#brands that use ai can fuck off
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immediately turned off when brands use ai
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side note. im just upset now about how it feels like my work is no longer belonging to me. I dont get to choose what it is put into. it is now a comodity for whoever believes that they have a right to my work.
When I work in an art-based industry, what I produce will not be my own. It will be owned by another company who hired me. I could spend hours on it and pour my life force into what I create, but it could be held by the company and not released or released and removed from my ownership.
Now tumblr is the same. now every website is the same. You never have control of what you post forever. You never get to choose what happens to your online work. But now I know that what I post will go directly into the content meatgrinder that is AI technology. I will not get to choose this. I will not get to own my work any more. Even if I opt out, even if thousands of users opt out, not everybody will. Not everybody will know. Not everybody will want to. Not everybody will be bothered.
Theres a difference between individuals reposting my work onto pinterest and an entire blog being fed into AI. Theres a difference between a single human feeding artwork that isnt theirs into AI and an automatic process in which my data, my artwork, my life is being fed into AI. I will never own my own work again unless I keep it directly next to me and never share it.
Im debating pulling all of my work from this website.
#fish talks#Im not sure what to do#I dont want my stuff used I want it to be enjoyed#but how can i enjoy my work being enjoyed by people and websites that i cant trust#i really dont know what to do about this#I think tomorrow Im going to ask someone for their pov#he's always given me good advice on AI debates idk#and I know most of the terms in this will be wrong and thats because I dont know how to phrase the processes of AI#Im not a machine. Dont treat my art as a product. Treat me as a person. as an artist.#dont treat me as something to be sold.#this year hasnt been my most productive year#I dont need likes and reblogs as much as I used to#But I also dont see how I am supposed to grow my 'brand' as someone who dreams of being an online professional if I cant enjoy being online#if i cant trust the websites that i use#idk. this is confusing#much less to mention the friends that i could be losing if i disappear from this website#i dont even want to reblog other peoples art because i dont know how to turn off the thing yet#how will i know if my art has been fed into AI?? How long does that take? How long do i have from when i get the option to turn it off#and when I do turn it off?#agggghhh fuck all of this.#ai#anti ai
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i don't mean to sound ungrateful, but as a content creator on this site, there's a part of me that's like. they absolutely just stole my work.
i'm not, like, unaware that tumblr has been shuffling downhill for years now. sometimes i play with the idea of switching platforms, turning myself into the shark. i often get tens of thousands of notes - i could be "doing numbers" on a platform that actually pays me to do so. i could have statistics that i could use to sell myself, i could rebrand and make content pay-to-play and make brand deals. i could have the other life, i mean.
but i don't want to. i like the quiet nature of tumblr. i like that it still feels like i'm writing poetry, not like i'm fulfilling ad spots. i like the community, and that i can sometimes still take someone by surprise and write something that really speaks to them. i like the tags and reading things like oh of course it's fucking inkskinned i love you inkskinned you gay mess. my girlfriend recently told me that people tag things "inkskinned" because they assume it is similar to tagging "creative writing". that's wild. i made this word up when i was 19, and have always assumed people tag me in things so i read it (and i often do). i have nothing but love and gratitude for you all, for this tiny scoop of family.
and i haven't made any money off it. i had opportunities, and i turned them down. i could have sold this thing like a thousand times. i thought about moving my work elsewhere - over and over and over i thought about it. i weighed each option specifically. but my tumblr felt like ... it's for you guys, only. if you're still here and reading this, you deserve to do it for free.
tumblr has now, most likely, skimmed my work (and yours) in order to make money. i will never see a single cent for that violation. something about landlords, i guess - my work pays their rent.
i just lost my job on valentine's day, and am working on scrambling for solutions. i am writing this to a blog that they will probably scrape with AI. and like, what number to do you think it was? do you think it was only a couple hundred thousand? no way it was close to a million, right? my time, effort, energy - it belongs to someone else now. how many silver pieces for them to completely sell out their user base.
and it's kind of like - funny? when it isn't very-sad. because i personally don't know what to do, ya know? i might as well move to a different platform, where my efforts are ai-scraped but could eventually pay me. where i know my privacy is the cost - but it could result in actual money. anyway. i need to figure out how i'm paying for meds. i need to email like six people about COBRA benefits.
my work is powering someone else's AI. it will be a beautiful fabricated poem, made from words i've already said.
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I've been thinking a lot about episode 4 recently, but not exactly in a way that what most would think. I'm actually specifically referring to this scene of Zooble and Jax.
But I'm not thinking about Jax and Zooble, rather I'm looking at the patties.
They're fucking High Definition. In fact, everything in the diner is high definition, save for the NPCs. There's also Orbsman. A simple NPC comprised of blue spheres, and simple elongated eyes. He's the most out of place NPC, if we disregard the mannequins. Even the way he moves is so outdated, and Ragatha had made a point that Orbsman comes from an adventure way before Pomni's arrival.
The guy even clips through the table when trying to order.
Something that always had some sirens going off in my head is how the Circus is this low-poly scenery with heavily stylized props, but the adventure locations are always much more detailed and realistic.
Since The Grounds is definitely, if not, one of the oldest locations, it makes sense for it to be graphically styled like this. But Caine's adventure set pieces are becoming more and more realistic, and also a whole lot more morbid than we had initially thought.
Going back to the patties, the food there is more realistic and has a higher polygon count compared to Bubble's "feast".
Where am I going with this? .... I have no idea, I forgot. /j
Jokes aside, I really do think that as more humans enter the circus and talk about what life is in the real world, Caine extracts that data and improves the 3D environmental props, resulting in higher definition textures.
All of this combined means he can learn. He IS an ever-evolving pseudo-sentient AI. And the reason why he's stagnating is because of a combination of being trapped in his own little bubble (haha see what I did there) of comfort, and the fact that no one's really able to give him criticism on how to improve, which is.... honestly understandable, given how he reacted to the whole "it was bad" line from Pomni and "Why did you think I would like that?!" from Zooble.
Not to mention episode 3 where the whole circus started to glitch when he was just thinking about the fact that he could possibly be bad at the "only thing he's good at" during the therapy session.
In fact it's interesting how human Caine acts sometimes... I think it's quite interesting to think about the fact that Caine is both progressing in terms of bringing the casts' world to the digital circus and making it so HD that it looks even better than Triple A games, but regressing even more in terms of catering to them and what exactly humans need.
He understands, and doesn't at the same time.
This also makes me think about the players themselves, too.
Ragatha, one of the oldest players, gets pierced by a spike through her chest, and barely has any reaction to it. Meanwhile, Zooble, the second most recent member, gets scalded by the stove.
The only time Ragatha actively claims she's in "so much pain" is when she's glitching badly. Both Ragatha and Kinger barely react to the knives too; and not to mention Ragatha even gets fucking plunged into a boiling deep fryer, and yes while she screams, it sounds more like she's just drowning rather than being fried alive.
And the only patch up she gets is a FUCKING BAND AID ON HER CHEEK. A COMPLETELY UNRELATED WORKPLACE INJURY FIRST AID APPLIANCE LMFAO
It could be just a coincidence and I'm just being stupid again, but I think this "improvement" actually also applies to the rest of the cast, and how their digital bodies react to the five different senses. I'm sure Ragatha and Kinger can most definitely still feel pain, but not exactly as "bad" as the newer integrations do. Dare I say, it's on brand with how used these two are to the digital world's wackiness because they've been there the longest.
Like they've been numbed to the pain of the countless adventures they've had to go through.
Anyways my brain be thinking useless facts fr fr
EDIT: Going back to Caine, it's definitely interesting how this AI seems to possess (some) emotions in the first place. He's mostly wacky and nonchalant, but he also gets angry under the right conditions.
... I think not only is his adventures his "work of art", but also his main coping mechanism from the fact that he can't achieve his goal, one that constantly backfires on him. Like a 'one step forward, two steps back' scenario that's slowly causing him to slip and break.
And what scares me the most is that like all things... he'll reach a breaking point sometime. He's already reached a breaking point with Zooble. It doesn't help that Gangle could've possibly made things worse with introducing Caine to the whole "punishment" thing, and since we literally have NO context for the last 3 episodes for the finale... I could only fear what's in store.
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“Disenshittify or Die”
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I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861
This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.
==
What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?
I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.
But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.
There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.
Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.
What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!
I’m talking about enshittification.
Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.
That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.
There’s so many ways to lock in users.
If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.
That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?
No way.
Can you agree on where to go next?
Hell no.
You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.
So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage
Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.
Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.
Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:
You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;
you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;
your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and
every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.
Think Different, amirite?
Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.
For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.
Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.
Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.
Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'
Bullshit!
Bull.
Shit.
The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud
Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them
The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.
"But wait!" I hear you say!
[Come on, say it!]
"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.
"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"
[Any guesses?!]
That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.
So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.
Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.
Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.
Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?
(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)
That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?
I mean, you love to see it.
But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?
Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.
If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.
Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.
John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.
Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’
OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.
Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.
Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.
Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.
Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.
That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?
That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.
Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.
Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.
And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.
Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.
The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.
Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.
Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.
Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.
Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.
Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.
For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”
When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.
Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.
Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.
That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."
That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.
Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.
Except you can’t.
Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.
That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"
The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.
But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.
Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.
Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.
Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.
That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.
So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.
Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.
That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.
Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.
And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.
Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?
There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.
If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving
Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.
Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.
But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.
[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]
That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.
So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).
Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.
But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.
But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.
Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”
If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?
But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.
Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.
Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.
Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.
Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?
Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.
It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.
It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"
Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.
And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.
That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?
IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.
It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.
It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.
The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”
“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”
100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.
But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.
It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.
You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.
The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.
The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.
Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.
Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.
Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.
Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.
And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.
Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.
So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.
But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.
Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.
When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.
Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”
This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.
But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"
I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.
[Any guesses why?]
Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'
Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.
Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.
The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.
But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).
Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.
All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."
So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”
And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"
Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.
“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”
Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.
To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!
Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.
FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.
Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.
When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.
Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.
But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.
Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.
To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”
They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.
They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.
This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”
This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!
But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.
Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.
So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.
But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.
You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.
That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.
As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.
Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.
As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.
Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.
Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.
So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.
A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.
But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.
They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.
To do that, we have to install constraints.
The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.
Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.
Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.
Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.
I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.
[Can anyone guess why?]
That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.
So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.
Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.
The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing
[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]
That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?
The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.
Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.
Next up: regulation.
As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”
Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.
So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.
That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.
For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.
Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.
This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.
This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.
In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.
Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!
Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.
And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?
A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems
There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.
If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.
What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?
All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.
These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.
Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!
Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.
For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.
You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.
It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.
The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.
Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!
That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.
Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.
Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.
As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.
Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.
But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.
Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.
They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.
What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.
And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.
The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.
Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.
It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.
To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1e4cd2048836d15b2b8f6b13b3c9204d/4b209e96a58c0131-f2/s540x810/1a913fe398728ec4d85446444f8ca90b18ddbbd0.jpg)
Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess
Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)
@[email protected] (cropped)
https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648
CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt
#pluralistic#defcon#defcon 32#hackers#enshittification#speeches#transcripts#disenshittify or die#Youtube
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Today in class we talked about gen ai.
When i started bringing up how unethical it is and that I won’t use it for those reasons, i was told I’m an extremist. When someone said “well it can be useful for branding if I don’t have the money to pay someone and would like to be paid for my work myself “ and I said in return “well I would also like to get paid for my work as an actual illustrator” I was told I should consider changing job. To say I am extremely mad and disappointed would be an understatement. I am furious.
Very genuinely if you use AI even just to write a stupid fucking email, fuck you. You are part of the problem. You are part of the reason why people get laid off to be replaced by AI. You are part of the reason why it keep creeping up on us.
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the altar is her hips 🔞
ship: anora mikheeva (anora) x fem reader
summary: it's finals week but ani convinces you into taking a sexy break with her.
word count: 2700+
notes: i had a strong urge to name this one "this is me swallowing (my pride)" but false god fit better than back to december lmfaooo. student fem reader suggested here, service top reader and ani loving to tell her what to do suggested here <3 thank youuu
You barely register the sound of heels on the linoleum, steadily clicking their way towards you. The library is packed, after all. With exam week coming up, there's more people here than there have been all semester. Everyone who had been pushing back their coursework is now suddenly cramming it in. You hate studying when it's too quiet anyways, you can't focus that way. Your eyes are glued to the textbook in front of you, words blurring together as you try to make sense of the impossibly dense material. The only thing keeping you going is the half-empty energy drink beside you, the chocolates you had instead of a proper dinner, and the distant promise of sleep - whenever that might happen.
Then, a familiar presence slides into the chair next to you. She must have come to visit straight from work, because it's damn near 5am. Ani's chewing some gum, snapping it between her teeth.
