real life, or at the very least, people who we had known online for a significant enough amount of time that they had proved to be trustworthy (and even then, we didn't owe that information to anyone, ever; there are forum friends who I made online 10+ years ago and still talk to who do not know my personal information beyond broad strokes).

There was a time when simply being an avatar with a funny username was enough. And it still is enough, but massive platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been brainwashing us for years to believe that's not the case, under the guise of, "You wouldn't want to be dishonest, would you?" Through these same norms, we were led to believe that anime profile pictures are cringe, that having a fake online name is stupid, that the photos of you having fun at social events have to be taken JUST right otherwise you might imply to others that you're not actually having fun.

And considering how long these platforms have been around now, we have entire generations of children now who have been born and raised on that version of the ZuckMusk web, who have been taught that it "protects them" to express to everyone publicly their age, their school, their workplace, their family members, everything about themselves, because to not do so would be disingenuous.

None of this is to imply that the Internet was "safer" back in the day. I definitely should not have been on the Internet as much as I was when I was 13 in the late 2000's, it definitely did not benefit my brain development or my social skills. But the version of the Internet we currently exist in now is one that's been predicated on the false sense of security - the belief that if you're honest, everyone else has to be, too.

We've always had ways of identifying our safe people - by participating in the communities that we know are designed around our hobbies, our interests, our people. They might be small, they might not be as "cool" as the idea of netting yourself a big following of thousands of people, but they're also a lot safer and more genuine than that idealized following ever could be.

Don't feel pressured to include every bit of information about yourself in your bio. Even on Facebook, there's no rule that says you have to list your workplace, your school, your family members. There's no rule that says you have to list your personality type, queer labels, and neurodivergent disorders in your Twitter bio. There's no rule that you have to "prove" your life is real and fulfilled through the verification of photos, location tagging, and open-book sharing. If you share those photos, it should be because you genuinely want to share them, not because you feel some societal pressure to live up to others' expectations.

And I guarantee you, even your local mutuals on Facebook - your former classmates, family friends, distant relatives, coworkers, etc. - do not actually give that much of a damn about your personal life that they should be owed that much of a look into it on a daily basis. They've got their own shit going on, they literally do not need to know every detail about you.

I know it sounds scary. It also sounds kind of boring, when we've been used to a certain "way" of browsing and participating for years, that if we don't do so, it feels like being in the "out group" and that we're "breaking the rules". But I promise you, after spending over half my life online, those rules do not exist or benefit anyone who wouldn't profit off that information.

If you're wanting to learn how to branch off from major platforms like Facebook and Twitter and/or become more self-sufficient online, here are some guides to navigating the Internet like an old schooler that may help you!

FREE SITE BUILDER:

DIGITAL PIRACY 101:

(also in addition to everything mentioned here ^^^ they neglect to also mention Tor Browser which is a light and free-to-use browser software that allows you to browse anonymously; note that it's similar to a VPN in that it helps hide your identity online, HOWEVER it won't mask you from your ISP quite as effectively as a VPN, and if you sign into personal accounts with Tor, that's still going to obviously out you online lmao but I love using Tor for the odd time when I need to make a sock puppet for something and don't want it linked to my IP! and unlike a VPN, it's free to use!)

LEARN HOW TO USE RSS FEEDS:

People still use these! They're especially helpful for getting updates from your favorite pages and sites directly to your browser WITHOUT having to worry about stupid algorithm bullshit picking and choosing what you see. And many sites DO have RSS support once you know how to find it! (like adding in /rss at the end of a URL! Like this!)

FAKE EMAIL SERVICES:

LEARN HOW TO CODE IN HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT (AND MORE!):

DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS:

I hope this helps arm you with some new knowledge in how to navigate the Internet like a Certified Old Person™️(like meeee!) Make your secret alt blogs for besties! Make your formal Facebook accounts that are clean of personal information and present the most neutral, safe-for-work version of yourself and keep the fun stuff to the secret profiles and chat groups that are just for you and friends/family/etc!! It might be "inconvenient" to have multiple accounts for the same purpose, but it's also INCREDIBLY freeing and can make your online experience both safer and more enjoyable.

Being "less" of yourself online does not make you any less you. It is your identity - you do not owe any amount of it to anyone beyond yourself. And in times like these, your identity is your greatest asset. Protect it.

[ny000mdraws]

tfp au swindle!!

backstory under cut

An opportunist and neutral (“opens up more business opportunities”), Swindle lives by one thing: money. She runs her enterprise on her warship selling weapons or supplies to anyone willing to pay a hefty price. Since Megatron is a frequent customer of her’s, bots associate her with the Decepticons despite not being a part of the faction.

Contrary to popular belief, Swindle is actually a good boss. She doesn’t want high turnover or a negative work environment, believing that if the workers aren’t at optimal efficiency, then that means less profit. Instead of paying for workers, Swindle hires desperate bots who offer to work in exchange for a place to stay/ protection/ fuel. And because of the good work environment and fair trade of work for shelter/ protection/ fuel, a lot of bots stay by Swindle’s side.

