#ai museum models

[artapir]

Yet more alt-timeline museum models--coastal Biomayan "flying wing" drones, exhibiting some Chichimech influence. Midjourney 5.2

[mindsynthcreations]

[aigeneratedarchi]

[a-alban-works]

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 1049: The Paul Cooijmans Session

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is from Paul Cooijmans. “How can we verify whether a system or being is conscious?” Rick Rosner: AI will claim and act as if it is conscious long before it’s conscious. Because AI takes, in these large language models, the thoughts of…

[misterlemonztenth]

06-20-24 | lisahewitt. misterlemonztenth.tumblr.com/archive

[lackadaisycats]

Miss Tracy, do u have any advice on researching a specific time period?

(also I know u probably won't see this, but I love your art and you are awesome)

Look for books about the time period, but also books written contemporaneous to the time period, whether fiction or non-fiction. Check used book stores for out of print gems at good prices.

If photography was a technology that existed in the time period you're researching, look for photos of people doing everyday things. Take in the context, the geography, the economic situation. Look at how they're dressed and what their clothes say about them.

Newspaper archives. Sometimes newspapers of the past are free to browse. Sometimes you have to pay for access. Old shopping catalogue collections - if they exist for your time period - are great too.

Documentary films about time periods, or specific events in a given time period can be useful, even if only for a broad overview.

Museum exhibits - helpful whether you're looking for famous paintings or artifacts of past civilizations in a world renowned institution, or trying to dig up something impossibly unique in an oddity denture museum in some forgotten place in the Midwest. If you can't go in person, check online. You can find museums with vintage clothing or household appliance collections from even a few decades ago. Some museums have extensive, searchable online collections too. Take the Metropolitan Museum for instance.

If you can visit historical sites relevant to your area of interest, do it! Do those little guided walking tours. Do the ghost tours even - they're often fairly history-centric with some paranormal folklore for added spice. Sometimes they get you access to places you otherwise can't enter. Check historical societies local to cities or towns of interest.

If you need information about something deeply specific, check the internet for communities that form around that deeply specific topic. I've found tidbits of useful info searching around old forum posts from radio enthusiasts, Model T owners, and people who collect old telephone booths. (Granted, it's getting harder to search for this kind of stuff nowadays.)

-----------

Be careful of AI trash, whether it's generative images, text descriptions, or entire articles. Don't rely much on film or television for accuracy. Some things are more interested in being accurate than others, but there's almost always some artistic license taken. If you're trying to be particularly accurate about something, triple check it for confirmation. Misinformation has had a way of spreading like insidious mildew even before AI started disseminating it with delusory authority.

Lastly, if you don't enjoy doing this kind of historical research like a weird little detective-creature, consider loosening up on the 'historical' aspect of your writing. It's okay to not focus on historicity in your fiction. But if you're going to dive in whole-hog on history, bear in mind it's an ongoing, often time-consuming adventure in information-finding.

(Thank you for the kind words!)

[animalphotorefs]

Okay so a little away from your wheelhouse, but do you know where I could find photos of an actual giraffe skeleton (any modern species at this point) from multiple angles? I've been trying to find useful reference on their bone shape and articulation of things like the sternum, pelvis/hip sockets (any close angle), bird's eye of the spine/neck for *months* - best I've found is a single 3/4 shot of a skeleton for sale currently housed in an Oklahoma City museum. Everything else is the dreaded '3D model' of someone's *idea* of a giraffe skeleton, a side angle taken from all the way across a hall, some old (once again side-view) anatomy diagram sketches and extremely cursed AI-assembled things.

I would suggest emailing the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City! I think that’s where the skeleton for sale you’re talking about is. I have cold-called them with a random skeleton question before and they were very kind about helping me figure it out - they might have photos in their collection, or be willing to take some for you!

If that doesn’t work, reblog this or send another ask and I’ll see what else I can find.

[dandelionsresilience]

whether the internet becomes an intolerable surveillance state, ubiquitous subscription model, or unusably ad- or AI-ridden shithole, I think we need to remember

how to do things offline

either on your personal hard drive (just because it’s an app doesn’t mean the information is stored in your device) or on paper. I’m not saying the collapse of the internet is imminent, and I’m not suggesting we do everything completely without technology, or even stop using it until we have to. (to be clear, I also don’t think the internet will just blink out of existence, suddenly stop being a thing at all; rather I think it might continue to lose its usefulness to the point where it’s impossible to get anything done. anyway) but some people may have forgotten how we got by before the internet (I almost have!), and the younger generation might not have experienced it at all.

