#most hyped nfts

[elalmadelmar]

95% of NFTs are worthless, and most of the most expensive ones are priced between $5-100 where they were once drawing millions US$ apiece

Not a moment too soon, and fully deserved 😎

In conclusion-

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market” is a new report from dappGambl, a community of experts in finance and blockchain technology. Upon analysis of 73,257 NFT collections, the authors found that 69,795 have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH), the second most-popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin. In practical terms, that means 95 percent of NFTs wouldn’t fetch a penny today — a spectacular crash for assets that reached a trading volume of $17 billion amid a frenzied bull market in 2021. The study estimates that some 23 million investors own these tokens of no practical use or value.

[...]

The “Dead NFTs” report observes that the nearly 200,000 NFT collections “with no apparent owners or market share” identified by the study caused carbon emissions equivalent to the annual output from 2,048 houses, or 3,531 cars.

[lizardsfromspace]

Do you ever get kind of interested in a subject where nothing weird has happened yet but you know something weird is going to happen?

Anyway, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was originally a upscale resort community, and also still is: it's where rich people from Chicago kept their lake houses, and maybe still do. Its heyday was in the early to mid 20th century, where its status as a vacation destination was so set that Hugh Hefner even put the first ever "Playboy Resort" there. I haven't been there myself, so I may be wrong, but it doesn't give me, like, Pigeon Forge or Niagara Falls energy. The list of attractions online seems to be spas and parks and a few theaters.

But Lake Geneva is more famous now for its most famous son, Gary Gygax. Over the course frigid Wisconsin winters, he and several wargaming friends who didn't become famous developed tactical wargaming into the game Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1970s. He also began hosting a small gaming meetup in Lake Geneva, later called Gen Con, which outgrew the town by the late 1970s.

As I understand it, Lake Geneva didn't really embrace its status as the Birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons. When Gygax died, there were fan-funded tributes here and there, and fans created a new convention in his honor called Gary Con where they played games from his time at TSR, but D&D was still a niche hobby and not the thing you define a rich people resort town around.

Then, whoops, shows like Critical Role turned D&D into one of the most popular entertainment properties in the world! Now there's D&D-themed events popping up all over the place. Some of this is normal, like efforts to fund a more prominent memorial for Gary Gygax, and a Dragon Days Fantasy Festival. But some are going further. Because there are now at least two proposals to create immersive, D&D-themed LARP experiences in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, population 8,227

One is a large themed restaurant/bar/wedding venue (?) called the Griffin and Gargoyle, which is supposedly opening in 2024, though all the art is concept art and they're still looking for investors.

The other one is Giantlands, the proposed theme park where the tickets will be NFTs, based on a game no one's heard of developed by the son of Gary Gygax by a company that legally can't call itself TSR anymore, but tried anyway before rebranding as Wonderfilled, and who also tried to make old Gygax games even more racist? I can't even begin to explain this. I think they got dunked on years ago but they were still hyping up its Lake Geneva theme park that's definitely going to exist this week (this is from August 11th)

What's incredible to me here is that they're boasting that their LARP theme park will be from the makers of Evermore Park. Nothing says quality in immersive fantasy roleplaying parks like someone whose main claim to fame is making that other one that failed. Wonder how many real tombstones and haunted dolls they'll buy this time. And this one appears to have fighting arena

I seriously doubt these are the only two pitches. Everyone with too much money and a love for theme parks feels the little voice in their head saying they can do the Star Wars Hotel right. I think what gets me here is, nobody would put anything like this in Lake Geneva otherwise. It's small, it's located in Wisconsin so it'd have to be seasonal, and it's less than two hours away from Wisconsin Dells - an entire town of kitschy roadside attractions - and even closer to Chicago, which is Chicago. Its tourism niche is beaches and homes around a scenic lake. The only reason to place anything there would be to honor Gary Gygax, and uh, I don't think the younger people who got into D&D with 5E really care about him, or even necessarily know who he is. Gary Con and most Gygax-themed events are for old-school gamers, not the Critical Role crowd. And they especially don't care about whatever Giantlands is. Giantlands as a game is so old-school there isn't even a PDF of the book, it's physical only. They want to build a full theme park around a game you can't even buy on DrivethruRPG. Anyway I hope all this open bc it would be funny

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

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/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

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

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

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[contextfreepatentart]

how many of these are/were for nft metaverse hype slop

Too many.