"Wow," Anora drawls, propping her chin on one hand as she surveys the mess of notes, highlighters, and sheer academic despair spread out across the table. "This is tragic. When's the last time you slept, baby?"
"Fuck. I don't know. I don't even think I got proper rest yesterday," you admit. You were tossing and turning all night, the only sleep you got being fitful at best. "I was reciting case study names in my head so I don't forget any. With AI bullshit, the uni's cracked down on making all exams closed-book."
"I can tell. Even your eyebags have eyebags." Ani, amused by her own joke, blows a bubble and it snaps. You roll your eyes, but that makes her smile, reaching over and running her thumb across your cheek. "Don't worry, they're designer. My baby's got Prada eyebags, for damn sure."
You hum in acknowledgement. "Yeah, thanks." Barely listening, unfortunately, even though you want to give your girlfriend all your attention. It's for both of you. All your efforts, your good grades, will culminate in a better life for the both of you. That's what you tell yourself when you have to blow off date night for a deadline anyhow.
Ani shifts closer, pulling out her bag. "I could put some BB cream on you at least," she offers.
You turn a page. The paragraphs are blurring together and while you swear you've read this before, it also looks brand new at the same time. You sigh, rubbing your temples, willing the information to stick. When you reach something you didn't remember from your lectures, you jot it down on your lined paper, highlighting the key words. "It’s exam week. I don’t have time to be cute."
"Good thing I’m cute enough for both of us, then." She grins, stretching her legs out so her foot nudges yours under the table. She’s wearing ripped jeans and a cropped hoodie that definitely isn’t hers - it’s probably yours, stolen at some point and now claimed as her own.
"Whisper at least, babe. If you're insistent on talking in the library." You gesture to all the other stressed-out students, your peers in suffering. While various courses have their exams spread out so there are no clashes, the energy of finals is potent in the air.
"Boring." You glance at her, but she’s already plucking one of your highlighters off the table, twirling it between her fingers like she’s contemplating doing something devious with it.
"How long have you been at this?" Anora asks. She picks up the stack of papers from your other classes, flipping absently through your notes and you watch in case she highlights something. "Because I’m gonna guess… too long."
"Since this morning. And all day yesterday."
Anora whistles. "You know, there are laws against self-torture."
You huff a tired laugh. "Not in Professor Raye's class."
She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms. "OK, here’s the deal. You take a break. Like, a real fuckin' break. No ‘just one more chapter.’ No ‘let me just finish this section.’ You step away from this table, right now, and I will personally reward you with something better than whatever caffeine-fueled nightmare you’re living," Anora says, poking your metal tumblr that was once filled with iced coffee - probably melted and watered down now.
You narrow your eyes at her. "And what exactly is this reward?"
She smirks, tapping a manicured finger against the table. "Guess you’ll have to find out."
You exhale slowly, staring down at your textbook like it might physically pull you back in if you look too long. But then Anora nudges your chair with her foot again, insistent, and there’s something warm in the way she’s watching you - amused, fond of you, but also knowing. Like she’s seen a hundred people burn themselves out and decided you won’t be one of them.
You sigh, shutting the book. "Fine. Five minutes. But then I'm continuing this in my dorm. And I have to check this book out."
"Ten minutes."
"Seven."
"Nine."
"Eight and a half."
"Deal."
She grins like she’s just won something. It reminds you of the time Anora took you to Coney Island because you said you'd never been. That night was magical, and you two had so much fun taking turns winning each other prizes. That proud-of-herself gleam in her eyes as she presented you with a stuffed tiger. Anora stands and holds out her hand to you, the butterfly charms glued onto her pretty nails seeming to glitter under the cold library lights.
Snapping your textbook shut, you take Ani's hand when she holds hers out for you, with her standing up in a shot and grabbing her purse. "That's my girl," she purrs. "Grab your jacket, sugar. We're going somewhere that'll make you forget all about... whatever boring ass shit you were studying."
When she pulls you up, she doesn’t let go. She leads you out of the quiet, fluorescent-lit library and into the bustling campus streets. The cold air is sharp, but Ani seems unperturbed, skipping slightly as she walks. Her heels click against the pavement, drawing the occasional glance from passing strangers.
"You really think you can make me relax in eight minutes?" you ask, curious about her plan. You'll give her the benefit of not taking travel time into your little deal though.
"Oh, you'll love it. Promise, babe."
xx
Luckily, the location she had in mind was apparently your dorm room. Ani lies back on your bed with its cheap sheets, her long dark hair splayed out around her. The tinsel in it really makes her shine, if the body glitter isn't enough. When she's unbuttoning her jeans, you tease her, "if making me fuck you was the break you had in mind, remember you've still only got eight minutes."
"Eight and a half," she reminds. "Don't rush this. And get your shirt off."
She's wearing a lacy black bra and a matching thong that leaves little to the imagination, her pale skin glowing in the dim light of your room. She looks up at you with hooded brown eyes, biting her plump lower lip as she beckons you closer.
"Get that pretty face between my legs," Ani orders, her breath hitching with anticipation. "And don't you dare stop until I tell you to. Think of it like studying for that exam - except instead of boring old notes, you've got a girl in your bed. Lucky you."
You like when she tells you what to do. How to kiss her, fuck her, lick her. It's a dizzying push-pull of control, where you're the one bringing her to ecstasy but she's the one commanding you to get her there.
"C'mere, baby," she purrs, voice dripping with desperate desire. Her accent slips out when she's not thinking about it, too focused on getting you where she wants you. "I want your mouth on me. Now."
"Yes, ma'am."
Anora spreads her legs, revealing the damp spot clear on her panties. The sight makes your mouth go dry, your heart pounding in your chest. You've seen Ani dance, have felt her body pressed against yours, but this is different. This feels more intimate, more vulnerable. The time limit you've set on this also adds to the thrill.
"Start by kissing up my thighs," Ani instructs, her voice breathy. "Nice and slow. I want to feel those lips of yours."
You obediently lower your head, pressing soft kisses along the inside of her thigh. You can smell her arousal, musky and intoxicating, as you work your way up. Ani shivers beneath your touch, her fingers tangling in your messy hair.
"I like when you tease me, baby."
"Mmm," you hum against her skin. "I know."
"Fuck, just like that," she gasps, guiding you higher with her hands. "Don't stop, baby. Keep going until you reach-" A little gasp when your tongue flits out for just a moment. Tasting the sweat on her skin from hours under HQ's bright lights, from working hard.
You continue your ascent, kissing and licking every inch of her soft, creamy skin. When you reach the apex of her thighs, you hook your fingers into the waistband of her panties and tug them down slowly, revealing her glistening folds. Ani lifts her hips to help you remove them completely, leaving her bare before you.
"Look at me," she commands, tilting your chin up with her fingers. "I want to see your face when you taste me for the first time. I want to watch you lose yourself in my pussy."
"Position me then." You'll lose yourself in between her thighs over and over if it means Ani's directing you. "You guide where I go."
Her eyes darken. You know she loves the control, it's what she appreciates about dancing at the club and getting suckers falling for her movements. Her grip tightens on your hair, guiding you downwards until your face is mere inches from her glistening folds. The scent of her arousal fills your nostrils, sweet and musky. It's almost overwhelming, in the best way possible.
"Start by kissing up and down the lips," Ani instructs, voice breathless. "Get them nice and wet with your mouth first. Show me how much you worship this cunt."
You lock eyes with her, your breath catching in your throat as you lean in close. Your first lick is tentative, a soft swipe along her slit to test her flavor. Ani tastes sweet and tangy, her arousal coating your tongue. It's intoxicating, and you find yourself wanting more.
Trailing open-mouthed kisses along her lower lips, you relish the silky smooth skin and the taste of her excitement. Knowing that it's all yours. You made her like this. You can feel Ani squirming beneath you, her grip on your hair tightening.
"That's it, baby. Just like that," she encourages, her hips rocking subtly against your face. "Now, focus on the clit. Suck on it, flick it with your tongue. 'til you feel it throb."
You do as you're told, capturing her clit between your lips and suckling gently. You flick the sensitive bud with the tip of your tongue, feeling it swell and stiffen from the stimulation.
"Ah fuck!" Ani gasps, her head falling back against your pillows. "Don't stop, nngh - just like that. Your tongue feels so fucking good." She's almost ranting mindlessly now, sounding so out of it as you keep going.
You can feel her growing more and more aroused by the second, her juices coating your chin and dripping onto the bedsheets below. You don't mind though. You'll buy a spare set some other time, after exam week has come and gone. The taste of her is intoxicating, and you know you could spend hours worshipping her like this.
"Mmm, you're a natural at eating pussy, ain't ya?" Ani giggles as her thighs clench around your head, trying to sit up to look at you know. "I knew you were hiding some skills under that nerdy exterior."
"My favourite meal."
"Oh fuck," Ani whimpers, her head falling back against the pillow as you start to eat her out in earnest. "Don't you dare fucking stop, babygirl. Put that tongue to work, baby. Bury it in my cunt. Show me how badly you want to please me."
You feel a rush of pride at her words, determined to impress her even more. You drag your tongue back down to her entrance, pushing past the lips to thrust your tongue inside, fucking her with the slick muscle.
Everything starts to become a blur. It could have taken hours, maybe minutes. You delve in deeper, your tongue plunging into her hot, tight center. Ani's walls clench around you, like her cunt is trying to pull you in even further, eager for more. Desperate. Aching. You lap at her greedily, savouring her taste and scent, relishing in the way she writhes beneath your touch. You squeeze your own thighs together, your own center throbbing in response.
You relentlessly thrust your tongue in and out, curling it to hit that spongy spot you know drives her wild. Ani is writhing underneath you, fisting the sheets and writhing against your probing, relentless tongue.
"I can't believe how good you're making me feel," Ani confesses, "No one's ever worshipped my pussy like this before. Like they actually gave a fuck about making me, oh God, making me cum."
You glance up at her, seeing tears glistening in her brown eyes. You slow down your movements, gentling your licks as you take in her expression. "Hey, hey... don't cry," you murmur, pressing a tender kiss to her clit. Slowing it down. Letting her acclimate to it all. "I'm here. I'm right here. And I'm not going anywhere."
"You really mean that?" Ani asks, her voice choked with emotion. "Because, fuck, I mean... no one's ever said they loved me like this before. Like I'm a real person, not just-not just a warm hole to fuck or something."
You feel a lump form in your throat and you blink back your own tears. "I mean it," you promise her fervently. "I love you, Ani. I love every fucking part of you, from your fierce spirit to your broken places to this perfect, greedy little cunt."
Their words seem to be what Ani needs to hear to reach that delicious, mind-ruining peak. She comes undone with a sharp cry, her orgasm crashing over her like a tidal wave. Her pussy spasms and clenches around your tongue, gushing her release into your eager mouth. She tastes hot and wet, a little sweetness to it. You lap it up greedily, humming in satisfaction as you work her through her high.
As her tremors subside, Ani goes limp on the bed, her chest heaving with exertion. "Holy shit," she whispers, a dazed look on her face. "That was-I can't even..."
You crawl up her body and gather her into your arms, holding her close. Ani buries her face in the crook of your neck, breathing in the scent of your skin. You stroke her hair soothingly, letting her come down from her intense orgasm.
"Thank you," Ani murmurs, pressing a kiss to your jaw. "Thank you for seeing me. For not just wanting to fuck me and then throw me away. I'm not used to feeling so - I dunno, shit - appreciated? Worth something?"
You tilt her chin up and press your lips to hers in a deep, tender kiss.
"You're worth everything," you tell her. You'll tell her over and over again until she believes it.
Ani kisses you back just as passionately, her tongue sliding against yours. Tasting her own cum in your mouth and all over your face. It's filthy and yet still so romantic. When you finally break apart, you see her cheeks are streaked with tears.
"I love you too, you know," Ani declares, a fierce look in her eyes. "You're stuck with me now. Hope you know that."
And it's true for your sex, but especially true as you build your lives together. So you repeat, "you guide where I go."
Anora shoves your shoulder for that, but you can tell she loves it. Eventually, she goes limp against the sheets, panting and flushed. She looks down at you with glazed eyes and a lazy grin. "Not bad for a study break, huh?" she giggles breathlessly. "We make a good fuckin' team."
Looking at the clock, you're not surprised to see you've gone madly overtime. Her pussy just does that to you. Burrowing in Anora's sweat-slicked chest, you groan. You're too exhausted to study now. "I'm gonna fucking fail this exam."
