#human skills vs AI

[thisisgraeme]

Custom GPT for Decision-Making: Fat Tony Weighs In On AI and Automation in Education

Discover why a custom GPT inspired by Nassim Taleb's "Fat Tony" might be your secret weapon for real-world decision-making. Tap into no-nonsense, street-smart advice to question assumptions, manage risk, and stay sharp in an AI-driven world.

Why Aren’t You Using a Custom GPT for Decision-Making? Fat Tony is a character inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the renowned scholar and author known for his work on risk, uncertainty, and probability, particularly in “The Black Swan” and “Antifragile.” Fat Tony represents the archetypal street-smart skeptic, a person who relies on intuition, practical experience, and a sharp sense for…

[mindtoolsofficial]

The Future of Conversations: How Emphasis Will Outsmart AI and Enhance Human Connection

Discover the subtle art of emphasis in communication. Learn how tone and stress can transform conversations, outsmart AI, and create meaningful connections in a tech-saturated world.

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it that makes all the difference.” Why Emphasis is the Secret Weapon of Communication Picture this: You’re in the middle of a heated discussion with a coworker. You say, “I didn’t approve that project.” But depending on where you place the emphasis, the meaning of that sentence could totally shift. Say it with me: I didn’t approve that project. (Someone…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[meatincorporated-2]

wait are you ready for me to go insane rvb spoilers ahead

how incredibly upsetting is it that in red vs blue, project freelancer specifically, there is a built in idea and ranking of soldiers based on skill and capability, which then determines the value of their life and whether or not they deserve to live and be told the truth, or to simulate a lie so as to improve the skills of other soldiers? freelancers exist at the top of this foodchain, so when theyre injured its a panic, when they are in trouble or need to improve so much is done. but when a sim trooper is injured it takes months to send a medic, they run out of water and dont have any medical supplies, theyre all horrible soldiers and are constantly ridiculed for it even though they never get a chance to improve. it is only when the freelancers and the sim troopers are put together that we see that they can be just as patehtic as well. one misplaced bullet to the neck. anyone can get brain damage. anyone can die. anyone can not want to be here. is this what temple meant? is this what bro meant?

and the ai are even lower in the foodchain, every ai we see in the show is a tortured abuse soul who doesnt get anywhere near the autonomy that the rest do. alpha was constantly abused, the reason sigma turned to wanting the meta was to complete a broken idea in his head that he knew was once reality. constantly tortured and put through horrible treatment.

then the "dumb" ai. we see it, theyre the lowest. only existing to serve a purpose in this world, only existing to serve. they have feelings too, dont they? filis hated being with the chairman, sheila loved lopez and was distraught when he was taken away, lopez hates working with sarge and the reds, and vic wants to die. they all experience it dont they?

everyone gets sad, everyone gets upset, everyone experiences misery, abandonment, injury, everyone is a person, everyone is a human. even the ai, the things they create, its all human isnt it?

even when its not human

[sunderwight]

y'know what, I think it's kind of interesting to bring up Data from Star Trek in the context of the current debates about AI. like especially if you actually are familiar with the subplot about Data investigating art and creativity.

see, Data can definitely do what the AI programs going around these days can. better than, but that's beside the point, obviously. he's a sci-fi/fantasy android. but anyway, in the story, Data can perfectly replicate any painting or stitch a beautiful quilt or write a poem. he can write programs for himself that introduce variables that make things more "flawed", that imitate the particular style of an artist, he can choose to either perfectly replicate a particular sort of music or to try and create a more "human" sounding imitation that has irregular errors and mimics effort or strain. the latter is harder for him that just copying, the same way it's more complicated to have an algorithm that creates believable "original" art vs something that just duplicates whatever you give it.

but this is not the issue with Data. when Data imitates art, he himself knows that he's not really creating, he's just using his computer brain to copy things that humans have done. it's actually a source of deep personal introspection for the character, that he believes being able to create art would bring him closer to humanity, but he's not sure if he actually can.

of course, Data is a person. he's a person who is not biological, but he's still a person, and this is really obvious from go. there's no one thing that can be pointed to as the smoking gun for Data's personhood, but that's normal and also true of everyone else. Data's the culmination of a multitude of elements required to make a guy. Asking if this or that one thing is what makes Data a person is like asking if it's the flour or the eggs that make a cake.

the question of whether or not Data can create art is intrinsically tied to the question of whether or not Data can qualify as an artist. can he, like a human, take on inspiration and cultivate desirable influences in order to produce something that reflects his view on the world?

yes, he can. because he has a view on the world.

but that's the thing about the generative AI we are dealing with in the real world. that's not like Data. despite being referred to as "AI", these are algorithms that have been trained to recognize and imitate patterns. they have no perspective. the people who DO have a perspective, the humans inputting prompts, are trying to circumvent the whole part of the artistic process where they actually develop skills and create things themselves. they're not doing what Data did, in fact they're doing the opposite -- instead of exploring their own ability to create art despite their personal limitations, they are abandoning it. the data sets aren't like someone looking at a painting and taking inspiration from it, because the machine can't be inspired and the prompter isn't filtering inspiration through the necessary medium of their perspective.

