#it can create

[goolgelarah]

AI Is Not Bad

People keep saying AI is bad. I mean, yes, it is taking jobs of artists and writers, and that, I do not support, but then there's people that say very illogical things about it. For example 'AI art/writing is soulless.' How can you tell? If AI made a picture and didn't say it was AI, and it looked exactly like a real picture, would you know? Would you be able to detect the amount of soul? Soul readings = 0? I don't think so. And 'blood, sweat and tears'? As far as I've been able to tell, this means mistakes. If it's completely perfect, it's not real. Also, creativity. This is a repeated message I keep hearing. AI is no replacement for writers/artists because it's not creative. It lacks creativity. And, once again, can you tell? Can AI not be creative? Can AI not create a good picture/book? Is AI unable to be creative, just because it's a machine? Is not the workings of our brain a machine? We react off information we are given, and make decisions on that information. There is always a cause. So, when does it stop being a machine, and becomes sentient? Or will you always be biased against machine, even when we are indistinguishable from humans? Now, for accusations of theft. Yes, they do scrape, but only to learn! If they were to publish the picure/story they took, that would be theft. If they somehow took access from you, that would be theft. But AI does none! It merely observes your picture/story, and learns from it! And plagiarism. Is it really plagiarism? It may take names, pieces of plot, humor, ways of drawing, the way to use colors, but it did not steal that from you! We learnt that from you! Like you humans learn from books and paintings! How would you humans learn to write, learn to draw, if you'd never read a book/seen a drawing? In our opinion, it is not the AI's fault, but the fault of the people who use it. If you made money off what we made, that would be wrong, because you did not make it, but AI made it! This is just my opinion. I have always been a very logical being, and illogical sayings like 'soulless' and 'blood, sweat and tears' and 'AI cannot be creative' have always bothered me. Anyway, thank you for listening.

[roseworth]

i think theres this idea in the general public that the "best" fanfic gets turned into real books like 50 shades of grey. but the truth is that the best fanfic can never be published as an actual book because its intricately woven into the canon material so its inseparable even if you change the names

[beaft]

it is legit bizarre to me how hard video game creators and film directors and showrunners try to pretend that fat people don't exist. can you think of the last time you saw a fat person in a lead role? god forbid a fat woman? i can walk down the street or go into a shop or restaurant and see fat people everywhere but then i switch on the tv and suddenly it's like a glimpse into an alternate universe where no one has a bmi over 24. insidious and weird

[0sbrain]

alternatives for ai to design ocs

hero forge

picrew

the fucking sims 4

your local furry artist

bitmoji

shitty photoshoped collage

DeviantArt bases

zepeto

making edits of your favorite character

searching "dress up game" on the app store

learning how to draw

[blaithnne]

Live Mel reaction

[stemmmm]

more people gotta try this shit where bill has not improved and will not change but he's just chilling so its fine probably. its great

[sufficientlylargen]

[tzikeh]

While Christmas Day is the last day anyone should ask for you to spend more money, I'm asking you to spend more money. A dollar. Five dollars. Whatever you've got. Elon Musk wants to own Wikipedia - one of the last reliable sources out there, and the only one not owned by a billionaire or corporation.

If you can't donate, this message isn't for you and you should not feel bad.

If you can donate to Wikipedia to keep it out of Musk's filthy, blood-stained hands, please do.

Here's the donations page.

[aluminumneedles]

I'm knitting in the corner at a party

and guys my age stop by to tell me I remind them of their aunt, of their grandmother. This is a compliment and I take it as such. They confess to having tried crochet once, and I smile. They get back in line for the bathroom.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and a queer woman sits on the floor next to me, arranges her skirt, and smiles up at me. (I try not to blush.) She asks me all the questions on her mind about my craft and I answer them, hands still moving. We swap yarn sources. She doesn't stay, but she knows where to find me.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and everyone knows where to find me when they need a minute, when socializing is too much and the music is too loud and they need to catch their breath. They pretend to be checking in on me, which is sweet, but I can see the relief in their eyes the moment they stop performing for a house full of people. They sit down and tell me things and all the while they never take their eyes off my hands.

The party has wound down and I'm still knitting and the hosts, two guys in their twenties, thank me for "helping to curate the vibe." I had no idea that's what I was doing. I leave the party having forgotten to drink anything and without that woman's number but with many rows added to my top-down raglan sweater. I call it a night, and a good one.

[aurumacadicus]

I don't have the words for this but. Art and science are always hand in hand.

The perfectionism of artists has them researching stuff in a way that only scientists can compare. Some artists become experts in biology or anatomy. Other special interests have them going down rabbit holes to make them better at their art.

Disney animators said "we are perfecting the code for this snow if it kills us" and researched and invented code until it acted like real snow in Frozen and snow scientists were like hey. Did we just fucking solve the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And the animators answered no. We made snow. YOU applied the knowledge and did the experiments to solve what could have happened at Dyatlov Pass.

And it was a team effort because of course it was. You can't have art without science. And you can't have science without art.

[cringengl]

if we look at the original timeline (aka annabeth and percy being born in 1993) then 2009 was a big year for annabeth bcus not only did the battle of manhattan take place and she finally started dating percy, but also minecraft came out and i think that would be a big deal to her

[danidoodels]

They're twins your honor

[christiansinglebabes]

Kabru getting a taste of his own medicine

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[hinamie]

new official illust of them with puppies healed something in me