#as long as it's not with a copyright stealing AI machine

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Thank you for the reference repository!! Such a useful thing to have and I can't wait to go through and doodle all the animals. I know you said blanket permission for artists, but I just wanted to check if that includes tracing? I'd really like to practice drawing the scenery and I've got a style in mind but I'd like to trace over the photos and just wanted to check if that's okay? :)

Absolutely!

To clarify for anyone with the same question: every type of non-AI art practice is included in the blanket permission.

The two things there's not permission for:

Feed it into an AI model

Use or re-post an unaltered image somewhere (without permission)

And for the second one, you just need to ask! I've said yes to every request so far. :)

Thanks for asking!

[whompthatsucker1981]

been thinking abt the gay sex cats post again. while the original point of the post is something for shits and giggles i would say to my art classmates after class, in extreme summary it still kinda stands, popular post making me wanna bash my head against the wall notwisthstanding. even if i hadn't put out a wall of text that was fueled by 1. being a few days out of the surgery table and still on various medications, 2. having read billy bat in two days and therefore having a fuck ton of thoughts about art, and 3. being immensely frustrated that people unironically used human soul of art spark of creativity etc as a talking point wrt generative art; the gist of my point is that you can't win any discussion about what gets to be art by appealing to idealist ideas of soul, creativity, or genius. it's been settled for more or less a century now. a tool is a tool, art can be made out of anything, and the medium is part of the message. end of that post.

of course the regret of anyone that has put out a popular post in whatever Discourse there is is that you can't leave a post scriptum disclaimer that yeah. of course this isn't the entirety of the subject. because everyone that has ever written a post never made a second post because the first covered everything. lol. that's why it continued in my askbox. as in, the issue with quote unquote ai art isnt philosophical or metaphysical, but of labor, and that it is as in marxist division of labor, not whatever people with small business owner brain make it out to be centered on copyright and potentially owed royalties that gets called an issue of labor. ai art is a threat as long as it is a tool in the hands of capitalists to hold working artists hostage. it's not the first tool to be used like that against laborers in art (and obviously other laborers too, but since people have bad idealist views on art it's what gets seen as more of an issue and an outrage lol) and it certainly won't be the last. tighter copyright laws wouldn't have saved any individual artist to ever upload works publically online, if anything abolishing copyright, even if just in regards to generative art would make it so the tool loses its leverage against the worker. also copyright as an argument misses the point because it's not a problem of any person uploading images missing out on royalties they could have earned with use of their images, if there's anything we were supposed to have learned from the nft shitshow is that right click saving isn't fucking stealing. art exists in The Age Of Mechanical And Digital Reproduction. what's more damning is that we take for granted that publically avaliable images and data online are able to be bought and sold from third parties to other parties for fun and profit in the first place, data privacy is more of an issue to machine learning than supposedly lax copyright law could ever be

and the things unsaid are the most frustrating; i did hammer home the point that you can't win an argument on art and meaning by appealing to creativity, soul and genius, but it was at the cost of having things unsaid, and that having a post become popular sucks ass in an unbelievable way. i also have regrets with regards to my tone but i was a bit silly from having read all of billy bat in two days, so even if i cringed afterwards i understand why. and with that is also the unsaid matter of taste. unlike the actual political arguments, i'm not mad that it got passed on, and i think it's better to say my two cents now with some hindsight. the gimmick of ai art is getting old now, people without art education are realizing that a program that can output pretty pictures doesn't mean you can get instant clout and a career out of it, especially with public opinion on the subject ranging from people cringing at it or being actively hostile. in the end artisanal artstation/instagram slop is gonna prevail over ai generated artstation/instagram slop in the content machine, especially since the idealistic views on art also include upholding the grindset. i think the only people left that are gonna keep relying on generative art are people with an insatiable fetish, people who think there aren't enough thomas kinkade paintings to use in their facebook posts, people who understand the comedic value of slop, and people with enough patience to mess with with image processing softwares as to get something satisfactory out of it, which is to say, artists.

[cyren-myadd]

But recently I realized that your stories are no longer visible to anyone in AO3 and it makes me sad because I can't read them... so I wanted to ask you if ¿you could make them visible again to everyone in AO3?… ¿And not only for those who have accounts there are? Please

I locked my fics a little while ago because I saw a post on tumblr warning AO3 authors that bots were copypasting public works to feed into AI algorithms for churning out artificial fanfic. The idea of my work getting fed into a soulless AI really pissed me off so I locked my fics. I hated to make my fics inaccessible to readers who don't have AO3 accounts, but I felt like I had to.

However, I've been thinking about it more lately and I've realized that there's so many millions of public works out there for bots to access that my work is only just another drop in the bucket. Whether or not they get fed into the AI algorithms won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. The AI will still learn how to write a story with or without my writing.

But you know what the AI will never have? Human creativity. The programmers can teach the AI to be perfect at story structure and grammar and word choice and all that jazz, but you can't teach an AI originality because all it can do is regurgitate stuff it's been fed. Sure, an AI might have a better writing quality than me, but an AI wouldn't be able to come up with all the unique ideas I've enjoyed writing about and my readers have enjoyed reading.

So long story short, I've decided to unlock my fics so everyone can read them. I don't care if a bot steals them to feed to an AI. They can steal my writing style, but not my humanity.

Also, I didn't know people still read my fics! I don't care how old a fic is, if you're rereading it and enjoying it, don't be shy, leave a comment to let me know 💙💙💙

and on another note, I really hope that one day legislators will make laws concerning copyright and AI. At the end of the day, if somebody uses AI to create a shitty X-reader fic or whatever for themselves, I don't care. But if somebody actually published an AI generated work and was making money off of something they didn't actually write? That would bother me. Same thing for art and animation. I don't want people to get paid for work they told a machine to make for them, especially since it will ruin the job market for writers, artists, and animators. Hopefully one day we'll have laws saying AI-generated material cannot be copyrighted, so creative jobs will be protected from getting replaced by machines that regurgitate stolen work.