Other bits of info…

- design is heavily influenced by TFU

- 40s (in human scale)

- can and will kick your ass

- Hardtop is her right-hand man

- a popular gossip on the warship is who her conjunx is

- the second youngest of the Combaticons

[thirtheenprimes]

Started Artificial Condition while I was at work and I marked the pages I had notes on so I could make another reread thread.

"ART, who was apparently very interested in the job scenario,"

Yeah I bet ART is super invested in this job scenario. ART, who's night job is fucking over corporations that profit off screwing over innocent people. Who was 100% already on an information run to do something to fuck over some corporation when a rogue SecUnit asked to come on board. I bet that ART is very invested in helping these young scientists that just lost their very important research to someone who is going to try and kill them so they can abuse the remenent detection tech.

And, I bet, ART is very excited to have a construct that is such a good person and hates corporations too and obviously likes to protect humans to do this little side quest that it would otherwise bot be ale to help with.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Hello TBSkyen, I have a question for you. I myself am a person who's interested in making videos about art and posting them on youtube but have heard pretty much every youtuber I watch complain about youtube's unfair copyright system. So I would like to ask, how do you typically deal with that? What do I need to do to decrease the chance of a video getting claimed/struck? I know you don't have all the answers but I would like to hear the opinion of someone who has had to deal with this.

*deep breath born from long history of frustration*

Okay, so number one, you can't protect yourself fully from that. Anyone can file a copyright claim on anything you upload for any reason, they don't have to have evidence that they own the work being claimed, and all of the onus is on you to prove you didn't commit infringement by disputing the claims being made.

Which sucks.

It's a very frustrating thing to deal with, and it can make it nearly impossible to discuss certain properties or media because the owners (or a bunch of shitty grifters abusing the copyright system) will strike and claim anything and everything they can possibly identify.

Having said that, there are some tips and tricks. First, understand the principle of Fair Use (which is American law, and which is usually what you have to deal with on YouTube, but not always), which Casey Fiesler has a good video primer about here:

The broad strokes are that you can use as much as is needed to make a transformative point and then no more than that. The spirit of the law is that you can't use Fair Use to simply repost and profit off of other people's work, and the reality of how it's enforced is that bots scan YouTube for instances of videos using Too Much of the media they're protecting, and claim it as infringement.

So. If you're discussing any kind of video media - film, TV, animation, etc. - use clips of no more than 5-8 seconds of continuous footage, and do not use the original audio of the show unless it is necessary. You can sometimes get away with longer stretches of footage, but anything over 10 seconds is just begging for an automated copyright claim.

Shrink the footage down on screen and put a frame around it so it doesn't take up the entire screen, edit something on top of the footage like animations and other edits that transform the footage, maybe slow the footage down to a lower speed so that your video can't be construed as a meaningful replacement for watching the original media.

If you're discussing static art - comics, paintings, etc. - make sure to double check the copyright status on them, and keep in mind the principle of using what is needed to make a point and no more than that. If you discuss a manga or comic, be careful about simply showing whole pages unaltered on screen if it's not necessary. Show the panels or dialogue as you discuss it, but don't put whole pages or issues or chapters up on screen in sequence.

There are other tips and tricks and guidelines and hacks also, but if you're discussing any popular form of media you do have to be ready to have to fight a ton of spurious copyright claims on anything you do, especially if it gets views and becomes popular. It's a long process of filing disputes and waiting 30 days for them to get dropped before you can publish your video, it sucks.

[elkian]

Its both tragic and hilarious how SecUnits (at least by Murderbot's perspective, which is admittedly... biased) are a prime example of that thing about working environments.

In Artificial Condition, MB says it likes winning, but it also says it likes protecting people, and things. It's very interesting to look at bots at this point because we never encounter a bot that seems to actually dislike its function, and ART (who admittedly is ALSO a dubious narrator in its own ways) is confused by MB's responses.

But Murderbot -and possibly by extension, all SecUnits- *does* like its function. The problem was that it was immediately forced into a configuration counterproductive to its function (protecting Company profits at the cost of people), and I'm curioud if this is because its initial programming is off, if it's made something new of its design, or if the people employing SecUnits now are deliberately if not necessarily knowingly forcing them to do shit they're not made to.

This as meant to be a short post but now I'm thinking of the BE SecUnits being different and wondering how that handled. I'm thinking of our one outside take of "Company Units are dangerous" and the Company being so infamously stingy that it about starts a space war over the events of the first book (events which it allowed to take place via taking bribes to begin with). The infamy for badly maintained and frequently malfunctioning equipment, including allowing a dangerous third-party update to be pushed and cause Ganaka Pit.

Maybe not all SecUnits have as miserable a time as Murderbot (though that doesn't mean like. they're not still experiencing brutal Future Slavery conditions) because the Company in specific fucks up a lot?

Anyways, the point I was actually making is that Marth Wells *gets* the many many flaws and vices and issues of the capitalistic system and how it destroys perfectly good people and products for the sake of profit and control.

[shiroxichigo]

I've been informed (and have confirmed it myself) that my fanfic "I AM Zangetsu" has been stolen and uploaded to a YouTube channel called "YaMochiWhatIfs"

I have not given this channel permission, and it appears to be a content farm (not someone who made an honest mistake, but someone deliberately stealing content to make a profit).

