#like. generated by a really shitty ai bad

[tkachunk]

was anybody going to tell me that danny brière's message for claude giroux's 1000th point said that he and "the kids" are very, very proud of him or was I just supposed to see that while rewatching the ceremony

[solace-seekers]

every time i see an ai generated writing piece on ao3 i become approximately 10% more evil

[hecksupremechips]

I think the best way to describe my feelings about aini is like if you were craving this specific meal from some distant restaurant you haven’t been to in ages and you try to replicate it on your own and it actually tastes decently good but then you get to eat the original again and you’re like “oh god what the hell I’ve been making garbage this whole time why did I think I could beat the original”

[marblebees]

I got tired of Character AI getting so repetitive and slow with its prompts and story threads so i literally just wrote down an outline of how i would make the story better. In frustration, it got me to do my own fully original writing. Lmao

[were--ralph]

why exactly do you dislike generative art so much? i know its been misused by some folks, but like, why blame a tool because it gets used by shitty people? Why not just... blame the people who are shitty? I mean this in genuinely good faith, you seem like a pretty nice guy normally, but i guess it just makes me confused how... severe? your reactions are sometimes to it. There's a lot of nuance to conversation about it, and by folks a lot smarter than I (I suggest checking out the Are We Art Yet or "AWAY" group! They've got a lot on their page about the ethical use of Image generation software by individuals, and it really helped explain some things I was confused about). I know on my end, it made me think about why I personally was so reactive about Who was allowed to make art and How/Why. Again, all this in good faith, and I'm not asking you to like, Explain yourself or anything- If you just read this and decide to delete it instead of answering, all good! I just hope maybe you'll look into *why* some people advocate for generative software as strongly as they do, and listen to what they have to say about things -🦜

if Ai genuinely generated its own content I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, however what Ai currently does is scrape other people's art, collect it, and then build something based off of others stolen works without crediting them. It's like. stealing other peoples art, mashing it together, then saying "this is mine i can not only profit of it but i can use it to cut costs in other industries.

this is more evident by people not "making" art but instead using prompts. Its like going to McDonalds and saying "Burger. Big, Juicy, etc, etc" then instead of a worker making the burger it uses an algorithm to build a burger based off of several restaurant's recepies.

example

the left is AI art, the right is one of the artists (Lindong) who it pulled the art style from. it's literally mass producing someone's artstyle by taking their art then using an algorithm to rebuild it in any context. this is even more apparent when you see ai art also tries to recreate artists watermarks and generally blends them together making it unintelligible.

Aside from that theres a lot of other ethical problems with it including generating pretty awful content, including but not limited to cp. It also uses a lot of processing power and apparently water? I haven't caught up on the newer developements i've been depressed about it tbh

Then aside from those, studios are leaning towards Ai generation to replace having to pay people. I've seen professional voice actors complain on twitter that they haven't gotten as much work since ai voice generation started, artists are being cut down and replaced by ai art then having the remaining artists fix any errors in the ai art.

Even beyond those things are the potential for misinformation. Here's an experiment: Which of these two are ai generated?

ready?

These two are both entirely ai generated. I have no idea if they're real people, but in a few months you could ai generate a Biden sex scandal, you could generate politics in whatever situation you want, you can generate popular streamers nude, whatever. and worse yet is ai generated video is already being developed and it doesn't look bad.

I posted on this already but as of right now it only needs one clear frame of a body and it can generate motion. yeah there are issues but it's been like two years since ai development started being taken seriously and we've gotten to this point already. within another two years it'll be close to perfected. There was even tests done with tiktokers and it works. it just fucking works.

There is genuinely not one upside to ai art. at all. it's theft, it's harming peoples lives, its harming the environment, its cutting jobs back and hurting the economy, it's invading peoples privacy, its making pedophilia accessible, and more. it's a plague and there's no vaccine for it. And all because people don't want to take a year to learn anatomy.

[reachartwork]

the process

a lot of people like to ask me about my process and how ai can be "creative" because they're under the impression that it's just kind of a big slot machine. you pull a lever and art uncontrollably comes out. well, let me show you my process

this is going to be a long thread tagged with #long post, blacklist that if you want to skip it.

so how it starts like most art is that i have an idea. in this case, earlier i made a post about witch-knights "surfing" on swords, so i'm going to try and make that - a witch-knight flying through the air atop one of her swords.

it starts with this picture.

i think this picture is dogshit so i discard basically all of it to try and find something closer to my original intent. there's a couple of uninteresting regenerations so it's clear i have to go back to the drawing board and teach the machine what it is i'm trying to do

let's start with a witch-knight on a broom. it's definitely not great but it gives us a better pose that i can work with.

i start by erasing the broom and replacing it with a skateboard - the machine understands skating better for what i need it to do.

there's a ton of small, subtle errors in this image and it overall looks like dogshit but the most important part right now is blocking and the overall pose structure - i need her "surfing" a large, lengthwise object, in the sky. i start by erasing pieces of the skateboard

now we have a sword, which is good. but the sword itself looks... bad. i'll spare you the abortive attempts at selective regeneration of the sword and just show you what happened when i rolled it back a couple of times from this pose and let it regen entirely.

again, tons of small little shitty errors, but this is something i can work with. i do another regen for a less shitty sword. her boob armor gets replaced with, like, generic scale mail.

this image has a great sword and decent pose but like... everything else is kind of futzy and i dont like it. instead of trying to pick and choose i just throw it back into the oven for a second. much better! but now she's going to cut herself on the sword, oh no!

again, i'll save you the agonizing thirty minutes of trying to get it to understand where the foot should go. unlike before i didn't really have a choice except to muscle through. there! now she's surfing safely :)

so it's done, right? well, i mean, i could post this. and it would probably do okay. but *i'm* not satisfied with it. there's stiffness. dozens of minor errors. the eyes look weird when you zoom in. let's start by fixing her hat, and then maybe her hands?

but she's missing fingers on her left hand so let's go ahead and fix that too. and i don't really like the tip of her sword and the ocean looks really flat and boring. so, VERY CAREFULLY, i have to etch out the parts of the sword and her body i have to keep, and also write an entirely new prompt to tell it "i want an ocean w/ rolling waves please :)"

this is better but not great. i try again - serendipitously, it makes this really cool variant with a shadow over the water, but i know working with that will take more wrangling so i'm considering it an evolutionary dead end and discarding it for now.

i proceed to spend 30 minutes trying to make the ocean look better but it's really not working imo. i'm gonna go back to the shadow version and see how that works

i'll spare you the other 8 minutes - i'm satisfied with the following picture. the sword isn't *perfectly* straight, her eyes aren't perfectly textured, the scale mail is... weird, in texture, but anything else would be greasing the wheel and i think beyond the machine's ability to do fine detail.

i've also attached the starting picture for comparison - it has better, "higher quality" clouds and ocean but i personally cared more about the pose and the sword surfing - the background is mostly tangential. could i get back ocean and clouds of that quality with another two hours of painstakingly cutting and re-generating bits of the background without destroying any of my existing work on the pose? probably. but i don't want to.

total time spent on this piece from start to finish was one hour and twenty one minutes. and now you know!