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Manic Robotic Dream Girl
IZ Days of Christmas 2023: Day 4 - Choi Yena
IZ*ONE's Choi Yena x Male Reader Smut
8,311 words
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/1dc576306f23e9a3e5bc4c0e98be8037/09551bfb321df149-41/s540x810/dca107d4cad6fc8836677ab7b42089b741f50063.jpg)
Neon lights dance like flames around you. There’s no need to touch them when you’re already burning. Burning with something that’s not a fever but a kind of pain that never goes away.
Sweat pricks the sides of your face and you’re aware of the blots of perspiration running down your jawline. Nights at the Rogue are often hot, but then they surprise you with a sudden burst of windiness, so you never bother to take your coat off. Whatever and wherever, you’ll always be here yet you’ve not once been able to predict the temperature.
That’s what happened when WAKE12 took over.
Apparently, they decide if people are under the weather by controlling it by them-fucking-selves. Kwon feeling shitty? Looks like rain then. Maybe she’s feeling happy? Alright, let the clouds find balance. Angry? Take a fucking hailstorm. What a privilege, one bigger than the lives of the rich men in the North. But everyone forgets about that fact after she sends out minimal alms—canned goods, a Bible, something. Then it’s back to President Kwon is the best! President Kwon can never fail us! President—
“Vodka.”
“Same as yesterday?” asks Yuri, smiling a little bit.
“Same as yesterday.” For a hologram, Yuri can be quite the social butterfly.
Online wallets are all the rage nowadays. The AI voice in your head offers you said option to pay, and you can hear your balance privately spoken. Somehow your brow prevents from creasing as you hear it. You lack funds but somehow have a few extra bucks to drink.
Choose that. You want to save your Wizes for other things. Lock eyes with Yuri and your balance goes down. You’ve paid.
Online and digital wallets modified with embedded signals and readers were in use before you were even born. Of course, there were already such payment options in the twenty-first century, but how WAKE12 changed everything, not just ordering options with telepathic payment, can easily be read in a sixth grade history textbook.
In October of the year 2918, Kwon Eunbi rose in the ranks as a scientist and soldier for Kang Hyewon, former president, and ended up working her way into dictatorship. The textbooks and classrooms teach that she proposed a law to the court and got herself a position for her wit and intelligence. But early first accounts challenge that, saying that she caught the eye of Kang and had a sexual relationship with her. WAKE12 branded this as propaganda that sullies the name of not only the dictator but the one of the late president, who died mysteriously before Kwon rose to power.
Massive backstory for cashless payment, but you know there’s more to it than the government would like to let on. What happened to Kang? What made Kwon so evil the moment she sat in her presidential throne?
“Thank you, sir.” Holograms all have different voices; Yuri’s sounds like she’s singing. At least the bartender slash boss hired her instead of those with monotone, emotionless ones. It’s cheaper to have hologram workers than humans anyway. Less money, less emotional labor, less of feeling like a normal person.
A beggar curled up below the counter holds his hand out. Not an uncommon sight in the Auster, but it’s a pity to see. The world has advanced with its telepathic wallets and 3D holograms yet there will always be individuals who haven’t caught up with time. While the North Rogue leads worldly lifetimes, the Auster is a home for the rejects. The poorest of the poor. The somewhere-in-the-middles. It can never be truly a perfect world if advancement doesn’t include everyone.
Give him a Wize. Back then, that would have been worth a hundred or so dollars, a currency long gone. Not that you’d know of it; WAKE12 claimed leadership way before you were born so the cheap value of the coin studded with the bust of Kwon Eunbi is all you’re accustomed to.
Take your drink and thank Yuri.
The cobblestone is rough beneath your feet. You take your seat at your usual table. Float your fingers around your shotglass. Pour the contents down your chapped mouth almost all in one go. Anything to feel something. Anything to feel anything.
You’re not an alcoholic by any means, though that’s certainly up for debate. But there’s a need for the liquid that rages more than the need for oxygen (the fucking shortage of it) or food (the fucking expense of it). How else could you be less numb? You’re welcome to every feeling at this stage, just not this empty neutrality that slumbers your senses.
Pain? Your throat seizes up when you drink and brings tears to your eyes, so there's that.
Happiness? Hm, none. You’re barely smiling. You’ve no family, little friends, and no partner for the last few years. There’s nothing to be happy about.
Anger? The displays of people fined harshly for their crimes on the big as life advertising screens stir some defiance in you. WAKE12 doesn’t take kindly to hacktivists and young coders dabbling in creating their own AIs. You have your own anti-government opinions, but what’s a human mind against an artificial one? Plus, and probably a less serious reason (tell that to the thousands who flock to the hospitals because of asthma), the air is almost always polluted here in the Rogue. It’s dirtied by car smoke and factory remains. You’d think that robots taking over the labs would improve it. Perhaps they weren’t programmed that way.
Loneliness?
You look around. See the glitching phantoms of new world technology make the drinks breezily. Watch the light-studded train filled with commuters from the Auster. Kwon Eunbi managed to build an underside track for additional trains to run and still the commuters—young students, old grandparents, not young but not old workers whose jobs belong to WAKE12—wear the same tired look you saw yesterday. All you could hear are buzzes and uncanny valley voices from holograms.
The second chair paired with your table is empty. You’re suddenly lucid to the fact that it’ll always be like this. These nights of drinking and walking in the Auster Rogue will be endless, and just the same, you’ll be endlessly alone.
Sometimes mortality could be so depressing.
So depressing that it makes it all so meaningless.
A man stumbles over to the outside bar, breaking your thoughtless reverie. His clothes are as black as the night you spend but you can see blood on the fabric. The skyscrapers provide enough light for you to see his red face from anxious internal and worrying external blood. The pleading look grips his expression like a malfunctioning robot’s limb.
He’s looking back as if afraid of what might be there. The rain-soaked road is tread on roughly by his shaking knees as he crawls his way to the bar. “Please, help me!”
“Warning,” comes the voice in your head, and you know the other visitors hear it, too, “a criminal of the state is in your proximity. Proceed with caution.”
WAKE12 always keeps an eye on those who threaten them. They have goons everywhere. The kindly grandfather down the street could be a veteran waiting for the chance of a medal. They have ears everywhere as well. Undercover cops stay in both crowded and clear spaces to identify possible threats. When it all comes down to it, you’re not safe in your own head at all. The implants can detect when you dream up something terrible. That’s how millions lose their reputation. Their jobs. Their families.
Their lives.
He staggers to the counter, crashing glass that shards his palms, and lets out this wail you’d hear from an abused pup. “Please,” he croaks. “Don’t listen to them. I just need somewhere to hide. I did nothing wrong, nothing!”
The implanted voice in your brain says otherwise. Everyone was given one when the Cyber Age came. That’s what makes a tiny difference in seeing who’s human and who’s not: the tiny, diamond scar below their hairline from the operation. Close inspection can’t always be done, however. Nowadays, too many of these robots and holograms pass the Turing test. You can never truly trust someone.
“Offenses include: playing the role of an accomplice in theft of government data, distribution of terrorist propaganda—”
“Get the fuck out!” says the bartender, having burst out from the back. As a longtime visitor, you haven’t seen him this angry, but you know it stems from fear. No one wants to associate with a criminal. No one wants the association to lead to arrest and the arrest lead to god knows what. Hundreds of people go missing after they’re taken under custody. What Kwon does to them, you don’t know. “Leave or I’ll call the cops!”
Like you said, they lurk everywhere. You’re surprised they haven’t caught up to him.
The bloodied man shakes his head, like please, please, someone believe me. “No, I’m not a criminal! Listen to me, please, I don’t have enough time! They just wanna—cut down”
Rapid footsteps. Sigh and put your glass down. There they are.
The man reaches for him, but the bartender shoves the whole table into his face. He falls back on the ground and cries out for help that never comes. Men and women wearing tight black uniforms and vests pull him up. Their lit helmets that opposingly disallow a view of their faces make them look emotionless. Like robots.
Huh.
While resting your head against the metal chair, you listen to the struggling shuffles of the police and criminal, and see the glitching robots walking down the road. No real emotion, no real living.
He scratches and screams and sobs, but that doesn’t matter to them. They pull him along the rocky cement and recite his nonexistent rights to him. There’s the right to remain silent (he’s screaming), the right to an attorney (nobody in the Auster can afford a good lawyer much less an honest one), and the right to live freely if found innocent of the crime (someone getting convicted happens more often than being released).
Besides, it can’t be called living when it’s in a place so completely devoid of any humanity.
“In more ways than one,” you say. Fuck it, you’ll drink to that.
-
Like always, you take more than you should. You believe by now you’ve built some kind of immunity. That’s what they all think, you remind yourself, before an inevitable death that buries them in the ground one bricked shot at a time. You swear you’re not dizzy at all or feeling the acid build to your throat, so the sight gathering just a little away from you is real.
Stare at your glass. Space out if not for what you see: behind it, a shapely form of a woman in purple. The blue and violet lights make it difficult for you to distinguish it from her clothes so she actually looks naked. That shocks you more than the arrest. You’re sure she’s got a little modesty in her because why else is she making her way to a table?
Your table?
It’s like she teleported when she’s suddenly seated before you, filling the chair that’s been empty for the last more or so years. You don’t even get the chance to look up at the right time, but the moment you do, you think keeping your eyes on your glass would’ve been better for the sake of your heart.
YENA.
Her name appears in your mind and she hasn’t even introduced herself. But it’s right there, emblazoned in lights in all capitalized four letters: YENA. This girl is Yena. And this girl—this fucking guilty pleasure of a girl—is gorgeous.
The ends of her hair are tinged with blonde, and it’s hard not to give attention to that with how her locks are gathered into twin tails. She smoothes them before looking at you quite seriously, like she’s about to propose a challenge you’d lose.
Blue shining eyes. There’s something odd about the way they twinkle below her bangs—almost like something not human.
Yena dances her fingers around her jawline, elbow resting on the table, and tilts her pretty face. Lets her fingers play with her lips that are made for things the Auster’s known for providing (she can’t be from here though; those crocheted coordinates look costly). That’s how you notice that fine feature. Naturally thick and casually jutted out in a distinctive pout, your eyes are glued to them. Can’t take your prolonged stare away if someone helped you.
“Are you waiting for me to start talking?” Yena asks. She’s not angry, just amused—her voice is smooth and clear, with a tiny pitch that makes her all the more cute.
You shake your head. “Was just trying to figure something out.”
“And that is?”
“A lot of things,” you state. Things you’d keep a secret forever, lest you spill them out to a girl all for the payment of being beautiful. “But I’m not sure pretty girls like you would want to know.”
You try to keep your curious peering at her normal, but it’s difficult when she just attracts attention. She’s a glowing lightbulb in a flutter of moths. Yena doesn’t flicker weakly; she shines, and it’s honestly why everyone else is “subtly” looking at her, this gorgeous stranger who came in and somehow chose the alcoholic who came from places more rock bottom than the Auster.
She laughs. It’s sobering—you think you’ll get drunk on her rather than the cheap alcohol. “Is that what you think of me? Too beautiful to think too much?”
Look her up and down. Yeah, you want to say, that’s about it. It’s not out of offense but rather the instinct in you that wants to tell her you don’t want to put her in a worried state. She’s too… ah, she doesn’t know what you’d do for a girl like her—someone too unreal to be human but too genuine to be the “living” dolls lonely men purchase. Someone who can keep a conversation going without fearing a low blow. Someone who’s out of your league in the Rogue’s mixed pool but chooses you anyway.
“I’m just saying you might not want to hear a stranger boring you with his hard problems.”
“Oh please,” she says, waving it off with a flick of a pointed wrist. “You know my name. I know yours. We’re not strangers anymore.”
How did you—how did she—
Her eyes twinkle again. They’re… violet? You could have bet they were blue. But then you see the suspiciously smooth and clear skin, with the perfect lines of her eyelids, which curve as if manufactured in. She’s definitely not human.
“Besides,” adds Yena sweetly, “you’re really underestimating how good I can take certain hard things.”
Swallow. You opened the door, now you’re locked in.
Yena catches the bob of your Adam’s apple and smirks. Traces her fingers over yours. She can’t be human for sure yet you feel the softness of her hand, the only thing giving you doubt being how chilled her touch is. It's humid here, so where did that come from? Goosebumps pop up in masses across your skin—note how nothing shows up on hers.
Maybe she’s just a confident woman.
“Come on, I dare you.”
“Only if you go first.”
“Yes, sir,” she says. A cutesy saluted hand positions itself before her temple. Her hands are tiny, could be dainty, while her cheeks lift to support an adorable smile.