I am making this post to make people aware that:

this YouTube channel is run by a thief

that if someone by the name EsquireBot (CopyKnight) reaches out to you on AO3 about your fanfic potentially being stolen, they are LEGIT

and that you can submit a copyright claim to YouTube if you discover any of your fanfics have been uploaded by this user (as of this post, I have successfully submitted a claim and the video with my work was taken down)

Anyway, PLEASE do not interact with this channel. Block them. And keep in mind that ONLY I can issue a take down as the copyright holder on my work.

DO NOT try to issue take downs on other people's behalf. DO NOT comment on the video. And DO NOT engage with the content since this will only encourage the YouTube algorithm to spread it.

Protect your work, guys! 💜

PS: if you want to use any of my fics to make a video, comic, etc - you totally can! Just make sure it falls under transformative work. This person just took my fanfic word for word and put it into a text to speech bot, then uploaded it. Didn't add anything whatsoever. And also monetized MY work. Something I wrote for people to enjoy for free, they were profiting off of.

[north-noire]

Hello everyone, just a little update while I complete my ArtFight entries + write my fic drafts, since I know there's still people trying to read my fic or still haven't read my fic.

I set my Hidden Hands AU fic to view-only to registered users for now because there's apparently a bot scraping fics off the site (rivd dot net - thankfully and miraculously I'm not on there, but plenty of fic authors are) and I wanna make sure it never happens to my fics at all, or to anyone else who's also an AO3 author themselves.

For AO3 writers, please check this twitter thread when you can, and hope you don't find yourself in it, because it requires you to give out your REAL NAME and real life information and that's NOT GOOD. Please don't give out your information to these people/the site.

Here's what to do if you find your works/username the site instead: thread of what to do

It's disappointing to hear that these kinds of people think they can just scrape off works out of complete passion or works made for fun by authors, where we're never paid or compensated for any of it, but they think they can just steal and feed it into some stupid A/I slop because they think they could just steal our hard work and make some profit off of it, and treating it like no big deal all "in the name of the future".

It's horrible, and I hope there's going to be laws and restrictions around not just this practice in general, but to all kinds of protection around artists' works as a whole. We artists and creatives really don't deserve to be treated like this.

[recurring-polynya]

I mentioned the other week that I'd been thinking about doing this, but I've decided to lock down some of my fanfics to ao3 users only. For now, I'm just going to do the smutty ones. I wanted to give people fair warning, so I'll do it a week from today. Download 'em if you want 'em or perhaps consider actually getting an ao3 login? (There's a queue, so you put in your email address and in a few days you get an email with instructions. It's not that hard). It's free and their bookmarking and collection features are really powerful ways to keep track of your favorite fanfics and recommend them to others. We're getting wave after wave of bots scraping fic for 3rd-party profiteering or just leaving nasty spam comments. Lots of authors resist locking their fics down out of love for their lurkers and Guest commenters, and I think that making an account is a way of telling your favorite authors, "hey, I respect your right to put the tiniest possible amount of protection between the work that you do for free and the current enshittification of the internet."

We'll see how it goes, but in the future, I will probably end up doing something where when I write a new fic, I'll make it public, but then lock it down after a week or two. Thanks in advance for your understanding, and I'm sorry we can't have nice things, but that's how it is these days.

[coldalbion]

"And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

Over and over again since that prodigal moment of shame and hurt and confusion, I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers. [...] And while Twitter hurts, I’m not sure anything will ever hurt as much as Livejournal did. It feels like no one even remembers anymore what happened to lovely, flawed, dog-eared, wacky old LJ in the twilight of the aughts and the dawn of the tens. Even though in this year of our lord 2022, when there are some pretty fucking good reasons to remember it, and learn its lessons...

So when Livejournal was sold, not to Viacom or Google, but to SixApart, a company no one had ever heard of, it was confusing. As was its refusal to develop anything like a usable mobile app. When fanfic communities started getting banned for gay content in the name of “protecting the children,” it was alarming and confusing. When it started going down regularly due to constant DDoS attacks, the new owner accused the community of trying to blackmail and destroy him for questioning what the hell was going to happen to all of us, when the Russian Prime Minister was commenting on fucking Livejournal, and when Russian users started put posts in English to let others know what was going on…we all just felt so helpless. It was sold to SUPMedia, a Russian company, and by 2016, had moved its servers to Russia and changed the entire site to conform with that good old very free and inclusive Russian law, but by that time, the community had long fled. Which was the point. Make it unusable and unreliable, bleed off the Westerners and the eye of Western media, and use the database to find and shut down dissenters.

And as hard as it was for us to lose that space where so many of us found family and work and connection, I cannot begin to imagine what those brave dissidents lost. What Russia lost. What they are still losing.

It was a small piece of what was to come. Like Gamergate and the Puppies, an experiment to practice taking apart a minor but culturally influential community and develop techniques to do it again, more efficiently, more quickly, with less attention. To lay out a reliable pathway to commit harm and lie about it for so long and in so many ways that by the time the truth is available, it doesn’t matter, because the harm is a foundational part of the system we’re living in. The harm is the new status quo.

Lather, rinse, repeat."