I figure most people probably use the internet mainly for communication with friends and family, entertainment and creation (eg. writing), and looking up how to do things, so here’s how to do those things offline:

First and most importantly, download everything important to you onto at least one hard drive and at least one flashdrive! files can get corrupted and hardware can get damaged or lost, but as long as you keep backup copies, you have much-closer-to-guaranteed access versus hoping a business doesn’t decide to paywall, purge, or otherwise revoke your access. I would recommend getting irreplaceable photos printed as well

download and/or print/write down:

anything important to you - photos/videos, journals, certificates, college transcripts

contact info - phone numbers and/or addresses of friends/family (know how to contact them if you can’t use your favourite messaging app), doctors (open hours would be good too), veterinarians if you have pets, and work

how-to’s - recipes (one, two), emergency preparedness (what do I do if… eg. I smell gas)

other things you might google: cleaning chemicals to NOT mix, what laundry tag symbols mean, people food dogs and cats can and can’t eat, plant toxicity to pets

and know offline ways to find things out - local radio station, newspaper, a nearby highway rest area might have a region map, public libraries usually have a bunch of resources

also, those of you who get periods should strongly consider not using period tracking apps! here’s how to track your period manually

free printable period tracker templates (no printer? public libraries usually charge a few cents per page, or you can recreate it by hand)

moving on to entertainment, you can still get most media for free! it’s completely legal to download your favourite movies to your own personal hard drive, you just can’t sell or distribute copies (not legal advice)

movies: wcostream.tv (right click the player) - the url changes every once in a while but usually redirects; I recently noticed that it’s hiding a lot of movies behind “premium,” so it may or may not work anymore | download youtube videos

music: how to get music without streaming it | legal free downloads

games: steamunlocked.net - doesn’t have every game and can be slow to update, but very reliable

books: free online libraries | legal free downloads

otherwise passing time:

active outdoor games

for road trips (social verbal games)

for when power’s out

for sheltering in place (not all offline, but good ideas)

board games (often found at thrift stores)

ad-free customisable games collection (mobile)

read, write, draw, or whatever your craft is, sing, dance, clean, reorganise, take a bath

go outside - excuses include napping (if safe), eating, reading, finding cool plants/animals/rocks, playing with the dog

places to go include:

zoos and museums can be surprisingly cheap

parks and nature preserves

library, mall, or game shop

and a few miscellaneous things for good measure:

time budgeting | household management

how to use a planner | I’ve had success with visually blocked-out schedules like these

please add on if you have any other offline alternatives to common uses of the internet!

[jadeharleyinc]

the scale of AI's ecological footprint

standalone version of my response to the following:

"you need soulless art? [...] why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art? i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources." "i think we all deserve nice things. [...] AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use [...] is too fucking much. none of us can afford to foot the bill." "go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. […] you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable […]? museums. galleries. being in nature."

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. i think it's important to consume less. but if you make these arguments about AI, do you apply them to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 months, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

the tech industry is guilty of plenty of horrendous stuff. but when it comes to the individual impact of AI, saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether that person is entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

[artapir]

Museum model of a chimerical panspermic pterosaur x squid x mysticete x goblin shark hybrid, converging on the true Cephalavians and allies.

Midjourney 5.2

[princesspetticoat]

The Muse of Her Ruin

Artist Modern AU: Chapter 1/? — Caramel

Summary:

Los Angeles was supposed to be your perfect canvas, but the struggle to make it leaves you feeling burnt out – until Agatha Harkness paints you into her world.

In her hands, you’re more than an artist, and she knows exactly how to mold you into her newest masterpiece.

