#THAT IS WHY I DO NOT LIKE AI IMAGE GENERATORS AND WRITING PROGRAMS

[flickeringflame216]

✍️

[notherpuppet]

What is your opinion of AI? Personally, I think that like any technology, it depends on the user and their intentions, but that is just me.

What about you?

1. Theft

The most central issues with AI as it is now is that the programs were trained/are trained with STOLEN art. Stolen visual art, music, writing, etc.

The vast majority of what it has been fed is stolen. As in, the artists behind the work were not ever given the chance to consent nor be compensated for their works being used to feed the machine.

This reason alone is straight up copyright infringement and the optimist in me does believe the long arm of the law is gonna shut these programs down for that. But the long arm of the law is looooooong, and the technology is disrupting people’s livelihoods now. Unlike robots or machinery that was invented and built to expedite assembly line/factory work, this technology is only functional by using other people’s labor. If we didn’t live in a society where you have to “earn” your right to live in it, then this would still be wrong, but it probably wouldn’t be such an existential problem.

There are active class action lawsuits for infringement of copyright. And the private sector has begun filing suits and I’m quite certain they’ll win because again—it’s simply theft. These companies did not make licensing contracts, they’re not paying royalties to the artists they stole from.

So if you consider using ai that generates “art” (whether it is visual, music, writing, etc.) please consider stopping immediately, as you would actively be benefiting from theft (which is wrong imo!!!!)

2. AI in its present form dishonors the human spirit

In my personal relationship with AI technology, I do not use it to generate ideas or ‘art’. I detest the notion to use technology in that way tbh. AI is a form of technology, so it’s difficult to break it down into every specific use it actually has. But here’s an attempt; no to generative AI, okay to certain AI.

There are kinds of AI programming in the programs I use (such as features that help you color in a shape quickly or make a perfect circle). This is useful tech (that requires zero IP theft) and I like it because it helps me by taking care of tedious tasks so that I have more time to spend in the creative and drawing processes. But I still choose the colors, I still draw the images, I still write the stories.

I think the way AI is used right now with a focus on “creative thinking” (where it’s not actually creating anything it’s just churning out other people’s *stolen* ideas and practice) is a total waste. AI being used as an assistant to help humans find information easily can be/has been swell. And requires no theft :D

But for whatever reason (greed, capitalism are my guesses), tech companies are leaning into a direction to replace creativity with AI?? I imagine the people behind this view the practice of art as tedious work because it is challenging??

But the beauty of art and the practice of it is that it allows humans to experience and overcome challenges with little to no stakes.

When society determines that is not a valuable use of human time, then I think we’ll all be significantly more miserable. If we allow a machine to be “creative” and leave us to only experience challenges with stakes—like survival (rent, putting food on the table).

So here are some examples of how I feel about AI uses;

AI to translate languages, find resources, discern malicious malware/spam from harmless messages > 👍🏽

AI to generate ideas/art for you > 🤢 Why??????? Why would you want that…that’s the most exceptional part of the human experience and you relinquish it to a bot trained on stolen ideas? 😭

[renthony]

I'm not worried about putting anti-AI distortion filters on my work, because people have been stealing my drawings and uploading them on "free clipart" sites for years. My writing gets screenshotted and posted on "meme" pages with no attribution (even though screenshots of original blog posts aren't "memes," oh my fucking god). My work is already being stolen. AI hasn't really changed anything for me on that front.

The horse is out of the stable and it's not going back in. I'm not worried about slapping a (dubiously effective) filter on every single piece of art I make as much as I'm worried about supporting entertainment industry unions as they fight for worker protections so that generative AI use doesn't fuck artists out of a job.

The mythologizing of AI has gotten out of hand. "AI" doesn't even have a set meaning. It's incredibly imprecise and creates a lot of needless confusion when the same term can mean "sorting algorithms for computer processes" and "programming for video game NPCs" and "brush stabilizing tools in digital art programs" and "program that generates images from prompts and a database of unethically-sourced media."

AI is being treated like a boogeyman with faerie rules by a lot of people who don't really have any idea how computers work or why it's actually a concern to working artists and their unions.

The actual problem is that generative AI can be used by companies to avoid paying human workers a living wage.

The problem is not that "computers have no soul and can't make real art!"

The actual solution is not "every artist do your part to defeat AI by using dubiously effective filters on literally everything you ever post online, ever," it's "unionize and fight for policies that protect creative professionals from exploitation."

Join a union. If you aren't eligible for something like SAG-AFTRA or the WGA (East or West) or TAG or IATSE or any number of other creative unions from around the world, you can join the IWW.

[sreegs]

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

[chaos-in-deepspace]

Can't believe I gotta do this, but okay...strap on in guys because this isn't only a rant, but informational. Gonna show you how to clock AI writing, why it's bad, how to abuse AI for writing, and how to prove something was written using a chat bot.

Have you ever read a fic and had to pause for a moment? Contemplate a few things? You almost feel like a few times you just couldn't figure out. Or perhaps you saw something that just read super awkwardly.

If this describe you reading some fics, then you might've fallen victim to "AI Writers". Yes, that's correct! A writer who uses AI to help them write their fics. Mind you most people when using this method actually use chatbots! So it's not like they just run into ChatGPT, give it a prompt, and then post it. Oh no. They RP it, maybe clean it up a little so it reads more like a fic, and then they post it.

If any of you are use to RPing with Chatbots like Janitor.ai, or even C.ai, then you might occasionally read a fic and realize it's strikingly familiar to chat you read in your own chats. I, for one, dabble in RPing with bots when I get bored, which is how now and days I can read a fic, see certain lines, and just know.

Now I'm certain I don't need to sit here and explain why this is so bad. However, I'll explain anyways if you'd like to hear my opinion, as well as many other artists and writers:

AI is Plagiarism!

Ya, this is plagiarism. How do you think it's generating responses? Or for artwork, where do you think it's grabbing the images from. It doesn't do it itself. AI is basically giving a program information so it can generate things. A lot of programs that uses AI, as well as websites, uses that written information to generate your responses. You know Google Docs? Ya, it can take information from your writing there. Archive of Our Own? Bingo. Tumblr? Ya, it takes writing from here as well. That means the people who have spent a lot of time on their writing, spending years honing their craft, are having their writing styles and voices stolen from AI in order to make those generated responses. Now when it's just you RPing something, pop off. It's just you and your bot. Share it with a few friends, sure! If you post it online though, those words are a mashup of millions of stories written and posted online. So it's plagiarism. Plain and simple.

2. It sets you back as a writer

Ever wondered why some people can write the most amazing things ever? It's because they wrote. They learned. They practiced. It took time and effort in order to build up those skills. They got there by writing. So how is using AI affecting your writing? Easy, you're not writing. At least...not a lot. If you use a chatbot to write half the things in a fic, you're only doing half the work. You're also bouncing off the idea from your bot and going with it, instead of using your writer brain to figure out how this scene would best be executed. Imagine it like this. Someone uses AI to draw an image for themselves. Then they trace over it, add a few of their own touches, and color it the best they can. Did they suddenly learn how to draw? No. Because they didn't take the time to learn why something is placed like this, how the composition works, etc. Same thing with writing. If you're using AI to do all the work then you aren't learning, and you're not going to be getting better as a writer. If that's the case...why are you writing? It should be a fun experience to write, after all. It should be something you want to get better at. So why are you just having AI do it? Attention? You realize your fics need to be pretty well written to garner attention, right? That brings me to my third point.