The NFT ones are mostly obvious thanks to the horrid art style/literal Bored Apes present or the flowcharts just spelling out some horrid idea. The metaverse ones can be a bit less readily identifiable, but I would say the three most common gaming patent genres I see are:

Advertising

Metaverse

Blockchain

It's a bleak picture of what sort of innovations the games industry feels are worth calling dibs on in 2024.

[jeffgerstmann]

Are we fucking doomed with AI? At this point more and more people are ignoring the negative implications (stealing art from actually talented people), sooner than later all content is going to be generated by a bunch of no talent hacks who couldn't think an original thought if their life depended on it. Burn it all down, this shit fucking sucks.

I think most of that shit is going to blow up and send companies like Nvidia and Microsoft crashing to earth. There will be uses for that technology but the way it’s being pitched right now to investors feels really unrealistic. When you add in all the NFT grifters who migrated right over to becoming AI grifters you’ve just got a lot of hype that probably won’t translate into actual user interest.

It’s sad watching companies and people who have been around long enough to know better jumping into this shit because it’s just the current hot thing.

[pb-dot]

Some Thoughts on the Reddit Blackout

Like many new arrivals on Tumblr these days, I used to be a Redditor until recent developments encouraged me to take my business elsewhere, and I have been following the development of the story as thoroughly as I can without actually giving Reddit any more traffic. With the most recent development of the Reddit admin corps taking on a suite of strategies lifted straight from the depression-era railroad baron playbook, I figured the time has come to talk a little about the wider implications of this whole story.

The Tech sector is, to the best of my understanding, in a vulnerable place right now. After the Web 2.0 gold rush and years of consolidation and growth from the biggest actors, your Alphabets, Twitters, Metas, and so on, many of the larger sites and services are reaching the largest size they can expect to grow to. How, for instance, could Facebook or Twitter grow much more now that everyone and their mother is on Facebook and Twitter? Prior to the Musk buyout, Twitter seemingly settled on upping engagement, making sure people were on Twitter longer and invested more energy and emotion in the platform, usually by making damn sure the discourse zapping through that hellhole was as polarizing and hostile as possible. Meta, meanwhile, has been making bank on user data as advertisers, AI folks, and any number of other actors salivate over getting their hands on the self-updating contact and interest registry that is Facebook.

With the rise of what we apparently have decided to call AI, data is now more valuable than ever. I consider this to be yet another Tech Hype Bubble on the level of NFTs or Metaverses, but, like with the two above, I can imagine it's hard to explain that when you are a Tech CEO and your shareholders ask you "Hey, how do you plan on earning us money off of this AI/NFT/Metaverse thing?" This is not to say CEO Steve Huffman isn't handling this whole thing with the grace of a three-legged hippo, but merely to suggest that his less-than-laudable decisions and actions in this mess don't arise from his character alone but also is a result of wider systemic issues.

One of these issues is the complicated role user data plays in modern websites and -services. Since its inception as a publicly accessible space, the question of how to monetize the Internet has been a tricky one for site and service owners. Selling ad space on your website or service has long been the go-to, but this in itself presents its own issues, having to curate content that is considered ad-friendly, malicious or careless actors making using said service or website less attractive for customers, and finally how to convince your advertisers that they get what they pay for in the first place, ie. "how do I know people even look at our ads?" All of this is before you even stop to consider how ads massively favor large, established actors.

It's no small wonder, then, that several startups in the era of internet mass adoption chose to forgo ads, or at least massively deprioritize them and/or relaunch them as "promoted posts," in an attempt to escape the stigma around ads. Meta/Facebook is probably the biggest fish in this particular pond, but we also see other services such as Twitter and Reddit follow the same pattern.