Your knees tremble. You don’t know where that came from either. Yena just knows what to say to get to a guy. Almost like she was made for it. There’s that question again, resurfacing in your altered brain: is she human or not?
You lean back. Cross your arms. Here you go, on your way to find out. “What’s your story?”
Yena shrugs, her shoulders bare and smooth. And you’re thinking of how you’d like to see the rest of them, the rest of her body naked by pulling down the crocheted strap of the purple coordinates. How you’d like to touch those puffed up cheeks and not care if they’re real or not when you pull her close to kiss her. How those lips—
“Don’t have one.”
“Sorry?”
She laughs. Even the way she giggles is attractive. “No, seriously,” she replies, licking her lips. “There’s nothing interesting about me. I’m the most normal girl there is.”
There is nothing normal about her. Everything she says is too prepared. The largeness of her eyes gives everything away. Her hair is combed too finely that you’re not unconvinced that it isn't human hair at all, though you can see them connect at the roots. It’s like someone drew a cute animated girl on a notepad one lonely night, sent the idea to a rich bastard, and brought her to life.
So no, you’re not buying it.
“So you’re saying you’re just a blank canvas.”
“If you put it like that, I guess.” Yena rolls her eyes. You’re a bit obsessed. “Guys want that, right? A blank piece of a girl they could shoot more than a shot at? Maybe paint her white?”
You’re thankful you didn’t continue drinking. Otherwise, your surprise would be visible and audible with the lodge of your throat as you wineboard yourself.
The side of her mouth raises. A soft dimple exceeding cuteness—it’s deeper, brighter, shinier. You imagine her as a college student, charming boys into submission just with a wink and a smile that can melt hearts and bring guilt to lust-addled minds.
That’s what she’s doing: Yena is melting you because of how adorable she is, but then you take a look at her body, note the fine curves it boasts, and feel the need to go to a confessional pastor. You’re not supposed to repeats in your mind, but you’re you—if you aren’t supposed to do it, then of course you’ll do it anyway.
“Woah,” you say with a nervous laugh. “Woah.”
“Look.” She rests her forearm on the table and talks so casually one would think she weren’t just talking about getting cumshots. “I‘m not taking that back, so do with that what you will.”
Under the table, behind the scenes, her leg is curled around one of yours. Her ankle glides along your skin teasingly. Not a speck of hair on all of those flawless legs, but you’re shivering anyway from the contact. Hence, make a show of closing your coat around yourself. You can’t fool her when it’s not even chilly.
Recover, piecing together the brokenness of your confidence she tore apart.
“My story is, uh, weird.”
“Tell me.”
“This might be too personal but—” You lift your shoulders awkwardly. “I used to date a girl who looks exactly like you.”
Kim Chaewon—short auburn hair, soft cheeks, and a tiny figure. She’s a memory you didn’t think of returning to today, but then Yena came here, and now you’re back to your youth.
“She was a cop. Cutest officer I’ve ever seen, but a real bitch, for the lack of a better word. Then she left me.”
“You broke her heart, didn’t you?”
Sputter. “No!” you immediately deny, shaking your head. “I—I didn’t hurt her, she was—”
A filthy lie. You became nonchalant, undeserving of a sweet woman who’d do anything for you, even give up her well-paying job. Again and again, Chaewon expressed her concerns: why were you talking to Minju? Where have you been? Why are you so mean? You disregarded them all the same. She deserved the ignorance; she was too fucking controlling, too fucking jealous.
Yena knows you’re lying. It’s like you’re a wound she can peel back to see all the ugliness, all the damage underneath. Her smile tells you everything.
“Oh, come on. I don’t care. Except for this.” Yena intertwines her fingers. Rests her chin on top of the formed platform. “Was she a good fuck?”
Your laugh is forced, trying to make a good deal out of this situation. A girl is flirting with you right after you saw someone disappear. Now you’re wondering if she’s a robot. Now, through some way, she knows you’re lying about your ex. Coincidences meet yet you refuse to connect them—parallel lines they shall stay, forever.
“Yena, what exactly is up with you?” you ask. “You just met me. And come on now, why me?”
It’s begun to be hotter in this space. Loosen your coat. Perspiration isn’t because of the atmosphere, so you find out (and what a surprise). It’s because of the woman across you, a midnight sun. If the painful sun was actually a symbol of good in the Rogue, Yena would play its role perfectly. She’d scorch through you and you’ll enjoy every second. Yeah, you’d get all sorts of tans and burns and cancers if you bask in her without protection, but my god, are you willing to take the risk.
“I just don’t like seeing pretty boys have problems,” she replies easily. “If they want, (and I know they do), I’ll take them all away. Soon, all you'll think of is me. Like I’m the sun peeking in your room and you just can’t get enough sleep because of it.”
You tense up. Millions of questions, a void empty of answers. Once again, how was she so spot on? You’re not breathing quite well, and your clothes are tighter tonight. “Yena, look, I-I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Don’t be, not because you aren't, but because she said so.
She pouts. “You’re not gonna buy me a drink?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Nope. Remember what I said? I’m a blank canvas. So do whatever you want with me. Buy me a drink. Or not. Tell me to fuck off. Or not. Force me on my knees.”
Yena kneels.
There’s no mantle on the table to cover up what she’s about to do. You gasp, then try to mask it as a poor cough, but you’re distracted by how she pulls your pants down effortlessly. The button sealing your coat is busted open and gone.
So is your dignity.
Yena’s tongue sticks out at the side of her mouth as she looks up at you with excitement and mischief in her eyes.
“Or let me do the job. I’m a big girl after all.”
She seals her teeth around your zipper and tugs down. It’s embarrassing how hard you are for her. But Yena doesn’t care. Adoration is clear on her face as she stares at your shaft, the worshipful energy in her eyes so overwhelming that she has to do something about it.
“Yena—” What a way to go out: screaming a stranger’s name.
You knew those lips were up to no good the moment you saw them. She’s provided evidence, too. Her soft lips embrace your boner and suckle fervently while dragging themselves upwards. It’s a caress that tenses you up rather than comforts you. It works you up, tying you down with the little weight Yena has. You could kick her away right now and tell her to go away. File a case against her.
You don’t.
The joined duo of careful teeth and wild tongue gets you whimpering. Shivering. Begging. How is she so good at this?
Her mouth is perfectly wet. It’s not copiously soaked to have you cringing but the perfect balance of wet and ready, coating your rod again and again. She gives you too much and just right. It would be a cruel violation if you were asked to choose one and only one.
“Baby, what the fuck—” you stammer.
Her throat’s an expert in taking you because one push of her lips to your base welcomes you in its tight hole. Your knees shake; Yena places her hands on it, not to stop their trembles but for leverage during the dip of her head.
Close your eyes, look up, and stare at skies that provide no reprieving stars. Think of how she’s infinitely bett—
“Better than any pussy, huh?” Yena asks. The third time is no coincidence, so you’ve heard. “And it’s just my throat.”
At this stage, you don’t care if she’s a robot or not, because either way, that mouth is a fucking treasure.
You lift your hips and start slowly working yourself in Yena’s face. Her lips pucker and pout to allow you inside with pleasurable friction. Those eyes—there aren’t any planets in the sky because of the pollution but you think you can see their sparkle in them.
The amazing part is that Yena doesn’t choke. She endlessly takes you in, receiving every inch like a blessed gift, but you don’t hear her wheeze. No sounds of complaints escape her. You have a feeling it’s not because of your cock sliding in and out of it. She only gags on occasion, and those already sound fake. It’s like she’s doing it just so you can get worked up hearing her moans.
While others might be impressed, you’re dumbfounded. She tightens and loosens and pushes and pulls just for your pleasure.
“Yena, I– you’re doing so good,” you compliment her in gasped breaths.
Her cheeks hollow. The suction strengthens and it now feels like your soul’s being swallowed down her neck. She knows how to tease you with light pandering from her teeth, generous licking, and strengthened swallowing. Her mouth is warm but you are more so. She’s making you feel hot in all these layers, an additional one played by her perfect lips.
Perfect hair, too, you note.
Hungry impulses take over your body and now you’re pumping your core into the girl’s face with the help of her pigtails. Yena’s hair is thick and silky, and it’s another enjoyable factor: feeling how it slips between your fingers and how each pull directs her lips to press firmly to your crotch.
She doesn’t gag with that either. She must have had a lot of experience; she did say she can take hard things fine. That is, if she were human. If not, whoever built her had dirty ideas: the lack of gag reflex surely brings in the five star ratings.
Bright star-like eyes, cute ruinable face, mouth that can take the largest.
Yep, perfect.
“Good—fucking—girl.”
Your cock weeps white. Yena feels the first drop and immediately pulls away. She pumps your shaft with a strong, urgent fist. As she hinted, you blast all over her face. Your orgasm grips you and shakes you like never before, and of course, the little brat enjoys it. She’s nearly laughing.
“There,” says Yena after she drains you. Her duck-like lips are sticky with cum. “Canvas painted.”
What a pretty painting you’ve made. Here, shown to the public, is the manic pixie dream girl, semen on her chin to symbolize how each word she utters has you climaxing; hair disheveled to show your subtle but messy rule over her, because you own her although you weren’t there when her mechanical limbs were assembled and her face drawn; and a smile on her face to show that despite all this: she likes it.
You laugh, short blunt breaths wisping in the air. “There really is something wrong with you, Yena,” you say.
She’s a girl who’s extremely pretty, good at blowjobs, and likes public sex and oral. She can also read minds. Oh, and she might not be real.
“You could say that again.” She wipes her mouth. “Though I do think I could use a little fixing from you.”
-
You take her home. Your mother would have been disappointed in you if she knew you violated the first law you were ever taught: don’t talk to strangers. Most of all, don’t ever let them in. But Yena is no stranger—like she said, she knows your name and for some reason, you know her own. You’re not strangers. And your mother isn’t around to command you not to kneel for a pretty girl.
This home of yours isn’t fancy, but if people from 2024 saw it, they’d be mesmerized. You’re not rich enough to afford the penthouses the North offers; this one is alright for you. The stories of the building aren’t aligned with each other, separating a few yards with floating floors that defy gravity. That’s right; WAKE12 somehow found a way to disobey the rules of physics. The ends are lit up with bright lights that blind you from miles away. Wide windows encircle the areas along with al frescos and convenient malls. Back then, this would have been classified as the house of the wealthy—you can’t say you agree with the sentiment when you’re not at all rich.
“Hi,” says Yena brightly at the front desk. She’s so smiley, always grinning like she’s just told a really clever joke. “Where’s the elevator?”
“I, uh…”
The manager looks at her oddly. Your ears redden; she still hasn’t cleaned her face up. Evidence of your deed lies there on her nose and chin and cheeks, even in her perfect hair.
“Well?”
The manager lifts the phone immediately. Before he could dial a number, Yena sighs loudly.
“Look.” She silences the telephone with a slam of the device down on the keypad. The man’s hand cringes. “I’m about to fuck this guy’s brains out and I promise your little backup bosses can’t do anything about it.”
He stares at her.
“I’m gonna use his dick until it’s limp as a balloon, then ride him in bed, then bend over on the kitchen table so he could breed me like a common whore.”
You lift an index finger to apologize, but put it back down. Did she just say you can breed her?
His jaw tenses. The teeth behind those unsmiling thin lips grit, not in annoyance but in fear. Yena’s bouncy and sweet, but apparently she’s excluding people who cockblock from her cute attitude.
“So,” finishes Yena, lowering her gaze, “where is the fucking elevator?”
The elevator has no pulley or doors. It sits at the side of the uneven floors and rises with nothing but a sizable pod. You’ve had to watch your weight to be able to enjoy the freedom from staircases.
Yena steps on it with no worry. As you look at her, you realize how positively tiny she is. That’s why she isn’t doubtful about fitting in the claustrophobic space. Her violet clothes can slip off at any time at her pull of a waist and slim thighs. All the fullness goes to her cheeks, painted with fake tattooed stars and minimal doodles.
She’s the kind of girl you could just pick up and do whatever to. You’re the kind of guy who really, really likes the idea.
Holding your hand is a thing of the past. Yena clutches your cock over your jeans as the elevator lifts the two of you up.
The first thing she does the moment you enter your home is not kiss you, or slam you to the door, or whisper dirty nothings in the hollow of your ear. Yena looks around and says, simply, “Doable.”