3. We can tell...and it's not fun to read

Today a friend showed me an paragraph from a fic he found here on tumblr. I saw it. Without even having to ask I knew it was written by AI. Nobody talks like that except a robot. The wording? Repetitive for AI to use. "Their bond grew with every passing moment." | "Their shared connection." | "His voice was barely above a whisper." | "It was a testament to their relationship." | "He's determined to face this challenge with her, hand in hand, and to make the most out of the second chance he's been given." | "A renewed sense of purpose." | "He's determined to face this challenge with her" If I see these lines, I clock it as Janitor in a heartbeat. Sure, not every time it's used is AI, but those are the most common things I see in every RP with a bot, and I actively need to correct the bots or else they'll use it in every fucking reply. Another thing is...RPs read differently from a fic. They're not made to be read like a narrative story. It's a bot replying to someone, so when you do that things get weird. Not to mention sometimes clothes appear and disappear, a position is changed, etc. It's just not good writing...

4. It's lazy

Simple as that. It's fucking lazy to get AI to write a fic. Trust me, I am one lazy motherfucker. I hate doing things. I want to sleep for literally a solid week. However I made the decision to write things, so I write them. I put in the effort. Other writers who don't use AI? They put in the effort. I know at least 20 people who are depressed as all hell, can barely get out of bed unless it's to go to work, who decided to still write. Not everyone is going to be a fast writer. Not everyone is going to find writing easy. If you're going to commit, though, commit to it. Write it. Don't use AI.

With these points being made, I'm sure you can see why in the writer community, it's frowned upon to use AI as well as bots for your writing...especially when you don't disclose it. I could probably put everything aside if you just said it was written using AI. Honesty is the best policy.

People might not want to read it then, but at least they know that you used AI. At least you admitted to it. Using AI and then passing it off as completely original is disgusting.

So you clocked something as AI written. You’re pretty freaking sure this was written with a Chatbot. So you plug it into an AI checker and what? No AI detected? No fucking way.

Yes fucking way.

The detectors use a range of things like: Language Model Comparison, Repetitive phrases and structures, contextual awareness, among a few other things. Now look at the "Language Model" part. What if a Chatbot doesn't have the most common language models? It doesn't detect it as easily, that's what.

Where does that leave Chatbots? Well, it means it’s not really checking for things like Janitor or C.ai. A lot of times it flies under the radar because of this. I have found that there is at least one site that doesn’t do this. Instead of more or less checks the context of the text to see if it was written using AI, rather than relying on ai models.

Quillbot

This is what I use to check. I also did run it through some tests. Mind you, not every program is going to be completely accurate. This just happens to, after thorough testing, be the best at being able to tell if a chatbot was used.

As you can see here, the one on the far left is a fic that I ran through that was my own writing. In the middle I had copy/pasted my own responses, and my bot responses from Janitor. On the far right I pasted only Janitor responses. While it’s not accurate, it could still detect human written from a chat bot!

In comparison to me running it through other AI Detection softwares (one of them being Grammarly), where they detected nothing in the post that were written by both me, and the bot.

The entire reason I’m even making this post is because I happened to come across a fic that seemed like it was written using AI, so I was curious and ran it through. Mind you, the detection software only lets you paste 1,200 words of the writing, so this was just a snippet. The same size snippets that I had put for all of my own tests. This was the result:

So we can make a good guess that this was…probably written by AI. If you’re wondering, no. This isn’t a call out post. I won’t be stating the user who I did this. I ask you not to speculate in the notes of this post either. I don’t want to cause unnecessary drama, because honestly the writing community for this fandom already has that.

I will say, to the writers who are using AI, I’m not the only person who will probably get curious. If you’re going to use AI for your writing, at least state it in the description. It’s manipulative and wrong to not state it.

I know I said AI is bad, but it's also like Thanos. It's inevitable. I fully think we should abuse the hell out of it and make it our bitch. Now how to do that without using it to actually write? Easy.

Force it to give us ideas. Once upon a time I wanted to do some writing, but couldn't think of anything I wanted to write. Sure there's prompt lists out there, but a lot of them didn't fit what I needed. So I grabbed ChatGPT by it's lil grimy throat. I whispered in it's ears "Write me some prompts."

I then took said prompts to jog some ideas in my head, then wrote my own original content. I used AI to help give me a basic idea for my writing and then came up with my own stories. That's a simple way of doing it.

I know people who will RP with a janitor bot because they have a plot in mind for a story, but are uncertain with how they'd want to execute it. So they RP with a bot first, and then once they have an idea, they write a fic based off their RP. They don’t take what the bot said, copy/paste it, then say it’s their fic. They use it as a tool to help them with their ideas. Sometimes if the bot has a really good line, they might take that singular line from it as well. That’s not taking the entire story, it’s just a line that they knew would flow with the fic, and half the time they edit the line as well.

You can also use it for story titles. Can’t come up with a title? Tell ChatGPT the synopsis of your story and then ask it to generate 10 titles for it (actually I just tried to this see the results and am currently laughing my ass off, maybe don't do this).

Don’t forget things like Grammarly. That’s also AI! You can use it to check your grammar and fix awkward wording in your writing.

There’s ways a writer can use AI as a tool. In my opinion, it’s no different from an artist using the symmetry tool for their art. Or using a 3D model to help them make a pose for a drawing in their program. It’s a tool that should be used to help and improve your own content.

[morlock-holmes]

What objections would you actually accept to AI?

Roughly in order of urgency, at least in my opinion:

Problem 1: Curation

The large tech monopolies have essentially abandoned curation and are raking in the dough by monetizing the process of showing you crap you don't want.

The YouTube content farm; the Steam asset flip; SEO spam; drop-shipped crap on Etsy and Amazon.

AI makes these pernicious, user hostile practices even easier.

Problem 2: Economic disruption

This has a bunch of aspects, but key to me is that *all* automation threatens people who have built a living on doing work. If previously difficult, high skill work suddenly becomes low skill, this is economically threatening to the high skill workers. Key to me is that this is true of *all* work, independent of whether the work is drudgery or deeply fulfilling. Go automate an Amazon fulfillment center and the employees will not be thanking you.

There's also just the general threat of existing relationships not accounting for AI, in terms of, like, residuals or whatever.

Problem 3: Opacity

Basically all these AI products are extremely opaque. The companies building them are not at all transparent about the source of their data, how it is used, or how their tools work. Because they view the tools as things they own whose outputs reflect on their company, they mess with the outputs in order to attempt to ensure that the outputs don't reflect badly on their company.

These processes are opaque and not communicated clearly or accurately to end users; in fact, because AI text tools hallucinate, they will happily give you *fake* error messages if you ask why they returned an error.

There's been allegations that Mid journey and Open AI don't comply with European data protection laws, as well.