[captainsophiestark]

Hey guys! So I haven't been on Tumblr like, at all for the past few weeks because of this ask I got:

I'm not gonna lie, I've been pretty much furious since I first read it, and so I decided to take a break from the internet while I worked through my feelings and decided how I wanted to respond to this. If you're reading this at all, please do me a favor and read all the way through this post. It's a little long, but it's also very very very important.

First of all, let's get one thing straight: I will NEVER consider using AI to write my stories or otherwise for about a thousand reasons, two of the big ones being respect for myself and my fellow creators, AND the fact that it "learns" to write stories and spits out responses based off of plagiarized work. Like mine, which was taken and fed into chatgpt without my consent. Using programs like this is not even remotely harmless, and I will never be one of the people putting shit into programs like chatgpt.

Additionally, this is illegal. Beyond the fact that it's ridiculously disrespectful of creators, under US copyright law, the elements of my writing that I created, including characters and scenarios, are my intellectual property. Taking my work and feeding it to the AI without my permission (and no one will EVER have my permission) is a violation of the law and also goes against Tumblr's terms of service.

If you are continuing to use, support, or otherwise feed the AI, seriously educate yourself and stop, or never fucking come near me again.

Right here is a link to a post that includes a legal disclaimer that I'll be putting with all my fics now making people aware that putting my work and my writing into AI programs is not only not okay, it is also illegal. I'm sharing it like this for anyone else who wants to use it too, to educate themselves on the law or otherwise. It's written by a legit lawyer and the sources are cited, so it's not just me screaming into the void.

I've been going back and forth for a while now on what the hell to do about this ask I got, because I absolutely love writing fic and sharing it with all of you. And it doesn't feel right to me that so many of my wonderful readers who have supported me for so long have to deal with the consequences of a few assholes. But I want to write professionally some day, and I am not okay with my voice, style, and words being fed into some machine to be plagiarized by both the people stealing my work and the people running and making money off of programs like chatgpt.

I debated for a while about taking down all my writing and just calling it a day, because as long as it's up I know that it's possible, despite my best efforts to protect my work, that people will still rip it off. However, I truly love writing fic and writing in general, and a big part of that has come from the incredible interactions that I've been able to have with people on here. There's something special about the feeling of sharing a story, and I will not let a minority of assholes ruin that for me or the people who choose to read my work and be good humans about it.

That said, I am going to take a little break from writing. I have no idea how short or long it might be, but right now I'm a little over it all, so I'm going to take a step back from requests and oneshots and everything else for right now. This is hitting in the middle of the Year of Themed Creation and it also came right before an event called Daniel Sousa Appreciation Week, so if you had requests or expectations for those events, I'm sorry. I hope you guys can understand where I'm coming from, and thank you for supporting me as much as you have.

I still plan to be online (I love Tumblr and fully believe it's the only useable social media), I just won't be posting my writing. Hopefully, it'll free up some time for me to do some reading and commenting instead, so I can support my fellow creators!

Tl;dr and a final ask for anyone who read all this: please, please, PLEASE don't feed the AI. Respect your content creators and recognize just how much of what the AI spits out is ripped off of the thoughts, ideas, and words of someone else, often without their permission. Fight for art and the people who make it.

[aristsagainstarttheft]

When AI users start screaming about art theft and how dare people repost their AI art yet they defend AI stealing from real artists. AI was trained on artist work with out permission and is theft but to them it doesn't matter. But HOW DARE someone takes their AI generated work and use it. Real artist are protected by copyright laws. Works made with AI is not only theft but guess what, you ain't protected by any copyright laws. Because it's machine made, not made by you. Also if you are using AI to be absolute creeps and using AI on real people(famous or someone else without their permission) and even worse children too strip their clothing off then you deserve zero respect and a long stay in prison. AI Deep fake porn/nudity and posting it on as art is disgusting and disrespectful, but i doubt you AI assholes know what respect and decency is.

.

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

The sad thing about AI to me is that it could be genuinely useful, but so many people are going over the top with it. So many companies are trying to make everything AI, even at the cost of stealing people's content (and often using the loophole of stealing non-copyrighted content). These companies are developing AI faster than the law can keep up with it, so we don't have enough regulation for it.

When I see "AI assistant" now from things like Google, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The product in and of itself probably is helpful to have around, but anything called any form of "AI" outside of video game based AI (NPCs taking actions independent of your actions) just makes me... really uncomfortable.

It also sucks because if they just waited long enough, they might have had people volunteer or get jobs to help with AI training and language learning. They could've had real people manually input things to help AI learn instead of stealing existing content.

As a writer, sometimes I wish I could generate brief AI paragraphs, such as to help with ideas and inspiration (this being very impersonal, not using existing franchises/character names, etc, or the ones that let you just input character names and that's it), but now the thought of using AI just... makes me uncomfortable all around, because I have no idea if the AI prompt generators have also had stolen works fed to it. I don't know what generators might be legit and what had entire books or fanfictions fed to it. Anything I would want to generate for an idea now might generate based on stolen content, and I hate that.

AI could have been actually helpful and legit, but now it's a fucking mess and huge companies are using it in a way that both steals from creators and leaves people out of a job or potential job. Voice AI is all around just a massive fucking mistake to me, like throw that shit in the trash.

Now I don't know what AI out there exists on theft, and honestly, probably all of them do now. Even if the companies who backed them didn't intend for users to feed it existing content, the users will do that and the machine will learn those things regardless of that not necessarily being the company's intent. It's not necessarily always the company at fault, but the people using it and what they feed it. In some cases it's the companies as well, urging people to basically do this.

Now the concept of AI anything at all just makes me... so uncomfortable and it's ruined so many things and caused so much stress for people. If I see something AI powered I completely avoid it, even if it could be useful... and also because I never know when that shit is stealing my data or learning off anything I do that I didn't give explicit permission for.