You chuckle. You’re not offended. It’s a tidy, minimal apartment with glass that spans a viewing pleasure of the artificial forest and the hills. Glass lost its value but skyrocketed in purchases when Jo Yuri, first activist recorded in the history of WAKE12’s domination, was imprisoned. People compared her name to glass (yuri was 유리 and 유리 meant glass) and since then, it has been used everywhere. High demand, low price. Her symbol and namesake is used the way the public wants her to be used: cheap thing convenient only to the eye. They always said she was too pretty to talk too much.
“Here, doable is the best compliment,” you reply. You go to your bedroom to clean the place. If you want to fuck a rich girl, make sure the bedroom is at least up to her standards. “You have personal maids there in the North?”
Yena continues looking around. She’s mildly fascinated by everything, especially in the big window placed on the ceiling that lets stars peer down at you. For some reason, all the ejaculation on her face is gone. You don’t remember her bringing a washcloth.
“I’m not from the North, you know.”
“You’re not?”
“Nope. I don’t come from anywhere.”
You come out, having cleared your bed from clothes and the floors of trash. You fed the trash to the connected chute that all apartments have, which leads down to the Southern Auster. The word may be Latin and is already defined as south, but there’s places poorer than the part you live in. You’re lucky to be here. The Southern Auster’s where it’s much more dangerous. The people there scavenge for food and money, and their cries go unheard in the night. It’s the biggest criminal capital of the Rogue.
You come out and Yena’s sitting on the kitchen table with a knife.
Stop in your tracks.
See the blood running down her arm.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she says dismissively. “It doesn’t hurt.”
You still don’t know what to say. The wound on her skin’s dissolved to a scar that looks more like a scratch on metal. Why would she do that? Why would that do that?
“In fact, I think it’s kind of cool.” Yena slides the blade on the strap of her top. It falls apart, right down to her braless chest. A pink, perky nipple is clear in the moonlight shining from above. “When people see me, they usually want to hurt me, so I might as well do it myself, right? They want to slap me, pull my hair, choke me. They say that and figure I’m totally flattered.”
You want to say that you couldn’t blame them. Yena’s got this innocent but naughty aura about her that you want to completely ruin. There’s her hair, all dolled up and her quirky makeup that brings attention that eventually switches down to the body she doesn’t bother hiding.
But it looks like she’s doing the ruining. Aren’t those the best stories? Boy corrupts girl when it’s the other way around in reality?
To use the word “reality” when you’re with Yena is laughable. She can read your mind like a Rogue Times newspaper. You get that things you thought were impossible have a chance of happening in these days, but you don’t remember wounds healing that fast. The knife slices right through the fabric, revealing swoon-worthy curves of her waist and hips, making her bleed only not for too long. Who would want a scar-ridden skinny girl anyway?
“Well,” you say after a dutiful swallow, “are you?”
Yena examines the knife. Her crimson blood dripping from its edge is a worthwhile watch while she considers this.
She finally puts down the knife, much to your relief. “I don’t know. What about you, handsome? Do you want to hurt me or fuck me?”
“I… I’m not like them. I don’t wanna hit you or make you cry or anything. I want to fuck you, that’s completely different.”
First confession of the night that didn’t need saying when it’s clear. You let her blow you in public. You took her home. The intention is staring you in the face: you want to have sex with a girl you just met.
Yena smiles. “You’d be surprised how blurred the lines are.”
Yena‘s hands fall on your shoulders and make you fall to the kitchen chair and make your pants fall on the floor. Falling, falling, falling for her—it’s all you’re able to do provided that she’s stunning. She’s tiny with her thin arms and legs but her breasts are surprisingly supple. The cleavage her top subtly shows off hinted to that and you’re still shocked.
She’s a hot desert, and the only source you can drink of is her core. Her pussy is slick, making her thighs glue together only for them to part as she sits on your lap.
The first grind has you both breathless. The second renders a duet of moans. She’s so wet that it’s excessive enough for her to drip down your cock and completely cover it with her. Yena’s pussy lips splay and clasp your shaft with slippery friction.
She curses. “You’re so hard. Big, t-too.” She aims your cockhead at her clit and sighs at the toe-curling pleasure. “You think you can fit in me?”
“I guess we’ll have to see.”
Yena smirks. She continues soaking you with her wetness. Her juices pour from your head to your balls. Then, without warning, she sheathes your rod inside her.
You gasp. It’s so easy to slip yourself in and all too difficult to cope with how tight she is. Her walls, perfectly textured and sloppy, trap you and let you out, giving you false hope of escaping, only to imprison you again. It’s the best punishment you ever had.
Her throat was already better than the other cunts you’ve spent yourself in, so what does that make her pussy?
The best. Her overflowing waterfall lets her ride you easily. It seems like there’s a million spots inside her you can target for she quivers and cries with each bounce. Her hair flows photogenically while her chest does the same erotic motion.
“So fucking good, fuck,” Yena groans. Her round butt lands on your lap and you think you’d like it to stay there forever. Curl your hands around her cheeks. Draw a healthy moan from the throat you used.
Yena’s pussy curves and opens in every best way. She makes it so easy to mold her into the shape of your cock, to rearrange her insides. Was she made for dick? She’s so wet that you’d think she’s a nymphomaniac who won’t let you go, the same way her vagina won’t let you go as its grip curls around you and threatens to milk you to your wits’ end.
You wouldn’t mind that.
Her riding accelerates to an unbearable point the moment you start to spank her. She’s right about hurting and having sex being almost the same—you want to leave red handprints all over her jiggling ass. You want to pull her hair until she screams. You want to fuck this perfect cunt of hers right up to when she’s creaming all over you, flooding your sexes with her naturla nectar.
And the crazy thing is: she’ll actually let you.
“Fucking brat,” you say, hitting her butt again. She yelps coquettishly. “Are you really this thirsty for cock?”
“God, yes…” Her head throws back. Yena’s eyes shut and although her vision is blocked she sees stars. “Wanted to know how your dick would split me open. Fuck, keep doing that!”
Her core tightens with each blow you expel on her bouncing ass. Her hole’s already so enclosed so when she squeezes more, it’s close to having your cock tortured. You’re suffocating inside her. You’re waterboarded again and again with her waterfall of wetness.
You guide Yena’s motions with your hands on her behind. She’s so light that you’re practically using her as a doll, fucking her on your erection and letting yourself enjoy how her tits recoil. Her moans turn on a part of your brain that you don’t know, but it transmits to you these thoughts: fuck her senseless.
You raise her as high as you can, her weight nothing even to your long-untrained muscles, then slam her down. She sinks deeper into your lap and takes longer inches. Yena’s screams bounce off the soundproof walls that ensure only you can hear them. Those walls were fucking expensive, so of course you gotta let them have purpose. Slap Yena’s thighs down on yours and let her pussy envelop you right up to the point of bruises appearing on your skin.
How does she not sweat? Your hands wander all over her tight body and still you don’t find a drop of sweat. Her pigtails are still secured. You guess she was just made to be eternally pretty.
She is pretty, under any circumstance—her smooth skin possesses zero blemishes and her winged eyes remain lamp-bright. She’s pretty, even when she lets out the pitchiest sounds, even when Yena’s lips rise into a devilish smile before sealing on your neck. She nibbles on your skin and rakes up your sensitivity.
“Holy shit, Yena…”
“Yeah, that’s right.” She licks behind your ear and you nearly lose it. Maybe you already did. “Say my name. Because I’m all yours. This pussy is yours to use and abuse, so do it.”
Rub her tiny pulsing clit. Yena’s cries deafen you. If that’s not enough, she drowns you with her cum. There’s no raft to save you. You’re all alone. You’ll drown here and never see the light of day again.
Electricity runs through her body as the pleasure ramps up. Her fingers weaken on your shoulders. Her gasps are split off by larger, more surprised evolutions. Yena’s close.
“Fuck, no, I can’t!” Yena’s riding is furious and borderline abusive. The noises between your two crotches are louder than before.
“You can,” you insist. You throb inside her while her pussy becomes smaller despite the many thrusts you perform. “Take it like a good girl, Yena.”
“Fuck me, use me, I’m just your cute little helpless girl, fuck me!”
She couldn’t be more correct. She’s just a useless doll, thin and adorable and tight—so why not use her like one?
You’re surprised your limbs have any power in them, but they impress as you lift Yena up. During your walk to the counter, you don’t stop thrusting in her. She’s wet and ready, just waiting and begging for it to happen. Her pretty face is smudged with tears. There’s sick satisfaction in you from seeing how the confident girl at the bar is now just a fuckhole to use.
“Oh, oh, ah!” Cute little whines come out from those lips. Her mouth used its power to pick you up, make you cum, make you scared. In this second, all that is gone: she’ll only ever use it to wail in pleasure.
Knock her against the kitchen counter. Her thighs press to the curve. You spread them open and continue spending yourself to death in her. Her sides that slant to make the physique you love are perfect handles to thrust.
You’re completely soaked, but she’s completely defiled. The dream girl is not just any dream but a wet dream. She’s the fantasy you never had but will constantly think of now. And you don’t care if WAKE12 knows you’re fucking her. They can read all the thoughts you have about Yena as much as they like, and you wouldn’t care.
Instead of giving a fuck, you twist her around, her smooth back in front of you, and fuck her harder while you’re at it. Admire the way your hips slap her ass and give her the spanking she deserves. One spank, that’s for being so tempting. Another for the price of her promiscuity. Three one-after-the-other’s because she’s too wild, too free for a girl with that face.
“God, please, harder!” Yena cries. “Make me your little cocksleeve cumslut!”
She does not take pain to heart, physically and mentally. In spite of your rapid pumps and the slap of your stomach to her bent and ready ass, no bruises or scratches appear on her skin. You say all these degrading words and rather than mope about it, she gets more turned on. She forces you to give all your might in railing her in this apartment where the open windows give you away rather than the sounds. And you’re nodding along, saying:
“Of course.”
Of course you’ll grab her tits and pinch their nipples as hard as you can. Yena’s skin might not be humanly warm but these boobs are real. They’re soft in your palms and plentiful. Is she a masochist? You tweak and slap and squeeze; in response, she’s… smiling?
Of course you’ll slip your touch all over her body. Appreciate every perfect curve, every fine fullness. After fondling her tits, you slide your hands over her smooth pits, then to her arms that struggle to remain stable. She’s sensitive all over; it’s evident in the way she babbles each time you caress her.
Of course you’ll take her hair and pull as hard as you can. She won’t get mad. Nothing ever gets to the cool girl.
“Oh my god!” Yena shouts.
Those pigtails are there for a reason. Thrusts become easier to do with her hair curled in between your digits. Her ass meets your crotch easily and you find yourself excavating her cavern, hitting her in all the good places. Yena hums and screeches and sobs.
“Bad girl.” Her hair plays the role of your reins. They’re convenient in spreading Yena apart with your shaft, tearing at her tightness. “You’re nothing but a filthy cocksucking slut.”
“M-mhm, yes, just for you, just for this perfect dick, ahh! I’m cumming!”
Yena’s core flexes and contracts. It holds you like it never wants you to go but you let go anyway. You can do nothing besides that especially if it’s her, someone who’s so cute but so seductive, so challenging but submissive. Each part of her—those blowjob lips, her blooming face, her cockiness—makes you wish this could never end.
The first sign of the end of this pornographic one-reeler is your semen raining inside her, setting a storm in her guts. You pant, legs weak, while Yena’s seem to go on forever although she’s smaller than you.
The second sign is the mess she made. Those aforementioned desirable legs are painted by obscenity. She squirted all over your floor and herself. Your cum coats her vulva plus spills down freely.
Yena looking back at you with a tired smile is the last one, along with her asking, through shattered breaths, “Better than your whore ex?”
Because that’s the thing about girls like Yena. They’ll do everything to please you. Perhaps she’s a good dresser, but really, this is your style, not hers. This type of fashion is what you like on women: modestly revealing. Girls like Yena will give you everything, make you discover yourself, and when all this happens, she’ll remain the thoughtless, forgiving girl. She won’t complain about things that will set you off and say coy, clever things, the kind men like to hear.
All just to be better.
She is.
“Yeah.”
Yena chuckles. For a moment, she looks like the sweetest girl in the world. The happiness overtakes her face and makes her smile reach her ears.
It disappears as fast as it arrived.
“Wrong fucking answer.”
Alarm sounds of every kind—natural disaster, fire, robbery, whistles—blare in your head. You can’t hear anything except the thin screeches of emergency. But for what?
Yena loses her brightness. Everything that made her shine shuts down. She smiles, that same one full of mischief, before she breaks, too. Her eyes turn pitch black, the ones you see in crows, the sign of bad luck. She disassembles part by part before you. The light girl is suddenly so heavy that she forces you down. Suddenly, her torso above yours feels colder than before.
