#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…

[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

--

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

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

[marcusrobertobaq]

And the most interesting part... it's in Detroit xD

i have so many things to say about how the android revolution was handled in dbh, especially how most of the conflict was around markus’s choices to be violent or peaceful. idrk how to phrase it all but like. ugh it just bug me so much really is can all be said from the quote by assata shakur “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

a huge part of the revolution is ‘we can’t stoop to the same level as the human’ and it makes me so mad. like yeah sure, murder and hurting ppl isn’t good. but protests for rights have never been peaceful. you don’t gain rights by being peaceful and perfect. i just hate it so much. plus, the game has obvious parallels to the civil rights movement (even if david cage says it’s not. it is. even if it wasn’t, this game is political no matter how u view it. the topic of rights and freedom will always be political) and to imply that the android revolution has to be near perfectly peaceful to succeed is crazy. girl does he think the civil rights movement was entirely peaceful?? someone put him and all the other writers in a god damn history class

not to mention markus. i think the writers saw him as like the equivalent to mlk jr, with the parallels to the civil rights movements and such, which is crazy considering they turned him into their Savior and led the whole movement. like. side eye. idk i love markus’s story, but i think the whole revolution and being turned into a savior robo jesus was so so bad and tone deaf (thank u david cage..) . and the whole revolution TOOK PLACE IN A WEEK. A WEEK. THATS INSANEE. A WHOLE REVOLUTION IN A WEEK IS INSANE. i understand that a game needs to end but we don’t need to see Every Single Second of the story!! spread it out over a month, give characters time to form relationships, let the plot thicken, let things get tense, let things simmer and develop!!! not everything needs to happen on screen!!! one of my biggest gripes about the game is its timeline </3

i know i just rambled a bunch but god it annoys me so much. markus’s story was done so wrong for so many reason, and as a queer person who’s largely interested in protests and movements for rights and such, it just makes me so mad how badly and idealistically it was created. it feels like it was written by humans, by OPPRESSORS, dreaming of a utopia where they are still good people. :/ which i suppose it IS in a way — but still u get my point

[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.

[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.

[mattapparentlystumbltourneys]

Virtual Character Tourney - Battle for 5th!

Propaganda below (May contain spoilers!)

P03 propaganda:

bro literally is stuck in a floppy disk and its whole goal is to perform 'the great transcendence' and upload the game its trapped in into the web to copy itself across the entire internet in attempts to be in charge

Ultraman X propaganda:

X canonically lost his physical form and lives in Daiichi's phone. His presence caused Daiichi's phone to turn gold, instead of the standard-issue silver the rest of XIO's employees have. It's possible for XIO's scientists to send powerups to X because he lives on Daiichi's phone. There's also a couple episodes where X gets trapped in cyberspace and Dr. Gourman and friends have to design something for Daiichi to help him escape. (Dr. Gourman is the first to notice Daiichi is secretly Ultraman X. Also in the crossover movie, Daiichi and X got separated and X couldn't live on Daiichi's phone so he jumped to the nearest computer (which belonged to Naomi from Ultraman Orb, air date 2016) and began pulling up photos of Daiichi in a "Have You Seen This Nerd?" sort of way. The enemy goons saw Naomi and her cryptid hunting gang putting up missing posters for Daiichi and tore them down bc they had him captured at their crystal witch's base, a creepy haunted house. Eventually when Daiichi and X reunited as man and lil alien on his phone, they were so happy they ignored everyone else in the room. They were grateful enough to fight alongside Naomi's sad space cowboy, Kurenai Gai, in battle.

He's used the phone's vibration function a few times to try and get people's attention, and he doesn't like being turned face-down because he can't see. In order to take on a physical form he has to essentially fuse with his human partner Daichi. (also they get a power up form after Daichi nearly Dies to save him and it's rainbow themed.) While X is very chatty and enjoys talking with his partner, he's often a formless voice while they're fused.The exception being one occasion where he looks like an entire network. tldr this alien is gay he is very polite and deserves your vote.