[faaun]

i want to be a machine learning engineer but some of u guys r making it embarrassing actually. long but IMO important explanation below. We have bigger issues to deal w and better things to focus on.

like our planet is dying and the commercialisation of massive AI models and training the models themselves releases like hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions. and this includes very "nonessential" models that don't tend to contribute much to society (re: new fancy image generation toy). but u have decided your new career path is "AI artist" (glorified prompt-writer?) .

and just as bad, some of you have decided the biggest issue w AI is those people, the glorified prompt writers!! you draw more attention to it instead of focusing on the real problems behind AI and the ethics of training models! about the harm it causes to the planet, about web-scraping limitations basically not existing (stolen art falls under this domain), copyright laws to do with AI, the way facial recognition deals with race, about the boundaries between letting AI learn and develop in an "unbiased" way vs preventing sociopolitical damage at the cost of (potentially) further progress.

conversely, there is nowhere NEAR enough focus about how AI can help us overcome some of our fundamental problems. i love machine learning bc i find it - specifically the maths behind it - fascinating and i believe one day it could help us make very cool advancements, as it already has. i think the mathematical architectures and processes behind creating new deep learning models are beautiful. i also know the damage capitalists will inevitably do - they always wield powerful, beautiful new tools as weapons.

AND HERE YOU ARE FALLING FOR IT! it's very frustrating to watch!! if you're angry on behalf of artists, i'm begging you to protect the rights of artists and be mad at greedy companies instead of villanising a tool that can help us immensely! learn about AI ethics, learn about how it is present in our lives, what we should try to stop, what we should promote.

if you "boycott AI" as a whole with no desire to gain more literacy on the topic other than "steals art therefore bad", you will have to be against your translate app, your search engine, your email spam filter, almost everything on your phone that categorises anything (i.e. pretty much all of your search functions), NPC enemies in games, your medical diagnostic tools, your phone's face unlock, your maps app, online banking, accessibility tools that help blind and deaf people, new advancements in genetic sequencing and protein folding and treating cancer and modelling new solutions in physics and so on and so on.

the issue isn't all AI as a whole. the issue is A) how companies are using it and B) how a lot of you guys are getting mad at the concept of AI instead of responding to A.

[alfazagato2]

AI IS NOT ART

I'll firstly and openly admit that I won't be the first to express such an opinion.   I also won't be the last, lest the world ends seconds after I submit this.   Either way, I cannot accept AI work as art.   I'm not saying that a computer could never make art.  Should we create an AI that can then create completely original images, down to the base linework, then I could accept AI work as art.   The current programs don't do that, to my knowledge.   They sample and merge existing pieces to form new images.   Done exclusively by increasingly detailed inputs from initial users.   Current AI is parroting what we tell it by stealing what we've already created.   That's not art. Making the AI itself is an art.   Such high-level, complicated work is not an easy task.   Especially as my understanding of the current process is early programming can only go so far.   AI needs to be educated, almost as a person would, to grow into its own.   And that's fine.   Let's make high-level AI. High-Level AI to work menial labor, that is.   Accountancy, manufacturing, construction.   Mind-numbing, back-breaking dangerous work that often pays little as it is.   If companies are pushing so ward for efficiency, why do they seem so intent on all but enlaving their workforce?  There's many jobs that have no reason even now for human involvement.   Maybe oversight, where AI may not have been programmed thoroughly, or educated totally, to ensure effectiveness.  We don't need people for bookkeeping, though.   In the same vein, we shouldn't be leaving art & expression to computers.   While art isn't exclusive to humanity, it still remains one of our greatest forms of expression and freedom.   We use art to express our content or displeasure, our happiness, pride, disapproval, depression.   Our creativity continues to be one of humanity's greatest strengths. Yet someone, or many someones, along the way decided that we should surrender art to our usurping children, to create a great folly to suppress our freedom.  We've been sold on the idea that our best interests lie with machines regurgitating our own work back at us. That's not to say that human art can't be derivative.   Can't be repetitive, be stolen.   A long-standing debate remains the use of tracing in art, then being sold (actively sold,) as original work.   I will contend, though, that tracing, especially tracing that leads to further alteration, is still greater art than what current AI is.   Tracing still requires some level of expression, some personal input, to produce.   Tracings bigger issue is when it violates the legal gatekeeping necessary to protect original artists from profiting on their work. Which brings me to the greatest issue with current AI art models.   All the current AI that I'm aware of effectively steal the artwork used to sample.   So many hosts have quietly changed their terms-of-service to subvert creative commons licenses.   This sort of corporate underhandedness is further evidence of the anti-humanity culture we've accidentally brewed. Thankfully, the 'artistic community' has submitted to forms of guerrilla counters to this theft.  Largely centering on baiting Disney, notable for their rabid protection of copyrights.   Many pages still retain options for negative reactions.   DeviantArt lacks such option, and traffic is traffic.   What DeviantArt does offer is an option to suppress how much AI art is presented to you.  Even that small denial is progress, is positivity.   What can we do to slow the spread of AI art?   Obviously, refusing to share it in the first place is great.   You should also even avoid interacting with it, too.   Don't watch the video.   Don't click on the image.   Don't leave a comment - positive or negative. Again, traffic is traffic at that point.   Do use options like dislikes or downvotes, if possible to do without directly trafficking the art.  reddit has a win in that department.  Youtube doesn't.   Sadly, we're at the point were even discussing AI is lending it strength.   My post here will only be seen by the algorythym as containing the phrase "AI."  Our phones, central to our lives, betray us unknowingly, hearing our words and divulging our thoughts.  We can't counter it; not yet. I do wish you're still with me at this point.  I ranted; I raved.   I sincerely hope I'm not alone.   We must do what we can to suppress AI art.   At least until AI work truly does become art.   This must be one piece of gatekeeping we accede to.  We cannot let ourselves become the drones in the great machine, displaced by the drones we've created.   We must remain the creators, the novel, the unique and original.   Thank you for your time. This will be posted both on DeviantArt and on tumblr.  Not Facebook, I still retain a divested identity between the platforms to some extent.  

[cosette141]

Sam Reich of @dropoutdottv on the writers/actors strike ✊✊✊🥰

why I love this production company so much!!