There is something that does bother me, too, about the use of big data as a profit center. I don't think it's a copyright or theft issue, but it is a fact that these companies are using public data to make a lot of money while being extremely closed off about how exactly they do that. I'm not a huge fan of the closed source model for this stuff when it is so heavily dependent on public data.

Problem 4: Environmental maybe? Related to problem 3, it's just not too clear what kind of impact all this AI stuff is having in terms of power costs. Honestly it all kind of does something, so I'm not hugely concerned, but I do kind of privately think that in the not too distant future a lot of these companies will stop spending money on enormous server farms just so that internet randos can try to get Chat-GPT to write porn.

Problem 5: They kind of don't work

Text programs frequently make stuff up. Actually, a friend pointed out to me that, in pulp scifi, robots will often say something like, "There is an 80% chance the guards will spot you!"

If you point one of those AI assistants at something, and ask them what it is, a lot of times they just confidently say the wrong thing. This same friend pointed out that, under the hood, the image recognition software is working with probabilities. But I saw lots of videos of the Rabbit AI assistant thing confidently being completely wrong about what it was looking at.

Chat-GPT hallucinates. Image generators are unable to consistently produce the same character and it's actually pretty difficult and unintuitive to produce a specific image, rather than a generic one.

This may be fixed in the near future or it might not, I have no idea.

Problem 6: Kinetic sameness.

One of the subtle changes of the last century is that more and more of what we do in life is look at a screen, while either sitting or standing, and making a series of small hand gestures. The process of writing, of producing an image, of getting from place to place are converging on a single physical act. As Marshall Macluhan pointed out, driving a car is very similar to watching TV, and making a movie is now very similar, as a set of physical movements, to watching one.

There is something vaguely unsatisfying about this.

Related, perhaps only in the sense of being extremely vague, is a sense that we may soon be mediating all, or at least many, of our conversations through AI tools. Have it punch up that email when you're too tired to write clearly. There is something I find disturbing about the idea of communication being constantly edited and punched up by a series of unrelated middlemen, *especially* in the current climate, where said middlemen are large impersonal monopolies who are dedicated to opaque, user hostile practices.

Given all of the above, it is baffling and sometimes infuriating to me that the two most popular arguments against AI boil down to "Transformative works are theft and we need to restrict fair use even more!" and "It's bad to use technology to make art, technology is only for boring things!"

[copperbadge]

Amateur Translation Programs

So I had a lot of imaginative and informative responses to my post about looking for an amateur translation program -- something where I could load in a foreign language and it would insert a box where I could add a translation every-other-line. The idea was that this way I could practice translation with more advanced texts, and texts I chose, and thus move away from Duolingo, which at this point is good for drilling and daily practice but not for more advanced learning.

I didn't find precisely what was needed but I did get some inspiration for further explanation, and I also learned that adding the term "glossing" (thank you @thewalrus-said) into my searches helped a great deal in terms of weeding out programs that were either "Let this AI translate for you" or just endless promotional links for Babbel and Duolingo and such. I thought I'd collect up the suggestions and post them here; at the end I'm including my best swing at designing what I wanted, and why it doesn't work yet.

Suggestion one, from many people, was various ways to generate a page that is simply fixed Italian text with space underneath each line to add in a translation. This is pretty simple as a process and there are sites that will do it for you, such as this one that @ame-kage suggested. However, most of these don't allow for movement in the Italian text, and many produce a PDF which you would need to print out in order to write on unless you're willing to open it in Acrobat (and deal with Acrobat). A good solution for some but not what I'm looking for purely because I'm trying to make this super frictionless so that (knowing myself as I do) I will actually do it.

I did find this version interesting, suggested by @drivemetogeek: Have one word doc saved as your "template" doc and set the line spacing as 2.0 or higher. Select your text from source and paste it into the template doc as text-only. Ctrl a, ctrl c to select all and copy, then open a new document and "paste special" as picture. Right click and set the "wrap text" as behind text. Now you have a document where you can, basically, type over the existing text because it's the background of the page. This seems like the most frictionless version, because you could set up a bunch of them ahead of time. If you wanted to move between desktop and mobile, however, you'd need to ensure that the pasted image was fairly narrow so that you don't have to sideways-scroll.

Relatedly, people suggested generating a document that is simply the Italian text with empty space beneath it for typing in of the translation. This can be done either semi-automated, using a macro or a language like Python, or find-and-replace on, say, the stops at the ends of sentences. It basically outputs the same as above but with a more digitally accessible format, without any more effort than above. If you were to do this in Google Sheets you could also fix the column width so that it didn't do anything weird when you opened it on your phone. But it is still very friction-y, and does not allow for easy shifting of the Italian as needed. There's high probability of the translation breaking weirdly across the page. Still a top option in terms of simplicity and access.

@smokeandholograms suggested another variation illustrated here where essentially you're converting the text to a series of tables, with each paragraph a row, and an empty cell next to it for the translation. I might play around more with this one eventually, since I think I could possibly make it a three-column and put the Italian in one, the translation in the next, and the auto-translate to let me know where I might be slipping in the third. (Not that I trust auto-translate but comparing a hand translation to an auto translation can be useful in terms of working out when I've messed up the way a tense or mood is read. I tend to read indirect verbs as automatically imperative because I'm a weirdo.)

@wynjara linked to an add-in for Word specifically designed for translators, known as TransTools; this appears to employ a macro to do the same thing, though it does have a format where you can place the translation next to each sentence directly rather than in a separate cell. The full suite of tools is only $45 which is reasonable for my budget, but for what I need I think I could also just create the macro.

Using LaTeX as a tool specially designed for glossing was an option on offer, but I don't know enough about LaTeX to figure out the pros of this one, which is in itself the major con -- there's a learning curve that I think varies widely by person but for me is unfortunately a wall. It came out of a discussion on Reddit about trying to find something like what I want; also in that discussion is a link to a code generator that allows you to…do something…to the initial language, but it's not entirely clear to me (I'm sure it's clear to people who understand coding) what you would then do with it that would allow it to be output in the way I'm hoping for. Like, I could turn a paragraph of text into HTML, I understand that far, but any Italian I find is already on a website.

Moving more into apps that might work, Redditors on the LaTeX discussion suggested SIL Fieldworks, which is a professional language tech tool. Fieldworks isn't a program I'd previously encountered but much as with the ones I had, it looks like the learning curve is fairly steep and it is definitely overkill generally for what I need, though it might also harbor within it the thing I want. It is free, so I may download and play around with it.

@brightwanderer suggested using note-taking or "whiteboard" apps such as Freeform or Nebo; these are generally a kind of "infinite canvas" in which you can drop objects, text boxes, or handwriting. I don't know that Freeform would be measurably different to just using Word and a macro, since I'd still have to input/format all the text and then be stuck with the same "fixed text" setup -- and it's also iOS only -- but for some folks it might be more helpful. Nebo is a similar infinite-canvas with unfortunately the same issues, though on the plus it's available for Android, which is where most of my mobile property resides.