[loquora]

I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month) and their terrible, very bad, no good stance on genAI (generative artificial intelligence) and why I won't be writing anything for this challenge again.

I'm very aware that I am an active and vocal genAI hater. But I am willing and open to hear about positive and useful things LLMs (large language models) can do. There are valid scientific uses for the technology and some really fascinating medical and academic breakthroughs that come from LLMs. But the use of genAI in creative writing context is complete bullshit.

Come with me for the breakdown.

The first part of their statement:

NaNoWriMo has made it clear they are not just tolerating genAI in their month long writing challenge, but that those of us who don't are 'classist' and 'ableist' because we don't.

The post was later amended with a list of reasons why they make each of those claims. We'll start from the top.

GenAI uses the technology in a way that is morally, ethically and environmentally bankrupt. See, all LLMs have to train on something. When you're using it to, say, detect cancers you can feed it images of cancer scans so that it builds up a dataset of what those look like to predict future scans. But when you want to generate text, images and video you have to feed it text, images and video. Those things came from people, actual people and actual artists who overwhelmingly did not agree to train anything with their work and can no longer wrest their work from the machine now that it's been stolen from them.

It also isn't 'intelligent' at all, considering it has that word in the name. Think of genAI like an alien learning our language with absolutely no frame of reference for what it's learning. It can predict that the letters "w-e" and "c-a-n" often come after the letters "y-e-s" because the phrase "yes we can" will come up often in training data, it's a common phrase. But it doesn't actually understand what any of those words MEAN. Just that they often follow one another so that when prompted it will, statistically, try put those letters and words together again.

So when it comes to actually writing or responding to prompts what you're getting is the most likely outcome based on a massive amount of data input. It is not actually giving you feedback on what your writing looks like, it's giving you the most statistically possible response based on input. It's fake feedback, a thousand other feedbacks crammed together and extruded into a goo that looks and sounds like feedback but is actually meaningless. ChatGPT doesn't understand your writing sample anymore than a phone tree understands your anger and desperation when you continue to say "OPERATOR" as clearly as you can to try to get through to a real human. Both understand you input a word and will output based on that, but context, emotions, cultural mores etc. are all beyond it.

This is why AI is so absurdly shitty at things like math, counting letters in words and identifying words that start with the same letter. It's mashing together a million math problem answers betting on the likelihood that statistically someone has already answered that question enough times in the training data that it can spit the correct answer out at you.

TLDR: If you're using genAI to get feedback on your writing you're not actually getting feedback on your writing at all, but the most statistically probable set of words that relate to feedback. So right off the bat the idea that genAI is going to help you be a better writer is just flat wrong. It doesn't know how to write, it doesn't even know how many Rs are in the word 'strawberry'.

Second point has the same issues as the first:

I actually agree with them on the point that if your brain doesn't handle certain writer activities well it's perfectly okay to use an outside source for help with it. GenAI isn't actually helping you be a better writer, though; it can't. It doesn't understand anything you write nor can it provide meaningful feedback when it's just spitting out statistically probably words to you based on your input. So while the point here is actually good on the surface, the solution of using genAI to help people who have trouble with certain aspects of writing is still not correct.

The final point:

Again, this is a very good point... if it wasn't being made in conjunction with a defense of generative AI WHICH DOES NOT HELP OR SOLVE THIS ISSUE. In fact, because of the known issues of bias in how genAI LLMs are built they can make issues for marginalized writers worse.

I genuinely have no idea how this very true paragraph about people who are routinely pushed out of traditional writing spaces is helped by genAI. Their entire point thus far seems to be that genAI is a 'cheap' alternative to some traditional writing aids but considering genAI doesn't work like that it's all dead in the water as far as I'm concerned.

If NaNoWriMo was actually concerned with solving these access issues to things they consider critical to writing in general, why not offer a place for real people to read and critique one another on their platform? There are myriad other technological solutions that don't cost huge amounts of water AND actually help aspiring writers!

All of this to say that you should write for yourself, write what you enjoy and get better the same way generations of people before you have: by reading other people's work, talking to and exchanging time with other authors and writing and rewriting in your own words until you're satisfied.

Wasting water asking genAI to do things for you that would make you a better writer to do yourself or with trusted allies is just that, a waste.

[snuffysbox]

I'd encourage you not to feel bad about posting art because of AI. If people repost your art- they could already do that. If people make their own art in your style- they could already do that. Reposting and straight ripoffs were shitty things to do then and still are, but AI didn't really change anything.

Making good AI art, like making any good art, takes a good idea of _what to make art of_ and _what makes it look good._ you're very good at those things and you make great art! so nobody can just replace you with AI. whether an AI learns from your stuff only matters as much as whether other humans learn from your stuff.

This is truly very kind of you and I do find it encouraging to hear, don't get me wrong, but I wanna clarify that this is less about me feeling down about potentially having my art style be trained on and honestly more about just like... lamenting the general shittiness of the late-stage capitalism of the internet in 2024. I've shared my art online since the early 2000s, I've seen every previously safe space for artists get restructured in order to satisfy partners and investors who don't actually give two shits about creatives.

And I also wanna note that I don't think you can't really compare reposts/ripoffs with AI. Scraping content for datasets is theft on a massive scale. The turn-around time for generating AI images is lightning fast, that's why it's flooding the internet so rapidly right now. Even if the majority still holds the opinion that AI images can't compare to human-made art, enough people and corporations out there are soooooo eager to cut corners and sooooo ready to tell artists that it's an inevitable evolution and we should all just ignore the unethical practice this shit was built on.

