#as if chatGPT will produce anything worth reading anyway

[tiarnanabhfainni]

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[vegapunk-aurora]

Can someone please just say the Ask Tales blog is permanently closed? It honestly hurts to look back at it with even the slightest optimistic glimmer of hope.

Hi Anon,

I'll go ahead and field this, IDK if any of my fellow former ToA mods got this message as well or not but hey, I was kind of unofficially looked to as the Owner so it's on me either way.

The short answer is yes, it is safe for you and anyone else still wondering to consider Tales of Answers over. All of us mods, while we still keep in touch, have largely moved on to other projects and gotten much busier in our personal lives, to the point where even with all hands on deck maintaining the blog at the rate we did at its peak is unfeasible.

It's also a matter of loss of interest. I still love a lot of these characters and I had a blast getting into their heads while it lasted but my interest in the Tales series as a whole has waned significantly since those days, and I think I speak for the whole ToA moderation team when I say that. Part of it is we agree that there is/was an overall severe decline in the series' writing quality for a while, but it's also just that naturally people move in and out of interests as their lives go on. Our hearts aren't in it anymore to the extent that we could produce content for this fandom with any kind of consistency and quality, and it wouldn't be fair to us or anyone who remembers our work fondly if we tried to go back to it without the passion we had when the thing started. Or, worse, start using ChatGPT or some bullshit. Honestly, that had already faded pretty significantly by the time we put a pause on the project, which was most of why we did it in the first place.

On that note, there was also a lot of Fandom Drama and toxicity to deal with back then. I've been somewhat disconnected from the wider Tales Fandom for the past several years so I don't know if it's cooled off, but at the time it was pretty exhausting to be entrenched in. For what it's worth, I don't think we were completely devoid of fault in any fandom drama that ensued, and I apologize if we ever did anything particularly incensing to anyone reading this.

In any case, I will say that yes, Tales of Answers is considered closed by its former moderation team. We consider passing it on to new mods out of the question, as it was a personal project by a group of friends and we don't really want to pass it to someone we don't know and can't guarantee would operate it in line with our own views and wishes. However, the good news is that there's absolutely nothing stopping someone else from starting a new Tales mailbox blog and taking up our mantle themself! In fact, if anyone is interested in doing so, please feel free to make use of all our character animations, which you can find on the blog itself. Most of those weren't even made by us, it was kind of a free for all to begin with.

Will we ever return in ANY capacity? Hard to say and I wouldn't count on it. For my part, I've considered occasionally popping in to make little unprompted skits whenever the inspiration strikes, but as y'all can see, said inspiration hasn't struck significantly enough in the past eight years to actually do it. Maybe I will some day, if any of the other mods still attached to the blog want to they're invited to as well. We're probably not gonna open the mailbox back up, though. Sorry.

ANYWAY now that I've disappointed everyone, if for some reason you still want to keep an eye on whatever I'm doing, I'm pretty inactive here these days. You can find me on Twitter (for however long it takes for Muskrat to kill it) at @aceofplaces, or on CoHost at @vegapunk-aurora. I have a lot of little projects I don't talk much about in public brewing in the background, hopefully some day I'll have one congeal enough to actually be worth sharing.

Now go, be free. Thanks for holding a candle for us for so long and sorry for making you do it for nothing, it is sincerely pretty validating to know this weird little shitpost factory my friends and I made when I was in high school ended up meaning something to somebody even now. Take care of yourself.

-Aurora (formerly Mod Ace)

[personalitynexus]

Life requires Art

Ever noticed that when you are out in the woods by yourself how the sounds of nature seem to have a melody all its own? The strange cacophony that the automobiles and construction crews make in the cityscapes?

Or have you ever seen the artistry in the setting or rising sun? The impossibly infinite shapes with-in the clouds in the sky?

More than likely you've noticed how stories and plots repeat and mingle with one another in your day-to-day life, or perhaps you've noticed that your daily routine feels more like a well rehearsed play, with you the lead actor for your role.

Music, visual art, stories, and theater... Art is in our lives everywhere we look even when we don't seek it out. It's true beauty lies in the human element that gives it meaning.

Life, simply put, requires art. And Art requires life.

You can take a computer program and have it study all of Shakespeare, Chekov, and Wilde and ask it to spit out a play based on what it has learned, but it will only regurgitate an amalgam of the three playwrights collected works into something that may not even make sense.

Conversely, you can make a computer program study various masterworks in illustration and have it produce an image that would win in any art competition...

But they lack the one thing that truly makes it art. They lack soul, they lack humanity.

Yet even though I type this and you read it, waving it off as another rant about how AI Generated works are a threat to the livelihood of human artists around the world... You know it to be true.

Why pay the artist charging $25 for a flat bust portrait when you can have an AI Program give you a complete Colored NSFW centerfold of your favorite characters for free?

Why take the time to write poetry of your own, when you can feed an AI Program any of the works of Byron and have it vomit up something that can only loosely be called poetry?

Screenwriters and Actors are taking a stand against AI in their fields for a reason. It's not all about the money, but about the Soul that is truly at stake here.

Are we truly going to let our society become the dystopia were humanity slaves away while the machines create soulless works of 'art'? Or are we going to finally, finally, put our collective foot down and say that enough is enough? ChatGPT is already facing a lawsuit that may force it to reboot. As I mentioned before, Screenwriters and Actors are striking to keep AI out of their industry (and trust me, if you hated what was coming out of hollywood before, what makes you think that an AI fed on that garbage is going to spit out anything better?), and for the love of all that is just in the world:

STOP.

FEEDING.

AI PROGRAMS.

ARTWORK. FROM. ARTISTS!

Lesser known artists might not have the kind of legal leverage or the same sort of sway from their status that the more well known artists do, but that doesn't mean that they aren't hurt when you plug their artwork into those programs without their consent, and more so when you ask them, are told no, and do it anyway.

TL:DR version...

Pay the artists their rates, and keep the Soul in the things that make Life worth Living. Pay them so that when future generates look back to what artwork is created in our day and age, they can see the Soul that we have collectively created, and not the empty husk left behind from the machines we chose to feed instead.