What makes this work is that the data these platforms collect from their users isn't all that valuable on a person-to-person basis, knowing that so-and-so is 32 years old, lives in a traditionally conservative part of the city, goes to Starbucks a lot, and listens to Radiohead isn't particularly useful information for anyone but a dedicated but lazy stalker; When viewed as an aggregate, however, large collections of data on a large population becomes quite valuable. This is especially true if you're working with, say, targeted ads or political campaigns. Look no further than the Cambridge Analytica data scandal for an example.

Now, all this is to illustrate the strange position the user occupies in Web 2.0. We tend to think of ourselves as the customer of Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and so on, but it isn't the case. After all, we don't pay for these services, and if we do it's to buy freedom from ads or other minor service modifications. It is more correct to say that we make up the product itself. This is true in two respects, first, an active social community is vital for social media to not be entirely pointless, and second, we generate the data that the platform holder seeks to monetize. This hybrid product/participant role doesn't map cleanly to traditional understandings of "worker," but I argue it is a closer fit than "customer."

All of this is to say that it is immensely gratifying to see the Reddit Blackout taking the shape of a strike rather than the more typical boycott model we've seen in the internet-based protests of yesteryear. Much of this, I think, we can thank the participating Reddit moderators. While the regular platform user can be *argued* to be a worker, the moderator inarguably is one, and the fact that they aren't paid for their efforts is more a credit to the prosocial nature of humans than to the corporate acumen of the platform holders. Either way, moderating a subreddit is work, if the subreddit is large, it's quite a lot of work, and moderators keeping malicious actors, scammers, and hatemongers out of everyone's hair is a must for any decently sized social space to not be an objectively terrible experience. So, if you were to, for example, withhold your labor (moderating for free) which you as a worker can do, it would be plain irresponsible to leave the place open for said bad apples to ruin everyone's bunches, thus the shutdowns.

I don't think it's a controversial take to claim that the Reddit admins also view this more as a strike than a boycott, given their use of scabs, intimidation, and other strikebreaking tactics in an attempt to break the thing up. This is nothing new, and the fact that Reddit admins are willing to stoop to these scumbag tactics tells us that their bluster about the shutdown not affecting their bottom line is nothing more than shareholder-placating hot air.

As this entire screed has perhaps demonstrated, I believe the Reddit Blackout is important. My stay at Tumblr so far has been excellent and will probably continue past this strike no matter what outcome it has, but for others in my situation, or perhaps entirely alien to the Reddit biome, I ask you to consider: If we do not stop this level of consumer and user-unfriendly bullshit Reddit have been pulling on the API change, where will it pop up next? Who's to say the next bright idea in corpo-hell isn't "Hey boss, how about we charge these nerd losers a dollar per reblog? And maybe a fiver for a Golden Reblog (TM)?"

This is perhaps getting into grandstanding, but I believe we are way past due for a renegotiation of what it means to be a platform holder and -user on this hot mess of an internet. If we as users do not take an active, strong stance on the matter, the Steve Huffmans, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world will decide without us. One does not have to be a fortune teller to see that the digital world this would create would not have our best interests in mind any more than the current one does.

So, in closing, I wish to extend my wholehearted support to the participating Moderators of Reddit and everyone who has decided to take their business elsewhere for the duration of the shutdown. Even without getting into the nitty-gritty of the API situation, this is a fight worth having, and may we through it make a world that's just a little bit less shitty.

Become Ungovernable

Become Unprofitable

Stay that way.

[koysiini-keinumaan]

Käärtist Central Discord

Are you a writer/artist in the Käärijä fandom age 18+? Want a place to discuss and promote art, post WIPs and get constructive criticism? Want to connect with other creatives in the community? Then why not join Käärtist Central?

There are a few basic rules under the cut, but as stated above this is strictly for artists and writers aged 18 and up! This is for both safety and to stop the server becoming too overwhelming <3 Hope to see you there - please feel free to reblog so more people can see it!

JOIN LINK

Basic rules (please note this is not the full rules, just the basic most important ones. The others mostly regard where content should go in the server)

This server is strictly 18+. We do allow NSFW content and by joining this server you agree that you are both an adult and ok with potentially seeing such content. If you are found to be under 18 you will immediately be banned for your own safety.