HAL 9000 propaganda:

One of the most iconic AI villains

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Giffany propaganda:

Pink hair

The blueprint for both Five Nights At Freddy's and Doki Doki Literature Club

in one episode of gravity falls soos plays a dating game to get better at social skills and the main girl in the game is sentient and falls in love with him. then soos becomes interested in a real woman and giffany takes about 3 seconds to start possessing animatronics and trying to kill them both. girlboss

[shithowdy]

Hewwo I am sending u this message about the detecting AI and I am shaking your hand. Another good one personally is ears and glasses especially. They have a hard-ass time keeping paired objects (glasses arms, earrings… tittybooby sometimes) matching.

Oh they have the WORST time of it. It's really bad at making the same thing twice, anything that is supposed to be symmetrical or match in some way is always a good place to start your scrutiny if you're feeling something is off. This is also why it's absolute dogshit for something like making a comic, because even if you feed it exclusively models of the characters you want it to draw it will still somehow make them look different in every panel (and god forbid they have a tattoo or other detailed feature).

This lack of consistency is especially true if the piece is otherwise a very polished-looking render. A lot of beginner artists express concern at their work being mistaken for AI because of their errors ("I can't draw hands either!"), but the thing about human vs. AI error is the consistency of the errors/shortcuts-- does it look like it's an error someone of that skill level would make? Your average deviantart user just learning how to digitally paint will probably fudge the design on some filigrees or draw glasses sitting wrong, but someone seemingly capable of producing literal Rembrandt-quality paintings would not.

[nateconnolly]

As a direct result of large language models, over the next decade we'll see more "literary" thrillers and detective novels in American publishing solely because those genres emphasize twists, foreshadowing, and extremely specific character motivations--the tropes that AI storytelling (currently) struggles with the most. They also require internal consistency, something AI can't pull off in longer stories.

There have been some prestige thriller/mysteries (No Country for Old Men, The Goldfinch, The Yiddish Policeman's Union) but they're rare, and even those examples tend to get a lot of flak. Every single review I've ever read of Yiddish Policeman's Union points out how bizarre it is for someone with an MFA to write *clutches pearls* A Detective Story???

Many, many writers have had successful careers in these genres within this century (Sue Grafton, Stephen King), but they aren't regarded as "serious" by the American "literary" community. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Umberto Eco tend to be regarded as "serious," but they also tend to be regarded as "dead."

If my tone hasn't already made it clear, I'm not invested in the pyramid of aesthetic values that puts "genre" on the bottom, "prestige genre" in the middle, and "literary" on the top. I don't even regard it as a series of legitimate distinctions.

But I do think it's worth paying attention to this model because it directly influences journals, small presses, MFA programs, and big publishers. The "literary" community has a stranglehold on our world of small independent publishing for short stories/essays, and it's Very difficult to attract a large publisher with a wide distribution network without a few publications in small journals. I'm not saying you can't attain popularity or financial success without kowtowing to these institutions, but it's certainly harder to make a living without their support (not that it's easy to make a living as a writer WITH their support, but that's a different post).

And I really do think their aesthetic values will rapidly shift to prioritize things that AI can't do well. Especially among the types that want to be seen as prestigious. I'm not saying that today's hard genre writers are less financially or emotionally affected by AI competition, but by and large they seem less... insecure. And I think the "literary" community will deal with that insecurity by flaunting skills that AI doesn't have.

Now, obviously, there's a huge difference between a book that's just generated by AI vs. a book that AI generates but which a human then edits. I do think an AI could conceivably provide a sound basis for a detective story that a human might then shape into something with hard-hitting twists. But I'm also not sure anti-AI reactionaries will agree with me on that. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that anything AI breathes on is both permanently and obviously tainted. Reminds me a lot of people who think it's 100% of the time easy to detect "fanfiction with the serial numbers scraped off".

(Please note I have never once said in this post AI is cool, good, or ethical. If you want those opinions come back with a warrant.)

Anyways, if you're an indie author, small press, or journal that publishes "genre" (prestige or otherwise), please feel free to hijack this post for self-promotion. There's a 99% chance I'll reblog.

[starlostlix]

GUYS I KIND OF LOVE SK8 THE INFINITY

[This ended up being kind of a review/discussion about the show so enjoy whatever the hell I'm talking about here.]

I binged the show this afternoon and.... wow.

I love the skateboarding sequences. The animation is so fluid and the skateboarding tricks they do are wild. I do not know the details of how animation works but I think it must have taken a lot of effort to make it look so good.