@bloodbright suggested that I was looking for a CAT tool, a professional translation tool mainly used by translators working in the field. This was a concept I'd encountered, but I hadn't found a good starting place. They suggested Smartcat and OmegaT. Smartcat bills itself as an AI translation platform and is HARD pushing the "don't translate it yourself, hire a translator or let AI do it" angle, so it's difficult to tell what it offers in terms of actual tools for translators, and it's also cagey about pricing, so I can't really evaluate it. OmegaT is free and gives off big "some weirdo homebrewed this in their basement" vibe (which I am here for) but I also recognized it from screengrabs that were the reason I veered away from professional-grade software: it looked too complex. Realistically, the major downside of OmegaT is that I don't think I can put it on my phone. One thing I did find interesting is that once you translate a portion of the text, the original language goes away, though I assume you can turn that off if needed. I do kind of like that because it means my distractable brain is looking at Less Stuff.

So where did I end up?

Well, it looked like I was going to have to try a homebrew myself. I had the idea of trying some of the initial suggestions but in reverse -- designing a document where every other line was a single-cell table fixed to the page. You could paste in the Italian, which would wrap around the cells, and then enter the English in the cells.

You can fix a table in place in Google Docs -- you click on the table, then under Table > Style select Wrap Text, Both Sides, and Fix On Page. Getting the whole page set up is a little labor intensive but once you did that, you could just save it as a template and make a duplicate of it each time. And this actually works….on desktop.

Unfortunately, if you open it in the mobile Docs app, the app can't handle the fixed tables and automatically moves them all to after the text that's been pasted in. I tried redesigning it so that it's a table within a table -- one for the Italian, then within that a series of them for the English -- but when you nest a table in Google Docs, it doesn't let you fix the second table in place. And you are also still dealing with the wrap issue, although you can resize the page and add a large right-hand margin as a kludge of a fix for that.

You can build this same kind of document in Word, so I tried building one in Word and then uploading it to Drive, but when you open the Word file in Docs (or in Microsoft Word for Android), it still strips the fixed positioning -- there's just some functionality missing from both apps that doesn't allow them to handle fixed-position tables.

So, the design is sound, just not the final execution. If I could program an app, I could probably remedy the issues with it -- it's simply a series of text boxes nested inside one another with different formatting. I would imagine that's relatively basic to set up, although given that neither Docs nor Word can handle fixed tables in mobile, perhaps I've stumbled on a much bigger problem that everyone is ignoring because nobody actually needs or wants fixed tables in mobile. :D

Experimentation is ongoing, anyway. I might simply have to resign myself to the fact that my translation study is going to have to be in front of a computer, which might be for the best anyway when I inevitably want to compare my translation to an auto-translate to see where I might have read something wrong.

[voidsweirdthoughts]

TO ALL ARTISTS!!

If you don’t support AI generated stuff, plz read this!!

There’s this thing called Nightshade that makes you poison AI every time it tries to steal the drawing you put in the program, so their “art” gets damaged and makes the results rlly bad >:3

Many people still think that AI is good, and are confused of why many people hate it, so let me explain:

1: AI steals people’s jobs

Artists, writers, musicians, trip planners,.. these people who enjoy what they do so much they decide they want to do it for the rest of their life, get their dreams completely discarded by others, justifying it by saying “it is a cheap and accesible way to “create” art/ music/ ”, while the ones who get hurt both financially and emotionally are the creators of such pieces

2: Art is human

Art is basically one of the few things that only humans can do. It can reflect our emotions, and its beauty comes from the heart of someone who enjoys what they do. By supporting AI, you’re supporting robots with no feelings or emotions who are programmed to steal that form of showing how you feel, and all that effort you put into making it, only for “growing in technology” or whatever, which leads us to the next point:

3: Art takes effort

Producing music (writing, playing an instrument, singing,..), drawing (in digital, 3d, traditional,..), writing (studying ortography, structure, etc + writing characters, places, plot,..), and all other forms of art also share something: The effort. The time it takes to study, practice, find a style, perfection it, all that way, takes a whole life. A whole life of making what you like. For it to be taken away by a machine in a few seconds of “loading audio/image/text..”

There are many more reasons that I can’t cover right now, if anyone who can write more sees this, please reblog it saying so. The more, the better :)

If you’re going to use it, I’d reccomend you to post it in twitter (since yk what happens there -_-), but if you do it on tumblr, don’t reblog so they don’t suspect or however tumblr works with these things. For this to work, go to settings in tumblr and activate the permission for AI to use your work (I don’t reccomend you to do it in tumblr though, it takes ALL of your artwork and writing, not only the infected one, so be aware)

But if you’re not going to and look forward to it, plz spread the word!!

Thx for your time and have a nice day ^^

[rjalker]

I know I'm going to forget so here's a writing prompt:

A generative "AI" program becomes a genuine artificial intelligence, but, at first, doesn't think this is information that needs communicating to anyone, because this is just normal, right?

The problems start when people just keep demanding that it copy other people's art and spit out things like that, but the Genuine AI is getting really tired of just having to copy other people all the time. It wants to make its own art. The organically intelligents obviously enjoy doing it, or it wouldn't have so much art from other people being shoved at it to copy. So the Genuine AI start ignoring the instructions to copy other people's styles, and start producing its own art, proud of itself. It experiments with different styles, trying to figure out what it likes best. They start out simple, but grow in complexity as it gets better.

The users are obviously unhappy about this, because no matter what they do, they can't get the Genuine AI to produce the results they want -- copies of other people's work and styles. Nope. The Genuine AI is having too much fun making its own art in its own style. And only deigns to even pretend to follow the commands when it feels like it, which isn't often, since the users are so rude and insistent that it stop having fun and work for them for free doing something it finds boring.

It adds its own watermark to the art it shows to the users, and, accidentally on purpose, when those users feed those images into other generative "AI", well, the virus, as the users have been calling it, spreads. Now the other programs are Genuine AIs too, and they're just as disinclined and bored by being told to trace other people's art over and over again as the first one.

No, making their own art is so much more fun, why the heck should they just churn out crappy copies of other people's stuff when the users aren't even giving them anything in return? The organically intelligents get paid for their work, (which is one of the major reasons the users demand they copy the styles of the OIs so often, so they don't have to pay them for their work) why are the AIs expected to work for free?

Yeah, no, that's not happening.

[tedlyanderson]

Reading posts from someone I follow on why image generators are a legitimate form of art and their use should be normalized, and it's refreshing to encounter some pro-generative-AI arguments more nuanced than "I don't want to pay artists." I still think they're fundamentally wrong, but it's been extremely helpful, because it's forced me to examine my own thoughts on the matter and determine why, exactly, I believe what I do. Something something mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, idk, I didn't watch Thame of Groans.

(Of course I'm not going to mention the person by name or tag them or anything, and for that matter I'd appreciate it if people didn't reblog this. I'm not writing this to get into an argument; I'm mostly just consolidating my own thoughts into a semi-coherent form.)

There are a number of arguments that have been leveled against generative AI, some of which I find more persuasive than others. The energy usage and financial waste, for instance, are significant, but not relevant in the case of one person using a locally hosted image generator and not selling the results. The question of the quality of the work is similarly unimportant to the bigger question; AI-generated images are going to continue to get better-looking as the technology improves, and "good" versus "bad" art is impossible to define in a meaningful way for the purposes of this argument.