This server is for artists and writers. We aim to keep numbers small and the purpose of the server focused to avoid it become too overwhelming for its members. You do not have to be actively posting your content to join - but we kindly ask that if you do not feel you fall into one of these categories you do not join the server. <3

We tolerate absolutely NO bigotry whatsoever, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia and ableism. Engaging in this behaviour - whether in general or towards other server members, will result in a ban. Personal reclamation of slurs or derogatory language -- eg. a lesbian calling themself a dyke -- does not fall into this. Please note that the server mod is openly pro-palestine and anti-ebu/esc and its bias and treatment of artists. While the subject of the genocide in gaza and occupation of palestine is unlikely to be a topic, we ask that you leave if this is something you feel staunchly against and engage in the community elsewhere.

We also do not tolerate any harassment, bullying or making fun of anyone. This includes talking about other people behind their backs or reposting their art with the purpose of making fun of it. Engaging in this behaviour - whether in general or towards other server members, will result in a ban.

Please only provide constructive criticism and feedback if asked for in the relevant channels! And hype up your fellow creatives <3

NO AI image generation. NO NFTs.

[scarefox]

Signed up to watch a 2h speech / presentation I need to attend... BUT it is online via zoom so I don't have to go outside and can sit on my couch in a blanket and drink coffe!

It's about new AI laws and legally save AI software... I need to know this as graphics designer 😔

---

lol started with a AI animated avatar / deepfake of himself that totally looked AI because the hand movements didn't match what he said.

Oh no, he is a Zuckerberg fanboy.

This is going to be fun. (probably will get pissed along the way tho)

But they have some lawyers there to answer questions. Yay Christian Solmecke is there too (popular german media lawyer on yt)

---

so far: unlike human made work, AI generated artwork or designs are not copyrighted (in germany) AND if the AI piece is based on an existing human made work and it's still visible in the AI piece you need to get the copyright from the original owner / creator (includes designs, logos, images, text and music)

Copyright owner can opt-out and sue if it's still gets used for AI training / generation (american laws aren't finished yet but also will go into that direction)

---

They test different AI software to give out a little comic scenario. And oh boy as a graphic designer with knowledge about typography the text is triggering me so hard. It's so bad. SEE alone typography is an area that can't be made by a machine because even tho it is based on design laws it's still an intuitive human-eye based way of design. There is a difference between mathematical-centered and optical-centered.

---

Man they are all so horny for AI and reduction of jobs and costs.... But no matter how good an AI could generate an image or video... it will never give you the raw files where you can do individual changes afterwards.

Besides that I still think humanity isn't ready yet for the power and options AI is giving us. (at least one of the very high quality AI builders isn't selling it atm because they are afraid that it will get misused for fake news and stuff, so they try to find a way to prevent that before they bring it on the market)

So many creative jobs and professions that will die out just for us to get 100% digital made "creative" content and advertisements :/ (so far even the most high quality AI still has some small uncanny vibe). Like even actors will be replaced in the future... all they need to do is allow companies to use their face / body.... there is literally a Black Mirror episode about that.

Reminds me of that one AI kpop idol project I have seen last year on tiktok.... absolutely creepy and wrong. I know some of us are simping over anime, game or vocaloid characters but... man idk, do yall want to simp over uncanny digital kpop idols who don't even exist nor actually work for their skills and talent? 💀 Being into an idol is not just about the visuals and songs, it's about their personality and individuality.... for me at least.... (but of course the kpop industry is one of the first trying this). I do like Taemin for example beacuse he's breaking out of the industry norms. AI dude could never be on his level.

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"Amazing. In a company in the US a CEO told us that with the use of an AI they could remove 700 jobs and save so much money!"

.... yeah cool. Maybe we should remove ALL jobs on this earth and let AI do it, so we humans don't do anything at all anymore. Oh wait, no, of course we still have to do hard repetitive labor like some work drones because it's cheaper than to build and maintain actual robots for these jobs.

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BRUH of course the event is mainly to sell an AI class from the hosting company. For the cheap price of 4900€ FOR THE LAST TIME because the next class will be over 6000€

I feel like AI bros always hype each other up to blow it all up artificially. Just like NFT and the mobile game market.