Tags:

agatha!reader, age gap, mommy kink, slow burn, mean!agatha, possessive!agatha, AU: Art world of Los Angeles, portrait of a witch on fire, reader is babygirl, the witch wears prada, sugar mommy vibes, slight Rio/reader but only to make Agatha jealous, agatha can’t beat the AI allegations, dacryphilia, eventual smut, angst, MDLG, bratty bottom, BDSM, praise kink, degradation, strap-ons, anal, dub con, slight piss kink, squirting, power dynamics, possible memory loss and magic maybe idk, kitten play, electrostimulation, humiliation, overstimulation, exhibitionism for the art, let the bodies hit the floor, more tags later because i’m sure i’ll find something else to be foul about

Links: Twitter | AO3

Chapter 1: Caramel

It isn’t the first time a beautiful woman has stopped you in your doom scrolling on the internet. You’ve had your share of rabbit-holing through Instagram profiles, tagged photos, your finger hovering over the DM button with a wave of confidence that only comes when you’ve had a drink or two in your system.

But this woman, this one comes with an extension of discovery.

Just by googling her name, a thousand articles pop up. Art piece installations cascade every website, timeline, and city cultural journal. Jesus, then the red carpet photos multiply as the SEO of your web browser catches on to your sudden enthrall of dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes.

Oh, and the hashtags. #WitchyArt #HarknessAndDesire #CursedCanvas. Layers of art plummet before you, most requesting to select if you’d like to view the art or not because of its lewd nature, violating community guidelines.

#AgathaHarknessUnveiled

A public invitation to forbiddenness. You’re intrigued.

Then more pictures of her show up, next to her work, her models, famous celebrities that you never knew were part of the same circle. You realize you’ve been following her art closely for years, and had even gone to one of her art installations at the LACMA a couple years back.

She has no social media and you quickly piece together why you haven’t been able to put a face to the name until now. The Agatha Harkness.

You curse yourself for living and breathing on Instagram, reading little excerpts about her pieces here and there, never proceeding past searching her name up one single time after seeing her most famous artwork grace the official Broad Museum verified account:

The Unbound: Agatha Harkness - A Palette of Desire contemporary collection of ‘22.

Ask AI or Search: Agatha Harkness

…

However, you were met with the reflection of: ‘⚠️ zero search results found’ staring back at you on your phone screen, and that was that.

Now, you pull open your ‘Painting Inspo’ Pinterest board to see a piece of hers pinned neatly between other modern art you admire. The pin is plainly titled and paired with a now-purple hyperlink to an article, with one of the most commanding portraits of her in a suit, standing sharply next to her work.

It had all been right there, connected, laid out before you. You scold yourself again. You could’ve been in this woman’s circle the moment you moved to Los Angeles. Only now she’s magically moved from your subconscious to reality.

All it took was a simple Google search to be completely floored.

Right place, right time, you think, as it were. Originally, you were filtering through junior-level marketing positions, revamping your resume for the umpteenth time. Waitressing just wasn’t cutting it anymore, you needed a big girl job. Even if you didn’t have the experience.

And, to be honest, people really do act like that in Los Angeles. Customer service is nothing short of unbearable.

You’d huffed and slammed your laptop, tired of the almost-hour it took to submit one clean job application, flopped on your bed, and began the inevitable doom scroll.

And there she was, in all her glory. Featured in one major headline that caught your eye (apart from every photo ever of her maddeningly hypnotizing smile).

Grand Opening of the Harkness Collection, March 2025 — DTLA, Seeking Social Media Manager Position.

You could do it, you think.

The link to apply for the position already looks infinitely better than the bland, morose copy/paste templates thrown around every typical job website like a hot potato.

This just might get your foot in the door.

You’ve painted your whole life, always the kid doodling in the corner of your notebooks in class. You’ve done your fair share of moronically smacking people with your big art portfolio at the end of each year in high school when you rounded corners.

Art school in Portland had its ups and downs. Your father used every last penny he had to see your dreams come true, and your mother hated you for it. Blamed you, even, for sucking his wallet dry. But it was of his own accord to pay for tuition, and you had nothing else to show for it. You had a real talent.

At least, that’s what Mrs. Montgomery had told you.

Your art teacher for grades 11-12 was someone who was stern but had a mother’s touch. You really only knew the stern part back home, and then some, after the divorce.

But Mrs. Montgomery not only put you on a pedestal, she really critiqued you. She actually pushed you, improved your skills and adorned her Letter of Recommendation to your chosen college with accolades of admiration you couldn’t possibly achieve from your own mother.