Data would be very confused as to the motives and desires involved, especially since most people are not inhibited from developing at least SOME sort of artistic skill for the sake self-expression. he'd probably start researching the history of plagiarism and different cultural, historical, and legal standards for differentiating it from acceptable levels of artistic imitation, and how the use of various tools factored into it. he would cite examples of cultures where computer programming itself was considered a form of art, and court cases where rulings were made for or against examples of generative plagiarism, and cases of forgeries and imitations which required skill as good if not better than the artists who created the originals. then Geordi would suggest that maybe Data was a little bit annoyed that people who could make art in a way he can't would discount that ability. Data would be like "as a machine I do not experience annoyance" but he would allow that he was perplexed or struggling to gain internal consensus on the matter. so Geordi would sum it up with "sometimes people want to make things easy, and they aren't always good at recognizing when doing that defeats the whole idea" and Data would quirk his head thoughtfully and agree.

then they'd get back to modifying the warp core so they could escape some sentient space anomaly that had sucked the ship into intermediate space and was slowly destabilizing the hull, or whatever.

anyways, point is -- I don't think Data from Star Trek would be a big fan of AI art.

[mekkthemighty]

So just came from seeing Wild Robot and a few things, SPOILERS for books and movie ahead btw

I will preface this by saying it was a fantastic film that I absolutely loved, the visuals were mindblowing and made me jealous of the practiced skill of the animation team

Anyway my biggest complaint for the movie (and I get why they did it) was the moment where the literal power of love wakes up the deactivated Roz, I really liked the book Roz that genuinely was still a robot to her core, emotionless and robotically logical but nevertheless falling into the patterns of motherhood due to her AI learning from nature

They did the power of love in the books too, it helped the animals overcome their fear and work together to pull off some epic battle tactics which weren't in the movie, like for the final fight of book one they had Nettle the bear's self sacrifice to take out the RECO only to be saved by the river fish was awesome, and all the birds raining bird poop all over the sensors of another one only to lead it blind into a muddy bog so it can be kicked to death by the moose, final battle in movie (while visually fantastic) lacked any of that strategy the animals learned from Roz

I had hoped they'd have focused more on the "helping others is a survival skill" aspect and the learning curve that took her from robot to wild robot, but the themes of motherhood were beautifully done

Oh and ROZ's camouflage skills, where was the intentional mud and moss coating of her body making her look like a cyborg treant, I mean they do the character design with moss and dirt by the end but they just accumulate over time naturally... instead of Roz just slathering herself with it and being a bush around which the animals all gossip

Also one last note, in the book Longneck is killed by a human with a rifle, Robots can't harm living creatures is a major plotpoint in the books, its a barrier Roz has to overcome and the RECOs are even subject to it which is why the animals had a shot against them in the first place, this is a plot point that the movie Brightbill even states out loud right before a robot pops out and shoots Longneck, like wtf

Other things I wish they kept from the book:

Brightbill turning Roz off and on again and temporarily thinking he committed matricide

Roz vs the bears during the learning curve

The learning curve

Roz and Brightbill bonding over the shared experience of being the only surviving "egg"

Roz being the goddamn prometheus of this islands critters literally teaching them to harness fire

Things the movie added that I liked

Brightbill acting like a robot

Fink the fox being a fully realised character (tho at the cost of some other favs)

Felling the tree to redirect the river to stop the forest fire

Vontra, just everything about it

The stickers for 10% off your next universal designs purchase

Brightbill helping build the lodge

"I am low on power, have made unsanctioned alterations to my code, and have been damaged in ways that have likely voided my warranty" "what she means is she loves you"

Pinktail Possum was great and so were her kids

"Are you here to kill us?" Whether your answer is yes or no, you're about to get yeeted by a moose

"HELLO I AM ROZZUM UNIT 7134 DO YOU NEED ASSISTANCE!" While chasing down random animals

Roz "I am not a mother I am a robot, I must be recalled at once"

Pinktail "no you're a mom now"

Roz "understood I am a mom now"

Still a great movie just wish they kept Roz a robot through and through and just kept with the whole "she doesn't need to have emotions to be a good mom" thing

Definitely recommend a watch of it

[txttletale]

Your discussions on AI art have been really interesting and changed my mind on it quite a bit, so thank you for that! I don’t think I’m interested in using it, but I feel much less threatened by it in the same way. That being said, I was wondering, how you felt about AI generated creative writing: not, like AI writing in the context of garbage listicles or academic essays, but like, people who generate short stories and then submit them to contests. Do you think it’s the same sort of situation as AI art? Do you think there’s a difference in ChatGPT vs mid journey? Legitimate curiosity here! I don’t quite have an opinion on this in the same way, and I’ve seen v little from folks about creative writing in particular vs generated academic essays/articles

i think that ai generated writing is also indisputably writing but it is mostly really really fucking awful writing for the same reason that most ai art is not good art -- that the large training sets and low 'temperature' of commercially available/mass market models mean that anything produced will be the most generic version of itself. i also think that narrative writing is very very poorly suited to LLM generation because it generally requires very basic internal logic which LLMs are famously bad at (i imagine you'd have similar problems trying to create something visual like a comic that requires consistent character or location design rather than the singular images that AI art is mostly used for). i think it's going to be a very long time before we see anything good long-form from an LLM, especially because it's just not a priority for the people making them.