As someone who's been online nearly 30 years (I'm 18ish months younger than the author) who cut his teeth on dialup BBSses, Fidonet et al rather than Prodigy, I cosign this and beg you to read the whole thing.

[dateamonster]

so like. think abt a cyberpunk scifi story, and its about ghosts.

except when i say ghosts i dont mean like the way were used to. spirits and spectres, visitors from beyond the grave with unfinished business to resolve and all that. what i mean is, in a future where the corporate control of the internet and subsequent privacy and data sharing/selling issues are even more exasperated, not even death can protect you from exploitation.

with the physical world becoming more and more inhospitable, many people live practically their entire lives online. and after death, their various accounts immediately become forfeit and their digital footprint, everything from social media posts to search history to whatever random bits and bites they leave behind, is compiled into an advanced ai program that uses that information to simulate an entire "person", a ghost made out of data.

these post-mortum simulacrums are then sold off to the highest bidder. if youre lucky, and wealthy, you may be able to win the rights to your loved ones digital remains, to with as you will. but more likely their ghost will be recycled into whatever form is deemed most profitable appropriate, as detailed in the all powerful terms and conditions. dead artists and musicians and creatives of all kinds are fed directly into the Content Generation machine. particularly charismatic or empathetic individuals become chatbots, bringing that "human" touch to automated customer help bots and mental Wellness apps and the like. if you didnt have (or at least document) any particularly notable talent in life however, odds are your ghost will simply become one of the innumerable faceless, mindless dead mining crypto and generating random text sequences like infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters for all eternity. a modern purgatory if there ever was one.

doesnt count as a human rights violation. after all its only a reflection of a reflection, humanity as seen through a pinhole, a thin beam of refracted light. and if this assemblage of random points of data occasionally spasms out some indicator of distress, just give it a new command to keep it focused and on-task, rinse and repeat.

the person is gone. only an echo remains. but it still falls to the corporations to decide how that echo is used.

at one point a certain company collects such a large number of mathematically-minded ghosts that they are able to assemble them into a powerful probability algorithm which generates likely outcomes to nearly any given situation in real time. essentially, a bot that can see the future, and tell it to you in a cheerful synthetic voice. in theory at least. in reality, the early trials of this cutting edge technology come out a little dodgy.

sure, the subjects who interface with the bot report a high level of overall accuracy. those that are still responsive after their trials at least. the problem is, to accurately account for the extremely high number of branching outcomes that are produced by any given action, the subject needs to be communicating with a massive number of these data ghosts at once. the glitches that occur therewithin this complex operation... could be due to a number of factors. user error? hardware limitations? there must be some reason that after a stretch of time, all subjects begin to report phantom voices, whispers, things that a glorified statistics model simply shouldnt have reason to say.

more data may be required.

[sophieinwonderland]

Truths...

There is another reason I think I made that post a couple weeks ago...

That reason is that pretending like we mean no harm to anti-endos feels like lying.

It feels like too much of the community is pretending this isn't a zero sum game where our advances aren't going to hurt people who cling to bigotry. Like everyone is just trying to make themselves appear as harmless as possible. And I can't tell if people are lying to others or just lying to themselves.

Are you upset because I phrased the reality of what we're doing in a scary way? Because I'm actually being honest about the repercussions for the people who maintain their bigotry in an inclusive world and it might scare people?

As much as I would love for every single anti-endo to become better and change sides on their own, that's not realistic. Which means as we journey towards a plural future, the people that don't change are going to get hurt. I don't think we deserve total blame for that. They're being hurt by their own actions. By their own bigoty. But... the hurt would also not happen if not for people like us pushing for acceptance.

No social progress is ever painless for those clinging to the past.

But it feels to me like a lot of people would rather pretend our actions are going to be completely harmless to everyone.

That when the dust settles, everyone will make it out unscathed.

Maybe it's bad to specifically threaten anti-endos with this to get a reaction out of them. But it also seems bad to pretend like our actions, even if we try to mitigate harm, won't cause it to others.

Convincing people to be better through kindness is a great strategy when it works. But even then, you're going to be distancing people from their existing friendgroup. While that's usually going to be better for the person whose mind you changed, it's going to hurt the sysmeds who cared about them and lost them.

I'm not saying people shouldn't spread plural acceptance either. Because more people will be harmed by inaction. To do nothing is to allow more endogenic and mixed origin systems to be harmed for our existence. And unlike anti-endos, we did nothing to deserve it more than simply exist.

More than that, a future for all plurals is going to help most traumagenic systems too.

I just am frustrated with what feels like everyone pretending that there will be no consequences for progress.

The words I used, the way I phrased things... it was cruel and intended to hurt.

But it also felt way more honest about what I'm doing than just pretending nobody will be hurt at all.

While ranting about these games of pretend that we play to make ourselves appear more respectable, I want to also say that yes... "The Future is Plural" mostly means plural acceptance. It means equal rights and protections for plurals of all kinds.

... but it also does mean more plurals. Not in the willfully ignorant "traumatizing children" way anti-endos like to portray. But rather, a boom in created systems through tulpamancy and similar practices as knowledge and awareness spreads. And that shouldn't be obscured either.

There is strength in numbers. Especially in democracies. Having enough numbers that plurals could be a valuable voting bloc is going to be an integral part of bringing about change someday.