---

DID HE JUST SAY that there aren't enough graphic designer and programmer on the market and that they will profit from the support of AI?? (it's actually oversaturated and therefore jobs are hard to get) AI bros really live in a secluded bubble hu? Of course none of these dudes in this event are from the creative industry but lawyers and CEOs

[queerautism]

'quests' for the black mirror NFT 'experience' are finally up, after much hype... And most of them are basically transparent attempts to get more engagement on twitter. Honestly kinda pathetic

[whisperingrockandroll]

COMING SOON: CLASSIC COMICS, REMASTERED BY AI!

01/04/2024

It's no secret that I'm not the best artist in the world. Although I think I'm improving, I'm still FAR from professional. Looking back at some of my older comics is rough.

Thankfully, that won't be a problem anymore! As everyone knows, new advancements in Artificial Intelligence have taken the internet by storm! Like any tool, AI is only as good as the task it's used for and the person using it, which is why I'm proud to announce I'll be remaster all of my older comics with AI! Using the power of upscaling technology and training data, even the most crudely drawn comic can from this:

To this!

[Insert the two AI versions]

What a difference that makes. You can be assured that I vetted eached AI image with my own two eyeballs before they went up, and they look fantastic! They stay true to my original artistic vision while capturing the fidelity and majesty I've always wanted. Let's look at some more!

Old:

New:

Wow! What an amazing upgrade!

Now I can already hear some naysayers with their unreasonable strawman arguments right now:

"I think AI can have good uses, but I don't think this is one of them. Most public AI services use training data that's just artwork taken from people without permission, including copyrighted art. A lot of these places use predatory monetization schemes as if the work of the models can't be done without constant funding, when the reality is just about anybody could download Stable Diffusion online and run it themselves. The only ethical way to use generative AI is if you owned and created all the training data yourself, and even then the stuff it produces would be derivative and lacking originality. Again, I'm not saying I'm reflexively against AI for any use at all, and I've certainly enjoyed many of the memes people made with it. But as an actual artistic tool it's still ugly at this stage, and the potential for abuse is so high that I certainly don't think you should be using it to replace your whole comic yet."

To those people, I have one thing to say. Firmly, undeniably, and without any hestitation: can you honestly look at shots like THIS and tell me this use of AI isn't the future?

AI is the future, baby! This will not be like NFTs where it becomes a massively popular bandwagon, then the hype dies out within a year to be replaced by the next big fad.

[lemonade-luvr]

Today, we are deleting Facebook and launching Skibidi Book. With Skibidi Book, get ready to edge and goon with your friends like never before. Forget status updates. With Skibidi Book, you'll broadcast your Mew Time sessions live while a virtual Kai Cenant reacts in real time, hyping you up with every jawline gain. We're revolutionizing the Mewing Economy. Our advanced AI algorithms will track your progress, awarding you Skibidi Bucks for each millimeter, and the rumors are true. The ballsmaxxing feature is in beta, and those who dare will see unprecedented results in both ball weight and ball risk metrics, and no more newsfeed. On Skibidi Book, you don't scroll. You edge through an endless stream of Sigma edits featuring Joker, Thomas Shelby, and Patrick Bateman. The Skibidi Marketplace is your gateway to risk supremacy. Use those hard-earned Skibidi Bucks to buy rare Fortnite skins, exclusive Duke Dennis drip, and the most potent Mr. Beast Feastables imaginable. Achieve-goated Sigma status and unlock the ultimate prize, early access to new Skibidi toilet episodes, a guaranteed zero-phonum tax rate, and a virtual NFT replica of Mike Yacht. Next week, we're unleashing Instagram and what's gritty?

[zambicarts]

INCREDIBLE pic by my friend of me beating the crap out of the AI-gen Wacom dragon! The little glaze bucket! The nightshade plant! I am so happy!

My take on all this business under the cut:

I'm not worried about AI. At least not in the long term.