If it wasn’t obvious already, you were completely smitten. And you know what else? You could trust her as far as you could throw her.

The after school meetings, the one-on-one sessions after class to help finish up an end of the year project. Anything to get a sliver of praise. Anything to prevent the bus ride home.

After college, though, you moved to Los Angeles in hopes of joining a gallery or an art community. You got sucked into the limelight, the overbearing and overwhelming nature of the city of angels. Everyone seemingly looks better than you, doing more than you, everyone trying to prove themselves somewhere. Nothing felt real.

You felt like a failure.

Email threads to galleries went stale and not to mention renting out studios could carve a hole into your credit card. It’s been three whole years since moving here after college, stuck in the same job you started with. The only real friend you made was from college, Oliver, who really was the one who dragged you out to California in the first place.

One friend, one lame job, one-room studio apartment, and no art to show for it. You start to think that this dream was meant to fizzle out and you’re supposed to become another cog in the wheel of Capitalism just like everybody else.

Whatever. You craft a partially-truthful resume, and an overzealous cover letter.

Somewhere in there you lie about managing a social media page for a cafe that doesn’t exist, and that you’ve worked with a few semi-recognizable artists in the industry as their interns. Right.

But for the record, this is working for Agatha Harkness. You’ve got to make it look like you’re somebody. You imagine yourself at her side on those red carpets, getting to pick her brain about all the art she’s created. You’ll get to show her the paintings you made, she’ll praise you, you’ll blush, and you’ll fall pathetically under her spell. Fuck.

Do you want the job or do you want her?

You suppose wanting both isn’t selfish. It’s ambitious. And you’re sick of circling around a realm that’s just out of reach.

You look at the unfinished canvases stowed in the corner of your apartment, the murky ‘mystery soup’ graying in several mason jars that scatter your work area. The dried paint, the tubes of acrylics strewn about. You can’t even remember the last time you painted.

If a hot, older woman was the motivation to be the artist you were always meant to be, then fuck it. You hit ‘submit’ on the application and sigh, closing your laptop with a better feeling of finality than the first time.

You never really get your hopes up about a job position, but for the rest of the day you find yourself tapping away anxiously, your mind scattered with the possibility of Agatha Harkness, of all people, becoming your boss.

————————————

The next morning you’re disruptively awakened by the buzzing of your phone. You begrudgingly hit ‘accept’ on the unknown number and pick up the line.

“Hello?” you answer and do your best not to sound utterly corpse-like.

“Hi!” a sweet voice greets you from the other end, “my name is Jennifer Kale, calling about the social media manager position for Ms. Harkness. Is this —?”

“Yes,” you shoot up, now seated in bed and exclaim before she can even finish her sentence. “This is she.”

She goes on to tell you how impressed she was with your resume and your expert copyright. You did always have a way with words, you forget how powerful they are as a way to get you exactly what you want.

“I saw in your CV that you have your work displayed at a cafe in Echo Park, is that right?”

You tell her of the few pieces you have displayed there and how you’ve made good friends with the owner. Jen mentions she’s relayed your portfolio, website, and resume to Agatha already and your breath instantly hitches.

She then goes to say that Agatha would like to personally meet you at that cafe for an interview. Tomorrow.

You nod and stutter a quick ‘yes’ into the speaker, forgetting you were on the phone at all. Lost in the possibility — no, actuality — of meeting Agatha.

After exchanging times and contact information, the line clicks blank and all the roaring thoughts begin to pour in. The anxiety, the expectations, the thought of being examined, let alone perceived by this powerful woman.

Your stomach kind of flutters at the thought, though. Her domineering presence picking you apart until you tell her exactly what she wants…and then she’ll hire you.

The confidence you feel mixed with the sheer horror of pretending you’re more than you say you are. You hope she doesn’t see through the lies.

But then again, so many people in the world have jobs they aren’t qualified for. They don’t even know what they’re doing, especially bosses and CEOs. So you’re sure Agatha can appreciate a little ‘fake it til you make it’; particularly from someone who really wants this.

————————————

You arrive infinitely early to the interview in the car you never use since everything in Downtown LA is right outside your apartment door.

The parking was the biggest hurdle but you gave yourself ample time to prepare.