Numbers will also encourage more accommodations for plurality because corporations will see appealing to us as profitable. Maybe we could use this increased visibility to get official proxying on Discord, for example, so we wouldn't need to rely on bots like Pluralkit with all of their limitations. And then we can work on getting similar accommodations on other websites.

And one final truth I need to put out there... making things better in some ways will make things worse in others. At least in the short-term.

If we push for acceptance too loudly, there will be opposition pushing back. The people who hate you for being gay or transgender are going to hate you for being plural too.

Expect, once we make a large enough splash, for the rhetoric you see about systems in syscourse and r/systemscringe today to make its way to Fox News, Newsmax and Breitbart. The Rod Dreher article on tulpamancy is a small taste of what's to come.

None of this is meant to discourage anyone. But I want to be realistic about what we're getting into.

The road we're on is going to be long and hard, and people on every side are going to get hurt along the way.

This is something I made my peace with a long time ago.

There are things I've done along the way that I wish I could take back. People I've hurt in ways that I shouldn't have, lashing out from being hurt and angry myself... And there are other times that I feel like I did the right thing, handled everything the best way I could, and people got hurt anyway because of things I did.

[thewindandthewolves]

So you arrrre related to the Koko stuff...?

Like, it's legit, not spam, bots, or any of that other annoying crap? (Excuse my language)

lol I used it once as a dumb kid literally like three years ago and it still uses my name to promote it. when I was 13 I would have said yeah check it out it genuinely did help me and made me feel better at the time, there’s no harm in trying it if you want to. but also knowing more about it now, its an airbnb owned bot made to profit off the mentally ill by harvesting their data while providing zero protections or crisis contingencies for the actual end users so like if it helps you that’s great but it isn’t your friend

[xitsensunmoon]

Main FAQ

First of all, let's make it clear - this blog is my home. You're not a "customer" and you're not "always right", you are a guest. If you don't like anything that happens here, just leave, scroll away or block. I will not change anything just because you don't like it.

Before sending an ask, please also check my bio. Surprisingly a lot of people don't do even that. Let's go.

Can I use your work for a profile picture/wallpaper on my device? Can I print your stuff?

You can take my work for personal use if you don't get any profit from it. If it's online - credit me.

Can I dub/translate your comics?

Yes but with few conditions.

1. You credit me as an original creator. If it's a video you put the credits in the video, not in the description. If it's a post you put them in the post itself, not in the comments.

2. You do not put your watermark on my work/do not erase my watermark. You also don't colour it/don't "fix" it. It's my work and my work alone.

3. You do not change the dialogue/add phrases that weren't said by the characters. Again, it is my work, it's my interpretation and I will not tolerate you taking my work and changing it to your liking.

4. If you want to profit from my work - you don't have my permission.

5. You take down videos/posts with my work if I ask you to.

If any of these don't suit you - you don't have my permission.

Can I make an AI bot of your character?

Hard no. Roleplay bots are almost always using public fanfiction without the consent of the authors, not paying for their hard work but using it for profit, it's theft and I'm not going to contribute to that. I'm already considering removing my own bots from Character AI, as ch.ai still doesn't tell the public how they're training their bots so we'll see about that.

Anything that is absolutely off the table when sending an ask?

- Please don't vent to me. I'm not a professional phycologist and I never agreed to play the role of one. I also avoid questions like "I had a bad day, can you draw[ ]?" because after them my inbox becomes a venting place. Please seek professional help if you feel like every day is worse than the previous.

- Please do not send me anything NS///FW. As much as I can support suggestive content, explicit stuff will be immediately deleted and if you make me uncomfortable I probably will block you. No hard feelings but Tumblr is an SFW place for me. If you see me reblog something not SFW, it was probably made by my friend or with previous discussion and proper mature labels for everything.

Can I send you a DM, not an ask?

After some not-very-pleasant experiences that made me uncomfortable, I closed my DM's for everyone except my mutuals. But you're still free to send me asks about anything(within reasonable limits ofc).

Can I write a fic based on your art? Can I use your ideas in my works?

About ideas - ask first. I can get protective over one idea but completely don't care about the other one. If I said yes, credit me as an original source.

Can I draw a fanart/write you a fic?

Of course!! I'm absolutely happy to see anything! Also please tag me when you're done. If it's one of my au's - use specific tags for fanart so even if dumb Tumblr doesn't send me your tag, I will eventually bump into it browsing the tag!<3 (you can also tag me again if you think I didn't see your fan work, I absolutely don't mind!!) Also, feel free to drop an ask with a link too!

Can I tag you in other stuff?

As I already said you can absolutely tag me for any type of fan content(it doesn't even need to be yours). Memes are fine too, just don't do it every day alright?

Why don’t you answer my ask?

It can be one of these reasons:

1. I want to answer your ask with an art piece/comic. It takes time.

2. Your question contains spoilers so I'm keeping it for later when the truth can be revealed =]

3. I'm busy. Yeah.

4. I've already answered something similar/I don't want to answer your question so your ask got deleted.

When will you continue working on [insert whatever]?