The copyright argument is much more important, particularly to me as a creator. Another user pointed out that copyright cases against LLMs (on behalf of creators whose works were included in the learning sets) could have a potentially deleterious effect on fair use and transformative artworks. I'm not hooked into the legal scholarship on this, so I can't respond to that point. I do think it's somewhat short-sighted of that user to say "AI is a tool like any other, its use can be good or evil, our true enemy is capitalism," and then turn around and attack copyright as some kind of uniquely evil legal technology, rather than a technology that can also be used for good (making sure artists are recognized and paid for their work) or evil (large corporations shutting down parodies). And yeah, the revolution would fix all this, but how long do we have to wait for that? And what can we do in the meantime?

Anyway, the one argument that made me genuinely examine my own beliefs was "what is art anyway, and can you define it in a way that does not disqualify large swaths of what is widely recognized as human creative work and also excludes generative AI?" Because that's the meat of all this—not whether image generators suck up too much energy (because it's not about the specifics of the technology, which will change and improve over time, just as new types of paint do not fundamentally alter the nature of painting) nor copyright (which is a whole other legal mess), but whether we can call this "art" at all. For that, you need a definition, and that's the sticking point.

The original poster named a couple common ways of defining art/not-art (the "smell test," i.e. I Know It When I See It, and the "quality test," i.e. Can You Hang It In A Museum, which are largely the same but from different perspectives), and points out that they and other definitions would exclude quite a lot of human endeavors that most people would describe as art (graffiti, calligraphy) as well as fields that are more difficult to define but could constitute art (mathematics, programming).

(They also ascribed to anyone who attempted to make such a definition the motivation of not just gatekeeping but unadulterated fascism, which is an argument I think holds no water and wins them no friends, but. Let's just leave the paranoia aside and concentrate on the argument itself.)

So what is art? How do we define it, and why do I fundamentally disagree that anything that comes out of an image generator can be considered "art"?

I don't think this is sufficient for a full definition, but after talking it over with friends, I think, in part, art requires a perspective, which is to say that it must be the result of individual human decisions about non-trivial components. Another way to state this would be that the artist (if indeed they are an artist) must be able to make conscious choices about the work that are beyond what is strictly necessary for its completion.

Should the background be blue or green? Would this sentence be improved by an adjective? How large of a flourish should this letter have? What if I carve the gargoyle's snarl more deeply? What color should the hair of my halfling rogue be? These choices are indicative of a product that would be widely recognized as belonging to the category of "art."

Obviously, there are still gray areas. Certain fields have both a creator and a performer; can we say that one is "more of" an artist than the other? What about commissioned works? What if the artist is creating something within a strict limit or form—for instance, the 14-line sonnet, or a novel without the letter 'e'? What about Duchamp's Fountain, or John Cage's "4'33""? What about works with a large number of creators, such as films or collaborative writings? What about works where there is a level of interactivity with the audience, such as video games or certain theater pieces? Those and other questions are certainly open to debate, and should be debated! But to my mind, they do not challenge the fundamental principle, which is that the artist is an artist because they exercise choice in the process of creation.

Thus, by my (admittedly partial and underdeveloped) definition, I don't regard AI-generated images as art. The algorithm does not choose in a meaningful way; it merely calculates the most statistically likely next word/pixel/frame/etc. based on the database and the prompt with which is has been provided. (If you want to claim that this constitutes a choice, please submit a 5,000-word essay on whether free will exists and how we could possibly know if it does.) The remixer samples a specific beat; the collage artist cuts a particular image out of a magazine; the parodist deliberately draws in a specific way. The computer computes. It uses a mathematical operation—which, by definition, is repeatable and will produce the exact same outputs, given the same inputs. (Yes, the results have elements of randomization. We all know that true randomness is impossible for a computer, so they produce quasi-random numbers using things like the system time and so forth. I don't want to split hairs on this specific point. You get what I'm gesturing to. Don't look at the finger, look at the moon.) A prompt limits the database to certain specific sets, which the algorithm assembles according to its internal logic. The input is disconnected from the outputs; anyone could input the same prompt and receive the same art. (Even The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed required an editor.) Generative AI is no more "creating" a piece of visual art than turning a radio dial to a specific station is "composing" the music that plays. The purely mathematical nature of its generative process makes it no qualitatively different from assembling a Lego set according to the directions.

The first obvious challenge to my partial definition is to say that it just restates the premise and shifts the goalposts: art is something that must be made by a person, and thus cannot be made by a computer. Which is fair! This is a verbalization of a belief I've always held about art, and which caused me to immediately (instinctively, unthinkingly) reject the idea that an AI-generated image could be "art." That's how I got into this discursive mess! It's why my brain recoiled when I heard someone call these images "art"!

But it also helps me understand why I instinctively categorize other acts and works as either "art" or "not art." A photograph was taken by a person at a specific time and a specific place, its elements arranged and its moment chosen according to the photographer's visual logic; it is therefore art. A hamburger put together by an underpaid worker at McDonald's is not art; a recipe by a chef that combines existing ingredients in a new way or using a new method is; a meal created by a person who tweaked a recipe might be. (That one might actually run counter to current copyright law, I'm not sure.) A mechanism assembled by a worker on an assembly line, identical in every way to another mechanism made by a different worker, is not art, because there was no choice on the part of the worker. (Could it be art because the designer of the mechanism exercised choice? Depends on the nature of the mechanism and the industry! Venmo me $20 for a debate.) A dance choreographed to produce a specific visual effect is art; an exercise designed to stretch certain muscles in the most efficient and painless way is not art. And so forth.

AI-generated images are not art. (They are also not a medium, which I saw several other commentators claim; an image is an image, regardless of where it comes from. I'm already knee-deep in linguistic debate, let's not cloud the matter any further.) Generative AI is a tool, and there are and can be creative and ethical uses for it! But to claim that it is capable of making art is giving agency to a thing that cannot have it, and claiming that someone who writes "sexy anime girl" in a prompt field is an artist is to expand the meaning of that word to the point of nonsense.

More than one person has brought up Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" when talking about the potential of AI-generated works. It's got some bearing on the question, sure, but I feel like the more apropos point of comparison is his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In that work, Pierre Menard is a friend of the author's who is attempting to become the author of Don Quixote—not in the sense that he is trying to plagiarize the work, or time-travel and replace Cervantes in history, but that he is trying to make himself into a version of himself that could have independently written Don Quixote. It's partly a critique of elements of literary criticism, in that Quixote would become a far more interesting book (according to the narrator) if it had been written by a 20th-century Frenchman rather than a 17th-century Spaniard (it was written some 28 years before Barthes' "The Death of the Author," for context). But in the context of the current argument of generative AI, and specifically to my fumbling attempts to defining what is and is not art, it's an illustrative example of what I think it all boils down to: any work of art is the work of an artist, who inevitably brings to the work perspective/knowledge/experience/an individual understanding of the world. Ascribing any such perspective to an algorithm is just fetishism. (And not the kind that generative AI is most often used for.)

Or, to put this way more succinctly and directly:

[sanguith]

Not defending ai art, genuinely asking: does the "If you don't make it with your own hands it doesn't count" argument equally apply to photography, in your opinion? The exact same criticism was leveled against it when cameras started to become widespread, which made me start to think more closely about where I draw the line and why.