So, it's just mostly venting. I have nothing to add that hasn't already been said. I'm just tired.

[theriverbeyond]

really sad to see nanowrimo™ fumble the bag so hard on this -- if their end point was supposed to be "we are neutral on AI, agree to disagree" then they could have literally said nothing instead of grossly insulting their entire target base like... I can't imagine how anyone thought that statement would go over well? IIRC their statement LAST year was that using generative AI would render the challenge meaningless, which is a true fact regardless of your personal thoughts on AI. the entire concept of the challenge month is that putting your words onto a page is good, even and especially when they are bad. you aren't writing a finished book, you're writing an intentionally shitty draft. making bad art is good for you. but more than that, nanowrimo was always a challenge within yourself. you could always copy-paste the bee movie into your doc and say you won. you could always lie and say you wrote more words than you actually wrote, whether that was because you were really SO close to the goal that it's probably okay to add enough to get you over the top, or maybe you weren't writing at all but wanted to impress your friends. it's like, whatever, because it's not about creating a product it's about doing the process even when that means doing it poorly. even their arguments about accessibility dont make sense because you were always able to make a lower wordcount goal to work twoards if the 50k goal specifically was not attainable, so you could still participate in the social fun of a writing challenge. I did that last year and it was still great fun and I didn't end up with a horrible repetitive stress injury. I mean I guess my expectations for nanowrimo™ as an organization were already rock bottom after last year but it's just. sad to see :/

[sexhaver]

are you a fan/supporter of AI-generated art, and if so, why? i've frankly never understood why people like it and i'm trying to wrap my head around it. thanks :)

asking if im a "fan" of AI art is like asking if im a "fan" of Photoshop. it's a tool that has the potential to be used for shitty things (i.e. photoshopping pictures of someone to make them look bad, or training an AI model specifically on one artist and then undercutting that artist on commissions), but it's also a really fucking powerful tool that has the potential to push art in directions it could never feasibly go before. like, how do you read "people without an artistic bone in their body will be able to spin up dozens of pictures of whatever arbitrary thing they want" and jump straight to the ethics of sourcing the datasets and "robbing artists" and supporting draconian IP law without even admitting that, at a base level, that's a really cool and useful piece of technology to have.

part of the reason i keep posting about it is because i work in warehouse automation. ive spent the last decade learning how to automate shitty tasks that nobody in their right mind would want to do for free, and people STILL get upset that robotics are inherently "stealing their jobs". this is literally only a problem because of capitalism; in any sane world, a machine that can do shitty jobs would be a godsend. but when you need to work for a living, these robots become competition instead of tools to make your life better. and yet people will still direct their outrage at the robots themselves and not their bosses or capitalism as a whole

the same thing is happening with AI art. without capitalism forcing artists to draw for survival, the ability for non-artists to create art at a whim would be a tool with a wide range of applications. under capitalism, however, these tools become competition. and yet again, people are directing their rage at the people making this good-in-a-vacuum technology instead of capitalism, or even more specifically, the miniscule percentage of AI artists who use the tech to financially harm artists by undercutting them on commissions.

of course, there's the added twist that, unlike stacking heavy cardboard boxes, art is something that a lot of people actually do enjoy intrinsically and would do for free. this has spawned an entirely separate branch of arguments against AI art based on ethics and philosophy instead of laws and finance. this branch argues that AI art is not just bad because it can directly financially harm artists who don't use it, but that it's actively eroding the concept of "art" itself. this is the branch that spawns soundbites like "AI art just copies from humans", "that's not art because it's soulless", and "what's even the point in making art when a robot can do it faster and better?"

i'm going to be blunt: this branch, just like any other train of thought that hinges on an unspecified definition of "true art" that ebbs and flows at the speaker's whim, is complete horseshit at best and outright reactionary at worst. unfortunately, it has also infected most of the anti-AI-art crowd to the point where it's almost impossible to find any arguments against AI art that don't eventually fall back on it

tl;dr: AI art is a powerful tool with the potential to benefit humanity at large, and desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle [by donating to Disney's IP lawyers] because it scares you is not going to work

[stem-sister-scuffle]

STEM SISTER SCUFFLE: ROUND 2 MASHUP 8

Raphella La Cognizi (The Mechanisms) vs Entrapta Princess of Dryl (Netflix She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

Raphella La Cognizi is an... Everything Scientist! (people said "all sciences"... also she loves magnets)

Entrapta Princess of Dryl is a Roboticist, Programmer and First Ones' Tech Historian/Archaeologist!

Why you should vote for each contestant:

Raphella La Cognizi:

"All of them, probably, focused on chemistry and biology if I had to guess. She's the science officer of the Mechanisms, a band of immortal space pirates. They regularly blow up planets for fun. Raphaella designs them better bombs, tortures poor captives, tortures and vivisects her crewmates, etc. I love her also"

"it's unclear--she's a mad scientist archetype more than anything! she does, however, really like magnets. she's an immortal space pirate. she possibly made herself immortal. she's autistic To me. i love her so much. as cruel and brutal as she is... science!"

"everything? the more unethical the better, although she does really like magnets. Immortal space pirate! so she's got all the time in the universe to do science. until she dies, of course, which happens when (spoilers) she decides to fly beyond the event horizon of a black hole to find out what's on the other side. She's the science officer on her starship, which is just a badass job in general, and she's got WINGS. the wings are mechanical and the reason she's immortal. we don't know for certain if she was born with wings and they were replaced, or if she just went "wings sound fun!" and built some, or much of anything about her backstory. But! speculation is rife and there is a nonzero chance she's immortal because she experimented on herself, which is fun. Also she's just *really pretty*, ok, and has the voice of an angel. She is as cruel and brutal as she is science."

"shes immortal she has time to do all the sciences. well. she does die after like 10 millennia but even that is a final science project! she throws herself into a black hole, maybe to die, maybe to learn something new :) your honor i love her"

"SHES IMMORTAL SHES A MURDERER SHE DOES EXPERIMENTS ON HER IMMORTAL CREWMATES SHE LIKES MAGNETS SHES ***GAY*** shes my beloved"

Entrapta Princess of Dryl:

"She builds robots!!! She's curious and inquisitive!! She loves her robots!! She has the coolest hair and also I want to be her bestie. She's an absolute love"

"autism :)"

"Builds robots and computers for fun and companionship. Can take apart and understand almost any tech she is presented with. Autism lever set to max and I love her. Mandatory boob window in all her outfits and I've never related harder to a character."