The sun beats down on you as you exit your car, despite the crisp air of the early Spring morning. You shuffle down the hill to the sprawling city strip of hipster cafes, vintage thrifts, and mom ‘n pop shops. Your favorite cafe is squished between them, a true hole in the wall.

One of your favorite baristas greets you from behind the counter when you walk in. It looks like you beat the morning rush, everyone already taken to their seats, noses pressed to their laptops in concentration.

You order your favorite iced latte and wait at the bar, albeit with impatience. The barista questions your nervousness and you lean in with excitement.

“I have an interview,” you smile.

“Here?!”

“Yes, here, well — not here here, but yeah. It’s with one of the most well known artists. She’s…fascinating.”

And you gush over her for a moment, her art, her looks, the job position, while periodically checking the clock that sits behind the espresso bar, like, every five seconds.

You notice their smile grows wider as you wrap up your story, handing you your latte. But what you don’t notice is the person who just walked in, approaching the next spot in line.

“Have a great interview,” the barista dazzles in a cheeky whisper, eyes flitting to someone behind you.

Your realization hits when you turn and your latte hits her, square in the chest.

The cold liquid clashes between you two as you bump into each other, the cap coming clean off, with bits of ice clattering to the floor.

“Oh my god I am so sorry,” you babble, reaching for napkins and grabbing a fistful from who knows where.

You scramble to wipe up the mess, avoiding eye contact as Agatha steps back to examine the huge spot now staining her crisp white shirt. She can’t even get a word in before you scurry to the bathroom.

How stupid can you possibly be?

You beat yourself up in your thoughts as you gather yourself, and, clumsily, several ice cubes that managed to fall into your bra.

With a wet paper towel you clean the coffee off your front as much as you can before taking a deep breath, fixing your hair in the mirror and hoping when you step out of the bathroom, she’ll still be there waiting for you.

The bathroom door teeters and squeaks awkwardly as you push it open. You survey the cafe lobby and find Agatha opening a notebook and pulling out papers, and your resume.

You don’t think she realized you’re the one she’s supposed to interview. And you can’t even weigh what scenario would be more embarrassing.

You slide into the chair across from her, snaking your bag down to the floor and pulling out your own resume copy. You notice her blouse is completely drink-free and it catches you off guard. The coffee stains on your shirt are terribly evident despite your efforts in cleaning yourself up.

“You should’ve written your name as Caramel at the top of your resume,” she states while still looking down at the paper. Oh, of course she knows it’s you.

Looking down at yourself you realize there’s a streak of caramel syrup dripping down your cleavage.

Your eyes flick to hers, and she’s looking at you now, for the first time. There’s a long beat that clenches your throat and you forget how to speak.

You know her eyes are blue but holy shit, they’re palpably blue. And they hold yours in suspension, her gaze lingering for a moment too long before returning to her paper.

Your cheeks warm with a feverish blush, and you take a napkin to wipe the syrup away, leaving your skin sticky and shiny.

Her eyes move to your cleavage again as she shifts slightly in her seat, adjusting her stature. She scans over your resume agonizingly slow now and this long gap of silence has your nerves bubbling.

Maybe it’s a good thing the coffee spilled, because you’re sure the caffeine would give you a panic attack right about now.

“It doesn’t state in here that you use condiments as a painting medium, so, tell me your process,” Agatha jokes, but her tone is blunt.

You breathe a laugh and smile anyway, wanting to squash the awkwardness and tension so badly. Taking a second, you muster up an ounce of courage. You have to prove yourself now after this train wreck.

“I could probably use caramel as a medium,” you shrug, meeting her stark gaze again.

Agatha quirks one brow, egging you to go on.

“It’s got a similar consistency to a fast dry. Could probably even be worked into a glaze too. It could make a really nice maple color over some oils. I work with acrylics, watercolors, too, but it probably would leave paintings like that,” you take in a ragged breath, your mind catching up to just how stupid you sound, “…sticky.”

She smiles for the first time, a wicked smolder perking the corners of her lips. Amusement flares in her eyes, and you swear you can almost see them darken.

“Your skills?”

You take a deep breath before you begin, grounding yourself. “Time management, organization, I’m ambitious and work well with others. I also have really good memori –”

“You know,” she dawdles, “none of your references called me back,” she states, practically disregarding the answer to her last question.