When I can. I'm not pausing my things just to spite you. Most of the time I'm just busy or I simply don't have the energy to do anything. To everyone who says stuff like "oh well we've been waiting for a few months already!!" - I'm not here to entertain you. I'm here to have fun and share it with other people and you're currently ruining it. I will block anyone who is doing this continuously.

Can you draw my characters?

For free? No, I don't accept requests like that. You can commission me though. When my commissions are open of course. I will open DMs when it happens.

What content are you okay/not okay with?

Admiring of any of these in real life: terrorism, racism, rape, war, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homo/queerphobia, pedophilia, sex trafficking, mental illnesses. If the content tries to show how terrible these things are I am mostly okay with it.

Is there anything I should watch out for on your page?

Dark themes, suggestive themes, and sometimes negative ones. I'm not afraid to draw violence, blood and gore. Dark humour. In general, I don't recommend anyone who's under 16 to be here but it's always your responsibility for what you're about to see.

In your bio, it says russians DNI? Is it about every russian or only those who support the war?

I don't care if you're a good russian or not, I don't care about your opinions and worldview. I don't want you in here. I have no time nor desire to try and understand how good you are. As a Ukrainian, I have all the right to tell all russians and people who admire anything connected to them to go fuck yourself. It's my safe place and I don't feel safe with zz's in it. Do you feel like I'm being "too categorical"? Don't make it my problem and leave. End of conversation.

Even WITHOUT war context (which I actually huge and should NOT be ignored) this post explains pretty well why this boundary exists.

What is your stance on reposting your artwork/fics?

The only cases when I allow reposting are dubs/translations with credits and all the other rules that I mentioned earlier. In other cases, no, do not repost my artwork. Doesn’t matter if you credit, I said no.

I saw your art somewhere but I'm sure you weren't the one to post it.

I post on Tumblr and Tiktok, my nickname always contains "xitsen" in it. You also could possibly see the dubs of my stuff on YouTube, as I allow these. Please send me an ask with a link to the repost if it's somewhere else. I will try to solve the situation myself.

Can I use your work as a reference? Can I trace/copy it?

Reference? Yes. If it's very obvious - credit me too. Trace/copy? No. No. And no. It's straight-up stealing.

What pronouns do you use?

She/they. Please don't refer to me in masculine terms.

What art program(s) do you use? Drawing tablet? Brushes?

For art pieces 90% of the time it's Paint Tool Sai 2, sometimes Photoshop and Krita. For animations, it's rather Toon Boom Premium or Krita.

My tablet is fucking 6 years old, Wacom something. They don't sell these anymore so I couldn't even find the model lmao.

Brushes - standard SAI brushes, watercolour for shading and brush for line art. If it's textured I use my custom one, you can create it yourself if you use SAI.

Don't mind the text quality please lmao. I literally had to copy it from Google for English translation. But the settings are mine yeah

Your "r" looks like "z"-

I know. Just let me be with my handwriting please lmao.

If you struggle with reading it this post with my alphabet can help you.

Why do you call [character] a whore??

It's an inside joke that suddenly became bigger than we expected. A silly, a funny, a goofy. It's not slut shaming if you thought it was. I love to joke about characters being whores in the most affectionate and lighthearted way possible even when the character clearly has no bitches. It even doesn't need to be sexual. Just a hee-hee ha-ha.

Probably gonna update it in future because I'm fucking sure I forgor something.

[abunchoftf2stuff]

The game Team Fortress 2, or "TF2", has been plagued by cheating bots for 5 years. These bots instantly kill any player that enters their sights, rendering the game unplayable for everyone there. These bots are run by malicious hackers who use their bots to spout constant slurs and hate speech.

Valve, the multimillion dollar company who owns the game, has done almost nothing to stop these cheaters, and what they have done has made little difference. Valve profits off of TF2, and yet will not put forth the effort to make their game playable. Sure, they tweeted that they'd do something, but they have not taken down the networks running the bots, nor have they taken action against the cheaters who will dox and SWAT players willing to take action against them.

The TF2 community is making noise on Twitter with the hashtag #FixTF2, reviewbombing the game, and major publications are covering the rampant cheating problem. We're also running a petition (currently at 235,468 signatures) to show Valve how badly we want these cheaters gone. It's getting a rise out of the cheaters, who've already DDos'ed the page and filed an illegal DMCA takedown.

Please consider signing our petition. This isn't about TF2 getting updated again. This isn't about if you play TF2 or not. This isn't about if you even like TF2. This is about getting these malicious cheaters out of our servers and protecting players.

Sign our petition. Push Valve to take action.

Make those cheaters pay.

[subism]

Tumblr, AI, and The Impossible Year

I'm very disappointed by the news that Tumblr's content is going to be used to train AI. with a default Opt-In and questionable means of opting out. As an artist, this is something I cannot abide. From January 1, 2012 to January 1, 2014 I shot and posted a Polaroid photograph a day to this site, and when the pandemic hit in 2020 I resumed in April of that year and carried through (although less strictly) until May of 2021.

This was all posted to theimpossibleyear.tumblr.com / theimpossibleyear.com. It was a personal blog, and a deeply personal project. I showed what I was doing every day for multiple years.

There are literally hundreds of people featured throughout this project. Friends, family, colleagues, some of whom I had fallings out with, and some whom have since passed away.