(small rant against AMPTP and top streaming platforms from me below the cut)

I don't even have words at this point for how upsetting this whole situation is. Dropout is such a role model for all production companies. AMPTP would be furious if people were trying to use AI to get rid of THEIR jobs. I just don't understand why people don't put themselves in other peoples shoes and follow the "treat others the way you want to be treated". Life should be about kindness, love, and helping one another. Encouraging one another. Creating things together for the sake of creation and invoking feeling, NOT for money. Does AMPTP even realize their AI would be nothing without the creators whose work is training their machine? Or that, hey, if you want to train your AI, how about hiring artists to create work to train it instead of stealing it? Oh, wait. No one would take that job. But wait, if we use AMPTP's content in, say, a fanvid that they take down from YouTube for copyright infringement, that's not ok... but stealing our fanfics and artwork IS? GahhhHHHHH

UGh. As an aspiring screenwriter, I can't wait until we win this fight. (But I will wait, as long as it takes).

No matter what, even when (WHEN) we win this, people are still going to try to use AI for art and storytelling, and I think the only way to stop it is to make sure it is entirely unprofitable. Boycott every single piece of "artwork" made by AI. If they can't make money, they'll move onto something else, so I hope to goodness that enough people out there are aware and care about this enough to ruin their attempts at making money from all of this.

[shodansbabygirl]

Since I'm pro stealing and also anti intellectual property uhhhh basically no one's anti ai arguments make sense to me :-3 like I understand the pressing matter of machines taking jobs but idk it seems to me there is a large enough consumer backlash (also already leveled judicial decisions) to keep it from properly taking off in a company-usable way. US lawmakers at about 15 different turns have said it can't be copyrighted because of a lack of human authorship, and the only people disagreeing with them are assholes that don't understand that human authorship has been an understood key part of copyright for, just, so stupid long. If for some reason US copyright offices decide to change their whole mind and the mind of several courts, then I will be concerned. But right now, since it has been ruled uncopyrightable (and even before that the US copyright office was turning down attempts to copyright AI images), I don't think this is going to be the capitalist-paid artist killer.

This is all to say. It's funny that the radar promoted ai art. It's funny as hell. Also not to be mean but it looks cooler than the last 6 radar pieces I actually saw. I'm so tired of high quality glossy renderings of blorbos.

[galvanizedfriend]

I'm scared about all the AI stuff that's been going on. I don't want to lose my work or my characters. Is there anything that we can do to make sure we still keep our works?

So am I. :( In my line of work we're already starting to see the use of AI being seriously discussed to replace certain tasks - and not because it'll make workers' lives easier, or even be necessarily more efficient, since it'll be utter chaos not to have real humans in certain position. It's purely to save money, both by replacing people and by creating more unemployment, which will then lower overall wages.

If you're a writer (I assume you are, since you mentioned you don't want to lose your characters), I don't think it's so much about losing rights over what you create, but having machines being trained on existing content (maybe even yours) in order to do your job. Publishing a single book is work that involves an entire chain of people. The writer is just one part. You have at least one editor, you have someone who prepares the text, you have someone who does formatting, you have sometimes a proof-reader, or sensitivity readers depending on what kind of story you write, then you have artists who create the covers and other related illustrations, and that's not even to mention people such as agents, who perform a very important role identifying good manuscripts, finding new writers, and then representing them.

What AI is already doing is using existing works in order to train a machine in specific styles so that a computer might churn out an entire novel in the space of an hour. They're using someone's work for machine-learning, but they're no longer having to pay any of these people in the chain of creation any money for it. In my country, there are big publishing houses already using AI created illustrations for books. But computers don't have artistry, it doesn't have coloring or drawing styles. They are stealing the work of illustrators to allegedly create something "new", making money off of this thing, and not paying the original creators a dime.

This is a particularly dire situation for independent writers/creators, or writers/creators who publish their work through small, lesser-known publishing houses. There's always going to be a hefty countract for the J.K. Rowlings and the Stephen Kings and other big name authors. It's for the little ones and the ones just starting that things are going to be very complicated if widespread AI use is allowed to continue like this. And then imagine the consequences of this in the long run in terms of authenticity, originality, creativity, diversity. Imagine the consequences of this for entire careers. How many people are actually going to be able to make a living in the publishing industry?

I'm obviously painting a very bad picture here that might seem like an exaggeration right now, but it's certainly the path things are starting to take (like with the book covers I mentioned). And I honestly don't know what we can do. I don't know if there is anything any one person can do to stop it. For so many years, particularly for artists and creators in general (but noy only) we've been told that the internet was where we should be. Showcasing our writing, photography, illustrations, paintings, and so on. It's how people publicize their work and get noticed. If you're not on the internet, you don't exist. You need to have portfolio online, preferably with a built audience. And suddenly, having that kind of thing out there now just means that everything we create can (and probably will) be used to train an AI that will make these very same creations not necessary to the industry anymore. It doesn't stop us from writing, painting, or what have you, but it means we might not be able to make a living out of it anymore.

It's not really about banning the use of AI, it's about establishing rules both about how it is trained, and about whether or not whatever an AI creates should be copyrightable. Honestly, if it's decided that AI-created content, whatever kind of content it might be, cannot be used for profit or protected by intellectual rights, then it's already a very big step, because then it will just not be financially interesting anymore to these industries to replace artists and writers and actors for AI, since anyone will then be able to just steal whatever they create out of that. If Disney have a show where scripts are made by AI, then it can't be copyrighted. Anyone can take it and do their own thing, make a new show, whatever. What are the chances that Disney will then start using solely AI for their scripts (like they want to)?

That's the discussion that needs to happen in the next few years in many, many areas. It's already happening in many countries, within many industries, unions and sectors of society in general. AI can be a very useful, helpful tool, but it cannot be used for exploitation and to create massive unemployment.

I'm not the most politically engaged person in that aspect, but what I can say is if you're ever in a position to have your voice heard, do it. If you know that discussions are happening close to you, or online, see if there's a way for you to take part in it. or just spread the word, make sure more people are aware of it. Discuss it with your friends or your social groups. And if there's a way for you to protect your creations from AI-mining, do it as well. As individual people with very little power, we can often only rely on our representatives to make the right decisions (which doesn't always happen, sadly, especially in certain countries), but there are serious people and unions fighting the good fight out there. We can show our support.

