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niqhtlord01 · 2 years ago

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Humans are weird: The thing that lives in flames ( Please come see me on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord Every bit helps)

There came a day when visitors from beyond the stars came to visit our humble home. They told us they were “humans” from a far off world that had heard stories of our people and traditions.

Before our elders, the leader of their group came forth and asked us to summon the thing we most feared. They spoke of wanting to study it, learn of it, and catalog it so their knowledge of the universe would grow.

At first the elders refused the request. To summon the being we all feared would only bring folly down upon the entire village and possible the entire world if left unchecked. Yet still the human leader pleaded for three days and three nights, and by the dawn of the fourth day the elders relented.

Deep within the caves of the tallest mountains the elders led the group of humans to a special chamber. Unlike the rest of the mountain, this chamber was carved from a strange material. It was as cold as the frozen north lands and the stone was not bedrock but an unknown red material that was soft to the touch.

Once all had gathered the elders went to the center of the room and lit a ceremonial fire. The fire blazed bright and fierce as the elders began chanting the holy words to summon their fear while the humans looked on un-amused. This lasted for an hour before finally the creature appeared.

From the heart of the roaring fire it took form. An every changing set of eyes surrounded by a dark flame that billowed manifested and from the fire it spoke. It raged and howled in anger as the humans recoiled in fear. The eyes of the beast grew large and sharp as it cursed all who brought it into being and swore revenge on them when the time of liberation came.

The human leader tried to speak to the being yet its rage would not abate. It threw itself into a maelstrom that spun the flames in a great whirlwind that risked filling the entire chamber in flame. Just as the fire singed the human leaders arms the elders stepped forth and doused the flame at the center of the chamber and the being within vanished.

Words could not express the joy of the human leader, despite their apparent injury. The rumors and stories they had heard were true. Beyond all realms of understanding the myths that they had laughed at were real and the monster these alien people was something they had never encountered before. The human leader begged the elders to summon it again, but they refused the request.

They said that they must wait several days before the summoning could begin again, but they did not say why. Once the period of calming had ended, they agreed to welcome the humans again and summon the beast once more. In the mean time they were invited to study the rest of their culture and learn of them, to which the human leader agreed.

Late that night, when the elders had returned to their village and the humans had returned to their landing ship; a hidden visitor returned to the chamber. There at the heart of the mountain they removed their cloak and hood, safe in the belief that they were alone.

It was a human girl who had been with the group early that very same day.

She lit the ceremonial fires at the center of the room and played the special chants from her recording device she had used earlier during the ceremony and waited. By the hours end the being returned once more and the eyes looked down at the lonely human.

“WHY HAVE YOU COME?!” The being bellowed in a voice that shook the room, yet the human said nothing.

Enraged by the silence, the flames grew large and filled the room as the eyes leered down at the lone girl.

“DO YOU SEEK YOUR FUTURE? DO YOU LONG TO KNOW WHEN AND WHERE YOUR LONG AWAITED LoVe WILL FIND YOU?!” It laughed as the heat began to prickle the skin of the human.

“YOU AND YOUR KIND HAVE USED ME FOR MILLENIA AND YET YOU STILL BELIEVE THAT…..”

The beings voice grew quiet as it took in the room and realized that only the girl stood in its presence.

“WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?” it asked.

“Others?” the human girl replied.

“MY KEEPERS!” the fire being roared. “HAVE THEY FLED BEYOND MY SIGHT AND WAIT BEYOND THAT CURSED DOOR?”

“I have come alone.” the girl answered. Her voice was soft, but devoid of fear.

“ALONE?”

“Yes.”

“WHY?!”

The human girl surprised the being by sitting down and pulling out a data pad. “I wish to speak with you.”

“SPEAK WITH ME!?” The eyes flickered as the being laughed heartedly at the human’s response. “SO I WAS RIGHT! YOU WISH TO SAITE YOUR SELFISH DESIRES!”

To the beings surprise the human shook her head. “Perhaps I used the wrong words.” She admitted. “I wish to get to know you; learn about you.”

The being paused as if uncertain, but recovered quickly.

“HAVE YOU NOT SPOKEN WITH THOSE VILE SKUM THAT LIVE BEYOND THESE WALLS?” The fire at the center grew so intense it began changing into a shade of blue; the stones surrounding the flames glowing a bright red. “I AM THE DEMON OF THE FLAME! THE MONSTER TRAPPED WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN! THE SUN FALLEN FROM THE SKY!”

Rather than cowering in fear, the human girl simply began typing down everything the being said and nodded.

“YOU……DO NOT PUT ME OUT?” the being asked, the confusion clear in its voice.

“Why would I?” the girl asked as she looked up from her data pad.

“I…” the being stammered, “I HAVE NEVER SPOKEN……THIS LONG WITHOUT BEING PUT OUT.” The flames shrunk in size to a humble camp fire and the eyes glared at the human with curiosity. “IT IS A STRANGE SENSATION I HAVE NOT FELT IN A LONG TIME.”