"autistic icon, amazing inventor and app round excellent character"

"she has prehensile hair it’s literally the best thing i’ve ever seen in my life, it’s never once acknowledged by any of the characters as abnormal or explained in any way i’m literally obsessed with it. also autism queen"

"PIGTAILS!!!! autism"

"Entrapta is very bubbly and positive. She never lets anything like losing her friends or going to the bad side or getting put on a death-sentence island stop her from scientific pursuits! She actually drives a lot of the conflict in the story, as she explains the technological backstory of the world, and helps both sides be better at fighting. She loves data, doing experiments, and the scientific method. She's also in love with space. She is an autistic queen <3"

"phenomenal canon autism representation without being weird & shitty. also she’s so strange & wonderful & relatable in so so many ways. my computer is named Darla bc that’s what she named the AI for the spaceship in s5"

"She is THE science queen because she loves science so much and her love of it is INFECTIOUS. I don’t know anything about science but Entrapta makes it seem like the coolest thing in the universe. I love her"

"She ourple. I luv her"

"She's so passionate about her work. Takes through notes! Figured out how to hack her home planet!!! She's autistic as hell and I like her overalls."

"You won’t get autism like this anywhere else bestie"

"amoral mad scientist who flips between the good guys and bad guys, loves building so many inventions, ends up converting the head bad guy (for most of the series) to good through the power of love"

"She has outfitted her entire castle to be a maze, and installed electronic locks on some. Her staff seems to be mostly robots she has built herself. In good part reverse engineering or adapting ancient tech found on the planet. She's incredible at what she does and personally fixes, invents and builds a wide range of stuff from space ships to portals to a prosthetic exoskeleton to trackers to war machines. She can do it all. Autism win! Girlie has been criticised for being treated childlike or being unable to understand those around her to a ridiculous degree, but I'm honestly just glad she's not a Sheldon Cooper. Her favorite bots have personalities and therefore implied AI (but not the shitty kind), which means she's pretty fucking good at software too. She likes tiny foods."

"So very autistic about technology. Initially believes robots are way better than people, eventually makes human friends but also very much still has robot friends (I love Emily so much). Gets so excited about finding new First One's tech. Also her happy spinning around in a space suit in that one season 5 episode heals my heart every time I watch it"

"She's the planet's leading expert on ancient tech (sci-fi/fantasy universe) and develops most of the tech in the show and is very autistic about it. i love her"

"She is fun and funky. Chaotic neutral. Definitely some autism coding going on, which is very charming. She has a pet robot? It is cute"

"Bc she is ENTRAPTA!! No srsly she is such a well-written character. At times kinda morally grey but always lovable and great and she is truly amazing at what she does!! I'm pretty sure she's already been submitted but I wanted to make sure :)"

[smahell]

is there a villain in obey me?

yes. according to this simple search, diavolo is the antagonist we should fear. and date. and collect cards of. for some reason.

this was sent in a discord server I was in as a very very obvious joke (hopefully) and this result is surely ai generated, or google's done a whoopsie-doodle and taken something off of reddit.

yes, diavolo can assert himself as an antagonistic force, but all of his actions are always within logical reason. though it may be against the wishes of the brothers and MC, he always does what is right for the devildom, whether that may be putting lucifer on house arrest, or locking belphegor away from his brothers.

diavolo is literally just trying his best, and he's been doing that since his father basically dumped the responsibility of a whole realm on his shoulders and abandoned him to sleep at the bottom of the devildom. his past is genuinely so sad.

so, who's the villain in obey me????

you could certainly say it's belphie.. but you can also date him. belphie changes through our the story, and as of right now, he holds nothing against humans and anyone in general. though it was a short span of time, he has gained the (somewhat undeserving) forgiveness of everyone around him after trying to kill MC.

like yes, michael, but it's very obvious with him disguising himself as raphael, going against god's will, and even his manipulation of the brothers that he wants the brothers back, and still sees them as family. even if that may not be reciprocated.

you could say father. but in a sense, lilith broke the rules, and so did the brothers. they all needed to be punished accordingly. and the brothers still refer to him as "father" and not by any other name. they don't hate him as of now.

they feel sympathy. an attachment. a connection.

in the og where michael was mentioned once or twice, the fandom was quick to assign him as The Bad Guy™, but getting to know him through nb, he really is just like all the other characters in terms of role. and throughout nb michael is doted on fondly by the brothers. it's that sort of difficult familial love estranged families can relate to.

are these good decisions? no

but he's not a villain.

if you lost the loving family and friends you knew, and you had the power to get them back through such unconventional means... michael is just using the powers he was given.

"so then.. maddie's the bad guy." okay grandpa, let's get you back to your wheelchair..

she's barely even mentioned for starters, and from what I've heard, she's not even been mentioned in nb. all she's done is made mammon cry at some point, and tried to marry diavolo. she might be a shitty person, yes, but she's never even involved enough to make out lives, or even all the brothers's lives a living nightmare. she's a very minor nuisance, at most.

all the characters do something antagonistic. every single one of them. if there was a villain it would discredit the fact that the game isn't about heroes and villains and morality, but about people. and that's what makes obey me so good. and if there was (a villain), the story would've ended by now, long before the franchise's fifth anniversary. ****

every character is morally grey, and the fact that it leaves it up to the player to annotate what is good and bad makes the whole experience more immersive and personal than ever. however, it speaks volumes concerning a lack of media comprehension that anyone would try to assign a villain to obey me.

obey me is about dating silly demon boys, and watching people live, whether that be in peace and harmony, or in tense, on-the-brink-of-destruction moments. the story has no need of a true antagonist, when we have well developed and wide range of characters gets that impact the story no matter what. enjoy the game, hate or love the characters.. whether they're antagonists or not, just have fun.

****(because the devs weren't very good at writing the first game.. so I doubt they could've had the support to have written a second one)

[edit: this was brainstormed between @prettylittlelambs and i on discord :3 thank you for sort of inspiring me and going me come up with more ideas]

[genericpuff]

So Webtoons is getting sued by a bunch of law firms in class action lawsuit. Saw it on reddit. Apparently they lied to shareholders about revenue which is like one of the worst things I could imagine doing to your shareholders. Then their stock dropped again. Wow....wonder how this is gonna effect readers going forward or how they're gonna be more exploitative in the future. Not saying the down of Webtoons has begun but I wonder if it's gonna be the start of it.