What the fuck?
Escape is your first instinct. You push the remains of the girl away. Your feet kick the broken parts as if you’d break, too. You brush past the fringe of her bangs. Below it, no diamond scar rests on her forehead.
Stare down at her. Yena truly is not real. Your manic robotic dream girl is dead. She was never alive.
“You have been found guilty,” says the implant. You used to hear it when WAKE12 arrested people and now it talks to arrest you. The alarms are loud but you understand every fragment.
The implant’s emotionless voice now sounds a lot like—
“Chaewon?”
Bad luck comes just like the consequences of the law, personified by stilettos clicking on your floor, a shadow in the moonlight, and the face of the woman you swear you never wanted to see again.
And yet here she is.
Chaewon looks so much like Yena. Yena looks so much like Chaewon. Their chins, their eyes, their bangs—who is who? Their faces mingle and mix in your vision. You think you’re going crazy.
She puts away a remote control and places her hands on her hips. Her black bodysuit is all you see as she approaches. Her smiling lips don’t utter a word. You hear her voice, all in your head.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything and everything you do shall be punished by WAKE12 accordingly. This is the price you pay for your crime.”
There’s a gun in front of you. It’s aimed at your chest, determined to crush what keeps it beating. Raise your hands, but not in surrender. You’ll die before you try to be Chaewon’s toy again.
“What crime? Being your ex-boyfriend?” you spit. This has got to be a joke. “Chaewon, I said, what crime?”
She can’t abuse her authority. She couldn’t have done all that just to get back at you. And for what? Being a bad boyfriend when you were younger and dumber?
You hear her speak. That striking smile looks more terrifying than beautiful. It dissolves into darkness to pronounce your wrongdoing.
“For the crime of fucking existing,” she snarls.
You hate Chaewon. You swore you never did yet now you do wholeheartedly. You tried to love her and reciprocate her efforts. She’s a busy woman so she should have understood you had other commitments.
This is the last time you ever want to hear from her.
A bullet you don’t see coming. It soars in the wind and finds its home sweet home in your skull.
She’s the last thing you ever heard.
#kpop smut#smut#kpop fanfic#fanfic#kpop fanfiction#fanfiction#girl group smut#female idol smut#izone smut#soloist smut#choi yena smut#yena smut#izone yena smut#male reader#x reader#reader insert#idol x reader#idol x male reader#kpop x reader#kpop x male reader#pov smut#kofimission#commission#iz days of christmas#iz days of christmas 2023#iz days of christmas 2023 day 4
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Some identifiers for AI generated fashion images that I've noticed
So, recently and not unexpectedly, I've seen a major uptick in AI generated images showing up in my searches for fashion photos, specifically. I've seen people make posts like this for specific art styles, and for 2D art in general, but I wanted to share some observations I made regarding clothing, fashion, and runways. I've seen a lot of people getting fooled by these, but it seems like for every one person thinking it's real there's about three people informing them that it's AI, fortunately. I'll admit, a lot of them look somewhat believable at first, but once you look closer it becomes apparent that they're off somehow.
To clarify: this is about common inconsistencies I've personally noticed in AI fashion images, so that you can learn where to look for these and similar inconsistencies and avoid sharing AI content by accident.
There's this one "collection" specifically that seems to come up a lot (also, click on all these images in this post to see the details more clearly):
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b2da60eae0620bb15207cc00b56604d1/ecb331997f811846-f7/s540x810/da67056dd3a219e19f93acd979e984f811c99822.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/fb4735867dd39dd2c91c464f5c1609ec/ecb331997f811846-8c/s540x810/6766db8864327dd143a14fbfcfeb715715458fb1.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0b0b1063b62d3345fcd07ab27e6991c2/ecb331997f811846-78/s540x810/e293aeba90dc55c0c462b0716742c2b81af23c06.jpg)
There's more images like this and yes, despite the "houseofai" watermark I still see people asking who the designer is, or saying that they genuinely thought it was real at first. First and foremost: these are all clearly meant to be from the same runway show, right? Then why does each image look like it was taken on a different runway? The lighting and coloring are different in each one, and the middle one has vague red stairs in the background while the other two look like just a plain light-colored runway. This is something you'll obviously only be able to notice in groups of images and not singular ones, but it's a pretty dead giveaway if you see it.
Secondly: AI generated images, as a whole, tend to have this specific kind of super dramatic lighting with very bright, white lights and soft grey shadows. I'm not very knowledgeable about photography, so I can't explain it exactly, but I know it when I see it (and if someone reading this can properly explain it , please do.)
Thirdly: AI generated fashion tends to attempt perfect symmetry, but always fails somehow.
As for the actual outfits: the best that I can describe it is that a lot of the shapes and patterns just don't look like intentional human choices.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0b0b1063b62d3345fcd07ab27e6991c2/ecb331997f811846-78/s540x810/e293aeba90dc55c0c462b0716742c2b81af23c06.jpg)
What in the hell is that monogram on the upper right supposed to be? It's clearly mimicking a logo of some kind, but it's messy and indecipherable, not actual branding.
The heart motif is clearly the running theme here, but the hearts don't really make sense. Like the main one in two halves across the chest here: why does it have those two notches missing at the bottom that prevent it from coming to a point at the bottom like a heart is supposed to?
The bottom hem is way longer on the left than on the right.
The little shoulder hearts are like, bleeding into the shoulder seams; those lines in the hair look like they're supposed to be headbands, but they disappear at the part with the rest of the hair; the embroidery on the pants isn't in a clear or intentional pattern.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/fb4735867dd39dd2c91c464f5c1609ec/ecb331997f811846-8c/s540x810/6766db8864327dd143a14fbfcfeb715715458fb1.jpg)
Again, compare the lighting on this one's neck with the lighting on the last one's neck, totally different.
Those pink things on the chest look like they're trying to be hearts, but they're so clearly not actually hearts. If your collection is heart themed, why aren't you using actual hearts?
The quilting effect is uneven and the individual lines don't follow through and finish in the places they should. Look at the upper right sleeve, where the diamonds are misshapen and the diagonal lines are clearly disconnected. On the lower right chest, the lines just disappear. This can't actually with quilted garments IRL because the top layer is literally stitched to the bottom one along those lines with material in between. It can't fuck up like that, especially not a designer garment that costs your monthly rent.
Smooth zipper. Zippers seem to be a common fuck up.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b2da60eae0620bb15207cc00b56604d1/ecb331997f811846-f7/s540x810/da67056dd3a219e19f93acd979e984f811c99822.jpg)
You can't read the text on the hearts. It's nonsense. Nonsense, unreadable text and fucked up hands are the absolutely surefire ways to identify AI art like this. Conveniently, there are no hands in these photos.
What are those embossed shapes on the sleeves? They're not identifiable as anything in particular.
That is not how zippers work.
I suppose that weird folding beneath the hearts is something technically physically possible. But it's much, much more likely that they would create smoother, less ugly seams with less excess fabric.
These generative AI programs don't actually comprehend what they're trying to depict. Thus, they make mistakes like these. Physical inconsistencies that are often totally impossible, but even the possible things are just... stupid choices that an actual designer isn't going to do. Yeah, sure, designs can be weird, asymmetrical, and imperfect on purpose. But it's way, way more likely that this is just an AI.
Experiment: look at these two images of retro-futuristic headpieces/eyewear and determine whether they're real or AI.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/fd5bce94bfd7cc7a18bbbe509b5ed413/ecb331997f811846-0d/s500x750/f452bf3be86217c8e0f46a44b4d92f3cf1786baf.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9f1de23eb0977e9e8a98263382e2090e/ecb331997f811846-82/s540x810/4f24cb6c045cb1833958e947314397d835818232.jpg)
Right one is easy, mostly because of the wonky bitch in the back. But some other inconsistencies I specifically wanna note: if the blue goggles color the "model"'s skin, hair, helmet, and the background behind the lenses blue, why doesn't it do the same for the eyes? And also, I've noticed that a lot of these images have trouble properly rendering the corners of the mouth, which is a weird detail but one you won't be able to unsee once you know to look out for it. Yes, there's a dark line where actual human lips meet, often with some subtle divots at the corners, but in the image on the right, it's rendered as a harsh, gaping hole more like something sculpted out of plastic than actual flesh. On the note of imperfect symmetry again: the left lens isn't perfectly round. And finally, this is a really good example of that giveaway lighting I mentioned. I don't know how you would actually achieve that lighting IRL, but it's so, so common in AI images.
The left photo is an actual model in 1967 wearing pieces designed by Pierre Cardin, a designer that the right image is definitely trying to emulate. The model has a look on her face that isn't super duper expressive, but it's still far beyond any of the AI images I've seen. Every AI fashion image I've seen thus far has totally blank-faced, expressionless "models". They might pout slightly, but I haven't seen any with visible teeth. Something tells me the AI would render teeth the same way it renders fingers. The emblem on the hat is actually perfectly symmetrical, and the glasses are clearly asymmetrical as an intentional design choice, not like the shapes are supposed to be the same but got messed up somehow. And she has ten fingers total, five on each hand.
Two more:
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3863031d5df15ae990a335dd0a151e88/ecb331997f811846-93/s540x810/29843f7a35195a43d6e147af91eea6d145cc4bca.jpg)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ee25cf23a0aa583446c2581a0b20b0b2/ecb331997f811846-31/s540x810/4d369063be41e61ba146d375fdbc2a9d1bd2c834.jpg)
These are both AI generated. I'm not gonna lie, i fell for the one on the left at first. The right is easy:
distorted faces
woman in back is being absorbed by the train(?) seat
those middle buttons on the jacket are totally useless
AI Lighting (TM)
But the "models" on the left look very, very convincing, and the lighting doesn't immediately register to me as AI lighting. The only really wonky thing on the faces is the mouth on the left "model". However, there's one dead giveaway: the headphone wires. Why are they different thicknesses? Why does the rightmost wire disappear into the jacket sleeve? Where the fuck does the leftmost wire even go? AI, I've noticed, struggles with thin lines, strings, and strands of things. Like with the quilted jacket above, you can often try and trace a single line, only to find that it drops off, distorts, or disappears. And sure enough, as soon as I noticed something was weird with those wires, I went to the Pinterest profile that posted it and found that they exclusively posted AI content. Speaking of the actual headphones, the leftmost ear cushion is sitting on an angle that doesn't make sense, and the one to the direct right of it is significantly thinner than the other three. Again, subtle failed symmetry.
This is by no means a comprehensive guide, and I encourage anyone seeing this to point out ways they've found to identify AI images like this. These are things I've just been on the lookout for lately. And when in doubt: conduct reverse image searches and try your best to identify solid sources for your images. AI images won't list designers, model names, photographers, stylists, makeup artists, etc., while actual runway and photoshoot images will, because there are human creatives behind them.
#posting this to my least active blog rather than my fashion one so that less notes will overwhelm that blog's notifications#ai#psa#long post
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completely off topic but regarding something that i saw pop up in my FB feed and i need to rant about
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7cc5bdd443bb85becbc2c4441bbe8982/c319fa3e42f810bd-03/s540x810/66381c4f81c138a7dd374352d9b47a2c1d192465.jpg)
please do not fall for this shit
nintendo is NOT anti-AI.
it's really easy for them to say they're not going to use generative AI to create their games, because this statement has nothing to do with the very real issues with AI art such as the blatant theft of artists' work, environmental impact, replacement of humans in the industry, and just flat out unethical shit that AI has been designed around
it has EVERYTHING to do with their intellectual property rights, which Nintendo is NOTORIOUS for protecting with an iron fist even at their own expense. and i'm not talking the usual sensible argument shit like "ofc Nintendo wants to protect their IP's, they're a business!" i'm talking about the fact that this is the same company that just recently did a major takedown of the vast majority of Nintendo-licensed games on Vimm's Lair which aren't even being sold legitimately anywhere anymore-
i have so many fucking bones to pick with the flaccid bootlicking anti-piracy arguments out there but basically it comes down to this:
Nintendo is not a small indie company. They are literally one of the biggest, richest, most powerful gaming companies on the planet, rivalling Disney in just how many major franchises they own and profit off of. Many of their games are cultural classics, not just through the sentimentality and nostalgia of our childhoods, but also for all the innovations they made through games like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and many others that we, within the world of gaming, owe a lot to and should be able to access and play. It's not a matter of "wanting these games for free", it's a matter of wanting to be able to access these games, period, and Nintendo is deadset on making it as difficult as possible, even when it doesn't necessarily profit from them (need I remind you that many of the games that were taken down from Vimm's Lair are NOT available through their shitty, poorly-ported emulation subscription service - plus that subscription service can be altered and/or removed at any time, regardless of what you paid for, just like the Wii Virtual Console was, meaning you do not own any of the games you're paying to play on there.)
