#it’s just more techbro nft bullshit

[crypticarchivist]

For those who don’t know, ai art theft just figured out how to make convincing videos.

So in case this was not clear before:

If a movie is made using this technology and you hear about it, don’t buy tickets. Yes even if it’s that one. No exceptions.

If a book uses ai writing generation or image generation, do not buy it. Do not read it. Do not give anybody money for it. Yes even that one. No exceptions.

If a song or youtube video uses this technology, no not like it, do not share it, do not watch it or save it or listen to it. Yes even that one. No exceptions.

If you have any shred of respect or empathy for people who are having their passions and livelihoods spat on, for the countless people who *will* become victims of deepfake media and identity theft, for literally every single person who will be affected negatively by this bullshit, than do not engage with ai art bullshit.

Ai art is from here on out fundamentally unacceptable. In any context.

Computers should not get to make art while humans work slavery wages and cannot afford to live.

[xray-vex]

here are some of my really general a/i predictions, re: art --

techbro types who want to generate bullshit as a get rich quick scheme will saturate the market and nobody will want their worthless shit, they'll get bored and move onto the next get-rich-quick trend. remember nfts? lol

people who got into a/i because they thought it was a legit way to make art will get bored of it because it won't challenge them to do anything & it will not be gratifying in the long term - those types will either: 1.) quit or 2.) start making actual art

people who buy art will get sick of looking at a/i generated shit that essentially all looks the same. real artists making real art will get more interest again because it will seem new and exciting.

same thing with films & stuff too. i definitely think that various actors & creators guilds & other creative industry unions should do everything they can to protect their art & craft against being outsourced to a/i, but i do think that people who watch films will get sick of a/i in films the same way people got weary of CGI overuse in films. a/i in film might not go away completely, but audiences will absolutely be drawn to films that don't use a/i.

i think the basic gist of what i'm trying to say is that human beings need actual art, and the vast majority of people don't fully, actively realize how interwoven art is to literally everything in their lives. on some level they must know, because when it's missing, they miss it. they seek it out. art in general is important to the fabric of society: storytelling, entertainment, community, emotional fulfillment, etc. and people want something real, tangible. they want something created by humans.

****this is why, i'm guessing, that fan art & fan fiction are so popular. most people who create those sort of works are doing them for the actual love of what they're making. and then those works create community. humans have been sitting in groups to tell each other stories and to express themselves visually & dance together with music forever. for literally ever. all of human history. literally all. art is the fucking foundation of society, civilization, human evolution. to make art & to experience art, to some degree, on some level(s). non-negotiable. essential as food and water. i'm dead serious.

a couple of examples of similar times that tech threatened to make the "real thing" obsolete, but failed to do so:

e-readers were supposedly going to make print books obsolete -- they didn't.

streaming music services helped usher in a renewed desire for physical media again.

for awhile, both of those things did kill a lot of brick & mortar music/book stores, but there has been a bit of a resurgence and lots of small businesses.

and no, things will never go back to the way they were, but things would have changed regardless, capitalism being what it is.

it would be nice tho, wouldn't it, if digital tech presented augmentations to our need to have art in our lives constantly, instead of threatening to replace them completely?

i'm just going on pure vibes here & from what i know about art & being an artist for 35+ yrs, some tech & aesthetics philosophy, and from having worked in retail books & music/dvd sales many moons ago. so i could be completely full of shit here.

but i do have some hope that things re: a/i will get better for people -- for real, working artists & authors & musicians & performers & creators. humans need art the way they need food and water. this has always been true for the entirety of human existence.

i'm just sort of in my thoughts & feelings about art tonight and felt like rambling about it.

now i'm gonna make more tea.

[volixia669]

Twitter fucking kicked me out lol

I tried logging back in and it just kicks me out again. I even have two factor authorization! So something is bugged, and depending on how many people it effects it may actually be the end of twitter.

Which is unfortunate, because Spoutible has an egotistical founder who led a harassment campaign against sex workers, romance authors, and queer people all because a few people went “Hold on, we need some clarification with your TOS.”

Bluesky has a lot of people intrigued, but black journalists are already noting the lack of moderation leading to high levels of racism. Which isn’t that surprising given they didn’t have a block button day 1. Y’know, that thing which marginalized people need to keep assholes from targeting them. Oh and Jack Dorsey is just another crypto shilling, AI loving techbro who works closely with people in that space. I have no doubts crypto integrations are planned.

Post if I recall is owned by a media mogul billionaire, and isn’t that popular, though may become more prevalent if Twitter goes down. Maybe.

Aaaannnd Hive had a guy who used the r word on their team, and didn’t have any friendly interactions with sex workers last I checked.

FORTUNATELY

There’s Inkblot, which is more a DA/Artstation replacement but with no AI/NFT/Crypto bullshit.

There’s also actually getting stuff done instead of doomscrolling, but pfffft, with my bouncy brain?