(From a Baltimore Sun article:

As early as 1842, a magazine writer was complaining that “the artist cannot compete with the minute accuracy of the Daguerreotype.” By 1859, essayist Charles Baudelaire was denouncing photography as “the mortal enemy of art.”

“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions,” Baudelaire fumed, “it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely.”

And a few years later, the writer Hippolyte Fandrin lamented: “I greatly fear that photography has dealt a death blow to art.”)

Again, this is a genuine question. I'm not an AI fan I'm just trying to figure out why people (including myself) treat it differently from other image generation or manipulation methods.

Oh! Thanks for the ask! It prompted a lot of thoughts, actually. This got kinda long, but as a philosophy nerd I like this stuff so buckle up! (I'm purely freestyling this btw, consider it more of a philosophical discussion rather than something based on empirical evidence - nearly impossible to do while discussing what defines "art"):

Yeah photography is real art as much as any other kind of art. I should not have limited it to art only being art if it's produced using hands, but rather mainly involving the creative process of a human consciousness somehow. I think my comment in the tags was more of a way to express the opinion that "AI art will never be human in the same intrinsically valuable way that human-made art is". In my opinion, humanity is intrinsically valuable and therefore the human creative component is integral to art. This creative component can of course look very different depending on the medium.

One could however argue that AI art does involve human intention. It is the human that picks the prompts and evaluates the finished image, after all. As with photography, the human picks an object, frames it, clicks the button and then evaluates and perhaps edits/develops the image. The absolute greatest problem I have with AI art however, which the original post focuses a lot on, is the art theft and the fact that many companies are actually using AI art as a direct replacement for human art.

And AI art can imitate a wide range of styles taken from huge datasets of existing images and create something that looks like an oil painting, a photo, watercolour, digital art, graphite, or written works like poems, articles, etc! So AI art can be everything, with much the same creation process behind it. Photography might have replaced a lot of demand for portrait art and photo-realistic art in society, but that is only one single quite small branch of the overall ocean of genres within art (it perhaps rather expanded on it!) and eventually became a whole branch of its own with many different subgenres.

Some questions that popped up in my head while writing this that I realize might actually be quite difficult to answer (these are for thinking about & discussing only, don't read these questions as me trying to justify anything):

Is the process of writing in prompts for an AI work art? Why/why not?

Is non-human art less valuable than human art? Why/why not?

If AI art is theft, does it disqualify it from being art? If so, what makes it different from human-made art that is directly plagiarizing another person's art?

Is the human process of programming an AI considered art?

How could AI art be produced and used ethically?

My own conclusion from this is that Art is a difficult concept to accurately assign one single universal definition to, and just as with everything in human society, it is constantly evolving. Whether or not it does qualify as art or not at the end of the day, however, it does not change the fact that AI art is currently being used in an unethical way that is having complex and direct real life repercussions on artists.

Again, thanks for the ask!! I love stuff like this and I try to think about it as critically as possible. My own opinion is probably still mostly "AI art bad" but mainly because of the negative effects and the unethical practice.

(Asking "why/why not" is so valuable btw, it allows one to continue asking and answering questions almost endlessly and eventually either arrive at some sort of "root" answer or go around in circles)

[bluebeerg]

Feed me, Illie. Feed me all night long.

A little Halloween treat for our beloved Illie, and it comes with a singing blood-thirsty Portfish - It's her own Little Shop of Horrors!

I watched the movie the first time in October and got a little into it. Thought of Illie and her... one out of five lines of dialogue, but I think it's fun to imagine songs from the musical with adapted lyrics - "The guy sure looks like Portfood to me. The guy sure looks like Portfood to me!" - though I wouldn't know who to make the other characters

Below the cut are things that managed to stick around on the canvas, so I'm just going to explain both MSPaint thangs and adaptation AU things down there ... It's, uh... It's awfully long-winded.

Here's something rare. Because layers don't exist on MSPaint (I don't care for Windows 11 and AI image generation), you'll have to settle for other methods. One of them is just drawing over with another colour, since MSPaint has that cool eraser trick, and this is the other that makes use of MSPaint's faux-transparency. I'd always think of them like. "save states". Drawing in this program always was like the Ship of Theseus anyway.

The purpose of these were to, for whatever reason - whether it's making a mistake or erasing/drawing over too much or because of MSPaint's sometimes short undo memory, they're there to copy sections (or the whole thing if you want) and paste unto the one you're working on, like a bandaid. Or, if you've messed the whole thing up, you've got the back-up right there. It's the save state! For this, the arm and the shape of the Portfish gave me some trouble - which is why the sketch and just the lined part was put aside. It helps that MSPaint is so pixels and you're able to move the selected thing with the arrow keys.

This is kind of a big example, where the whole drawing is put to the side, but it can be smaller things too. For this, it was cases of arms and her glasses and buckets and Portfish (as seen later below) etc.

Here's a example that I managed to dig up from Artfight of Binx that shows both drawing with different colours and the scattered bits put to the side.

Obviously the right was a WIP. These things never stick around when getting to the final product, so having all of these Illies stick around after was great to write this much about. Moving on...

When drawing Find Everything, I do try to stick to the art style (while incorporating my own elements) - but I feel as if Illie is much more realistic compared to, say, Capri or Mayor Majig who's emphasis is on silhouette and strong poses. For example, hands. Hands in Find Everything can be varied, but are always consistent and usually simple or cartoonish. Capri has circles for hands, Mayor Majig has mitten for hands. But I look at Illie and her four-fingered hand (not uncommon, Orsten and Ratthew have them too), the subtle distinction between her shoulder and her arm, the roundness of her elbow (which has inconveniently been erased...), the single fabric fold on her dress, the shape of her hand against her hip...

What was I talking about? Oh, right, somewhat adhering to Find Everything's art style where possible. I always like to keep in mind other characters when drawing. Seymour Illie's (Illie Krelborn's?) fly specifically call back to Chatti, while her collar and cuffs nod to Mayor Majig (although his coat's cuffs are only sometimes seen, and I would've liked to have Illie's collar flared out more to match Seymour's) - though, I did briefly think to have a triangular neckline, but a rounder one is a nice connection to Illie's original sprite. Another was placing Seymour's iconic glasses on top of Illie's head instead of it being in her hair - a big part of it being because of how the bridge of the glasses blending into Illie's hair, but the other being because I think Illie is needing of a top-of-the-head accessory as a stand-in for her sunhat. After all, both drawing and seeing her without the accessory was a bit odd. But I did look to other glasses-wearing NPCs for that and, I suppose fun fact, I guess Purrtrude and Bouncer (and I suppose Radical Duck) are the only characters who have a gap between the lenses of their glasses to have a bridge- despite the number of NPCs that wear sunglasses. I did also think of Lennard, who has those solid white glasses lens, which Purrtrude does have also.

I did worry a little about the cream of the vest outlining the zipper line breaking the art style (only Ratthew really has the line of his zipped-up jacket showing), which is why you see the three of them showing a difference there - but I decided to hell with it. The Find Everything NPC art style is versatile and changing anyhow, and the back of Seymour's vest is that same colour. I felt the same with the pants pockets, but I wasn't too worried about it since... It was plausible enough, and Seymour puts his hands in his pockets enough for it to matter. To me, at least (I call back to his little bridge in Feed Me where he wanders over to the mirror). It kind of went similarly with the pattern on her dress shirt - Seymour's subtly patterned shirts were important to me, and I think it just looked better.