It does super suck right now, but I think if we can get through the next year or so, the hype will be dead and we'll be more powerful than ever. Couple reasons:

First, it has to pull content from somewhere. The more AI out there - images, chatbots, generative anything - the more it turns into a feedback loop on itself. I predict that within the year, everything's gonna sound like late-stage Pajama-Sam garbled nonsense and all the corporations will quietly scrap their AI programs and come crawling back.

Second, what most people are looking for in art, real art, is so much more than "pretty picture." We crave art and stories that MEAN something, that lets us share stories and be human together. Take that away, and you're left with the people/corporations who wanted the cheapest possible aesthetic... and they were gonna try and shaft artists anyway. The venn diagram between people who use generative imagery for their online brand and the people who tried to haggle me down from 15 bucks for my time is a circle.

TL;DR What we do as creatives is always gonna have value, and in times of corporate shittiness, it's important to hang on to that.

And of course, I will be first in line to point and laugh when all this goes the way of NFTs and crypto schemes in the next year or so. I hope you join me!

[melonefelone]

Have a dump of my various riddler headcanons because I want to share them 💔 not for any specific verse I just apply them as they make sense

- really good at like slight of hand magic (like that pulling quarters out from behind people’s ears stuff) flexes it a lot despite most people being pretty unimpressed since like - actual magicians exist

- chronic migraines; complains and whines about them when they are bad but most of the time seems pretty unfazed by them

- does all of his taxes by himself, and by hand. Refuses to invest in an accountant or just do his taxes online like any normal person

- resident man friend for the women, drives them around to bars on girls nights and rounds them up when it is time to go home.

- texts extremely formally, basically like it is an email. Corrects other people’s grammar and spelling in texts, and shames people for using emojis

- on the note of texting, since he doesn’t use things like lol, he will type “Laughing Out Loud” refusing to do any abbreviations

- the equivalent to an elon musk dick rider but for bruce wayne on twitter. He hypes up anything wayne tech does on all of his accounts to an extreme where he probably gets bullied for it by teenagers online.

- watches reality tv (i.e keeping up with the Kardashians) but as a guilty pleasure.

- IT guy for most of the rogues, if they are willing to deal with him gloating and will pay him he doesn’t mind coming over and fixing their tech and computers. Its just a matter of it they mind dealing with him.

- bad reflexes + low pain tolerance + clumsy as shit sometimes. It is honestly a miracle he hasn’t died building his own death traps.

- working for him includes a dental and healthcare package (echo and query forced him to do this), if batman really kicks your ass you may get paid time off or if your spouse has a kid/someone has a kid he could possibly give paternity leave. Depends on his mood when you ask.

- honestly, really good at fantasy sports. he likes crunching the stats and all that. Kind of dominating the rogue fantasy league; likes coming up with the punishment for the losers

- also really good at stock investing; has considered running an NFT scam to trick stupid people into just giving him money. However doesn’t want to deal with the federal government if he gets caught since thats like… fraud.

- refers to his therapist in arkham strictly by their first name purely to be disrespectful

- possibly, maybe, composes his own music for anytime he takes over billboards in Gotham. Gotta make sure the people have some tunes to listen too as he quizzes Batman.

- allergic to animal fur, also just generally thinks animals are gross.

- the guy who talks through the entire movie trying to explain and guess every minute plot point and event in the movie. Gets mad when he is wrong, probably turns off the movie if someone points out that he was wrong. Generally just horrible to watch movies with, honestly.

- collects old books and stamps. Has a little shelf/binder full of them he is pretty proud of.

- banned from any and all escape rooms in Gotham after signing up for one once, covering the cameras, and converting it into a death trap for a poor staff member to find when he finally left because nobody in the staff is paid enough to kick him out

- really into gambling, gets really down and out when he loses, but whenever he wins he goes absolutely bananas. Definitely does not have a rigged slot machine in his little hideaway that only gives him wins that he uses whenever he is in a bad mood.

- car guy. he really likes cars.

- really nice cologne, still somehow always has an underlying smell of motor oil or a similar smell on him however. He doesn’t smell bad, it’s just something noticeable if around him for a while.

- gatekeeps whoever he orders all his custom stuff from.

- absolutely horrible at keeping secrets unless it has some sort of blackmail behind it, or he is getting paid to keep quiet.