These folks did not consent to have their likenesses used to train facial recognition algorithms or AI image generators. According to US copyright law, I am the owner to the photographs, and I can sublicense them however I want. I'm not keen on Tumblr doing the same. And while social media sites like Tumblr always had the rights to do things like this in their privacy policies, tools like Dall-E and Midjourney didn't exist at the time, and I never conceived of such a thing. My personal views on AI aside, I don't think allowing the likenesses of these folks to be bought and sold in such a way without their consent is ethical. Hypothetically I could reach out to every single one of them (or at least those still living) and ask for their consent, but aside from the tedium and awkwardness of having to repeatedly have that conversation, including with some folks I no longer associate with, I simply don't want to.

Additionally, I don't believe most folks really understand machine learning algorithms, large language models, and AI image generators, and I think honestly, it would be extremely hard to get informed consent for such a matter, and I sincerely believe most people would say 'No' if they understood it.

I believe artists should be compensated for their work, and I believe when that work is used for profit that the subjects of such work either need to have consented to that first. And, through that lens, the entitled beliefs of the people behind corporations like Open-AI and Midjourney, that they should be able to train off this work for free absolutely disgusts me. And I am disheartened to see Tumblr go the same route.

I do believe there are positive sides to AI, I do believe it is somewhat inevitable, but I do not believe the ends justify these means.

While I believe strongly in the public domain and creative commons, and I think US copyright law is deeply broken, I also know how hard it is to make a living as an artist. I will not I cannot sit by and just allow my own work, my own memories, my friends, family, and loved ones to be used as a tool to enrich billionaires at the expense of small creators.

I used to think that when I died I wanted all of my creative works to be willed into the public domain for the good of everyone. Now I'm not so sure. As such, I will be removing my content from Tumblr in the coming weeks. As I write this I'm importing the content of theimpossibleyear.tumblr.com to a self hosted server and theimpossibleyear.com is redirecting there. Once I am sure it's been successfully migrated I'll remove all of the content from Tumblr for good.

I know relocated content can still be scraped by AI bots against my will. But I'm considering ways of disabling crawlers, making it password protected and/or parsing all of the images through Nightshade or some other tool. At the very least I’ll have made my terms clear. I'm still figuring out what to do with this blog. It will eventually go away, but I have yet to decide what will happen with the content. Either way, this sucks. I am so tired.

[coveredinmetaldust]

You ever notice how there seems to be a rather large overlap between the crowd that evangelizes "AI", and the crowd of corporate bootlickers who will wag their finger at you and go "a company has to protect its IP!" whenever a multi-billion dollar corporation responds to a perceived copyright infringement with a grossly disproportionate level of duress?

There is just a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, naked hypocrisy, and performative hand-wringing that seems to be part and parcel for the vocal group of core believers of this technology on places like Reddit and Twitter.

These people will shout "It's the law! Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!" but then immediately turn around and berate any artist who makes the mistake of suggesting that these laws should apply to everyone.

This particular phylum of AI cheerleader loves to tell artists to "get a real job", while at the same time shaming them for having the audacity to charge money for their labor. Because in their mind, everything artists create and post on the internet should be free and is "fair game", but anything corporations post is protected within our current legal framework.

They see no problem with the fact that corporations are using petabytes of artwork for profit with impunity, yet the moment you use even 1 microsecond of a piece of media these same corporations own in a video that you post online, their copyright bots will hunt it down and expunge it--or a legal team will send you a DMCA takedown and potentially nuke your account.

They will be more than happy to lecture you about how capitalism is the best system ever, and explain in great detail all of its benefits and how it works--but the moment an artist finds monetary success by engaging with that system, suddenly that's not ok. No, when artists engage in capitalism they aren't "contributing" anything to society based on an arbitrary framework that only applies to artists.

Yet, many of these same people will worship the ground that businessmen like Jack Welsh and billionaires like Elon Musk walk on, because they figured out how to make an ungodly amount of money by exploiting this system--even though they did this in ways that make everyone's lives objectively worse. No, for some reason it's immoral to charge money for your art, but it's both morally sound and smart to leverage our legal system to shake people down, parasitically suck the life out of small and large businesses alike, treat wall street like a casino, tank the economy, and then cry to your government sugardaddy to bail you out when your gambling debts come due. (All so you can do it again.)

Ok, so maybe artists just need to be more proactive and protect their work so this doesn't happen. Well, apparently that's not ok either! Because when artists tried fighting fire with fire by employing Nightshade, the conversation suddenly shifted to how artists are immoral for "creating malware."

I'm sure most of you probably know about Nightshade at this point--but for those unaware, you can kinda think of it as a filter that artists can apply to images before they post them online. To vastly oversimplify what this accomplishes: when an image that has the Nightshade "filter" is scraped by someone and fed into their generative AI program, this image will ruin the dataset that the program spits out.

What's important to know is that this does not affect the host computer in any way, shape, or form beyond a non-essential, third-party program, that the user willingly installed on their system and fed data they gathered from the internet into, outputting a file that the user finds sub-optimal compared to what is normally generated. If the nightshaded image is omitted from the training data, there is no ill effect on the model or host computer--regardless of whether or not the nightshade affected image exists on the internet or somewhere in their hard drive.