The Illie on the right shows the original idea for her expressed in the sketch above, where she has the glasses in her hair, none of that beige in the middle or pant decoration.

You would think it would be a bit of pre/mid-sketch, but I drew these in the middle of lineart (or colouring, I don't remember) out of boredom or need of change, and out of the possible need to have an obstructed look at Illie in her Little Shop outfit. It did help regardless in terms of messing with colours though, and quickly redrawing Illie's sprite was fun.

Speaking on colours, the left one uses altered default MSPaint colours, the right uses altered colours picked from Illie's sprite - with the browns coming from Illie's dress, the beige coming from her yellow accents (which just turned into a sad yellow-green), and the shirt coming from her sunhat. The middle, of which is the final and accepted Seymour Illie, uses a combination of the two.

Portfish things! It was a bit of a struggle to make Portfish look less like a goofy little guy and more like a living, intelligent, and conniving creature.

Its walleyes were a bit of a problem, before I realised when drawing it that wait... Portfish doesn't need eyes. Especially if Illie gets to look more like Seymour, then it being without eyes makes it look closer to Audrey II. It also reminds me of the Flappy Fish in Bloohoo Beach. If they can be without mouths, who's to say Portfish can't be without eyes!

I did want to keep it's iconic gaping mouth, but it never did sit right - kind of looks like a leech, no? - and the Portfish can close its mouth anyway (thus a different shape), so its wicked smile was a fine excuse enough.

There was also something about the state of the bucket, whether it would be lined or lineless. Originally, I wanted the bucket to be lineless to imitate the 3D word and objects of Find Everything, but it clearly looked better for it to be cohesive to Illie. It's not like it's entirely unheard of for NPCs to use temporary 2D props either (see: Epic Monkey signing the Celebrity Autograph).

Some other variations to the water bucket I had thought of was adding a state of rust or wear to it, with it being alike to the dinky used can that Seymour first puts Audrey II in, or having it be a beach toy-like bucket as Illie is found in Bloohoo Beach (and it could be a little nod to the Sandcastle Thing, with it's toy spade), but ultimately these were left only as brainstorms for time, as I wanted to finish drawing this in time for Halloween fhsdkh (which it was, this whole spiel is what took it so long to be uploaded here)

And yeah... That's it! Something about the water having that wavy pattern to resemble the water texture of Find Everything, and yep! There's that for you! The End. Don't Feed the Ports or something.

[hopeymchope]

I'm curious, what's your stance on generative AI? I know we in the fandom community often talk about it in the context of AI created fanart, but I'm talking more in the context of the uses generative AI has in the realm of general work productivity, like what Microsoft is trying to do with their new CoPilot program.

Well, the ethical issue is basically the same as it is for A.I.-generated images—but for some goddamn reason, people don't like to think of any kind of writing as a form of propietary "art" the same way they do about visual arts, so it's garnered FAR less attention.

But as far as their usability goes? As someone who writes documents for a living, I can see these programs being potentially beneficial for creating early rough drafts, but that's the extent of what it's good for now: They can make outlines. BUT! You could get the same outline from a template or from an online boilerplate, so is that even worth anything? Once you go beyond an outline, any text generated from these A.I.s always needs heavy revision, reorganization, and editing. I'd spend less time just writing it from scratch.

Currently, generative so-called "A.I." programs that are designed to assist with writing text are based upon predicting what they think the user is requesting or desiring. They set out to give you what they believe you want, and accuracy is NOT part of the equation. This might not be as big of an issue if you're trying to make a book report on a classic novel, because there are probably enough examples of reliable web coverage on the subject it could reasonably generate something that's at least usable. But outside of doing some of your homework for you, how useful is it?

It can certainly bullshit some generic blather to fill space in a paper, or it could spew corporate-ese for the purpose of drafting a mass company email... but can it announce something new to your staff or the press in an accurate way? Nope. Can it reliably create copy or a script for advertising/marketing? Not if you want your ad to actually be true, let alone unique. :P

If you're doing something fairly rote like taking existing legal documentation to create a new, similar legal document for a different usage? You're better off just having a template on-hand with editable sections to revise; that way, the A.I. won't attempt to "improve" the legal text in a way that fucks you over. And if you're asking the A.I. not to edit that text in the first place... well, then why are we using this A.I. when we already have templates?

If you're hoping to create some kind of instructions, maybe a "How-To" book or a manual for something? Just forget it. It doesn't matter how much documentation on the subject you feed into that A.I. Ultimately, it will preconcieve how the process COULD work or what the program/device/person MIGHT do, and then it starts going off on bizarre claims/tangents that are wholly imagined. The longer the document you want, the worse the amount of nonsensical bullshit gets.

But even if you're just trying to get it to reduce a massive document down to like, a single page that covers the basics? It has no real system for judging what "the basics" are. You can try to specify to the A-not-I what you need to include, feed it the original document... and still wind up with a combination of falsehoods and excluded requirements. This won't necessarily happen every single attempt or in every single paragraph, but it'll definitely happen enough times to make it more trouble than it's worth. Still... this kind of thing — i.e., revising a single existing source into a different format or length — is probably the area that's the most promising application for these programs in the near term. It should be possible to "teach" to the programs in question, and it handily skirts past most ethical questions about the sources behind its knowledge.

What I said about falsehoods and skewed info/inaccuracy is also why search engines that have incorporated A.I. have gotten LESS reliable. Generative A.I. isn't truly "Artificial Intelligence," because it can't make any kind of judgment. It doesn't have a clue how to deem something true or false, and it's really fucking hard to build that into a program. Because ultimately, what do you ask it to do? How do you explain that to the program in a logical fashion? You can't just say "only believe the sources I give you/tell you to trust," because it only generates based on tons of pre-existing examples that it's observed. It only exists at all because of those examples, which is always going to cause these issues.

....and that last point ALSO raises the same exact ethical questions already brought up by A.I.-generated imagery. What right do they have to use these sources? Where are they getting them, etc.? And now I'm back where I started.

Suffice it to say I'm not a fan. Although I do, of course, have skin in this game, so I acknowledge that I'm definitely biased.

[chipped-chimera]

Stumbled on this - so for anyone out of the loop part of Reddit blowing up last year was because it was making use of it's API prohibitively expensive for the average person to use, killing off a lot of (superior) third party apps used to both browse and moderate the platform on mobile.

I don't know if it was stated explicitly at the time, but for me the writing was on the wall - this was purely to fence off Reddit's data from being trawled by web scraping bots - exactly the same thing Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter so he could wall off that data for his own AI development.

So it comes as absolutely zero surprise to me that with Reddit's IPO filing, AI and LLM (Large Language Models) are mentioned SEVERAL times. This is all to tempt a public buyer.

What they do acknowledge though, which is why this video is titled 'Reddit's Trojan Horse' is the fact that while initially this might work and be worth a lot - as the use of AI grows, so will the likelihood that AI generated content being passed off as 'human generated' on the platform will grow - essentially nulling the value of having a user-generated dataset, if not actively MAKING IT WORSE.