Yep, I've been following this since the initial investigations began.

All that said, we likely won't see anything of this for a while, if anything even comes of it. The reality is that Webtoons... really didn't actually lie about being bad at making money. It's literally outlined in their IPO documentation:

So these lawsuits, at least in my opinion (*I AM NOT A LAWYER NOR AM I ANYONE WHO HAS ANY EXPERIENCE PLACING WALL STREET BETS, TAKE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY WITH MOUNTAINS OF SALT) is less about Webtoons 'lying' to shareholders and more so about them kicking the debt down the road which these lawyers want to try and hold them accountable for. It's not uncommon for startups to seek out private and/or public funding to help them stay out of bankruptcy, but such practice is incredibly shitty because if a company was already near the point of bankruptcy to begin with, what exactly is going to change to ensure that they actually make that money back with an additional net gain for those investors?

So in that sense, either something will come of this, or it won't, nothing's really a guarantee as of now. It's just as common for startups seeking public investments to get sued within their first 1-2 years because a company not returning on their initial investments within 3-6 months is a prime cut for lawyers to drool over. Despite their attempts to be honest about their earnings, the vast majority of Wall Street investors are paranoid little fuckers who invest in whatever's new and exciting with the hopes that it'll turn them a profit quickly and without headache. Unfortunately, Webtoons isn't a company that's known for having huge profit margins, which these investors would have realized if they knew anything about this industry or at the very least, bothered to read the fine print that Webtoons was obligated to lay out for them in their documentation. At best the majority of them saw Webtoons' offering that covered buzzwords like "content generation" and "AI" and went "yes please, I love money!" without realizing that webtoons, as a medium, have some of the highest production expenses to lowest-paying demographics out there and therefore companies like Webtoons aren't going to be a short-term gratification. It's more like waiting it out for the "next big thing" that will make that stock valuable again, a massive gamble that isn't guaranteed to payoff. And that's just the game of Wall Street in general.

That said, it's because of how difficult it is to directly monetize digital comics that Webtoons often has to rely on selling merchandise and IP rights in the hopes they'll land a whale - but even their pre-existing whales like Lore Olympus and Let's Play have either nothing to show for themselves, or have left the platform entirely. Of course, they'll vaguely claim that two of Netflix's highest-performing projects came from their platform, but any peek at an aggregated Top 10 list will prove that that is simply not true, and at best, they're referring to True Beauty's live action adaption, which is simply not even close to breaching that list of all-time top-performers (except probably in Korea but this is Goldman Sachs and their American investors they're trying to convince), All of Us are Dead (see above, same situation as True Beauty), and Heartstopper which is... not even an Originals series. Of course, that didn't stop Webtoons and Tapas from boasting about Heartstopper's Netflix adaption and its success on the platform, but literally none of its success is exclusively owed to either of those platforms, Alice Oseman flies solo and if anything, Heartstopper never would have gotten to the point it's at if it were tied down to a Webtoon Originals contract.

So in a sense, until anything comes of these lawsuits, they're more so just lawyers jumping on their own investment opportunity - the opportunity to get settlements from Webtoons for both their clients and themselves by extension. At best what they feasibly have against Webtoons is the company getting way too high on their own supply without anything to feasibly show in terms of profit for their IP's. Considering how many IP's they sold to television and film production studios back in 2019-2022 when they were at their peak over the lockdowns - a peak that is long in the rearview mirror - they are incredibly behind in actually paying off those promises. Even in a recent meeting they held just the other day with Goldman Sachs, they're quoted as saying: "When Rachel Smythe was a graphic designer in New Zealand, 4 or 5 years ago, and she had a story to tell, we enabled her to not just tell it in one part of the world, but globally. She became a NYT Bestselling author, she is rumored to be releasing soon as a major animated release."

When even the company that hosts Lore Olympus as its prize pig can only say that its long-anticipated TV production that both Rachel and Webtoons have been assuring people on repeat that the show is "still happening" and that what they've seen so far "looks amazing" is simply 'rumored to be releasing soon'... I don't even have the words to describe how embarrassing that is for them. Never mind the fact that Lore Olympus has been over for months and both it and its creator, Rachel, have been falling into the pits of irrelevancy. They don't have any other home-runners to bet on, they're just continuing to bank on Rachel as their own example of someone who "got big" even though it was years ago and that fame is now shrinking with the passage of time, you can even see the performance of the series dipping in its own front-end metrics over time. They are trying so hard to convince people that they're worth investing in when the one thing that actually DID have that kind of allure has now come and gone.

Never mind the fact that again, most Wall Street investors probably don't even participate in webtoon culture so the name "Rachel Smythe" isn't some golden ticket to fortune. Lore Olympus might get a bit more of a reaction, but it's going to be a lot more mixed due to how divisive the series became in the end, and general audiences who are new to Webtoons as a public company (and the medium as a whole) are still not so likely to know what the fuck that means or why it's significant. The best time to pull the "we have Rachel Smythe!" card in the public investing pool was, like many other things Webtoons has fallen behind in, years ago. Now it's clear Webtoons thinks that Rachel is their own personal J.K. Rowling, but they forgot the part where Rachel is creating for an incredibly niche and historically unprofitable medium that is nowhere near as big as what Harry Potter was back in its prime, and - personally speaking - that Rowling and Rachel are both, well... terrible at what they do.

Webtoons also has the added burden of not being a startup company. They're not some grassroots Silicon Valley tech startup run by a bunch of friends "with a dream", they're an extension of an industry that thrives overseas but barely has any infrastructure to support it here. They've been bankrolled for years by an overseeing tech company - Naver - but have consistently failed to get out of the red and so of course, now they're turning to public investments to help them out and subsequently, are passing that debt off to the next highest bidder, which is Wall Street. They had nearly a decade to figure their shit out here in the West and while they had their opportunities to thrive, those opportunities have come and gone, a lot of doors have closed and now this all feels like their own attempts to rip those doors back open again.