ultimately though i think you could absolutely do some really cool stuff with AI generated text if you had a tighter training set and let it get a bit wild with it. i've really enjoyed a lot of AI writing for being funny, especially when it was being done with tools like botnik that involve more human curation but still have the ability to completely blindside you with choices -- i unironically think the botnik collegehumour sketch is funnier than anything human-written on the channel. & i think that means it could reliably be used, with similar levels of curation, to make some stuff that feels alien, or unsettling, or etheral, or horrifying, because those are somewhat adjacent to the surreal humour i think it excels at. i could absolutely see it being used in workflows -- one of my friends told me recently, essentially, "if i'm stuck with writer's block, i ask chatgpt what should happen next, it gives me a horrible idea, and i immediately think 'that's shit, and i can do much better' and start writing again" -- which is both very funny but i think presents a great use case as a 'rubber duck'.

but yea i think that if there's anything good to be found in AI-written fiction or poetry it's not going to come from chatGPT specifically, it's going to come from some locally hosted GPT model trained on a curated set of influences -- and will have to either be kind of incoherent or heavily curated into coherence.

that said the submission of AI-written stories to short story mags & such fucking blows -- not because it's "not writing" but because it's just bad writing that's very very easy to produce (as in, 'just tell chatGPT 'write a short story'-easy) -- which ofc isn't bad in and of itself but means that the already existing phenomenon of people cynically submitting awful garbage to literary mags that doesn't even meet the submission guidelines has been magnified immensely and editors are finding it hard to keep up. i think part of believing that generative writing and art are legitimate mediums is also believing they are and should be treated as though they are separate mediums -- i don't think that there's no skill in these disciplines (like, if someone managed to make writing with chatGPT that wasnt unreadably bad, i would be very fucking impressed!) but they're deeply different skills to the traditional artforms and so imo should be in general judged, presented, published etc. separately.

[witchyintention]

Servitors: Your Personal Magical Minions (No Payroll Required!)

So, You Want a Magical Minion?

Let’s be honest—who hasn’t wished they had a little helper to handle life’s tedious tasks? Imagine having a personal assistant, but instead of a human (or a very expensive AI subscription), you have a magical entity that exists solely to do your bidding. No snack breaks, no salary, no complaining about workplace conditions. Welcome to the world of servitors!

Servitors are artificial spirits created for a specific purpose, and they’re entirely under your control. Need protection? A servitor can be your mystical bodyguard. Looking to attract opportunities? A servitor can work as your personal energetic recruiter. The possibilities are endless, as long as you know what you’re doing.

But before you go off creating an army of these things like some kind of magical overlord, let’s dive into what servitors are, how they differ from egregores, and how to make them work for you.

Servitors vs. Egregores: What's the Difference?

Many people confuse servitors with egregores, so let’s clear that up. While both are thought-forms—entities created through focused thought and energy—they serve different functions and have different levels of autonomy.

🔹 Servitors are personal and programmed. You create them with a specific purpose in mind, and they are bound to you. They act like well-trained magical pets: loyal, obedient, and existing only as long as you choose to maintain them.

🔹 Egregores are collective thought-forms created by a group’s shared beliefs and intentions. Think of them as corporate mascots with a touch of spiritual power. Major religions, brands, and even fandoms have egregores that take on lives of their own (looking at you, Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus).

While servitors are like robots designed for specific tasks, egregores are more like cultural forces—harder to control and capable of influencing large groups of people.

Why Create a Servitor?

The real question is, why wouldn’t you want a magical assistant? Here are some common uses for servitors:

✅ Protection: Keep negative energy, harmful spirits, and sketchy people at bay. ✅ Prosperity: Attract money, job opportunities, or even creative inspiration. ✅ Healing: Act as an energy worker to aid in physical or emotional healing. ✅ Enhancing Skills: Boost your intuition, psychic abilities, or even productivity. ✅ Emotional Support: A servitor can be designed to provide comfort or motivation.

You get to decide exactly what the servitor does, and you tailor it to your needs.

How to Create a Servitor

Ready to build your own magical companion? Follow these steps, and soon you’ll have a fully functional servitor at your service.

Step 1: Define the Purpose

Before anything else, be crystal clear about what you want your servitor to do. The more specific, the better. A servitor for “helping with work” is too vague, but a servitor “to enhance my confidence when speaking in meetings” is a focused goal.

Step 2: Design Its Form

Servitors don’t have a default look, so get creative! You can design them to appear as:

A shadowy protector

A glowing orb of energy

A small, helpful imp

A wise owl or cat familiar

The form should match the function. A servitor for confidence might take the shape of a lion, while one for stealth could be a smoky, formless wisp.