“How long have you been in here?”

The flame said nothing as it pondered the question. Each eye shifting into a different shape as the flames grew and shrunk, but never breaking contact with the human.

“I DO Not kNoW.” It answered; the anger in its voice not as strong as it was before. “I AM oNLY aware WheN they stoke THE FLAMES.”

“What happens to you when the flames go out?” the human asked as she inched closer to the flame now that it was not as aggravated.

“IT IS BEYOND WORDS TO EXPLAIN.” The fire answered.

“So you can only appear when there is fire?”

“NO!” the being shouted and the flames soared up once more. The human girl inched back slightly and the flames died down again. “I NEED HEAT.”

“Heat?” the girl asked.

“MY BODY NEEDS HEAT TO ACHIEVE FORM.” The being stated, “WITHOUT IT I SLEEP.”

The flames grew silent again and the eyes shifted to the doorway. A cold draft was being pulled in by the heat and with each gust the being seemingly retreated away from it.

“YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG I HAVE DREAMT OF LEAVING THIS ACCURSED PLACE, YET IF I MOVE PASSED THAT DOORWAY I WOULD SLEEP ONCE MORE.”

The eyes looked back at the girl and she could see what looked like sadness cresting within them. “I wish to return home.”

At this the human stopped typing. “This isn’t your home?” The eyes shook in response.

“I FELL FROM THE STARS LONG AGO AND WAS TRAPPED HERE. SURROUNDED BY COLD STONE I SLEPT FOR SO LONG UNTIL THOSE FOOLS DUG A TUNNEL AND FOUND ME.”

The flames grew large again in anger. “I PLEADED WITH THEM FOR SO LONG TO LET ME GO, YET THEY BELIEVE ME TO BE A MONSTER AND HAVE TRAPPED ME HERE, DENYING ME MY FREEDOM WHIL THEY USE ME AS A SYMBOL IN THEIR PRIMITIVE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS!!!”

“THEY WOULD IGNORE ME DURING THEIR CHANTS AND SO I GREW TO HATE THEM.” The flames finished.

The human said nothing as the flames finished. It had enjoyed speaking its mind for a change but now expected the discussion to end just like all the rest. They would empty the dirt on to the central flames and extinguish them and once again they would sleep until summoned once more.

Just as expected the human put away their data pad and stood up. They walked over to the central flame and the being closed its eyes waiting for the darkness to take it once more.

Seconds passed.

Then minutes.

The flame opened its eyes to see what was taking them so long to find the human had removed her jacket and wrapped it around their fist.

Without hesitation they shoved their hand into the flame and the jacket caught fire, carrying one of the eyes into it.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” the flame demanded.

The human girl smiled as the jacket continued to burn on her hand. “Taking you home.”

She motioned to the doorway and looked back at the rest of the eyes still gathered in the central flame. “You coming or what?”

The flame eyes went wide in disbelief at what has happening. A second of silence went by before the being let out a joyous booming laughter and the flame eyes all gathered on to the new flame.

Without missing a beat the human girl began navigating her way back through the cold tunnel to the surface. Each passing second the jacket burned hotter and closer to her hand underneath all the while the flames laughed and eagerly cheered her on.

Just as the jacket was nearly all burned away the first rays of light crept into view.

The pair rounded the final corner and were greeted on the side of the mountain by the sun cresting over the horizon as a new dawn broke.

Warmth from the sun broke across the mountain like a wave and the eyes inside the flame vanished. The human girl looked around in confusion, worried that the being had not survived long enough to reach the new warmth and that she may have just murdered it.

She looked to her side in search of the eyes and saw the burning eyes floating before her outside of the flame. As the sun reached higher into the sky a silhouette sprung out around the eyes and a humanoid shape took form.

The collection of eyes swam around within the silhouette as if being limited to one position was something it would never do again. It struck its hands to the sky and let out a roar that woke the very mountainside itself. It was as if a nightmare had finally lifted from it and the joy of the universe had returned once more to the void it had left behind.

Spinning around, the eyes focused on the human as they threw off their jacket and dabbed their hand in the cold dirt to sooth the pain.

“Why?” it asked; its voice now softer and caring. “Why did you help me?”

To its surprise the human girl shrugged once more. “Just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do.” It repeated. “You would be surprised what a strange concept that is among the stars.”

The figure began to burn brighter and crouched down like it was ready to leap, but stopped itself for a moment. It looked back at the human and spoke “Thank you.”

With nothing else to say the being leapt upwards and shot into the sky like a rocket. A trail of burning fire followed behind it like the tail of a comet and the sound of it breaking the sound barrier woke the surrounding villages.

In the coming days they would demand the head of the human girl for freeing the demon of the mountain and some going so far to execute her on the spot. The human leader was likewise angry beyond belief as the chance to study a unique life form had been snatched away from them, but they were not of a mind to execute one of their own so instead opted for fleeing the planet.