Your mouth parts in silence.

“Oh,” is the only pathetic word you can assemble. “That’s weird,” you breathe, thoroughly fucking failing.

“I’m sure they’re all busy artists.”

And you just know she’s seeing right through you.

“But…your copywriting is very good. I’ve seen your social media, your website, you’ve got a way with words, hon.”

Your neck and chest must be as red as your face now. But the way she looks at you, blue eyes dark yet twinkling with intrigue, you’re blushing for an entirely different reason.

“Thank you,” you manage, and you give her a truthful look that you really need this, that you really want this. Because you just want something to go right for once in your life. You need to find your purpose again.

It’s like she can hear your thoughts as she studies you. It’s hard to look away when you meet her eyes again. As if she’s holding you in the palm of her hand, weighing you, rolling you between her fingers, testing to see if she should clench and squeeze the dream right from your heart.

“You know, I don’t normally meet with artists in this circumstance, or even in such a…sticky manner.”

And you blush for the millionth time.

“But I’d like to test your writing skills. I’m hosting a live painting session this weekend that I want you to come to and write a little mockup article for. If I dig it, you get the job, sweetheart.”

Her words drip like honey, the opportunity laid out before you, sounding sweet to your ears. It’s almost unbelievable.

“Wow, thank you so much Ms. Harkness,” you fawn, beaming a smile.

“Agatha,” she says warmly, holding out her hand for you to shake.

You hesitate for a moment before taking her hand in yours, her slender, delicate fingers just barely grazing the inside of your wrist. Something flutters in your stomach at the contact, like a chemical reaction right in your core.

The embrace is subtle, but it carries the weight of something more than just a job, more than just a task she’s asking you to complete. You tug your hand away, but the air between you stays charged.

“I won’t let you down,” you exhale earnestly.

Agatha blinks at you slowly, that smile never faltering, “good girl.”

She rises now, collecting her papers and notebook, storing them inside a black tote bag. “My assistant will be in touch.”

You absentmindedly nod to her, feeling her presence leave, with the click of the cafe door echoing in your ears. You’re completely dumbfounded. What just happened?

Did you actually manage to fake your way to the top? You have a real shot now at getting this position. And the way she looked at you, like she just knew what you were capable of?

Her request is simple, just a mockup article. Nothing truly serious. The significance of her words, though, make your heart race. The heady mix of exhilaration and nerve wracking anticipation makes you dizzy at the thought. And her praise.

Good girl.

You’re completely slack-jawed at the thought of it again. You just know you’re in for something more than just a mere task.

Whatever she wants from you, you’ll give it – willingly, completely, without question.

[valdevia]

Hi, I love your works!! I was wondering where you find the original, unedited pictures you use for your art? Do you take them yourself or find them online?

Hey there! I get them from many different sources! Whenever I can I use my own, and sometimes my followers send me cool pics to use (or put them up in the Sacrificial Altar channel in my Discord), but I find most of what I use through public domain sources online!

For the online part, I put this little list together with some of the common resources I use! Feel free to share it around and copy it:

For an easier experience, I'll copy the relevant part below:

STOCK SITES

- Unsplash: Usually the best quality out of the free stock sites. They’ll try to sell you a subscription plan but you can ignore that.

- Adobe Stock: Select “Free” on the dropdown menu next to the search bar. The free image selection here is big and high-quality, though they feel more like stock pictures than natural photos. Note: They limit how many pictures you can download per account per day, but you can make several accounts to circumvent this if you use it a lot.

- Texturelabs: lots of free, very high-quality textures!

- Pexels: Similar to Unsplash, but it has more pictures with people. If you need a photo with models, this is usually the best place.

- Pixabay: Widest selection, but worst quality control. Go here if you haven’t found anything in other sites and don’t mind sifting through a bunch of garbage pics and occasional AI images.

PUBLIC DOMAIN SOURCES

- Wikimedia Commons: an enormous selection of CC and public domain pictures. Super useful, especially for the really specific images that you'd expect to find on a Wikipedia article. Always check the copyright conditions! To filter by license, search something and then click on the License dropdown under the search bar. Select “No restrictions” for public domain images.