Step 3: Give It a Name

Names hold power. Choose something easy to remember but unique enough that you don’t accidentally summon it when ordering takeout.

Step 4: Charge It with Energy

To bring your servitor to life, you need to pour energy into it. This can be done through:

Meditation and visualization

Chanting its name repeatedly

Drawing or sculpting its form

Using candle magic, sigils, or crystals

Some practitioners even use a ritual circle to mark the servitor’s “birth.”

Step 5: Program Its Instructions

Like training a puppy (but with fewer messes), you must teach your servitor what to do. Be clear and direct. You can write down its purpose, speak aloud to it, or mentally command it.

Example: “You are to increase my focus while studying. Whenever I sit down with a book, you will sharpen my concentration and block out distractions.”

Step 6: Assign a Home

Your servitor needs an anchor in this world. You can link it to an object (a crystal, a piece of jewelry, a drawing) or even keep it within your aura. This prevents it from dissipating.

Step 7: Feed It (But Not with Food!)

Servitors need energy to function. You can feed them with:

Your focus and intention

Offerings of light, incense, or sigil activations

Absorbing excess energy from specific sources (like the sun, moon, or even music)

If a servitor gets too weak, it might dissolve on its own.

Step 8: Dismiss or Destroy When Done

If you no longer need your servitor, it’s important to properly dissolve it. This prevents lingering energy from going rogue.

To dismiss a servitor, you can:

Thank it for its service and instruct it to dissolve.

Burn its sigil or physical representation.

Absorb its energy back into yourself or the universe.

Warnings and Ethics of Servitor Work

🚨 Do NOT create servitors for harm. They can backfire or grow beyond your control. 🚨 Do NOT forget about them. A neglected servitor can become unstable. 🚨 DO set clear limits. Make sure your servitor knows its purpose and doesn’t overstep its bounds.

Remember, servitors are tools—not independent spirits or pets. Treat them with respect, but always stay in control.

Final Thoughts: The Magical Workforce at Your Fingertips

Creating servitors is a powerful magical technique that allows you to shape reality in a unique way. They are the ultimate customizable magical assistants, designed to fit your exact needs without any unnecessary fluff. Whether you want help manifesting money, sharpening your intuition, or keeping bad vibes away, servitors can be a valuable addition to your practice.

So, what kind of servitor will you create? Let me know in the comments!

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[captainjonnitkessler]

the main thing im struggling with in regards to AI art is if the person using AI can even call it their art. is the creator the person who put in the prompt(s)? is it the person who made the AI? is it all the artists that the AI created 0.01% of its patterns from? is it the AI itself? does the question even matter? i don't know if it's comparable to something like scrapbooking, moodboarding or interior design (see: using things You Didn't Make (magazine images, gifs, furniture) to then create your own art. the comparison just feels...off. there is a general understanding that scrapbookers/moodboarders/interior designers probably didn't create the things they're using, and people generally have a different view on it than say painting or drawing because of those differences in fundamentals. i understand that a lot of AI artists can take a lot of time, effort and skill into narrowing down prompts to get very unique and specific outputs but it feels more comparable to a commission to me. i do think there is an amount of creativity that goes into prompt-making, visualising the end product and figuring out how to get there, but i struggle to see where the line sits of "AI did this" vs "I used AI to do this". i also don't find generative AI to be very similar to other technology 'shortcuts' like digital art tools such as layering, blending and line stabilization -- generative AI is on a whole other level to that. i'd love to know your thoughts on this

I think AI generation is a tool that's the logical progression from a lot of already-existing digital art tools. We don't question whether a digital artist gets to call their work their own even though they couldn't have done it without the hundreds of people who program and maintain Photoshop and we don't question whether a traditional painter gets to call their work their own even though they didn't grind their own paints or build their own paintbrushes. For that matter, we don't call digital artists lazy hacks because they use a computer to generate colors instead of buying and mixing their own paints, because we understand it's a different medium that requires different skills - or at least, we don't anymore, because I'm pretty sure we went through all this same discourse when digital art started being a thing.

There's already plenty of art forms out there that rely on some level of randomness or automation - plenty of digital artists use custom brushes to do the grunt work of filling in foliage so they don't have to individually place every leaf, splatter artists let paint fall where it will instead of deliberately placing every dot, epoxy artists let physics and gravity pull resin across the canvas with relatively little human input. They're still artists, they're just using art styles and tools that don't rely on intention in every aspect of the art the way traditional artists might.

Overall I think if you say "sure, this person has an artistic vision they are trying to express with a tool that requires skill and practice to use effectively, but can we really call them an artist?" you're getting lost in the weeds. But I also think we've had this argument with every single advancement in art technology since we moved on from cave paintings, so I kind of wish we could just skip this one.