[nova-ayashi]

NFTs and AI, the marriage

So, this is quite a complicated post to write, because a lot of people close to me abandoned me at the beginning of 2022 when I did these things. But if they're still around, or reading this, you must understand that making money, and affording things I've needed for over a decade, is my top priority (if you view me and the things I do in the harshest black and white light possible, maybe we weren't meant to know each other anyway).

Making money by any means necessary in the middle of increasing inflation, as the prices of food and necessities skyrocket, should be everyone's priority. Especially if you are a normal person who isn't rich.

That said, I had not one, but a few hand drawn NFT projects. I made them myself. I bought into the Ethereum network and got featured by the official Twitter account, a full year before Elon Musk bought and destroyed the website.

(pieces from my project, Catgirl Pixel Club, including a screenshot of Twitter's ownership of one I made named Skelly)

I made a little bit of money, bought a bunch of things I needed, and then watched the whole scene turn into an obsessive gambler's paradise for scams and trickery (which is still happening, as I type this).

But I left that all behind and put the project I was and still am casually working on up on my website, for free. Nowadays I've mostly returned to music and writing.

I had a lot of fun making these things, though, and after I left behind the blockchain mess, I realized that I could still do this, because the part I liked most about it was just that--making the art.

(pieces from my current, now completely free project, the haxPunks)

None of these were generated by anything. All of them were inspired by cryptopunks, which, funnily enough, was a completely free project before NFTs became a thing.

But not even cryptopunks were fully and completely drawn by hand. And most NFT projects you see aren't either. Nearly all of them are cheaply made, auto-generated bundles of assets that were made once and forgotten.

And you might ask yourself, "How in the world does or would this have anything to do with AI?"

What was and still is the purpose of the current atmosphere of NFTs?

To make as much money as possible for as little effort as possible.

If you can autogenerate assets, and then autogenerate 1000 utility avatars using those assets, you have a machine that doesn't even require an artist.

The wild thing is, they were doing this before these algorithms gained major steam and started stealing art all over the internet. I remember the ads on Facebook for the software that could "generate fully 3d NFTs for you in minutes!"

I got into NFTs because I wanted a new way to share art, and I wanted to do something fun.

Most people get into NFTs because they want to be millionaires for nothing.

We are not the same.

And AI is one side of the same coin.

If you buy into the AI "art" hype, you are buying into what is an extension of something most people already hate. or are at least very leery of.

Make art, do it with your own hands no matter how good or bad it looks, and whether or not anyone likes it. Because 50 years from now we could be surrounded by media that has no soul, connected to no artists, and if nobody's making anything just because a machine is sampling things from half a century before it destroyed society ...

then we as a species are surely dead.

Thank you for reading.

[concerthopperblog]

Avenged Sevenfold’s Life is But a Dream Tour

Avenged Sevenfold is a band I’ve followed and listened to for a long time. From their early years until now, they have evolved collectively as a band, overcoming many hurdles over the years, and also evolved their music simultaneously.

Being a member of their NFT token club, the Deathbats Club, or the DBC, I knew I had no choice but to jump at the opportunity to photograph them during their stop on the Life Is But A Dream tour. For those of you who have no clue about the DBC, I’ll drop some helpful information at the end of this article.

Their opening act was Kim Dracula. There’s no better way to explain Kim’s music than saying this is just the beginning for him. While still very fresh on the scene, his potential is limitless. You could describe him as similar to a fine wine, one could say. He will only get better and better with time. If you think he’s a sleeper, you’re wrong. This Australian act will be a top contender in a few years!

Kim Dracula is an Australian alternative/indie music artist whose songs have achieved popularity on TikTok.

Following behind was another artist I’ve listened to for a long time and this would be Ronnie Radke’s Falling in Reverse. Ronnie has a truly unique perspective when it comes to music and it’s brilliant. Falling in Reverse continues to bend genres and isn’t defined to any type of music. His vision is his vision and the passion spills into the crowd with every note. Love him or hate him, as most people do one of those, you can’t deny that he has an extreme amount of talent and passion. The music scene and the world needs more of Ronnie, a genuine person who speaks their mind and continues to break the norms. The highlight of the show wasn’t him playing “Popular Monster” or “The Drug In Me Is You,” rather than when he split the pit wide open, hyped everyone up to go hard, and then sang Smash Mouth’s “All-Star!” Ronnie has a vision that is beautiful and insane.