[multitrackdrifting]

Patch notes on my thoughts on AI Art

I'm not a tech idealist so I see shit like AI art and only three things come to mind:

AI Art sold to people as commissions

AI Art NFTs

Vocal contingents of people talking about how they feel persecuted for people shitting on them for spending hours mastering parameter refinement and rightfully being called skill-less.

"You don't understand how it works", oh execpt that almost every notable example of the technology being abused demonstrates that even if you lay out ethical guidelines and terms of service it doesn't stop the abuse cause ultimately it expects the users to act in good faith which is a fucking insane system to rely on given that technology's intended purpose is not always its practical use-case.

You're expecting people to choose ethical AI art generators with the embedded assumption that a significant amount of individuals will be guided to those ones instead of the ones that can farm the shit out of their favourite artist's style and spit out a commission at less than 1% of the cost.

I am not a tech idealist, nor am I a computer scientist/programmer that has a hard on for the promising areas of the tech: e.g. making personal use items like DND icons for monsters & players. I don't care about that at all, but you must realise that the niche positive use cases come with the wide-spread abuse opportunities right?

When you have to read shit like "man replicates recently deceased artist's style with AI", "plagiarist earns money through artist's style selling ai generated works" and see art hosting sites flooded to the brim with AI art that is default opt-in that you have to manually turn off you really have to wonder are these the problems of an emerging technology, or a technology that cannot feasibly be controlled.

If you say some shit like "it's democratizing art", I must remind you that creating art that you envision with ease is not a human necessity, nor do you have the fucking right to pillage the skills of others for novel concepts that you have the ideas but not the skill to execute. Let's stop "being fair" to techbro bullshit, how is this shit even defended on here at all?

Some of the muddy discourse around it is like "stealing labour" and "real art" arguments, I'm not as fascinated by these particular points, but that doesn't mean the vitriol people have towards AI Art is unwarranted just because some of their premises are not that agreeable.

You can already see examples of AI art having racial biases, turning people with darker skin tones white for no reason (like that new photo => anime one).

You can see that AI art for some people isj ust about making random fetish art, I literally got recommended a random ass tweet of some Genshin character's detailed armpit sweat recommended below a tweet about what my friend's thoughts on a game were. Are you for real? That's more of a twitter issue, but yeah.

You can see that AI Art won a fucking prize at the Colorado State Fair's Fine Arts competition and people were fucking pissed.

Anime Los Angeles had to ban AI Art from the artist alley because you can produce a dozen unique images to sell in bulk and you still make money off people who aren't privy to the indicators of AI Art.

There are so many notable examples of the misuse of AI art and how damaging it is to fandom, to the ability to see legitimate artworks (especially if it's some unpopular ass character that one person just spams the fucking tag with) and how difficult it is to moderate the content because there is no super convenient way to detect AI Art.

It is not a beast to be tamed, it is a scourge that should be eradicated from this planet because using a fucking honor system when traditional and digital art is already reposted and fucking stolen prior to the inception AI. Do you know what you get now? A layer of obfuscation, on-demand content generation that farms impressions and followers, paying no mind to the skill check that people are skipping over cause they know how to make a decently convincing AI picture based on very specific parameter searching.

It's no longer "this pic is so coool, credits to who made this", it's now [insert joke caption here] [ai generated image].

And skill does not equal influence (and lets not be obtuse, there are fundamentals that can be meaningfully measured i.e. anatomical accuracy, the consistency of linework and other such things), I know many skilled painters thta can do both realistic and anime styles that have like 1500 followers - but you know what it does do?

It means budding artists are held to the fucking unrealistic standards of AI Art trained to artists with over 20 years of professioanl experience bodying their earnest works of their character that they love. It trains the subsconsious to discern betwen good and bad under a very superficial scope. In turn, it lowers their engagement with random people, but random people that aren't your friends constitute a large amt of followers for any creator.

I don't condone harassing random people, but I certainly wont feel a lick of sympathy when people express their woes about people shitting on their 20 word prompt pictures that an AI spat out in 15 minutes.

At the end of it all, how I feel about AI Art is this:

It's kinda like a swiss army knife, it can do a lot of shit, some are harmless in nature -- but if it's got like 13 different Knives That Are Good At Killing People, should we be that surprised reading about times it's used to kill people (metaphorically). It's not the strongest rhetoric in the world, but it's how I look at it. There's so much bad it can, and has done, that we are beyond the point of reigning it in.

I'm just keeping it real, this shit is bad, and honestly, I am glad that so many artists I follow on social media shit on it because it deserves to be pummeled into the ground. Ad hominem my balls, just pick up a pencil and paper and stop feeling so entitled to pillaging the works of others mayhaps - don't really care how you wokeify it, it's still stupid as shit

Saying "democratizing art" and making art accessible are just uses of buzzwords that don't mean anything socially progressive, they are lies meant to sell you on subscribing to a technology or tacitly accepting its existence