And because I think there's a disconnect here that people are getting tripped up on - am I saying that every person who throws a prompt into DALL-E is an artist? No, in the same way I don't call myself a photographer because I took a picture with my cellphone. But that doesn't mean the nature photographer who spends hours laboring over getting the perfect shot isn't an artist either, y'know?

[selamat-linting]

me : obviously any business would want to cut costs and the adoption of ai makes sense when you see it from that perspective. i think LLMs is a tool, its not inherently bad especially if you look at how it helped with biomedical researches, and honestly the issues i've seen with it is mostly related to labor rights issues, the nature of a fragile economic bubble, and people's general incuriosity enabled and amplified. that being said, i've seen mostly small business that are cheap and kinda shitty that uses it so "ai art" has that tacky vibe i dislike just like how i hate the microsoft corporate art style. seeing wwe using it is not exactly surprising to me, they've never really got rid of the tacky "company on the verge of bankruptcy" image no matter how high their production budget gets. like, every show, every video package seems like one last bid to tell their investors theyre profitable even when they've been number one in pro wrestling for decades.

that being said i probably wont start gassing them up if they actually hire artists for the show. its wwe, lol. a corporation like any other. i mean, hollywood hires artists and its mostly underpaid vfx and cgi workers, a lot from the global south. plenty of us animation studies outsource their work to other countries like korea and japan, underpaying them in the process, and erasing the work and skill that goes into it by slapping a US brand to it. or i can argue the whole scale of it and how normalized it is makes it more harmful than the occasional use of "ai art". also, back before CGI was a thing there are cases of actors left disabled or very ill from special effects make up too! everything has its downsides and risks, and as long as mainstream / pop art is produced under capitalism, its not going to be free of exploitation. and i think hyperfocusing on one issue while forgetting the rest and losing the bigger picture is pretty silly isnt it?

my inflammatory reddit user alter : your disgusting and exploitative use of artists (ai art) vs our authentic display of human collaboration and ingenuity (outsourcing and underpaying animation workers from "nameless" studios in asia)

[avastarr-official]

RANDOM Ava HCS

@official-buckybarnes @your-fav-russian-assassin @even-better-john-walker @official-redguardian @officialrobert-bobby-reynolds @going-with-the-floe

Ava hoards those soda cans like a dragon. She has coke bottles hidden in the walls. Mini fridges stashed in ventilation shafts.

Ava keeps little things. Trinkets from missions, receipts from stores. A cinema stub when the team all went to see a movie together. It all goes into a shoebox labeled “Proof I Exist.”

Ava has mild motion sickness. Phasing feels fine—but when they get the jet, it was instant nausea. Kai and Yelena now carry ginger chews and hands them over.

Ava also disappears into the vents. Not intentionally at first—she phases away from one of John and Alexei’s overly intense arguments about European football vs American football and ends up inside the duct system. But then she discovers she likes it. 

In one of the vents, Ava finds a hidden alcove. It’s a makeshift hangout spot where Clint and Nat used to go. She finds old books, photos, arrowheads, and one of Nat’s worn leather bracelets. It’s all dust and forgotten. Ava collects it and brings it to Yelena, Alexei, or Kai .

 TUMBLR. SHE'S ON TUMBLR. also ao3 is her guilty pleasure. she is def on twitter/x and has a john walker hate account. literally messages walker: "i hate you 98" "i hate you 99" "i hate you 98" "oh no i messed up." "i hate you 1" 

she calls people on twitter/x morons and idiots. she loooves watching legitimate drama channels.

enjoys looking at shopping online. and is defff a chill pinterest girl. she's also the girl that helps with all the tech issues.

is also a discord mod and does nitro giveaways. constantly calls people out for using ai and mocks them. "oh poor baby 🥺🥺 do you need the robot to make you pictures? 🥺🥺 yeah? 🥺🥺"

ava secretly steals the last cookie and blames john when she gets caught. she likes to play pranks on everyone because every day is april fools day. she also catches people picking their nose or doing embarassing shit and makes fun of them for it

loves video games. she got animal crossing bc bob suggested it and she actually loved it

a pr nightmare. if she gets asked a question in a press conference, she’ll give the most deadpan slightly threatening answer. journalists are scared of her

phases through walls instead of using the door. she finds it funny to scare people  

She grew up with no friends (bc of shield) and missed out on a lot of experiences bc of this. she likes to do normal girl things with yelena and Kai to help her experience these things she missed out on. it also helps her with her social skills

He favorite food is Chocotorta and Asada ( reminds her of her childhood in Argentina with her parents)

Ava loves in flashes. She doesn’t mean to disappear, but she does. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for days. She always comes back, eyes glassy, hands shaking. You don’t ask questions. You just open your arms.

She doesn’t like to be touched when she’s vibrating out of her skin, but she’ll let you hover—fingers barely grazing hers, your breath a tether. She says it helps. You believe her.

She doesn’t do romance traditionally, but you once caught her fixing the hem of your coat when she thought you were asleep. She’d die before admitting it.

You once asked her if she loved you. She said, “I don’t know what that word means anymore. But I’d tear the world apart for you.” You take that as your answer.