There is a LOT to insinuate already that Webtoons - a Korean-hosted platform - wasn't ready to enter the Western market and this fumbling of their public stock image is yet another great example of that. Even outside of Webtoons, other Korean-run platforms like Tapas have relied on private investments to keep them afloat (and still do, Tapas is still operating privately) and have routinely struggled to get a real foothold in the greater Western industry despite how much they hyped themselves up as the "next big thing". They're all playing the same game over and over again expecting better scores even though the playing fields are entirely different than what they've come to expect in Korea, where much of the entertainment industry is built around webtoons, much like how our entertainment industry in the West is built around comic giants like Marvel and DC (and even those giants are faltering as we've been seeing over the past several years).

Anyways. I don't know if this lawsuit is gonna go anywhere, there's a lot to the legal process that could lead to a variety of different outcomes, but at the very least, their plummeting stock value and the lawyers circling them from above is yet another notch on their belt of fuck-ups over the past few years. I know it's easy to say this in hindsight and I'm not the kind of guy to say "I told you so", but considering I've been following along with the bullshit of these major platforms for years and knew as soon as Webtoons was rumored to be going forward with an IPO that it would lead to disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying, "No really, I told you so." And I don't entirely blame the investors for that (except for the ones that clearly didn't read the fine print) - I also blame Webtoons for that, because they are a chronically unprofitable company run by a bunch of clowns who manufactured their own demise by getting in WAY over their heads and clearly don't even have a concept of a plan let alone an actionable one.

And that sucks, because the people who stand to get hurt the most are the ones who were made those empty promises years ago, long before the platform entered Wall Street - and that's the creators who were promised that their livelihoods would be secured and their work would be protected.

I will forever bully and make fun of Webtoons for everything they've done in and to this industry. I hope at the very least those investors learned an expensive lesson, and that the damage these lawsuits have already caused to Webtoons' public image - regardless of whether or not these lawsuits win - empowers others who have been screwed over by them to speak up and make their moves. They are not a monolith. They are a brittle business operating from the trunk of a clown car on their way to becoming a penny-stocks sham.

Fuck Webtoons <3

[theswordwizard]

ai art: both sides

I think a lot of non-artists are also just really and truly not understanding the big picture. I personally could not care less about that cat image, it was fun, whatever, but you are only producing those kinds of images in the sense that an art director "produces" whatever art they are in charge of. They are telling another artist what to do, even guiding them, but they are not considered the artist themselves. Artists who are creating their own art, who are trying to survive off of their work (many of whom have some form of disability, as art is easy to do while sitting down, etc), who are already in the middle of fighting to not just be tossed aside for a product which doesn't even produce the results it claims, are reacting negatively because they are seeing that in parallel with tabling spaces taken up with people presenting generated art as their own illustration, and game devs/producers using it as a way to explicitly avoid paying people for work, while using something that was trained on their work.

"Why do people react so strongly to things possibly being AI art?" If you want to keep it out of the courts, then public opinion matters all the more. It's about a party line that is easily communicable. Most artists are going to be strongly anti-AI because that's the best way to protect themselves than trying to "open a discussion" about it. It's like nurse scabs. We can argue back and forth all day about the intricacies of scabbing for important jobs, but at the end of the day the party line will generally be "scabbing is bad," "we don't like scabs," "scabbing harms workers."

People are trying to compare people getting mad about it to people getting mad about Duchamp's fountain, which just lets me know about their level of art education, and the level of which they like to talk out their ass.

Duchamp's fountain isn't a major point in art history because of the object itself, its because of the STATEMENT. It is because of the placement of the object IN THE GALLERY. It is the equivalent of a political pamphlet, but summed up in a single object that incites discussion around his political statement. It isn't about the object it is about the CONCEPT. We can literally call anything we want "art" if we dedicate ourselves to reframing it and treating it as such, it's just that most non-artists don't even care. They want the label of being an artist without even putting in an effort to. It's like if I wanted to be called a photographer and I wanted people to treat me as such, and so I just made a portfolio of pictures I took off of Pinterest or even a stock photo site, because I've decided that it's the photos I would WANT to take, and thus I can just act like they have anything to do with me.

There have been arguments over much more "similar" things for a long time too. Since the 90s Richard Prince has been taking people's instagram photos, making slight tweaks to avoid copyright, and then printing them large scale and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars. Technically legal, kinda shitty, as he does it without even contacting the (plenty of times, women) original posters. And that's just with selfies people have taken! But I don't see people mentioning that because a lot of people don't like him, and most people arguing to legitimize AI art to be uncontested don't actually care that much about contemporary art. They have zero real interest in being an artist and talking about art to that degree, to have those discussions in a way that isn't validating themselves. Duchamp's fountain in a gallery incites discussion because galleries are places of art discussion. If someone brought a crate of mechanically woven baskets (that they bought from amazon) to a craft fair, people are going to be rightly pissed off. It's about context.

It's also, in my opinion, a similar discussion to the one that was big on twitter not too long ago, where people argued that artists weren't obligated to be able to draw non-white and/or disabled people. Which, sure, but you probably aren't that good of an artist if you don't know how to. And someone going through a portfolio of exclusively white people might go "huh, only white people. interesting." (I even want to include a gotcha here! If an artist has a portfolio of white people, and they have a section talking about their focus being painting their family tree in like, northern Ireland, it's gonna be a totally different story. why, you ask? because there is an underlying concept other than "wow this artist really only likes white people." this is part of the reading comprehension test that will follow.)

And you know what, I'm going to be honest - and this is likely a result of me not being a photographer - but I'm not even really talking all that much about AI photo edits, outside of the large scale implications of what it means that anyone can create a highly realistic image of anything they want (including political figures, female celebrities, you see my pattern here) with zero effort, on a mass scale we've never seen previously. I think they should only be used with stock, and I even think that photographers who upload their works should get additional payments from it. I actually had used a generator back in 2019 for a project, well before this even became a discussion, and it was even featured in a gallery show for a bit! The overall theme was "fake news," so it was a conceptual piece with fake landscape photography that I made with some beta tool. The point was the tool in combination with the tool's result, not how pretty the fake pictures were. I also want to say it was trained a lot more ethically than a lot of the generators that are so popular today.

And this isn't to say that you have to have a gallery or be so fully integrated in a physical art scene or whatever to be able to make conceptual art or talk about it - honestly I think zines that could actually combine whatever your concept is with having room to talk about it, and they're easy to create both physically and digitally and share. maybe just don't have it be around "look at all these pretty pictures that I made with AI." similar to how people at the art book fair aren't going to be impressed with me being like "look at all these pretty pictures I found on Unsplash."