[firespirited]

Long post. Press j to skip.

I AM SICK OF THE STUPID AI DEBATES, does it imagine, is it based on copyrightable material, are my patterns in there?

That's not the point.

I briefly got into website design freelancing (less than 3 months) before burn out.

The main reason was that automation had begun for generating stylesheets in somewhat tasteful palettes, for automatically making html/xml (they really haven't learned to simplify and tidy code though, they just load 50 divs instead of one), for batch colourising design elements to match and savvy designers weren't building graphics from scratch and to spec unless it was their day job.

Custom php and database design died with the free bundled CMS packages that come with your host with massive mostly empty unused values.

No-one has talked about the previous waves of people automated out of work by website design generators, code generators, the fiverr atomisation of what would have been a designers job into 1 logo and a swatch inserted into a CMS by an unpaid intern. Reviews, tutorials, explanations and articles are generated by stealing youtube video captions, scraping fan sites and putting them on a webpage. Digitally processing images got automated with scripts stolen from fan creators who shared. Screencaps went from curated processed images made by a person to machine produced once half a second and uploaded indiscriminately. Media recaps get run into google translate and back which is why they often read as a little odd when you look up the first results.

This was people's work, some of it done out of love, some done for pay. It's all automated and any paid work is immediately copied/co-opted for 20 different half baked articles on sites with more traffic now. Another area of expertise I'd cultivated was deep dive research, poring over scans of magazines and analysing papers, fact checking. I manually checked people's code for errors or simplifications, you can get generators to do that too, even for php. I used to be an english-french translator.

The generators got renamed AI and slightly better at picture making and writing but it's the same concept.

The artists that designed the web templates are obscured, paid a flat fee by the CMS developpers, the CMS coders are obscured, paid for their code often in flat fees by a company that owns all copyright over the code and all the design elements that go with. That would have been me if I hadn't had further health issues, hiding a layer in one of the graphics or a joke in the code that may or may not make it through to the final product. Or I could be a proof reader and fact checker for articles that get barely enough traffic while they run as "multi snippets" in other publications.

The problem isn't that the machines got smarter, it's that they now encroach on a new much larger area of workers. I'd like to ask why the text to speech folks got a flat fee for their work for example: it's mass usage it should be residual based. So many coders and artists and writers got screwed into flat fee gigs instead of jobs that pay a minimum and more if it gets mass use.

The people willing to pay an artist for a rendition of their pet in the artist's style are the same willing to pay for me to rewrite a machine translation to have the same nuances as the original text. The same people who want free are going to push forward so they keep free if a little less special cats and translations. They're the same people who make clocks that last 5 years instead of the ones my great uncle made that outlived him. The same computer chips my aunt assembled in the UK for a basic wage are made with a lot more damaged tossed chips in a factory far away that you live in with suicide nets on the stairs.

There is so much more to 'AI' than the narrow snake oil you are being sold: it is the classic and ancient automation of work by replacing a human with a limited machine. Robot from serf (forced work for a small living)

It's a large scale generator just like ye olde glitter text generators except that threw a few pennies at the coders who made the generator and glitter text only matters when a human with a spark of imagination knows when to deploy it to funny effect. The issue is that artists and writers are being forced to gig already. We have already toppled into precariousness. We are already half way down the slippery slope if you can get paid a flat fee of $300 for something that could make 300k for the company. The generators are the big threat keeping folks afraid and looking at the *wrong* thing.

We need art and companies can afford to pay you for art. Gig work for artists isn't a safe stable living. The fact that they want to make machines to take that pittance isn't the point. There is money, lots of money. It's not being sent to the people who make art. It's not supporting artists to mess around and create something new. It's not a fight between you and a machine, it's a fight to have artists and artisans valued as deserving a living wage not surviving between gigs.

[recreationaldivorce]

well. ai art is stolen art. it gets its material online, that is fics that were made by other people, and it just mixes it together to make a new fic. its machine art. as contrary to a real person spending their time writing something their passionate about. i agree that people can be passionate about strange and problematic things but i do think ao3 should ban or not accept ai fics as that is stolen content basically. and i think REAL PEOPLE should continue writing what they want. that's my take on it

all fanfic is "stolen art" unless what it's writing fanfic about was in the public domain. most fanfic is about intellectual property which the author has no legal right to use, therefore it is also stolen.

ai does not have to train on other people's material. you could train an ai fic generator on your own manually written fanfiction, or train it on your own original fiction which is literally legally your intellectual property.

but suppose you did train ai on other people's fics without their consent. firstly fanfiction is not copyrighted; if it were, that would be illegal/infringement of the ip rights of the source media. you, legally, have no right to say what other people do with your fanfic. but let's suppose we can deem using some other non-legalist framework that the training material was "stolen"; okay, so why do we take more seriously the stealing done by ai generated fanfic, more so than the stealing done by manually written fanfic? if you write fanfic then you are stealing another author's characters and possibly their worldbuilding and plot too depending on whether it's canon-compliant, canon-divergent, or complete au. some fanfics have complete scenes lifted from the original media, and simply rewrite the prose—but all the dialogue and actions are copied exactly. is that not stealing? did you get permission from the author?

i also don't think that the amount of "effort" put into art makes it more or less genuine. i mean, firstly, suppose there was an ai generated fic that took someone an equal amount of "effort" (assume that "effort" can be objectively quantified; it cannot, but your argument hinges upon that assumption too so we will work on the same assumption) as a manually written fic. maybe you spent a long time setting up the ai and finding appropriate training material for it. or maybe you whipped together a fic super quickly on a whim. or both. either way the author spent the same amount of effort on both the ai generated fic and the manually written fic and put the same amount of "passion" [also cannot be objectively quantified but assume it can, again based on your own argument] into them. do you see these two fics as equally valid works of art? if not, why not? because then that means you think that something other than quantified "effort" or "passion" determines the validity of the art.