She’s not good with soft. But she tries. She reads the books you leave out. Listens to your favorite song on repeat. Brings you stolen coffee because she can’t stand in line that long without phasing through the floor. It’s love. In her language.

 ava really struggles with social cues. when she was a shield soldier, no one except bill treated her like a human. the lack of real social interaction and friends has caused her to struggle to realise when someone is genuinely trying to help her and be her friend. she also sometimes goes mute for days because of how overwhelmed she feels by the constant liveliness in the tower

she cleans and stuff but not a lot. i guess she more of is like, "I'll take care of my mess, you take care of yours." she cleans up after herself but not other people. it's not necessarily selfish, it's just a different mindset. plus she thinks it helps the others be more responsible of / for themselves. she will help out if the others are sick.

[problematic-yuri-poll]

Problematic Femslash Ship Tournament - Round 1

Lalondecest - Rose Lalonde x Roxy Lalonde (Homestuck) VS. 2zuki - Mizuki "Bibi" Kuranushi x Mizuki Date (AI The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative)

Info and propaganda under cut! This will not be spoiler-free.

Problematic elements for Lalondecest:

Incest² (Sister-Mothers)

Problematic elements for 2zuki:

mizuki date is a clone of mizuki kuranushi, who she calls bibi (short for big sis which she was too young to pronounce at the time). bibi is 6 years older than mizuki and shoots her in the beginning of the game, then consistently stalks her in order to protect her when she's in danger. after bibi reveals who she is to mizuki (who for most of the game doesn't even know that she had an older sister), they flirt with each other despite everyone knowing that they're sisters.

--

Propaganda for Lalondecest:

THEY LITERALLY YEARN FOR EACH OTHER!!!!! Roxy desperately yearns for her dead mother (who is technically Rose ((timeline shenanigans))) And Rose hates her mother (the mother in question absolutely adores rose) and rose and Roxy literally cling to eachother and love eachother <- guys cmon they are so yuriful

Propaganda for 2zuki:

bibi is OBSESSED with her little sister!!! they were both tortured in violent human experiments as children and bibi fought the scientist doing it to them put her own body in the way of a rotating drill in order to protect mizuki from being harmed. over the course of mizuki's life, bibi was always watching over her to make sure she could live a normal life without ever finding out what happened to her as a child. whenever mizuki was in danger, bibi would show up at the perfect time to protect her, as if she was always watching her. she even went as far as shooting a warning shot at mizuki to keep her from investigating the case that would lead to her finding out the truth about her. her in-game file lists her only skill as "guessing which panties mizuki date is wearing that day". despite firing a gun at her and keeping so many secrets from her, as soon as mizuki finds out bibi's true identity, she doesn't hold a grudge against her at all, and her normal brattiness disappears. she becomes soft around bibi and fully trusts her. after losing both of her parents and her adoptive father disappearing for 6 years, she finally has a big sis who loves her more than anyone else in the world and will always be with her!!!

[borrelia]

guys this is bogus ^

it's not a peer-reviewed article, just a pdf microsoft put out. they surveyed just over 300 people. the respondents self-reported whether they were using critical thinking or not. the observation that participants were using "less critical thinking" when using genAI, was also conditional: people who were relying on AI to help them in a field with which they were unfamiliar reported less critical thinking regarding the AI's result, while people familiar with the field reported more. this is just saying "people who were able to critically analyze the AI output did so, and people who lacked enough context did not." same as people uncritically passing around confident-sounding tumblr posts full of misinformation vs the users who know it's bullshit and expend energy typing up paragraphs debunking it.

also it should go without saying, this is a study funded by microsoft to help them improve their ai products.

Finally, design could aim to enhance the ability to execute critical thinking. We find that knowledge workers often refrain from criti- cal thinking when they lack the skills to inspect, improve, and guide AI-generated responses. GenAI tools could incorporate features that facilitate user learning, such as providing explanations of AI reasoning, suggesting areas for user refinement, or offering guided critiques. The tool could help develop specific critical thinking skills, such as analysing arguments [72 ], or cross-referencing facts against authoritative sources. This would align with the motivation- enhancing approach of positioning AI as a partner in skill develop- ment.

the point of this paper is just to identify how to make genAI accomplish its stated goals as a product. it's not a peer-reviewed study, it's not actually saying genAI is rotting our brains. it's saying "oh oops, people who don't know better are taking wrong ai answers at face value, and people who do know better aren't actually helped by the answers. needs some fine-tuning!"

[mi-i-zori]

The Hunter and The Prey

CoD Fae!AU - Fae!Ghost x f!reader

SYNOPSIS : When the Hunter finds herself vulnerable in the middle of the Frost, a certain spirit decides to make it clear who exactly she belongs to.

WARNINGS : Gore, body horror, violence, predator behavior (Fae VS Human)...

Author’s note : This is part 3 of The Hunter’s story. As always, my take on this AU is inspired by @ghouljams ‘s works.

I do not give anyone permission to re-publish and/or translate my work, be it here or on any other platform, including AI.