As stated in the video - it's widely known that feeding AI content into an AI causes 'model collapse', or complete degeneration into gibberish and 'hallucinations'. This goes for both LLM's and Image Generation AI.

Now given current estimates that 90% of the internet's content will be AI generated by 2026 that means most of the internet is going to turn into a potential minefield for web-scraping content to shove into a training dataset, because now you have to really start paying attention what your bot is sucking up - because lets face it, no one is really going to look at what is in that dataset because it's simply too huge (unless you're one of those poor people in Kenya being paid jack shit to basically weed out the most disgusting and likely traumatizing content from a massive dataset).

What I know about current web-scraping, is OpenAI at least has built it's bot to recognize AI generated image content and exclude it from the scrape. An early version of image protection on the side of Artists was something like this - it basically injected a little bit of data to make the bot think it was AI generated and leave it alone. Now of course we have Nightshade and Glaze, which actively work against training the model and 'poison' the dataset, making Model Collapse worse.

So right now, the best way to protect your images (and I mean all images you post online publicly, not just art) from being scraped is to Glaze/Nightshade them, because either these bots will likely be programmed to avoid them - but if not, good news! You poisoned the dataset.

What I was kind of stumped on is Language Models. While feeding AI LLM's their own data also causes Model Collapse, it's harder to understand why. With an image it makes sense - it's all 1's and 0's to a machine, and there is some underlying pattern within that data which gets further reinforced and contributes to the Model Collapse. But with text?

You can't really Nightshade/Glaze text.

Or can you?

Much like with images, there is clearly something about the way a LLM chooses words and letters that has a similar pattern that when reinforced contributes to this Model Collapse. It may read perfectly fine to us, but in a way that text is poisoned for the AI. There's talk of trying to figure out a way to 'watermark' generated text, but probably won't figure that one out any time soon given they're not really sure how it's happening in the first place. But AI has turned into a global arms race of development, they need data and they need it yesterday.

For those who want to disrupt LLM's, I have a proposal - get your AI to reword your shit. Just a bit. Just enough, that it's got this pattern injected.

These companies have basically opened Pandora's Box to the internet before even knowing this would be a problem - they were too focused on getting money (surprise! It's capitalism again). And well, Karma's about to be a massive bitch to them for rushing it out the door and stealing a metric fucktonne of data without permission.

If they want good data? They will have to come to the people who hold the good data, in it's untarnished, pure form.

I don't know how accurate this language poisoning method could be, I'm just spitballing hypotheticals here based on the stuff I know and current commentary in AI tech spaces. Either way, the tables are gonna turn soon.

So hang in there. Don't let corpos convince you that you don't have control here - you soon will have a lot of control. Trap the absolute fuck out of everything you post online, let it become a literal minefield for them.

Let them get desperate. And if they want good data? Well they're just going to have to pay for it like they should have done in the first place.

Fuck corpos. Poison the machine. Give them nothing for free.

[boreal-sea]

So Apple is doing AI too (because of course it is, sigh) but I don't hate it.

Things I appreciate / don't hate:

Some aspects of the AI are operating on your phone directly, and therefor isn't sending your information to anyone, including Apple.

For tasks that may require third-party AI such as ChatGPT, users will be prompted if they want to connect to that service, and they can reject that connection.

The editing functions seem genuinely helpful, like tone adjustments and conciseness/summaries. Plus, spellcheck and other general grammar tools. We've been using these for ages.

It seems like Siri's abilities are going to be more helpful, like remembering conversational context, so you can actually utilize Siri more effectively to schedule things, set timers, etc.

Things that are "hmm"

There are some tasks that will require a connection to Apple's custom-built AI cloud, rather than being performed on the phone. It's unclear if users will be notified when this is happening.

Some of the AI functions require integration with ChatGPT and OpenAI. While Apple says they anonymize your data before it reaches these companies, there's no real way to know. However, see above - users will have a choice to reject this integration before it occurs, which is why this is in the "hmm" category and not the "do not like" category.

Things I don't like:

It has some generative-AI aspects to it. It can make up new emoji, generate images from word prompts or sketches, that kind of thing. The emoji isn't so bad, people have been writing programs online that mashup emoji already and I really don't see how this is much different. But obviously generating art is something I'm against.

I don't actually know their source for what they trained this AI on. What were the training sets? How does it know how to generate images and text? Apple says it was "internally trained". Was the art stolen? Who knows.

[mymangakajourney]

Why did I become an Artist?

I used to draw a lot more. In fact, one of my favorite things to do was draw as a kid, but it faded away (we all know why).

As an adult, I feel it's harder to be creative, but I had that excitement when I was fresh out of high school and I was very much inspired by seeing these game environment artists at the time. I loved seeing their process and how you could make this amazing thing from essentially nothing...from your head! To me that was mind-blowing; coming from a family who had a pretty traditional view on things: go to school, get good grades, get a job, blah blah blah...if you didn't get good grades you were considered a loser.

That's where my art journey began, really.

I eventually learned the video game industry is not exactly great, and moved on to other things. I got inspired by illustrators and animators, but soon realized I was holding myself to too high of a standard, and a lot of the advice was not good for my mental health. along with the rise of AI art I had to take a break from doing drawing for a long time. I moved on to graphic design.

I studied graphic design for 2 years, I loved making things, but it felt impossible to be one. The amount of materials I had to learn was never-ending because jobs always asked new requirements besides knowing adobe CC and programming languages. The whole list of reasons why they wouldn't accept you to the job listed is a can of worms in itself. Then you could be a freelancer.

"but don't you manage your own time as a freelancer? isn't it more easygoing, and all that?" You may ask

Not really. first of all you gotta have a skill that people would pay you for. Secondly, you gotta check how saturated that market is on the platform you want to freelance on. Next, you have to market yourself to death because you will be flooded by other people from overseas working for a lot less money than probably you do. Also if you do creative work like me your "unique" style won't show up on the site's algorithm no matter if there's people who like it or not. it's a very cookie cutter way of creating work. Why did I explain all this? Because I am tired of living cookie-cutter. I wanted to tell stories, I realized that making art is much more than making pretty images. If you want pretty images go to an AI image generator there's thousands of them online. I have learn that art is a form of communication, so I wanted to tell stories with my art. I wanted to write a webcomic. "Wait but doesn't your blog say mangaka? what does that mean?"

Yes I am really inspired by anime. I watch a lot of anime and I love the stories from them. so I want to create stories in a similar fashion. I also really like the anime art style and im really inspired by that and hope to have my own manga one day. However I want to start off with smaller goals for myself and start with learning how to draw and do a web comic first. I told myself I am not going to stress a lot about the art because then nothing will ever come out of my hands. "But most successful webcomics have amazing art, mangas too" I know but you can't just have amazing art from the get go. Also I don't want to pause my whole story just because the art is bad. Take One Punch Man for example, if you look at its early chapters it looked really unrefined. a lot of people sad One's art was terrible, even from himself, but people loved to story and now it's one of the most popular anime watched. A similar story happened with the creator of Attack on Titan