The human girl was expelled from the program and barred from ever serving on any future fact finding missions, but she was strangely okay with it.

Her dream had always been to go into space and help those in need, and she had done just that.

She wouldn’t have done it any other way.

#HUMANS ARE WEIRD #humans are insane #humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #scifi #story #writing #original writing #niqhtlord01 #ai generated art #deviantart dreamup #flames #Alien #compassion

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drosera-sundews · 2 years ago

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On AI and art theft

This one’s for you @drawsoneverything

So starting off with a disclaimer. I do not know how deviantart’s Dreamup works. I never worked there. I just know how AI works in general.

Shortest version: AIs (or neural networks, which I assume Dreamup is) are programs that mimic human neuron cells -and thus human learning processes-to a degree. A big difference between a neural network and a regular computer program is that neural networks require training. Like a human would require learning.

A neural network (the simple ones, at least) consist of a few ‘layers’ which contain many ‘nodes’. At least 3 are required, an input and output layer, plus one extra layer in between. Imagine it as something like this:

Naturally, this will all be computer code. But this is the basic anatomy of your simplest neural networks.

Each node is connected to each node, like so:

Not gonna draw all of it but you get the gist, ey. They are all connected much like -once again- neurons in the brain.

Now once you make an empty neural network like this it can’t do anything. It’s there but it’s useless and it’s interchangeable with every other untrained neural network (barring amount of layers and numbers of nodes).

What’s next is thinking of the task you want your network to perform. For example, to train it to recognize hand written letters. In this case, you’d have 26 nodes in your output layer, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Now we need some training data

Perfect. Now imagine that’s a dataset with 5000 people’s handwriting. You need quite a lot of data to properly train an AI.

The idea is we want to input an image of a letter in any handwriting, and we want the AI to fire one of it’s output neurons, namely the one corresponding to the letter it ‘sees’.

The images need to be translated to numerical values, in order to be put in the input layer. This can be done, for example, by translating each pixel of the image in a numerical value, and having each node in the input layer be a ‘pixel’. In a human, these would be the neurons in our retina, or the back of your eye.

Translation of the image is going to look somewhat like this:

With the red numbers going into the input layer as the starting values.

We can now input our images. Something complex is going to happen. Every node is going to look at the values of the input nodes and nodes before them, and gain a value based on that, following arbitrary, random patterns. You don’t need to know the specifics here, just know that now that we have input, the nodes (or neurons) can fire.

Wow, the AI is just super wrong.

That’s okay tho, we can simply run it again until it hits the right answer by chance.

This is what the training is for. You need a dataset that’s annotated. In this case a human has to look at the inputs and identify them, so they can tell the AI if it’s right or wrong. If you do this enough times, the AI will learn to do it on it’s own.

And now here’s the catch. With every new piece of input data the machine guesses right, the values Thiof the nodes in the middle layers are changed. Like a maze, the paths to the right exit become clearer with every time the maze is completed. And while the values of the in and output layers are changed with every run, the middle layers remain. This is where the learning happens.

This is a trained neural network. And this is why it doesn’t matter that deviantart changed their policy to opt-in instead of opt-out. Those few days were enough. Once you train a neural network it doesn’t need it’s training data anymore.

Worst thing is, the middle layers are very much a black box. We don’t know what happens in there. The AI learns to categorize things on learned criteria, but what those are we can not know.

This is a very shortened down version of a very complex process ofc. Naturally, an art generator like DreamUp is going to be much more sophisticated. But I recon it follows the same rules as the simpler neural networks, which gives us something to work with.

Once a neural network is trained it cannot be ‘untrained’. Once you taint the dataset it’s very hard to reverse the effects. And generally, you can keep training an AI to make it better even if it’s already in use. Which I’m guessing is what deviantart is still doing with any new artworks that are added without the noai-tag

And the art on deviantart is already a neatly annotated dataset. We (the artists) have been annotating it by putting descriptions below the artworks, and giving it titles describing what the work depicts.

And oh, wouldn’t it be such a shame if someone were to accidentally add wrongly annotated art to this young, impressionable AI’s dataset.

Oh wow, if you uncheck the noai checkbox and then go back to re-edit your deviation, deviantart even let’s you directly annotate your art for their database! How convenient!

No artist alive has ever been able to draw a proper horse, I’m going to make sure this AI imitates life. Maybe in my next work I will teach it how to draw ‘the other eye’.

This is the beauty of the system. The AI can learn all it wants, but in the end it’s not a person. It doesn’t understand what it’s looking at.

Thus, we can do the most human thing possible to this mindless piece of code, lie!

This is the toddler we can learn curse words. This tool was designed to steal art en-masse, but it was left hilariously open and vulnerable. Let’s break this stupid thing!

Honestly, they called it deviantart, if anything I’m living up to the name.

#dreamup #deviantart #ai art discourse #ai art #dreamupai

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