The plot is relatively simple in terms of the main skateboarding beefs/tournament (it even has a beach episode!) but it's effective because it feels more grounded. An underground skateboarding group with competitions could probably exist which is quite interesting.

It's the characters that really make this show. Reki and Langa and their dynamic, with its ups and downs, are so compelling, and Reki's issues with his own self-worth and skill are so human. Langa's growth in skill in skateboarding is so interesting to follow and his joy at the sport after his dad's death (and his previous passion for snowboarding) is reallly nicely done. Them becoming distanced and coming back together again because they realise that skateboarding is enjoyable due to each other is so sad but also beautiful when resolved. "Reki my love... of skateboarding" is maybe my second favourite dub line of the series.

Joe and Cherry (aka Matchablossom) have a great dynamic together, with their history with Adam is really interesting (speaking of that I'm convinced young Cherry had a crush on Adam, oh and Cherry should have kept that lip ring). I love a married-couple-style bickering duo with their endearing nature shining through in small moments and that's really sweet. Plus they act as mentors to the younger characters and that's really fun. Cherry relying on the calculations of his AI assistant vs Joe being more brute and somewhat reckless in his technique is quite an interesting comparison between the two and I appreciate their childhood best friends backstory.

Miya is also really great, and his struggles with balancing competitiveness and fun are compelling. The small parts we see of his backstory of him losing friends because he got successful is really interesting. Shadow is also really fun, at first a minor antagonist and eventually an ally. Him becoming a chaperone to these kids is really funny and his different presentations in and out of the skateboarding world is really cool.

Adam... where to start really. Well I was quite uncomfortable at some points with the way he acts towards Langa (a minor) and he's a bit... intense at points which I feel mixed on. That being said, his character is really really interesting - a politician with an outlet in an intense skateboarding persona and an abusive family makes for a very interesting antagonist and his ambitiousness and need to win as a driving force explains how he really pushes himself and the limits of skateboarding. His desire to find his 'eve' - someone that can truly match his skating - is really intriguing (I only wish he wasn't pursuing a 17-yr-old Langa for that considering it's romantic connotations). His dynamic with 'Snake' - his childhood friend turned secretary - is really interesting too (as is Snake's actions and motivations in general).

To me so many people in this show feel queer-coded. Joe Cherry and Adam are such a messy trio and it's kind of comical that Cherry could be seen to have had feelings for both of them. Reki and Langa are so awkward and they clearly like each other a lot in a way that feels romantic ("show her she's a lucky girl" kind of speaks for itself). Adam is Adam, I don't really have to say much else there tbh.

Also THE THEMES!!!! THE THEMES!!!! Loss, friendship, passion in your interests, the desire to have FUN rather than be competitive all the time, what an interest can mean to a person (which as an AuDHD individual is something I feel attached to in this show in particular), etc. It's really well done in this show and there is loads to talk about but they honestly deserve their own in depth posts (which I may do eventually you never know).

STUDIO BONES!!!! DROP SEASON 2 AND THE MATCHABLOSSOM OVA AND MY LIFE IS YOURSSS!!!!

I enjoyed the show a lot and it's a very fun and well made series despite its short runtime.

There's a lot that can be talked about but to put it simply, I am now a SK8 fan.

[peachjagiya]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C656SVDvhuU/?igsh=b3ozZHJhdXViMGZx

Not TaeKook but TaeGi. This is so funny to watch. Tae really takes having a life outside what they're doing seriously. He also called JK out when he was spending so much time practising and coming home late. Same vibes but the TK one felt more like a boyfriend waiting at home for hours for his boyfriend who has been working all night long. LOL

I'm glad Tae brings that balance in the group. Jimin himself has said Tae is the most human among all of them, and I see it. He takes his craft seriously but he doesn't forget to also have a life out of it and enjoy his life. JK inspires me with his passion. He really puts his heart and soul into his works, I have noticed him putting more prioritiy on taking breaks and not being too hard on himself when he feels lacking vs when he was younger. I love witnessing them mature. I said it's not TaeKook, but hey... I can't help it 😆

My Daegu boys. They're my favourite platonic pairing.

Tae for SURE looks like a fed up househusband at a dinner party moaning about his husband spending entire days on the golf course. He prepared kimchi-jjigae for this idiot to get stuck in the rough and not get home until late?! Ugh, he's definitely about to go have an affair with the pool boy who is at least AT HOME SOMETIMES, MIN YOONGI.