- Picryl: A repository of public domain sources, ranging from ancient historical books and artifacts to fairly modern pictures. If you're looking for something old/historical, chances are it's here! This website is probably one of the most complicated ones to use, so here are three important tips before you use it:

This site added a paywall that appears after the 3rd page of search results. To remove it, install uBlock Origin, go to the “My Filters” page (clicking on the gear icon after opening the extension), and paste this filter: picryl.com##._9oJ0c2

After searching, use the timeline on the top right to narrow down the result by year.

It won’t let you download the full picture without paying, but it always has a link to the source site below the description. Click on that, then copy-paste the image’s name to find it in the original source. That way you can get it for free, and often in better quality than Picryl offers.

National Archives Catalog, The Library of Congress, NASA, and Europeana have wide selections, but they are included in Picryl so it’s usually better to search there and then download them in the source as mentioned above!

- Flickr Search: a ton of usable pictures with a generally more amateur feel, just remember to filter by license using the “Any license” dropdown menu. When you find an image, make sure to check its specific license (you can find it below the image, on the right side).

- Openverse: The official Creative Commons archive, has many sources! Includes other sites on this list, but has a lot of clutter if you don’t filter.

- iNaturalist: a repository of user-submitted images of animals, plants, and fungi. Look for a genus or species, then navigate to the photo list and filter by license.

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

- The Met: An amazing selection of artifacts from all over the world, with top quality photographs of most of them (usually with several angles for each). You can filter images by material, location, and era.

- Getty Museum: Another smaller selection of museum pieces, but this one includes old photos as well as artifacts. You can also filter by dates, materials and cultures. Make sure you include the “Open Content” filter to only see public domain things!

- Smithsonian: Big selection of around 5 million museum pieces, with some 3D scans of museum pieces. Most pieces just have a single picture that can sometimes be low quality, but pieces with 3D models sometimes also include a lot of high quality photos from multiple angles. This collection also includes things from museums of natural history, so you can also use it to search for bones and specimens.

- Artvee: public domain classical art. They make you pay to download high-quality images.

If you guys got any others, please let me know and I'll add them to the collection!

[aigeneratedarchi]

[autisticandroids]

i've been seeing ai takes that i actually agree with and have been saying for months get notes so i want to throw my hat into the ring.

so i think there are two main distinct problems with "ai," which exist kind of in opposition to each other. the first happens when ai is good at what it's supposed to do, and the second happens when it's bad at it.

the first is well-exemplified by ai visual art. now, there are a lot of arguments about the quality of ai visual art, about how it's soulless, or cliche, or whatever, and to those i say: do you think ai art is going to be replacing monet and picasso? do you think those pieces are going in museums? no. they are going to be replacing soulless dreck like corporate logos, the sprites for low-rent edugames, and book covers with that stupid cartoon art style made in canva. the kind of art that everyone thinks of as soulless and worthless anyway. the kind of art that keeps people with art degrees actually employed.

this is a problem of automation. while ai art certainly has its flaws and failings, the main issue with it is that it's good enough to replace crap art that no one does by choice. which is a problem of capitalism. in a society where people don't have to sell their labor to survive, machines performing labor more efficiently so humans don't have to is a boon! this is i think more obviously true for, like, manufacturing than for art - nobody wants to be the guy putting eyelets in shoes all day, and everybody needs shoes, whereas a lot of people want to draw their whole lives, and nobody needs visual art (not the way they need shoes) - but i think that it's still true that in a perfect world, ai art would be a net boon, because giving people without the skill to actually draw the ability to visualize the things they see inside their head is... good? wider access to beauty and the ability to create it is good? it's not necessary, it's not vital, but it is cool. the issue is that we live in a society where that also takes food out of people's mouths.

but the second problem is the much scarier one, imo, and it's what happens when ai is bad. in the current discourse, that's exemplified by chatgpt and other large language models. as much hand-wringing as there has been about chatgpt replacing writers, it's much worse at imitating human-written text than, say, midjourney is at imitating human-made art. it can imitate style well, which means that it can successfully replace text that has no meaningful semantic content - cover letters, online ads, clickbait articles, the kind of stuff that says nothing and exists to exist. but because it can't evaluate what's true, or even keep straight what it said thirty seconds ago, it can't meaningfully replace a human writer. it will honestly probably never be able to unless they change how they train it, because the way LLMs work is so antithetical to how language and writing actually works.