Sure, AI art is "real art," but it's not illustration or photography or whatever, it's conceptual art. Which means it's main goal is to incite thought and discussion about it. Like the D&D book's release that suddenly turned to being about the AI art they used. So if you want to be an artist using primarily AI, go ahead, no one can stop you, but the topic is culturally significant with the current fight between the entertainment unions to protect their livelihoods, so the discussion will be heated.

[midnightbears]

✿ tell 'em how the crowds went wild! tell 'em how i hope they shine!

⎯ in which you look back on how grateful you are for the opportunity bestowed upon you. aka: you joined the opla's cast!

#STARRING. iñaki godoy, mackenyu, jacob romero, taz skylar, emily rudd ft. fem!reader [elle fanning 4 faceclaim but u can imagine y/n anyway u wish!].

#TAGS. sfw, kind of context, a bit of smau but its tiny. mentions of covid just in case it's triggering?

#NOTE. pardon my rusty writing but i really wanted to get this out!!! i added an oc from one piece for the sake of the story but she's barely mentioned so uuuh yuh! timeline may be wrong but i work with what i'm given please bear with me. let me know if you would like more fics of this y/n??? ALSO IGNORE THE WATERMARKS ON THE PHOTOS I NEEDED TO MAKE THEM NEATER

© midnightbears on tumblr, apr 2024. please do not repost to another platform, plagiarize, translate, use for AI-related purposes or claim as your own.

In the past, if someone were to come up to you and tell you that you’d be a part of the One Piece Live Action main cast in the future, you would’ve probably laughed in their faces despite your wishful thinking.

At that time, you were content with your work, doing short theatre plays with companies or gaining minor roles in musicals. Everything changed when you landed the role for the one-woman show Fleabag for a limited time on London’s West End after the leading actress underwent emergency surgery for an appendectomy. You only acted as the sex-obsessed mess of a woman for about three weeks, but it was enough time for people to notice you, to really see you.

You believed your career had reached its pinnacle when you were cast as Katherine Howard in Six: The Musical in London. Your name had become somehow well-known in the musical theatre world, and you had a small but dedicated fan base who liked uploading edits of you being a dork during the Megasix on YouTube and TikTok. 

Months later, you were bound to play as Fantine for Les Miserables when COVID abruptly struck, and you were dismayed that your job was ripped from you so abruptly. Your best friend, the sweetest person on earth, insisted on you moving in with her in fear that you’d be evicted from your apartment.

Months passed, and you eventually found a small way to help your friend pay rent by offering singing and acting lessons online to musical-aspiring teenagers. Since you had gained many followers from your earlier work on social media, it didn’t surprise you when the classes became sold out.

Your friend also convinced you to create a YouTube channel for you to upload videos of yourself (sometimes joined by her) where you watched and commented shitty movies, followed DIY tutorials just for the fun of it, performed covers of your favorite songs, and just generally vlogged your life (along with reactions to Taylor Swift’s (From The Vault) songs).

At first, you thought it was pretty stupid, but you were delightfully proved wrong when your videos harbored over 200k-300k views on a bad day, so you found no reason to stop as COVID-19 continued, growing to gain a little over five hundred thousand followers. Your reactions were often used for TikTok audios or clips, so you found your popularity growing and evolving during that year.

You believed yourself to be a general, simple woman. People liked you because you were elegant and levelheaded, although you could sometimes be chaotic. You also had a subtle sense of humor that many found charming. But mostly, you grew a steady fan base because your videos and presence comforted countless young adults and teenagers.

You were an optimist and a reassuring one, so during the times when COVID was so prominent, people sought refuge from the monstrosities of the world in your videos, where you seemed to connect with them even though you were on the other side of the screen.

However, everything changed somewhere in 2020-2021. That evening, your best friend got home from work with excitement practically oozing out of her every pore. You and your best friend were avid anime watchers and manga readers, so you couldn’t help the face you made when she told you that One Piece was getting a live-action.

Although you were skeptical, your friend practically insisted you send an audition tape. You grimaced at that. It was well-known that live anime actions were almost always corny and cringeworthy compared to the original work, and people never liked them. You had learned that much from Death Note and a couple of others. However, your best friend convinced you with this argument:

“If it’s that bad, then at least you’ll gain more followers out of the memes that people will make, and if it’s good, you’ll still get famous anyway!”

Eventually, you sent a video of you performing one of the lengthy monologues from Fleabag to your agency and simply hoped for the best. Your friend was practically rooting for you to get the role of Anastasia, one of the first integrants of the Straw Hat crew, joining before Sanji and after Usopp. You adored her as she greatly reminded you of your late mother, although you would be happy with any role.

Somewhere in November 2021, you remember a lot of screaming and crying. When you try to look back on it, all you remember is the happiness you felt when you received confirmation of the role of Anastasia. You were practically over the moon, and you and your friend celebrated inside your small apartment. You were entirely alone, just two drunk girls dancing and cheering, until one of the neighbors knocked on the ceiling with a broom.

liked by inakigo, emilyrudd and 574,949 others

yourusername actually lost for words and filled to the brim with gratitude...... i cannot express how excited i am to play my girl anastasia and bring her to life. from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who has supported me. your faith in me means everything. congrats to iñaki, emily, jacob, mackenyu and taz, thank you to onepiecenetflix, thank you to my best friend for convincing me to audition for the role, and thank you, oda sensei, for putting anastasia's heart in my hands. love u all <3

view all comments

November 10, 2021

y/nsfanclub.02, AAAAAAAA SO EXCITED FOR THIS I ACTUALLY CANT BELIEVE IT

⤷ starl6ighwnb, LIKE FR IM GNAWING AT THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE THIS IS INSANE

user8392y3r927y, HELLO YOUR GRACE ANASTASIA

inakigo, Congrats!!!!!!!!

taz_skylar, 🔥🔥🔥

The One Piece fan base dearly loved the character of Anastasia, a well-mannered, bubbly, upbeat, fashion-loving duchess who always spoke in a Transatlantic accent but also had a quick wit and a bit of a sweet tooth. Anastasia’s dream was to become the most dangerous pirate to ever grace the seas and prove everyone who doubted her wrong.