CoD AUs - Masterlist

Main Masterlist

A Wild Hunt - Masterlist - I - II - III - IV

Her wards are no more, and she doesn’t know why.

This hunt was supposed to be an easy one. And it had been, in a way ; her target had been born not so long ago, and couldn’t gather enough magical power to give her too much trouble. Yet, as she prepared to leave, all her protections had suddenly shattered, leaving her with only her weapons and experience to fight her way back to safety.

A curse falls from her lips. She can feel the shadows slowly tighten around her, their weight hindering her progress through the snow. She has become too vulnerable to be ignored. An easy meal for the beings of the Frost.

The creatures move within the misty darkness of the trees. In their hollow eyes, she sees nothing but the reflection of her own fearless expression. Although wary of the multiple weapons lining her clothes, they linger, waiting for the moment their potential meal will falter ; for a breach to exploit in the seemingly unbreakable walls of her mind. Yet, according to the magic dancing around her, a danger far greater than all of them combined hides in the shadows. While still keeping an eye on the freezing monsters, she steps forward, looking for the outline of a masked silhouette amidst the smog.

She survived many similar situations, she thinks. Hell ; as a child, her father even willingly put her in danger to hone her hunting skills. She can do this.

With a snarl, of the beasts suddenly rises in front of her. Gritting her teeth, she adjusts her stance in the slippery snow. Her dagger sits comfortably in her hand, its iron blade glistening in the wintery sun. Her opponent launches its scaly body at her, and her arm gets ready to plunge the cold metal in its flesh ; but the monster is suddenly covered in multiple layers of smoke, its muffled cries echoing within what soon looks like a thick, misty cocoon. It vanishes seconds later, leaving only a broken, hollow shell in its wake.

A cold, eerie silence falls upon the forest. The young woman suddenly tenses as black tendrils slowly wrap around her, dancing at the edges of her vision. The remaining creatures’ mouths tremble, teeth instinctively ready to rip the flesh from her bones ; yet they can’t stop a series of whimpers from escaping their throats as they crawl in front of the power emanating from the strips of darkness. A large, gloved hand rises from behind her to rest on her chest, a newfound warmth settling against her back and somehow preventing her blade from striking the invisible threat.

In front of her, the monsters take a step back. They know that, even with her wards destroyed and her body covered in wounds, the Hunter is still a threat to their very existence. But as a skull mask emerges from the overwhelming darkness above her, they all understand that, right now, the Spirit of the Fog is the one they should fear ; especially when he is powerful enough to remain unfazed by his close proximity to the living weapon standing right under his palm.

She can feel him shift behind her. His body curls around her own, just enough to dip his head against her shoulder. And, despite his size, he still manages to keep her back flush against his front. She can feel his breath on her neck, probably way too warm for a fae of Winter.

Just like his entire being.

It took her days of cleansing to get rid of just half of his scent. She has a feeling he is going to make this process much longer because of this.

And she knows it’s working just like he wants it to by the way the monsters in front of them keep cowering under the threat of the Ghost’s power.

- Fuck off.

His tone is commanding, somber, cold. The beasts don’t waste a second to scramble away, leaving them both alone in the middle of the misty forest. The silence weighs heavy on her chest as the fae keeps his hand above her heart. A single wrong move could be the end of her, whispers a voice in her mind, and her instincts are torn between fighting him and remaining still.

- Not trying your luck against me, Hunter ?

His low timbre echoes against her back, shaking her very core. Everything about him screams danger. She stays frozen as he slowly turns her around to face him. Her eyes stay focused on every one of his languid movements as he takes off one of his gloves to grab the hand holding her blade. Lifting it to his throat, he slides his fingers against the sharp iron, unbothered by the vicious burns it leaves on his skin. He tilts his head with a low hum, prompting her to answer. The ice of his eyes glow under his balaclava.

Whatever he is, she thinks, she greatly underestimated him. She barely manages to articulate the question that has been bothering her since he showed himself, her teeth almost cracking under the pressure of her jaws.

- You were the one who shattered my wards, weren’t you ?

The Spirit lets out a deep chuckle that sends shivers down her spine.

- What a clever girl.

He leans towards her, the bone of his mask coming to stand right before her face. His free hand steadies her in place when she tries to put some distance in-between their bodies, allowing him to get even closer to her ear.

- One more reason to make you mine.

She finally manages to push him away ; and he lets her, obstructing her view with a thick layer of smog when her dagger tries to strike him. And, just like the first time they met, he leaves her alone in the middle of the Frost, his back fearlessly facing the predator she was raised to be. But as she watches him disappear into the shadows, she can’t help but think that, right now, she feels more like a prey than ever.

What is he ?

[fantasyfantasygames]

Replicant Memories

Replicant Memories, Orusha Grangette, 2021

Cyberpunk games typically focus on violence, power, corporate greed, and cynicism. Cyberpunk literature, on the other hand, deals with themes of alienation, virtual vs. analogue reality, the effects of technology on society, and the meaning and worth (or lack thereof) of humanity as a concept. Replicant Memories isn't so much a cyberpunk game as a cyberpunk literature game.