finally—what ideological implications does conflating "good art" with "effort" have? what movements and politics are associated with this sort of thinking? what sort of movements and politics have been opposed to "low-effort" or "easy" art? why do you think that is? if you see yourself as ideologically opposed to these movements and politics—how is your opposition to "low-effort"/"easy" art different?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#yeah#generative AI just keeps reminding me of machnine translation#where the tech existing has been an enormous boon to all kinds of people and accessibility across so many walks of life#and it is also true that it destroyed translation as a professional field in general#and to this day deflates wages and encourages companies to cut corners in ways taht harm everyone#and the solution is not to ban machine translation#it is to fucking regulate the bullshit capitalists do with it to mitigate the harm#anyone who is calling the use of gen AI categorically evil had best never touch google translate#or at least accept that they are a massive fucking hypocrite

Machine translation and generative AI do both have one massive drawback that is one of my biggest bugbears with both technologies: they're both shit. Machine translation does have massive advantages and allows at-home, low-effort translating, as well as greatly expands the number of things that creators can afford to translate, which is great! It also means that things that are supposed to have decent translations now have absolutely terrible translations, because rather than hiring a professional to do it, companies just plug it into The Machine. If your product requires translation, why spend money for a professional to do it properly when you can get a kind-of-coherent mess for free? What's the customer gonna do, use a different product that's also translating to a kind-of-coherent mess for free?

Customer-facing AI products (the ones that aren't bafflingly stupid and unnecessary concepts with 'ai' put on the front or thin masks stretched over malware and data harvesters -- actually, no, those ones too) are worse at their jobs than what they're replacing. Things like Duolingo and Grammerly noticeably tanked in quality after switching, customer service chatbots are somehow even more useless than they used to be now that they can hallucinate nonexistent answers and discounts for you instead of linking you to the FAQ based on keywords in your enquiry, search engines give wildly inaccurate answers synthesised from blindly harvesting from other pages (sometimes little-visited pages that are now being further deprived of attention as the search engine takes advantage of their creator's work and doesn't display the actual page), and even if we set aside the labour concerns for the moment, the flood of mindless autogenerated articles, bland art, pointless error-ridden stories with neither purpose nor even consistent context, actively dangerous 'non-fiction' books, and max-impact generated videos has made pretty much every artistic market with any digital component actively worse.

It's worth noting, though, that none of these things were invented by modern AI. These problems all existed before these tools were ever developed. Customer service bots always sucked, meaningless schlocky books pumped out by ghostwriters working a gig economy for below-poverty wages at the behest of some grifter picking topics from a 'most searched terms' list were an old problem years ago, shitty top-ten lists full of errors and made up bullshit are as old as print, and people have been sampling, tracing, and stealing each others' art since long before the internet. What modern AI, particularly generative AI, has done is make them cheaper and easier to get away with. It has created zero problems, and exacerbated many that were already pervasive. Addressing these problems directly is a far better use of our time than attacking the whole technology directly (which is a bubble that's going to burst within a few years anyway). And trying to kill some niche side uses of the technology by massively expanding copyright laws will create far more problems than it could possibly mitigate.

What I don't get is that other your support of AI image generation, you're SO smart and well read and concerned with ethics. I genuinely looked up to you! So, what, ethics for everyone except for artists, or what? Is animation (my industry, so maybe I care more than the average person) too juvenile and simplistic a medium for you to care about its extinction at the hands of CEOs endorsing AI? This might sound juvenile too, but I'm kinda devastated, because I genuinely thought you were cool. You're either with artists or against us imho, on an issue as large as this, when already the layoffs in the industry are insurmountable for many, despite ongoing attempts to unionize. That user called someone a fascist for pointing this out, too. I guess both of you feel that way about those of us involved in class action lawsuits against AI image generation software.

i can't speak for anyone else or the things they've said or think of anyone. that said:

1. you should not look up to people on the computer. i'm just a girl running a silly little blog.

2. i am an artist across multiple mediums. the 'no true scotsman' bit where 'artists' are people who agree with you and you can discount anyone disagrees with you as 'not an artist' and therefore fundamentally unsympathetic to artists will make it very difficult to actually engage in substantive discussion.

3. i've stated my positions on this many times but i'll do it one more: i support unionization and industrial action. i support working class artists extracting safeguards from their employers against their immiseration by the introduction of AI technology into the work flow (i just made a post about this funnily enough). i think it is Bad for studio execs or publishers or whoever to replace artists with LLMs. However,

4. this is not a unique feature of AI or a unique evil built into the technology. this is just the nature of any technological advance under capitalism, that it will be used to increase productivity, which will push people out of work and use the increased competition for jobs to leverage that precarity into lower wages and worse conditions. the solution to this is not to oppose all advances in technology forever--the solution is to change the economic system under which technologies are leveraged for profit instead of general wellbeing.

5. this all said anyone involved in a class action lawsuit over AI is an enemy of art and everything i value in the world, because these lawsuits are all founded in ridiculous copyright claims that, if legitimated in court, would be cataclysmic for all transformative art--a victory for any of these spurious boondoggles would set a precedent that the bar for '''infringement''' is met by a process that is orders of magnitude less derivative than collage, sampling, found art, cut-ups, and even simple homage and reference. whatever windmills they think they are going to defeat, these people are crusading for the biggest expansion of copyright regime since mickey mouse and anyone who cares at all about art and creativity flourishing should hope they fail.

[jessequinones]

You Can't Copyright AI Text

You shouldn’t be able to at least.

This entire post is gonna be a response to this article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/author-granted-copyright-over-book-with-ai-generated-text-with-a-twist/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2V8UhBqIhPZOItkutVWV5dbrdzcfv1temluvDLoqq2mH_VYhQ8XQmJWeg_aem_AVdhQregse5E_2iNn2sfJWW_g2qbp6kMQe1224x8sroZY6JNpxAl20foXPq5_FhwZm3VnVmoyXoNWXK8mFpY7JmR

So if you would like full context, go take a quick read then come back to me, I’ll wait.

Now with that out of the way, let’s begin.