the issue is that people think it can. which means they use it to do stuff it's not equipped for. at best, what you end up with is a lot of very poorly written children's books selling on amazon for $3. this is a shitty scam, but is mostly harmless. the behind the bastards episode on this has a pretty solid description of what that looks like right now, although they also do a lot of pretty pointless fearmongering about the death of art and the death of media literacy and saving the children. (incidentally, the "comics" described demonstrate the ways in which ai art has the same weaknesses as ai text - both are incapable of consistency or narrative. it's just that visual art doesn't necessarily need those things to be useful as art, and text (often) does). like, overall, the existence of these kids book scams are bad? but they're a gnat bite.

to find the worst case scenario of LLM misuse, you don't even have to leave the amazon kindle section. you don't even have to stop looking at scam books. all you have to do is change from looking at kids books to foraging guides. i'm not exaggerating when i say that in terms of texts whose factuality has direct consequences, foraging guides are up there with building safety regulations. if a foraging guide has incorrect information in it, people who use that foraging guide will die. that's all there is to it. there is no antidote to amanita phalloides poisoning, only supportive care, and even if you survive, you will need a liver transplant.

the problem here is that sometimes it's important for text to be factually accurate. openart isn't marketed as photographic software, and even though people do use it to lie, they have also been using photoshop to do that for decades, and before that it was scissors and paintbrushes. chatgpt and its ilk are sometimes marketed as fact-finding software, search engine assistants and writing assistants. and this is dangerous. because while people have been lying intentionally for decades, the level of misinformation potentially provided by chatgpt is unprecedented. and then there are people like the foraging book scammers who aren't lying on purpose, but rather not caring about the truth content of their output. obviously this happens in real life - the kids book scam i mentioned earlier is just an update of a non-ai scam involving ghostwriters - but it's much easier to pull off, and unlike lying for personal gain, which will always happen no matter how difficult it is, lying out of laziness is motivated by, well, the ease of the lie.* if it takes fifteen minutes and a chatgpt account to pump out fake foraging books for a quick buck, people will do it.

*also part of this is how easy it is to make things look like high effort professional content - people who are lying out of laziness often do it in ways that are obviously identifiable, and LLMs might make it easier to pass basic professionalism scans.

and honestly i don't think LLMs are the biggest problem that machine learning/ai creates here. while the ai foraging books are, well, really, really bad, most of the problem content generated by chatgpt is more on the level of scam children's books. the entire time that the internet has been shitting itself about ai art and LLM's i've been pulling my hair out about the kinds of priorities people have, because corporations have been using ai to sort the resumes of job applicants for years, and it turns out the ai is racist. there are all sorts of ways machine learning algorithms have been integrated into daily life over the past decade: predictive policing, self-driving cars, and even the youtube algorithm. and all of these are much more dangerous (in most cases) than chatgpt. it makes me insane that just because ai art and LLMs happen to touch on things that most internet users are familiar with the working of, people are freaking out about it because it's the death of art or whatever, when they should have been freaking out about the robot telling the cops to kick people's faces in.

(not to mention the environmental impact of all this crap.)

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender

When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's.

In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, USA, and cohost of the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. We talk about Emily's work trying to formulate a list of rules that a computer can use to generate grammatical sentences in a language, the differences between that and training a computer to generate sentences using the statistical likelihood of what comes next based on all the other sentences, and the further differences between both those things and how humans map language onto the real world. We also talk about paying attention to communities not just data, the labour practices behind large language models, and how Emily's persistent questions led to the creation of the Bender Rule (always state the language you're working on, even if it's English).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three places where we can learn things about linguistics!! We talk about two linguistically interesting museums that Gretchen recently visited: the Estonian National Museum, as well as Mundolingua, a general linguistics museum in Paris. We also talk about Lauren's dream linguistics travel destination: Martha's Vineyard.

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Emily Bender

Emily Bender on Bluesky and Twitter

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter

The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

'Data Sovereignty and the Kaitiakitanga License' on Te Hiku

wordfreq by Robyn Speer on GitHub

Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’

Bonus with Janelle Shane: we do a dramatic reading of the funniest auto-generated Lingthusiasm episodes

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).