Of course, with a big character came a big responsibility.

Sometimes, insecurity nearly got the better of you. You had to fill huge shoes, and there were many people to convince and impress. However, your love for this project was bigger than the gnawing uncertainty on the back of your neck, so you continued strongly until the end of Season One, finding comfort in your cast mates and the countless people who counted on you and, most importantly, believed in you.

Oda handpicked you, and that argument alone was enough to shoot any insecurities away.

Well, needless to say, people loved you!

Critics acclaimed your portrayal of the character, as well as the commendable chemistry you shared with the rest of the cast. The fans found it incredibly funny that your character was the complete opposite of how you actually acted in real life, and you often found yourself blissfully immersed in the fan base's love and praise.

Your channel and social media suddenly grew tenfold. Although you had stopped uploading videos every week due to the recording of season one, your followers were more than happy to wait for your return, and as one would expect, they were thrilled to have you back once you did upload a vlog explaining everything.

Over the course of the six months, you had been recording from time to time for a YouTube video in the set. Previously, you had asked the producers for permission to record some behind-the-scenes for your channel and your usual interactions with the rest of the cast with your personal Sony camera, as you felt it would be a nice way to bring the fans and the cast closer.

The producers gave the okay on the condition that you would wait until the first season aired on Netflix. You happily agreed and carefully began recording some scenes of your dressers and hairdressers as they prepared you, a few shots of your instructor showing you how you were supposed to use the guns that Anastasia employed... simple things.

Back in the day, you were still getting acquainted with the other cast members, and you didn't want to seem rude by forcibly making them appear on your videos, so you waited for a few weeks until you could properly call yourself companions. Then, you invited them to appear in the videos.

Iñaki, Taz, and Jacob liked to take advantage of the little free time they had between scenes they didn't appear in to innocently steal your camera and use it to their heart's content. One day, you got home only to find the memory card was completely full. It was an extensive video of them walking around the set, with Taz recording while Kiki and Jacob pointed out random stuff to the people who lived inside your camera, as Jacob liked to call them.

Mackenyu, being more reserved and introverted, mostly liked to act as a cameraman for you as you showed the props you used and other things, often making comments or turning the camera around whenever you referred to something.

Meanwhile, Emily had a natural knack for being in front of the camera. Whenever you asked her to join in, she effortlessly slipped into the co-host role, bantering with you and adding her own insights into the behind-the-scenes world of the show.

With the first season out of the way, you took the time to carefully pick what videos you wanted to use in the final tape, and it took you a little over a month and a half to properly edit it and turn it into a wonderful thirty-minute-long behind-the-scenes. You even sent it to the producers and your co-stars in case there was a scene they wanted deleted. Fortunately, they all gave you the okay.

You teased the video a bit on your Instagram before uploading it a few days later, and the support it received was out of this world. It gained over two million views and hundreds of thousands of likes.

You were kind of expecting this. While some BTS had already been uploaded on YouTube, yours was different because you were showing it from your perspective. The fans loved every second of it, and even started asking for a second or third part. You even saw new videos on YouTube of recompilations from your video with the titles being silly things like The One Piece Cast Being Chaotic for Seven Minutes.

At that moment, your life felt so full. You were getting contacted by industries who wanted you to appear on their videos and their stages, thousands of fans who loved you, and a feeling so peculiar that this would be eternal.

liked by taz_skylar, morganlogoff and 1,523,199 others

yourusername missing my wig and my gang hours ☹️

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November 10, 2023

morganlogoff, love love love you💗💗💗

curlikaqy, NO ONE KNOWS I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN

emilyrudd, GIRL I WANT TO SEE YOU COME BACK TO AMERICA

bookofjacob, missing your camera hours💔

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not being entirely negative about AI?

05/16/2024

Just before anyone scrolls down just to vote YTA, please hear me out: I'm not an AI bro, I am a hobbyist artist, I do not use generative AI, I know that it's all mostly based off stolen work and that's obviously Bad.

That being said, I am also an IT major so I understand the technology behind it as well as the industry using it. Because of this I understand that at this point it is very, very unlikely that AI art will ever go away, I feel like the best deal out of it that actual artists can get out of it is a compromise on what is and isn't allowed to be used for machine learning. I would love to be proven wrong though and I'm still hoping the lawsuits against Open AI and others will set a precedent for favouring artists over the technology.

Now, to the meat of this ask: I was talking in a discord sever with my other artist friends some of which are actually professionals (all around same age as me) and the topic of discussion was just how much AI art sucks, mostly concerning the fact that another artist we like (but don't know personally) had their works stolen and used in AI. The conversation then developed into talking about how hard it is to get a job in the industry where we live and how AI is now going to make that even worse. That's when I said something along the lines of: "In an ideal world, artists would get paid for all the works of theirs that are in AI learning databases so they can have easy passive income and not have to worry about getting jobs at shitty companies that wouldn't appreciate them anyway." To me that seemed like a pretty sensible take. I mean, if could just get free money every month for (consensually) putting a few dozens of my pieces in some database one time, I honestly would probably leave IT and just focus on art full time since that's always been my passion whereas programming is more of a "I'm good at it but not that excited about doing it, but it pays well so whatever".

My friends on the other hand did not share the sentiment, saying that in an ideal world AI art would be outlawed and the companies hiring them would not be shitty. I did agree about the companies being less shitty, but disagreed about AI being outlawed. I said that the major issue with AI are the copyright concerns so if tech companies were just forced to get artist's full permission to using their work first as well as providing monetary compensation there really wouldn't be anything wrong with using the technology (when concerning stylized AI art, not deepfakes or realistic AI images as those have a completely different slew of moral issues).

This really pissed a few of them off and they accused me of defending AI art. I had to explain to them that I wasn't defending AI art as it was NOW, because I know that the way it works NOW is very harmful, I was just saying that as an IDEAL scenario, not even something I think is particularly realistic, but something I think would be cool if it were actually possible. The rest of the argument was honestly just spinning in circles with me trying to explain the same points and them being outraged at the fact that I'm not 100% wholeheartedly bashing even the mere concept of AI until I just got frustrated and left the conversation.

It's been about a week and I haven't spoken to the friends I had that argument with since then. I still interact on the server and I see them interacting there too but we just kinda avoid each other. It's making me rethink the whole situation and wonder if I really was in the wrong for saying that and if I should just apologize.