The article talks about how Elisa Shupe was able to get her book copyrighted despite using AI text in her novel and in a weird turn of events no one mentioned her book or where to find it, so I did the work and discovered it’s called “AI Machinations: Tangled Webs and Typed Words” under the pen name Ellen Rae, which you can find here: https://www.amazon.com/AI-Machinations-Tangled-Typed-Words-ebook/dp/B0CKWSQYVV/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=Mnte1&content-id=amzn1.sym.cf86ec3a-68a6-43e9-8115-04171136930a&pf_rd_p=cf86ec3a-68a6-43e9-8115-04171136930a&pf_rd_r=138-1086470-4047013&pd_rd_wg=JsCX3&pd_rd_r=95cbab0f-fbc0-4b67-8c1f-dbdc7d81c427&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk

I was only able to find this thanks to the United States Copyright search engine here: https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&SAB1=Elisa%20Shupe&BOOL1=all%20of%20these&FLD1=Keyword%20Anywhere%20%28GKEY%29&GRP1=OR%20with%20next%20set&SAB2=Ellen%20Rae&BOOL2=as%20a%20phrase&FLD2=Keyword%20Anywhere%20%28GKEY%29&CNT=25&PID=KsAg2GziUD-KWXZ2p16doyefGFC9I_&SEQ=20240423225121&SID=8

The copyright office doesn’t seem to acknowledge Elisa as the owner of her “completed work” but merely in the “arrangement” in which those AI texts are placed. “This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.” - KATE KNIBBS, WIRED.COM – 4/18/2024 11:24PM

Now I don’t need to know and I don’t care why Elisa created a book with AI text, all I want to focus on is what this means for the future of storytelling and copyright?

For starters, since the book is free thanks to Kindle Unlimited, I can download it, and rip the text straight from the book but as long as I rearrange the words, I’m safe. First of all...how much of it needs to be rearranged for it to no longer count as stealing? Can I simply move words around or do I need to add in my own input? How much of my own input is needed?

I took a chapter from the book and rearranged it, here’s my version of the text which I got from said book which according to the copyright office, is legal.

[This is for educational purposes only]

The pallid light of an October morning spilt into the Wakefield kitchen, accompanied by the gentle rustling of leaves. Lily, ever observant, set her backpack down by the breakfast bar and looked closely at her mother. "Mom," she began, concerned, "you should sit down for a bit. You look tired."

Brenna forced a smile, appreciating her daughter's concern. The pressing nature of the situation bore down on her. "You know we have plans," Lily called out, her voice irritated and affectionate.

Brenna hesitated for a few seconds, yesterday’s meeting still fresh in her mind. "Thank you, sweetie. I'll be okay. Just one of those days, you know?" Brenna leaned down, despite her pain, “Tell me about that darkness.”

“Alright,” she conceded with a smile. "Let's just say I have my ways considering how many Confederate prisoners died,” Lily's expression brightened.

Brenna snapped, “This is me trying to make things right and,” Brenna's eyes widened. “Is that what I think it is?”

“A forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera. Top of the line. It can detect the slightest temperature variations.”

“How did you manage to get this?" Brenna took the camera, sensing its heft in her hand. The reality of what they might discover tonight suddenly felt more tangible. "Thank you," she whispered back.

***

I would like to point out I didn’t add any of my own words, I merely rearranged Elisa's to create a new story which is different from hers. Under normal copyright laws I would consider this stealing because I literally stole Elisa’s words, rearranged them, and added none of my own input and if you agree with what I did is considered stealing, congratulations, that’s how AI text is made.

If the copyright office allows these kinds of stories to be copyrighted then we’re gonna see more and more text which are stolen from authors used in stories under the AI machine. Again, I ask, how much-stolen work will the copyright office allow to be used if we could go with the excuse “A machine made it but I changed it.”

[This is for educational purposes only]

Me - Give me two paragraphs which use text from Warriors Into The Wild, Lord of the Rings, and Wings of Fire

AI - Here's a mashup of two paragraphs using text from "Warriors: Into the Wild," "Lord of the Rings," and "Wings of Fire":

In the heart of the forest, Firepaw watched as the shadows lengthened, casting a darkening cloak over the land. The whispering wind carried tales of ancient battles and forgotten realms, stirring memories of a time when the world was young and filled with magic. As he gazed into the depths of the woods, Firepaw felt a sense of foreboding, as if unseen eyes were watching his every move, waiting for the moment to strike. He knew that danger lurked in the shadows, but he also knew that he was not alone. With the courage of a warrior, he pressed forward, determined to face whatever challenges lay ahead, for he was destined for greatness

***

AI steals from authors, I didn’t create any of the text you just read, but thanks to Elisa and the copyright office, all I’ll have to do is most likely change Firepaw’s name and I’ll be golden, despite telling AI to use stolen text.

Let me be very clear, AI doesn’t create anything new, it’s a machine which was created using stolen works and if for some reason you don’t believe me, take it from Open AI themselves. “OpenAI said it could not train large language models such as its GPT-4 model – the technology behind ChatGPT – without access to copyrighted work.” - The Guardian, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-chatgpt-copyrighted-material-openai

If you use AI to create a story, it shouldn’t be copyrighted because the “words” you use to create a story didn't come from you. I understand creating a story is hard, and for those who suffer from a disability where it’s difficult to create a story the normal way, I can see the appeal of using AI. However, please don't use it until AI can be made where it’ll NEVER steal from others.

“I fired a nuke at the US Copyright Office this morning,” - Elisa Shupe (2024)

I can’t deny that, because I can only see this snowballing into more AI-written books trying to get copyrighted and while Elisa admitted to using AI text, not everyone will. Here’s another article by Kate where she goes into detail about how Amazon has an AI book problem so the problem is already here and it’s getting worse thanks to Elisa’s book making it through the copyright office: https://www.wired.com/story/scammy-ai-generated-books-flooding-amazon/

It’s nearly impossible to figure out who’s using AI text unless they tell us. But if someone gets caught using AI text, they can simply claim they changed enough of the AI version to justify putting their own “spin” on things.