This isn't about being "cheap" or "not wanting to pay for games". This is about media preservation and the virtue of actually owning the things we pay for. If these games were resold at official outlets for reduced prices or made more accessible through e-shops that don't close down in between console generations or drip feed the odd legacy title every few months or release crappy ports on their outdated af tech for only a few months at a time for three times the price of their original value, people would gladly pay. It's the fact that people are having to put up with all of the hoops that Nintendo has put in place to prevent them from even handing them money to play their favorite titles that even drives them to piracy to begin with, and Nintendo will gladly shut those sites down to protect their IP even when it's an IP they're no longer profiting from and aren't making active efforts to sell.
Like, I would gladly hand over a reasonable amount of money (i.e. not the cost of a brand new triple A title in 2024 which is like $80-$100 here in Canada) for Diddy Kong Racing on the Switch, but ofc it's not on the fucking online play store and even if it was, I'd have to deal with paying an overpriced subscription fee for a port of the game that would undoubtedly run WORSE than it does on my PC, and that subscription service can be taken down at any time. But Nintendo wants me to not pirate the game that's not available on their shitty subscription service because... just don't do it, pretty please??
youtube
Nintendo is not anti-AI. They would gladly use AI in place of manual labor to scour the internet and dish out DMCA's to every emulation site, archived ROM hub, fan game, and artist alley creator if they could... oh wait, they already are.
Do not fall for the virtues of anti-AI when it comes to companies like Nintendo. They are not anti-AI. They're anti-ownership. They're anti-preservation.
#fuck you nintendo#the nintendo subscription service sucks ass#the games are ported horribly#the fact that the original gamecube can run at 60fps but the switch is locked at 30fps is fucking insane#it's 2024 get with the fucking PROGRAM
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things that seemed reoccurring this update:
- Meat
- peas
- jelly
- Hibernation
- Eddie's absence
- Acting out a script (Sally mumbling asking if it's her cue and Howdy changing the script of the narrator in Homewarming storybook, characters general interactions with the narrator, different moments in the video, like the Sally and Frank ad break or the song a barely silent night, where the two literally fight over who get to sing, Sally mentions she wrote the lyrics, and Frank says she already has a song. yeah all of these are easy to see as meta goofs in the original material, but it's the fact there's so much of it this update) (of course all this wrap up with the end of the video where Eddie and Frank are obviously acting off script)
- Being alone (Eddie not having any news of anyone and not even seeing anyone outside (which is interesting as the story says that Sally was up in a tree near his home and saw him fret over having nothing to do), Wally saying it's so quiet during Homewarming and it's just he and Home for a while (potentially the show putting out a christmas special and then being on break? can a show do that?), and in the normal website material, the end of "An ode to hibernation", Frank saying "Where all that's left is me", the "me" being a "...me?")
- Welcome Home being used to sell stuff (cigarettes, medicine, eggnog, cereals, and the cookbook lists ingredients that are a specific brand)
(I'm putting under read more my rambling thoughts so you can just reblog the list without having to see them)
so I can't really make sense yet of all the food stuff. Maybe there are cultural elements/expressions I don't know that explains it? But I still find it very interesting how fucking unhinged that cookbook is yet the commercial and the website treat it normally. The cookbook is overall extremely interesting, because some of the recipes seem to actually be written by the characters; Barnaby who only presents you weird hot dog dressings with pictures but no recipe (and all jokes), Frank who lists not just the ingredients but also the material, and overexplain each steps (at least overexplain compared to the other recipes. it's actually interesting to know why you do x or y), and Julie who turns her recipe into a game at the end, and felt a bit harder to follow? anyway.
The cookbook, the Homewarming tradition of hanging a ham in the tree, Santy Claus being said sometimes instead of Santa, the ham for Santa? Once again, the christmas commercials being so casual about some of the weird stuff it says and presents? This almost feels like an alien who only has a blurry grasp of Christmas and what humans enjoy made the cookbook and the live commercial.
Sometimes, Welcome Home feels like it never actually aired and produced things, but we're making it retroactively exist. Something is making it exist. Like a retcon of the universe, "What do you mean you never heard of Welcome Home? No, of course it always existed and was very popular, look at all this old material we find!"
So maybe whatever is making it exist doesn't fully get humans and accidentally creates things that are weird to prove its existence. Like a cookbook that tells you a single pea in a buttered plate is a classic meal, or that of course you give Santa ham on Homewarming! (tbh almost getting an AI weirdness feel)
But in total contrary, in its story, Welcome Home also feels like it always existed, but got somehow completely wiped from people's mind, as something caused its sudden stop, and its characters gained consciousness of what they are and their world. As an existential dread fell on them one after the other, slowly realizing something isn't right. As Eddie felt anxiety and nervousness over no one being there or contacting him, to then having the story acts lightheartedly about it, the narrator saying things have been solved but he doesn't feel it, and suddenly Home is staring at him.
Both "It never existed but the universe is being retcon into it existing" and "it existed but something terrible happened that erased it from peoples mind" seem plausible. If two theories contradict each other, that means there's a third one that needs to be found.
Maybe it existed. Maybe it truly was popular, but something corrupted it, leading to its disappearance. A disappearance so big it stopped to exist. And now the thing that corrupted it is trying to crawl back, make it exist again, but it's making it come back completely off.
Anyway.
Also, I think the show may have been on hold during the Holiday season, "hibernating", and the character who got some self awareness realized that something was off. They're alone because there's nothing new, so no one is there bringing life to the neighborhood.
#welcome home#anyway there is an existential nightmare going on that's for sure#also at one point writing my rambling I thought about metaphor for capitalism#the show gains succes and so there's a push to make money out of it. capitalism is corrupting it until it goes in shambles.#now a few decades later banking on nostalgia to make profit is what big things do#bringing back the thing from your childhood to show it again but it's off because what brought it back is not love for the thing#it's being brought back because of capitalism. the thing that corrupted it in the first place is trying to bring it back.#sorry i still ramble in the tags :x
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Yeah so anyway, I'm making my response to this fucking garbage its own separate post in case people want to reblog it without having to reblog a scare-mongering lie.
This video pisses me the fuck off whenever I see it, and today I'm not in the mood to just scroll past.
Wow! Am I being lead to panic by scaremongering algorithm fodder completely unsupported by real evidence?! test:
The reason you think something exists is just what you're being told by a nefarious *them*, there is actually a conspiracy behind it!
I, an ordinary person with no expertise who critically examines the world around me, have uncovered this conspiracy.
"That's what they're telling you." (put the emphasis wherever appropriate for the conspiracy of your choice - in this case, it's on *telling*)
This new tech thing is actually a bad idea and the old school method was better - which clearly proves there must be a secret conspiracy, because why allow the possibility of incompetence and investor tech-hype when you can instead assume a highly-competent evil conspiracy?
I will now tell you my conspiracy theory while scrolling rapidly through a document without pausing or allowing you to actually read any of it. This allows me to look like I have proven my claims while doing nothing of the sort. Because do you really think someone could do that? Quickly flash a document on screen and just lie about what it says?
But Owl! This is real! A user upthread found the patent and it *does* prove it!
Yeah. I read the linked patent. Did you?
Let's quote the "real purpose" hidden in the patent, as claimed out in the video:
"The real purpose of these screens is to use the little camera at the top right here to scan your face and use AI facial expression analysis to judge whether or not you like the packaging designs of the product you're looking for."
This is complete made up horseshit.
First, let's look where the reblogger directs us, to column #4 on page 17:
"Preferably, each retail product container further comprises customer-detecting hardware, such as one or more proximity sensors (such as heat maps) , cameras, facial sensors or scanners, and eye-sensors (i.e., iris-tracking sensors). Assuming cameras are employed, preferably cameras are mounted on doors of the retail product containers. Preferably, the cameras have a depth of field of view of twenty feet or more, and have a range of field of view of 170 degrees with preferably 150 degree of facial recognition ability. Preferably, software is employed in association with the cameras to monitor shopper interactions, serve up relevant advertisement content on the displays, and track advertisement engagement in - store." (emphasis added and references to figures removed for readability)
That is the extent of the "nonconsensual data collection."
Now, to be fair, there is some stuff on page 18 and 19 which kinda-sorta-maybe has at least some relation to the claim in the video:
"Preferably, the controller/data collector is configured such that as a shopper stands or lingers in front of a given retail product container, the display associated with the retail product container changes yet again. At this point, preferably the controller/data collector has been able to use the customer-detecting hardware to effectively learn more about that particular customer, such as gender, age, mood, etc. The controller / data collector is configured to take what has been detected about the customer to determine which advertisement and other information to present to that particular customer on the display associated with the retail product container in front of which the customer is standing. By tracking shopper data in parallel with which advertising content is being served on all displays within the viewing range of the shopper, the retailer and the brands are better served, providing new analytics. As such, the system provides advertising, influence opportunities at the moment of purchasing decision, optimizing marketing spend and generating new revenue streams....
"Additionally, preferably all inputs collected by the IOT devices will be analyzed locally as well as remotely (via cloud) to provide the feedback inputs for the system to push more relevant/targeted content, tailored for the consumer. The analytics are preferably conducted anonymously, images captured by cameras are preferably processed to collect statistics on consumer demographic characteristics: (such as age and gender). This data is preferably subsequently analyzed for additional statistics for the retailers that are valuable for in-store merchandise layout design and smart merchandizing, including the ability to track the shoppers “traffic” areas, known as “heat maps”, areas were [sic] customers would concentrate more and spend more time exploring, etc." (emphasis added and references to figures removed for readability) (And note the repeated emphasis on preferably - they don't have a patent to do any of this.)
Which, like, not great! I fucking hate the idea of shit like this! But there is literally nothing here about monitoring your expressions to sell the data about how you react to packaging!
This isn't a nefarious plan hidden in the patent. It's tech bros adding on totally sick ideas about how they can sell this shit to walgreens. (Because to be clear, I'm sure walgreens's corporate office would love to collect and sell this kind of information. But just because they would, doesn't mean they can or are. And this patent sure as hell doesn't prove it.)
Because let me be clear: the image capture of consumers is so irrelevant to the product that it literally isn't even included in the claims section of the patent.
Because the patent is quite explicit and detailed about the idea they are selling big retails stores on - this is a better, new, innovative, tech-driven way to "provide an innovative advertising solution"! (The words "AI," "intelligent," and "machine learning" are deployed liberally, but in the same way that "blockchain" was a few years ago. It's advertising tech hype.)
I want to make it clear - the OP in the video is straight up lying to you. Whether for fun or profit or just attention, I don't know and I don't care. If you shared this, you probably should have know better, but everyone makes mistakes. OP, on the other hand, is just a fucking liar.
But Owl! What about "the senators looking into this"?
I don't know how to tell you this, but thing linked about is a press release by a politician's office. That doesn't mean it's not true, but it's not evidence on it's own. Like, the letter linked in the link included links to sources, but is not itself evidence (ooh, layers of links to actually get to a source, my favorite)(actually my computer wouldn't even goddam open the links to the source, I had to independently search for it).
Anyway, the letter to Kroger linked in the press release by the senators contains a single sentence and a single link relevant to the claim here (linked for your convenience because it sure as hell wasn't for mine). Unfortunately, this article is itself based on a goddam press release (That isn't linked! Again, you're welcome.)
And when we finally get to the underlying fucking source. "In addition to transforming the customer experience and enhancing productivity for associates, the EDGE Shelf will enable Kroger to generate new revenue by selling digital advertising space to consumer packaged goods (CPGs) brands. Using video analytics, personalized offers and advertisements can be presented based on customer demographics." So it's purporting to something *kind of* like the claim in the video, but an entirely different format completely unrelated to the thing the video is scaremongering about.
Now Kroger did actually start using the advertising screens in 2023. And you can believe what you want about the data privacy claims and the claims about not using video, just sensors (which remember is entirely consistent with the patent). But remember: being skeptical of a company's claims is fine and good! It does not mean you have proven they are lying, and it especially does not prove you have claimed they are doing something extremely specific! And most of the articles, and the letter from the senators, are (much more reasonably) concerned about so-called "dynamic" or surge pricing. (Which is not related to the screens.)
Like goddamn. Aren't there enough real problems with surveillance and price-gorging to be concerned about without having to make up fake ones? Hell, why can't we at least be concerned with the real problems with those dumb screens, which is that the a) make shopping harder and b) catch fire?