Ahem.

It makes me happy to see JK being a little less hard on himself. And a little more certain! He said a couple of times in AYS that he could handle these little things that went wrong, he's a pro, he's seasoned, it's not his first rodeo. I'm sure he's still a perfectionist but I love to see him confident and advocating for himself and his substantial skills.

And it really does seem like solo era did him good in terms of freedom to reconfigure his priorities a bit.

Tae has always stood out as valuing his wellbeing, protecting his spirit and living to a strong set of principles. He's an inspiration to me in that way and I get the distinct impression the people who love him value it in him. I have this silly little bead bracelet that says "What would KTH do?" and I honestly do think about that so much. haha.

[best-underrated-anime]

Best Underrated Anime Group D Round 1: #D8 vs #D1

#D8: Singer idol android goes back in time to save humanity

When highly evolved AIs set out to eradicate mankind, the carnage that ensues fills the air with the stench of fresh blood and burning bodies. In a desperate bid to prevent the calamity from ever occurring, a scientist bets everything on a remnant from the past.

Turning the clock back a hundred years, AIs are already an integral part of human society, programmed with specific missions meant to be carried out for their entire course of operation. Vivy, the first ever autonomous AI, is a songstress tasked with spreading happiness through her voice. In a theme park where she hardly ever gets a proper audience, she strives to pour her heart out into her performances, bound to repeat it day after day—that is, until an advanced AI from the future appears before her and enlists her help in stopping a devastating war a hundred years in the making. With no time to process the revelation that flips her world upside down, Vivy is catapulted into a century-long journey to avert the violent history yet to come.

#D1: Prohibition era Mafia revenge story

As a child living in the town of Lawless, Angelo Lagusa has witnessed a tragedy: his parents and younger brother have been mercilessly slaughtered by the Vanetti mafia family. Losing everything he holds dear, he leaves both his name and hometown behind, adopting the new identity of Avilio Bruno. Seven years later, Avilio finally has his chance for revenge when he receives a mysterious letter prompting him to return to Lawless. Obliging, he soon encounters the Vanetti don’s son, Nero, and seeks to befriend him using the skills he has quietly honed for years. Set during the Prohibition era, this show tells the story of Avilio’s dark, bloodstained path to vengeance, as he slowly ends each of the men involved in the killing of his family.

Titles, propagandas, trailers, and poll under the cut!

#D8: Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song

Propaganda:

Most first think that this anime is an idol show. I promise you, it is NOT. Quite far from it. Vivy is regrettably underrated despite having great animation—just watch the fight scenes. It has the best of songs that will get stuck in your head for a long time. Character growth for characters - you will adore them. It even won some recognition from anime awards, yet no one talks about it. You have to watch it at least once and appreciate how this anime is made with love as it talks about experiences that make us human. You will be surprised how well the storytelling is.

Trigger Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Cruelty/Violence/Gore, Suicide

#D1: 91 Days

Propaganda:

This series has character designs by the art director of Baccano. In fact, the setting of it being in the early 1920s in America is sort of reminiscent of Baccano. However, the story is much crueler and more grounded than that other famous series, even if it involves a similar amount of guns and blood.

The anime follows a broken and traumatized young man fueled by revenge. It’s a tragedy and a thriller and a Mafia series. We see the lengths Angelo Lagusa goes to avenge his family, whom he’s the last living survivor of. He changes his name and leads a double life, getting close to the Vanetti family, who killed his birth family. But in the process of trying to do this, he gets adopted into this Mafia family.

He must wrestle with his morality as he keeps on the bloody road of revenge. People that don’t deserve to be hurt get hurt or killed because of his actions—even dying by his hands.

It's an anime that shows just how far someone is willing to go for revenge, willing to break everything in his path for it. And considering the Prohibition era came to an end in history, was all the trickery and killing even worth it?

Trigger Warnings: Animal Cruelty/Death, Cannibalism, Emotional Abuse, Graphic Depictions of Cruelty/Violence/Gore, Suicide, Alcohol and Smoking.

This entire series is a mob story so there's lots of guns, blood, and killing. There is an assisted suicide of an important character. Also the family dog dies when the main character's family is massacred in the first episode.

If you’re reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.