“You don't just hit ‘generate’ and get something worthy of publishing. That may come in the future, but we're still far from it,” she says, noting that she spent upwards of 14 hours a day working on her draft … On a sentence level, she adjusted almost every line in some way, from changes in word choice to structure. One example describing a character in the novel: “Mark eyed her, a complex mix of concern and annoyance evident in his gaze” becomes “Mark studied her, his gaze reflecting both worry and irritation.” - Elisa & Kate (2024)

Anyone can claim this. Anyone who uses AI text can say they spend 14 hours a day, going over AI written text and changing it, but it still doesn’t eliminate the fact that Elisa used stolen text to help create a story. It doesn’t change the story she "created" is now copyrighted and being sold to others with protection.

I honestly don’t know why Elisa used AI text because in her own words, “firing a nuke at the US Copyright Office” is so good, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Those words came from a person, they were created by thought, and it describe this situation so perfectly, that I have to give credit to the person who created it, Elisa Shupe.

I guess only time will tell how the United States Copyright Office will handle AI-created stuff but if they agree with one person using it, others will follow. If your argument is that you need AI to help write because of your disability, then please speak with disabled writers. I give out free writing advice all the time because I enjoy writing and I want others to enjoy it as well.

What makes writing beautiful is that it comes from a human. Humans with their own thoughts, ideas, and personalities. I could end this article by saying something profound that’ll reflect on the themes of what you just read, or...I could say something stupid but regardless of how this article ends, it ended as it began, with a human thought...pickles.

[prometheus-clay]

What Is This?

Basically, it's a space to put my AI art character/item/place designs on with a bit of (non-AI-written) microfiction, all under a CC0 license for anyone to make fanwork of.

If you make said fanart, put it under the tag of #prometheusclay, and I'll reblog it! Simple as that.

Basically, the giak iscreating AI art blorbos and stories behind them and boosting those who draw those blorbos. That's the long and short of it...

Well, but the long-and-long of it is past the break tho, gimmee a moment...

Dispelling Some Misconceptions on AI Art

Before I get to the reason for this blog existing, I may as well clear up a few misconceptions about AI art.

-It is not an automatic collage machine, it does not hold any of the images it scans but rather learns "rules" from them on how to "find" an image within white noise, guided by a prompt, like an artist scribbling with their eyes closed on the page and trying to then make a picture out of the lines there.

-The databases used do not actively scan to "steal" art, they more or less try to find everything on the internet and just winnow out the worst results. We're talking on the level of "Books about television being categorized as televisions" or "logic trees being categorized as trees" here.

It's hilariously indiscriminate is what I'm trying to say here, and the pool is huge, we're talking in the hundreds of millions, it's more akin to a search engine like Google than deliberately scanning for art to "steal."

Hell, from what I've heard they weren't even trying to go for artistry, they were going for photorealism, this caught them off guard!

-It does not constantly scan the internet for "new" art, the program is "fixed" with how it's been trained. The dataset is what it is, set in stone the moment it's trained, putting images in your gallery to "jam up the gears" of it won't work.

-The nature of the huge sizes required for databases and the differing copyright laws between nations make the idea of a model training on just PD/CC material extremely difficult if not impossible

-While some AI art programs are behind paywalls/leashed to corporate overlords, there are others like Stablediffusion that are completely open source and free to use if you can access as system to run 'em!

-Just writing a prompt to get an image is not the only way in which AI art can be used, there are other means of getting it to work such as img-2-img (Where it uses an existing picture as the "base" alongside the prompt), outpainting (Where it paints "out" from an existing image to expand it), combining different parts from different iterations of an image, or all of those in succession even!

-"Raw" AI art is legally public domain (And should stay that way IMO for various reasons) and, while there's no direct legal precedent for it, using img-2-img on non-PD-images or ones you don't own is pretty much the same legally and morally as tracing from it.

So ask permission, or better yet, don't do that.

-A lot of AI artists are also traditional artists, who're trying to combine their skills with this new, interesting medium.

Actual Issues With AI Art

This is not to say that there aren't problems with AI art, which I'll list here too:

-The possibility of traditional concept artists being economically displaced by megacorps using this rapidly advancing field, enabled by the current bloated monopsony power of megacorps to set standards (Go read the book Chokepoint Capitalism for more on that)

-The possibility of this destroying the commission economy for small independent online traditional artists, already precarious due to years of internet gentrification and everyone else's lack of disposable income post-'08-crash, and with it the pipeline for new traditional artists.

-The data privacy issues inherent in the data scraping of the training process, because the issue is significantly more a data privacy issue than a copyright one.

-The fact that there are models trained on this public data that aren't Open Source and are stuck behind a paywall, such as Midjourney and DallE-2, which is infuriating and should be changed

-The legion of techbro assholes who actively cheer about the idea of traditional artists losing their jobs and not needing to pay traditional artists to make their images...

...BTW if you do this, I hate you and I don't want you around.

-The deeper philosophical fears of what it means for specific creative processes deeply important to creators to potentially be marginalized via automation in the name of efficiency

-The fact the field is advancing so rapidly we have no idea when it'll plateau enough for traditional artists to figure out their position in this landscape.

So, Why Are You Doing This?

Because, in my notice, one of the things AI art is really bad at is duplicating character designs and giving them narrative context (Given how most AI writing has been pretty bland at best so far).

That may change in the future, but for now, I think it's a thing traditional artists can do that AI can't, and I think it's a good thing to build community around, something radically open inspired by stuff like Fanpro or the SCP Foundation or The Fear Mythos or Jenny Everywhere if you're familiar with those.

Not just to provide free blorbos, but to boost small artists who're doing stuff with said blorbos, in a symbiotic relationship. Because I ultimately want traditional artists and AI artists (Those with ethics at least) to have a sense of solidarity.

We love art, we hate what the megacorps are doing to it, and I think we should stand together; because copyright law won't save us; the Hammer of Ludd won't save us; we will save us.

And, if you'd like to join us, I will point out, we have a Discord server and a code of ethics.