The chair emerges and a spotlight beams down as M Shadows, draped in his “Nobody” ski mask, is sitting observing the crowd work into a small frenzy. “Game Over” and “Mattel” began and blended into each other. The best part of Game Over is the old-school hardcore punk feel it gives off, no doubt a tribute to Brooks Wackerman’s, Avenged Sevenfold’s drummer, legendary past bands within the punk scene. Most people disliked the new album from Avenged Sevenfold, but those people failed to see their vision. It’s about really pushing the envelope on music and their capabilities as artists. It’s about writing meaningful lyrics, it’s about topics they’re passionate about, and it’s about them producing an album that they love. Any band can regurgitate the same sound over and over, failing to evolve or change direction, and some do. While this album wasn’t for everyone, you can tell it was for them and the fans who just love all kinds of music. My favorite part of it all is that you can see how much they love to play this album. M Shadows looks like he’s constantly having a blast on stage. When an artist truly loves what they’re playing and it translates to live concerts, there’s no doubt that the audience feels it too.

While many old-school fans teared up during “So Far Away,” especially with a silhouette of their late drummer, The Rev, it was evident that there were a lot of new fans within the crowd. The largest burst of excitement from the entire night rang out when the iconic warbling sound, for a lack of better words, bellowed to mark the beginning of “Nobody.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with NFTs asor anything involving web3, that makes two of us. I’m not a cryptobro or an expert on the subject, but I do know about the DBC. While some NFTs are just JPEGs as some may say, the DBC is much more. They have perks or utilities attached to each one of them. What that means is that every Deathbat within the club has basic perks of skipping the line at every headlining show, exclusive DBC merch, and giveaways for members only and that’s every Deathbat. There are Deathbats that are rarer and more expensive and come with even more perks like meet and greet access for life, free tickets for life, limited merch drops, or even coffee with Brooks or golfing with M. Shadows. You can purchase DBC tokens on Coinbase NFT here!

The best part of the DBC is how active the band is within the Avenged Sevenfold Discord, especially M Shadows. He’s always in the Discord channel interacting with fans and he’s always lurking. Within the Discord channel, you can find the “Token Hub,” which is where you can ask anyone about how to purchase a DBC token if you’re on the fence or don’t know how to. Their Discord channel is really a one-stop shop for everything associated with the band, whether it is their march, tour dates, Drinks with Johnny, or anything else. The DBC acts like a family, queue “Welcome to the Family,” and it operates as such as well. Whether you want to purchase a Deathbat, that’s up to you, but giving the exclusive merch and skip-the-line perks alone is enough for me, hence why I own several DBC tokens, but being a fan is more than enough for the band and their 3rd leg of the Life Is But A Dream tour is rolling out next year, so make sure you check them out near you!

AVENGED SEVENFOLD "Life Is But A Dream…" 2024 North American tour dates:

March 06 - Buffalo, NY - KeyBank Center March 07 - Toronto, ON - Scotiabank Arena March 09 - Cleveland, OH - Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse March 11 - Grand Rapids, MI - Van Andel Arena March 13 - Cincinnati, OH - Heritage Bank Center March 15 - Des Moines, IA - Wells Fargo Arena March 16 - Lincoln, NE - Pinnacle Bank Arena* March 18 - Moline, IL - Vibrant Arena at The Mark March 19 - Indianapolis, IN - Gainbridge Fieldhouse March 21 - Uncasville, CT - Mohegan Sun Arena March 23 - Manchester, NH - SNHU Arena March 25 - Pittsburgh, PA - PPG Paints Arena March 26 - Columbus, OH - Nationwide Arena March 28 - Knoxville, TN - Thompson- Boling Arena March 29 - Raleigh, NC - PNC Arena March 31 - Newark, NJ - Prudential Center

* Without SULLIVAN KING; featuring support from VENDED