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Hmm. I just noticed something odd: It seems like DuckDuckGo is utilizing AI Summaries for web results, and they don't allow you to turn this off.
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6a84c2ef411b1224ced1c01f87682ae5/23654b15d63840c1-bc/s540x810/d703eef45160bc6f82817a8ec7fb1619e6406ad3.webp)
![Tumblr media](https://64.media.tumblr.com/efdba1564c7b5955781be8f2b4f7aff0/23654b15d63840c1-07/s540x810/5b6d2a0c91e8b2f28d3b6c0dd89d1741b3055af4.webp)
In their "AI Features" settings tab, you can only toggle their AI Chat and their AI Quick Answers that occasionally pop up. There is ZERO mention of this feature, despite it being pretty clear (to me anyway) that they're using some type of neural computing to create those result summaries. (Hence the difference in descriptions for the #1 result with and without "fuck" added.)
Maybe something else is going on that I'm not aware of or don't understand, but it's certainly a disappointing amount of non-transparency from DuckDuckGo when they're trying to build a privacy-focused and trustworthy brand identity.
#rambles#duckduckgo#ddg#search engine#privacy#security#online privacy#online security#transparency#ai#fuck ai#ai bullshit
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The topic of Palworld is pretty charged, but often times I see people be shamed for liking it because the CEO tweeted stuff about NFTs and the company using AI art in a separate game. Acting as if that's the most damning thing ever for a gaming company in an industry filled with similar people.
Make no mistake, I dislike both AI art and nfts, but do you realize how many gaming companies have involvement with that?
To begin with, Pokémon used AI art in a promotional piece for Pokémon Go in September, and nobody gave a shit because uwu Pikachu. The Pokémon Company also put a job listing some months back seeking an expert in NFTs. That's not quite damning evidence, but if I were a betting man, no "NFT expert" will willingly say "yeah nfts suck are bad for the environment, man, I'll take my paycheck and fuck off now." There's also a strong argument to be made that Pokémon has stolen ideas from fakemon artists (Finizen and Palafin, Scovillain, Dipplin, etc) and other franchises (kaiju movies, Dragon Quest, Megaman, final fantasy, western cartoons and food mascots, etc), a dubious legal statement that claims they own all fan art from the remixes and fakemon made on youtube to the pikachu your kid drew at breakfast; they have yet to apologize for the state of Scarlet and Violet while charging full price to millions of paying customers for a clearly unfinished and barely functioning game (which i did enjoy, but you can't tell me it was finished baking when it struggles not to shit itself just to run), and a bunch of other things people shit on Palworld for, but A. It's Pokémon so people don't care and think it's fine, and B. That's not the point of this post.
You know who else does NFTs and AI art? (Yes I heard Muscle Man from Regular Show in my head just now, too, moving along)
Square Enix sold several of their IPs for NFTs and claims to have used AI art "a minimum amount" in Foam Stars, yet I see nobody yelling for boycotts of Final Fantasy 14, 16, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Life is Strange, etc etc etc.
Sony has invested in both, they want to implement AI into gaming, and has a patent for nfts to be used in games and consoles, yet there's no movement to throw out your playstations.
Bandai Namco- you know, that company with a hand in pretty much most anime games on the market and popular games such as the Dark Souls games? They have a game called RYU that's essentially a virtual pet game that uses the blockchain, and its AI driven, among other projects. Yet there's no outcry to stop playing the many, MANY games they brand with. This also includes quite a few Nintendo games (btw they just partnered together to form a special studio quite recently) like Smash Wii U/3ds and New Pokémon Snap. Nobody gives a shit though.
Android, Microsoft, Google, Apple- I don't even need to explain those, they have whole teams dedicated to both. Even popular VPN companies accept crypto.
I'm just saying an awful lot of you guys that scream and shit bloody murder about Palworld's company being involved with that shit are either the biggest "It's okay when my favs do it" type of hypocrites, or you're sorely ignorant to just how evil and greedy most corporations are. You'll be hard pressed to find a game company with popular AND fun games that DOESN'T have some interest in either, let alone movie and show studios. That's the awful reality we live in.
You have 2 options
1. You basically stop doing anything involving most modern tech, including throwing out your pc and smart phone. You could probably live a comfortable life with tech circa 2010, but you have to be aware that any thing you buy may go towards a cause you don't like.
2. You accept that people can enjoy a product while not necessarily agreeing with the CEO of said product. Most CEOs tend to be jackasses anyway, that's kind of the shared trait they all have. You can also discourage companies from using them while understanding it is everywhere.
Palworld at the end of the day is just a toy, that's it. From the looks of it, it's not even actually hurting anyone, and it seems like the company at least treats their employees pretty decently- at least according to a few things I've seen here and there that seems rather progressive for a Japanese studio (with room for doubt obviously, it's a company after all and as we've established, they're all evil). At the least its not like when people supported Hogwarts Legacy and directly put money into JKR's wallet so she can openly hurt more Trans women. In fact, the only people seemingly hurt in all of this Palworld drama are obsessed Pokémon stans that can't accept a parody, or the Pokémon Company themselves, who rightly deserve some punching up tbh.
You can just say you dislike the game, that's fine, I totally get that. Even though I personally think The Pokémon Company deserves a few nut shots after the way they've treated fans these last few years with the state of their games (and you know, stealing ideas from fans without credit), I can see why someone would be turned away from a parody that's literally meant to be Pokémon with guns. I can totally understand all of that, personally I'd prefer if the game was MORE like Pokémon with turn based combat.
But if you're going to defend Pokémon because you think its perfectly innocent because of Wooloo or something like that, just be sure you're aware you're defending the World's Richest Franchise and their own attempts at AI and NFTs while calling out an indie company (a real one thats learning as they go, not the fake "We're totally indie" franchise that hasn't been indie since gen 3) for having a ceo that also seems interested in the same stuff. And remember, you don't become number 1 without hurting people somehow (we could dig up receipts about certain partners Pokémon has teamed up with, such as Tencent with Unite, but I'd rather not right now.)
Just saying. I don't think you're an irredeemable person for still liking Pikachu, cuz I do too believe it or not. I've been a life long fan and still have fun with the games despite the clear scummy business practices towards their paying customers. Just maybe extend that courtesy to the millions of players just trying to have fun in this awful, putrid, shithole planet that just keeps getting worse and worse with each passing day.
Plus... you know, think about it. Do you think Pokémon would ever get around to making a gunless Palworld? Probably not. Do you think Palworld would exist if The Pokémon Company and Nintendo were the slightest bit chill about Pokémon fan projects like SEGA is with Sonic? Also probably not. From what I've read, the devs just wanted to make a fun game that happens to mostly be ARK with Pokémon adjacent monsters. That's not really a bad thing, all things considered, and it seems like the worst they've done is reference official Pokémon when making their own models.
Palworld being successful is actually beneficial to Pokémon fans, as well. It'll never really truly compete, but it has outsold Legends Arceus in terms of units sold (not as much financially because Palworld was only $30 plus a sale recently, but still impressive), and it is enough that Game Freak is aware of its existence. Let Palworld light a fire under their ass, and maybe GF will actually finish their next game before releasing it for full price (and no, we're not bringing up the tired imaginary ball and chain game devs, game freak owns 1/3rd lf the franchise and can easily take methods to get more dev time, they just haven't because money). Just saying, at least the Paldevs were honest enough to sell it in early access for half the price.
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another digital circus post dont mind me-
Just an overview for myself and others - but here is both proof for and against the idea that jax might be the NPC hidden amongst the group organized by each ep we have so far
JAX IS AN NPC:
Ep1
Jax supposedly knows Kinger has been here the longest, either he was told this or he is all knowing, same reason goes for why he says "We've been trapped here for years" how does he know how long its been?
This one is such a reach but Caine says he doesnt have control over ppls minds here and earlier Jax mentions having an adventure for the newbie, while this could be jax fucking around it is plausible he and caine have influence on eachother's ideas when it comes to the humans of this world
pt1 of Jax breaking the forth wall and no one understanding what hes looking at ("She still thinks this is a dream")
"Ow" Jax getting hurt by the gloinks. Aren't their senses cut off for the most part? How come he got hurt?
"I got a key to his room" "You shouldn't have a key to anyone's room!" Jax somehow has keys everywhere with no explicit hiding spot and simply pulls this key out of thin air randomly
Jax breaks the "Spare" sign idk if this is reaching too far but thats weird
Jax seems to be the only one who gets hungry
Ep 2
Jax is the only one who acknowledges a new ai
another fourth wall break
Once again Jax grabs something out of thin air or magically has it without it being handed to him
Can is both unaffected(Mostly) by the fidgeting car and also able to defy gravity?
But Jax is also pretty good at convincing the npcs of things while also yapping with them
Caine mentions if he loses track of whose a human and whose an npc he doesnt know what could happen, but gumigoo's temporary presence in the circus affects nothing so far
WE COULD SEE ANOTHER JAX???
Ep 3
Jax breaks forthwall
wants to see what everyone can do
Doesnt share what he does when he holds his breath
Pulls a shotgun out of nowhere again
impecable memory for what everyone can do?
kills the ghost-
JAX IS NOT AN NPC
Ep 1
Jax says "Just keep pulling on it, that worked for all of us" when Pomni tries to remove this digital headset. This is proof against because unless he is all knowing like ai tends to be in this world he wouldnt know what shes doing unless hes experienced it himself
"Kinger has spposedly been here the longest" Someone had to of told him this, this necessarily doesnt prove he isnt ai but yknow,,
"If there was an exit I'm pretty sure we'd all have left by now" implying he can leave
Caine likes to reuse npcs, we would see another jax
Ep 2
Caine is testing out a new ai which seemingly made gumigoo self aware, if this is brand new it is unlikely there is a self aware npc in the midst
jax seems to have driven a car before
Jax is NOT in the npcs list
Jax knows modern references like his movie ref
Jax has the fascination of harming npcs like a teenage gamer
Jax seemed genuinely upset over someone's abstraction
Ep 3
"We cant die"
deadass tied up for most of the adventure
"Zooble turns straight"
"Her and everyone else" in ref to pomni having a few bad days
"Dont ever quote brainrot again"
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Taylor Swift by far is not the worst celebrity in terms of like... being bad. Her music isn't the worst--it is the definition of radio friendly. Her behaviour, in terms of celebrity bullshit, isn't the worst either (though we really shouldn't understate the ecological harm from her private jet which gets handwaved but is... truly horrific). She isn't particularly unfashionable, she definitely isn't provocative or boundary pushing.
But all of this middle-of-the-roadness is just... the embodiment of capitalism, especially White Girl Boss capitalism, and... more than that, it represents the sanitation that brings to art. The calculation. The risk aversion. And the laundering of any real feeling--that I'm not even sure she's fully capable of--into something somehow less than the sum of its parts.
It's so egregious it feels brain-numbing. It feels like a mockery of the craft. It feels like every board room decision that has excluded marginalized voices in art and every experimental song from the soundwaves embodied in one person. Everything is PR, nothing is organic. Even when she does awful things (like dating a massive racist or using her moment in Time Magazine to bring up years old beef with the fucking Kardashians instead of speaking on the GENOCIDE happening right now), it's a choice to distract from a worse thing or get another burst of attention. She can't even be awful in a way that feels authentic. There isn't a controversy that isn't also a chance to pivot her public image into something New and Fun.
She feels like a vessel for every breaking down of music as an art form happening in our capitalistic world. She's the tiktok algorithm, the pushed paid promotion on every social media feed, the pay-to-win Grammy awards all in one little bundle. She's hollow and business opportunities are what's filled inside her to keep her from floating away into the blandest possible season of the real housewives of ___ anyone has ever seen.
To me, she's a step above AI art in terms of like... human passion.
To me, she feels like the second she experiences a real human emotion, she writes down five different ways she can profit off of that or spin it into a new victim complex (which she profits from).
To me, the rare tolerable-to-good song she has is just... entirely tainted by the brand around it. Her career isn't a musical exploration. It's a brand. Her music is a plain white t shirt with a logo printed dead center, nothing else to offer.
It can't have anything else on it, no statements, no daring, because then the logo, the brand might get obscured.
#i do think this form of sanitization is like... evil btw#to be clear#and i'm not handwaving the bad stuff she has done outside of this#like it is truly awful#but relative to other celebrity/rich people bullshit it isn't PARTICULARLY awful#(though still heinous)#so i kinda get how people plow through it#but like..... when added together#yeah she's terrible
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