Your character in Replicant Memories (RM, or a monospaced lowercase rm as the game always writes it) is defined by their actual memories. It's a Fate Core variant, using the memories as Aspects or as justification for Stunts and Skill ratings. Since characters in Fate Core have 10 Skills each and a few more Stunts, that's a fair number of memories to write, but so far this is relatively normal stuff.

However, this being cyberpunk, those memories might be implanted. During game play you will discover your "real" memories, which themselves might just be a cover over deeper truths. Any effectiveness of a previous high-ranked Skill was just luck; a Stunt was just a moment of adrenaline or a flash of insight. You can switch one memory out for another every time you take Stress (for memories connected to level 1-2 skills) or Consequences (1-4 and stunts). You need a brief (brief) flashback each time.

The usual Fate mechanics take up about half the book; the other half is setting. Specifically, it's organizations, each with a two-page spread, each with descriptions of how your characters can hook into them and what you might have done for them. Sometimes it's a tight-knit neighborhood described in loving detail; sometimes it's a franchised nation done in broad strokes. The goal is pick-and-choose, but they're arranged alphabetically rather than by type, so the game's not doing itself any favors there.

Were it not for the timing of the book's release I would accuse the art of being AI, but all the work was done just before that really became feasible. It's eerie. It's creepy and disconcerting. It has all the flash and grit you normally expect in near-future city scenes, but it's off, and not in the way that The Actual was off. I have trouble believing that it's intentional, and also trouble believing it's unintentional.

There's a single supplement, entitled "rm -rf", which provides a trio of scenarios for the GM to use. One is high-class, one is low-class, and one is "runner"-level, with the potential for any of them to switch between levels as your group discovers more about their "real" selves. They're all intended to be 1-3 session games, and the plot flies by fairly quickly. Given the game's lack of character advancement and the potential for everyone to switch their skills to the same thing at the same time, that's probably for the best.

Orusha Grangette (not real name) maintains Replicant Memories as a wiki. They keep changing providers, so I have no idea where it is now, and Google searches mostly get you older sites. At least you can toss them into the Wayback Machine.

[vcendent]

art vs industry

Sometimes I'm having a good day, but then sometimes I think about how industry is actively killing creative fields and that goes away. People no longer go to woodworkers for tables and chairs and cabinets, but instead pick from one of hundreds of mass-produced designs made out of cheap particle board instead of paying a carpenter for furniture that is both made to last generations and leaves room for customization. With the growth of population and international trade, the convenience and low production costs are beneficial in some aspects, but how many local craftsmen across the world were put out of business? How many people witnessed their craft die before their eyes? There is no heart or identity put into mass produced items; be it furniture, ceramics, metalwork, or home decor; and at the end of the day everybody ends up with the same, carbon copy stuff in their homes.

I'm a big fan of animated movies, and I see this same thing happening too. When was the last time western audiences saw a new 2D animated movie hit theatres? I can't speak for other countries, but, at least in America, I believe The Princess and the Frog was the last major 2D movie released and that was back in 2009. Major studios nowadays are unwilling to spend the time and money that it would take to pay traditional animators who have spent years honing their craft to go frame by frame, and to pay painters to create scene backgrounds. We talk a lot about machines replacing jobs, but when the machines come, artistry professions are some of the first to be axed (in part because industry does not see artistry as "valuable" professions). Art, music, and writing are no longer seen as "real" jobs because they belong to the creative field and there's this inane idea that anyone who goes into those fields will be unsuccessful and starving. I'm not saying that 3D animation is bad, it has its own merits and required skills and can be just as impressive as anything 2D, but it has smothered 2D animation and reduced it largely to studios that cannot afford the tech to animate 3D.

And now we have this whole AI thing to deal with, stealing existing artists' work to "train" it to take over those few professions that, until now, required actual people to do them. Internet artists have already been dealing with people complaining about the price of art for years and now have to face their work being stolen to train AI. With AI technology, anyone who undervalues the work of the artist can now get something generated at little or no cost to them, all at the expense of the artists themselves. Why would studios pay script writers when they could just get an algorithm to do it without pay? Why pay actors to bring characters to life or pay models to pose for ads when CGI has progressed enough we could digitally render humans and cut out having to pay people entirely? Why use practical effects or film on location when green screens and adding in-post is faster and so much cheaper? It's no wonder we had the SAG-AFTRA strike. AI has already been trained to write children's books and produce music, continuing down this road will replace authors and musicians too at the convenience of cost. How much longer until the actual, real-life people behind all forms of artistry become completely obsolete?

Industry is just driving the cost of people-made crafts up and up with every mass produced product and every streamlined shortcut to reduce costs, which only makes it harder and harder for artists of all kinds to make a living, as very few people want to pay for the time and skill of artists when they could just pick something off a shelf or feed AI a prompt and get something satisfactory enough, yet not what they actually wanted, for so much cheaper.