How effective this process actually is in the real world has been debated, with many in the AI scene boasting that it's completely ineffectual--but that doesn't matter as far as the narrative is concerned. Many have chosen to interpret this act as artists "creating malware", because the Nightshade'd image that the AI practitioner willingly scraped and fed into a program negatively affected a function on their computer--which is about the same logic as robbing a bank, then getting mad that the bank ruined your clothing because a dye-pack hidden within the bundle of cash you stole exploded and got blue dye everywhere. (Or maybe a more accurate analogy would be posting an AMV you spent a long time editing together to YouTube only to have it immediately deleted by a copyright bot because it's sadly not 2006 anymore. idk.)

Regardless, I find this hilarious coming from a crowd that usually has such a massive hard-on for "personal responsibility." I mean, these are the kinds of people who would see a topic on Reddit where someone is complaining that got injured because a burrito they bought was filled with caltrops, and their immediate reaction would be to reply with something like "this is your own fault, everyone knows you're supposed to eat around the jagged shards of metal."

But no. Instead the lengths some of these people have gone to twist themselves into knots to demonize nightshade could only be viewed as satire in a sane world. But we live in the hell world, so I cannot tell you how many of these losers I've seen unironically clutch at pearls while wailing "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?" because there is a chance their AI model could get corrupted after they scraped 1tb of porn from Deviantart without checking what they actually fed into their system.

Or worse: they will turn the onus back on the artist and say they are the one causing environmental damage--because the person stealing their art now has to remake their model and expend electricity.

Well, more electricity than they are already consuming on AI models. Which, by their own admission, is enough to make their energy bills skyrocket.

This is is like Dupont saying "All of you people protesting in front of our factory ruined productivity for today. You actually caused more environmental damage than us, because we had our machines running all day but no one was able to work. The world is more polluted now because you don't want us to further damage the environment. We may dump literal tons of chemicals into the water supply on an hourly basis, but the markers you used to make those signs you're holding were created using technology that pollutes as well--so I guess that makes you all huge hypocrites hmmmmm?."

But wait, it gets worse! If you read the two screenshot directly above carefully, you may have noticed that some of these people go so far as to believe that they are entitled to everything you create, and anything short of your full consent is tantamount to stealing THEIR property.

Because that's really what this is all about: when you strip away all their moralizing and semantics, you're left with people who view artists as nothing more than an annoying barrier between what they think should rightfully belong to them.

I'm just going to say the quiet part out loud:

These people absolutely fucking hate that there are people out there who are good at art. They are mad that there are people who put the time and effort into improving a skill-set, and got good at it as a result. That's not me putting words in their mouths, they have explicitly said as much time and time again--to the point where it has become a core part of their belief system and mythology.

(This wasn't directed at me, but I know their theory is bullshit because I do know how to weld, and I can't draw for shit. Also, knowing how to weld has never stopped me from being insufferable on the internet.)

They try to make themselves the victims by setting up this narrative that artists have a "monopoly on creativity." They make a big deal about how unfair it is that someone can be technically competent at formal compositions through years of hard work. (Which, is funny, because some of these same people were railing against Le SJWs for being so-called "Professional Victims" in the mid to late 2010s.)

It's not hard to understand why they need to dress this up like it is some kind of righteous crusade that flattens an oppressive hierarchy, because their objective reality is a lot more pathetic.

They know this, so they will gleefully tell artists they can't wait for AI-art to "replace" them in however many years. They will smugly tell artists, right to their face, that nothing they have ever created has any value--all while feeding that artist's work into an engine so they can copy their style.

They will spew all kinds of inflammatory, hateful bile like this at creatives, spit in their face by scraping their work after explicitly being asked not to, and then have the fucking nerve to act like they have the moral high-ground when there is any pushback from artists.

Because to them, creatives are just malcontents who don't know their place.

Many of these people like to present themselves as an austere nonpartisan with a rigid code of ethics; someone who will solve problems through objective logic and rational debate. But when you look past their attempts at self-mythologizing it becomes very clear that these people don't want to have a "civil debate"--they want to maintain a farcical moral high-ground while they stab you in the throat and then twist the knife. (Then complain about how you got blood all over their nice shirt.)

Now, I'm fluent in both "pretentious art-speak" as well as "toxic terminally online forum user", so let me speak to these AI art bros directly in a language they will understand:

This is copium so potent that it's considered a controlled substance in most states. How about you fucking casuals try getting gud instead of getting buttmad and running to social media so you can bawww about needing an easy-mode?

FFS this isn't complicated, but you drooling idiots will just sit there and stare at your monitors with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a dog that just saw a magic trick any time someone suggests you pick up a pencil.

Don't worry though, I hear Kotaku is hiring. You should ask ChatGPT to write you a resume and email it to them, because you suck at art just about as much as their writers suck at video games.

Now go back to your subreddit hugbox and circlejerk about how logical and civil you are compared to those mean artists who hurt your feelings. I'm sure all those heckin updooterinos and wholesome affirmations will make you feel like you didn't just waste thousands of dollars on a new computer for the express purpose of generating anime waifus who look like they tried to high-five a disc sander.

tl;dr: