#sometimes rightly so

[lockea]

I can't make any comments on legality because I have complicated feelings I'll put in the tags, but OP is right and the puzzle art is a really good analogy for how Stable Diffusion works. Like they said, the puzzle piece fitting happens at the pixel level to create "new" art.

For an example, this was taken directly from DALL-E 2 (a popular algorithm and data set) showing its variation function.

[Alt text: On the left. The original "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painting. On the right, AI generated variations of the painting]

The problem becomes that if you describe the image you want well enough, it will generate a straight up stolen image instead of making an amalgamation of images in a new, transformative way.

I use DALL-E to play a game with my AI team at work (yes, I'm one of those evil Artificial Intelligence engineers) where we generate art based on a piece of media and try to guess the media portrayed. It's a fun little game that helps get me going every morning.

Here is my entry for "Final Fantasy VII" along with the prompt I used to generate it.

[ALT TEXT: image prompt reads "A dark and moody anime image of a man with yellow spiky hair holding a large sword staring up at a skyscraper." the man also has a yellow cape despite that not being in the prompt.]

So... that yellow cape, huh? I wonder where that came from...

Honestly? I don't know enough anime to tell you immediately which characters wear yellow capes that DALL-E thought that this render of Cloud needed one, but I can guarantee you it pulled enough anime images and fanart to have learned it somewhere.

And that's really the problem here. I did not tell the AI to make a cape. That cape is not a creation of the AI either because, as OP said, true Sci fi level AI does not exist. The cape is here because the artwork it was trained on had enough anime men in capes to give Cloud one.

That's not a good thing.

How AI Datasets ACTUALLY Work

I love the irony of techbros shouting “YOU NEO-LUDDITES JUST DON’T KNOW HOW THE TECH WORKS” when they obviously don’t know how AI datasets that generate images work.

This is not true “artificial intelligence.” It doesn’t see images, form an understanding of them, then create something new. It’s not like a person looking at photos of frogs and then making a new painting of a frog.

That’s what tech bros seem to not get. True artificial intelligence WOULD be able to do that.

But the machine being fed real art is NOT artificially intelligent. What it does is take dozens of images and break them up into teeny tiny pieces, like a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle but on a near pixel level. It also takes the understanding of those images based on what people say those images are.

Most puzzle-makers have the same die-cut, which means you can take pieces from multiple puzzles and put them together into something new. I won’t link it here so this post reaches the most people, but look up:

Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein

Examples of montage puzzle art:

What he did is EXACTLY what AI image generators do, except instead of using two or three artworks, one AI-generated image might use hundreds. And this is what those who actually understand the technology are trying to get across.

Right now, most things that exist are now fed into image datasets. The number of works that exist in midjourney and stable diffusion number in the literal billions. Datasets have stolen so much art that most people can’t fathom that kind of statistic because we’re just not capable of thinking in those kinds of numbers.

That’s why techbros think an art generator just takes inspiration from the works it has.

In reality, the reason tech-bros state that it takes them hours to get a particular set of prompts “just right” is because they are educating the machine. Basically, if you give it a set of prompts and it gives you something you don’t want, it is internally assigning labels to the pieces of the puzzle it gave you. Eventually, when you DO get what, the same datasets that produced those images will scrape them again and assign labels to pieces based on what is perceived as “correct.”

This is also why it is impossible to remove images from a dataset. Any image used to create an AI work must also exist within the work itself. Removing any one particular image necessitates finding and removing any child data produced from that image, or else the machine can literally just re-scrape it. 

Currently, because a dataset uses the data from hundreds of images to create a new work and does not compensate the original artists for the use of their art, this qualifies as theft under international copyright law.

I hope providing a real-world example of how datasets work is helpful.

[malacandrax]

if you're thinking of switching from a tiny tablet to a big one...I recommend shoulder workouts because I am a weak baby and I was getting really bad shoulder and neck ache from the extra movement hahaha. Muscular rather than tendon, so it's not the end of the world, but I have to now switch between the two tablet scales which is. very annoying to adjust to each time.

[smol-bean-of-the-smols]

here's my new icon !!

for those who don't know, this is based on his costume party unit in mayoi!

[tea-spawn]

Hello, Season 3 Alex. This new look is fine.

(Everyone looks fine)

Too bad it doesn't last.

You can literally see him crossing over to the darkside in these shots 😭

At least five to six shots of her lurking in the background, murmuring in Alex's ear... For a 2 minute trailer, that's a lot. They're clearly not shying away from the creepy predatoriness of this relationship and I am so here for that 🙌

But yeah, post-SCORPIA Alex is going to be the death of me (haha, geddit?) LOOK AT HIM. He looks so fucking tortureddd 🤐😩

Moral dilemmas, here we go✊

Anyway whoever decided to bless us with more of this duo needs a raise:

They were so correct.

I have such high expectations for this season and I can already tell it's not going to disappoint. Just like season 1 and 2 never did. Especially not with shots like these:

I don't know what we did collectively as a fandom to deserve this great an adaptation lol. I am simply filled with so much joy that, whatever happens, I can safely get excited about a story so close to my heart 🙏💘🙃

[undefeatablesin]

Thinking about your hunter OCs makes me think about my hunter OC and how they might get on.

The problem is that Stella was always more lover than fighter, tends to be more of a nervous wreck than one would expect from a hunter, and I think she'd be secretly scared of Aloysha...

Hey there!! Thanks for popping in!! I always love to discuss Hunter OCs with people lmao ✨️

But I am not surprised poor Stella would be a little scared of Aloysha though; that's honestly a very reasonable reaction for anyone to have to her company 😂 She can be quite intimidating at face value, given her coarse attitude and the very real threat of her more bestial nature lurking under the surface. She was hounded out of Yharnam in part for that very reason, though the real catalyst for that much was her brother Rain selling out her and her private affairs to his superiors (probably Hradi tbh lmao.) Even Aloysha's employer-turned-hunting partner, Ruza, found her extremely off-putting at first. People generally either find her insufferable or unnerving (or both!) and understandably so, with Aloysha being the sort of creature that she is.

However, Aloysha is definitely not all bad. She's one of the better people you could hope to bump into in Yharnam, honestly! Despite her hard edges and bestial qualities, she's very much lucid and rational; she makes for a valuable (and powerful!) ally if you get on her good side. So your hunter wouldn't have too much to worry about if she ever did cross paths with Aloysha. Sure, she's blunt, curt and a little rude, but she's relatively level-headed, and generally open to rubbing shoulders with other hunters. Her worst qualities only tend to show themselves in full when she is provoked–so a genial hunter will be (mostly) treated genially in return.

Well, except for maybe being teased a bit, but that's just par for the course with this woman 😂

[kyuutekyu]

But seriously... He needs to be give some rest for the next few days...

🥺

[dnangelic]

sometimes i think abt towa and argentine in the very last manga chapter n cry

[iamthepulta]

@harvestar The Myra questions are going to take some thinking so I wanted to focus on the fun Jamison ones. xD

8) Has your character ever fired a gun? If so, what was their first target?

Oof. Jamison has, I think. Guns aren't exactly common in New Winchester, but they're not uncommon either. There's the occasional range in back of the gentlemen club - (a misnomer, truly, because most of the gentlemen are there to cheat on their wives and drink cheap mushroom wine, but this is the Reach) - and he enjoys the time taking potshots at empty bottles while onlookers make bets. Jamison's sole motivation is to have the skill when the need arises though, which appears more and more likely as threat after threat against their newspaper arrive in the mail.

Which make it all the more bitter when the night arrives and there's no warning and no chance to aim. Just sunlight and blood.

19) What is your character’s biggest relationship flaw? Has this flaw destroyed relationships for them before?

SHIT that's a good question. Externally, it's probably something super mundane like pouring his milk before his cereal. In reality, I think it's that Jamison isn't as good a communicator with his partners as he is with other people since he simply... forgets. I like to imagine it doesn't destroy his relationships though, because that means there's hope for me. lolol

33) In the face of criticism, is your character defensive, self-deprecating, or willing to improve?

It probably depends on what he's being criticized on. He's introspective enough to improve on most small things, like fern care, and not tossing his suit jacket over the chair; but when criticized about life-defining moments, he leans defensive and self-deprecating, but realistic. He definitely blames himself for his first wife's death; he's just functional because he (rightly) blames the Glorious and the Crown more. If you criticize his business or how he operates though, he'll get defensive.

[bread--quest]

whenever somebody insults a language i pick it up and kiss it gently on its little head. you are safe and loved here language even if you are hated everywhere else. you are such an ugly little beast and youre biting me right now but i love you

[thatonebirdwrites]

KEiiNO appreciation post. I adore everything this band does. They're Norwegian-Saami, and their music is so good. This one in particular is one of my favorites.

[stillfruit]

the most difficult part about group projects is not doing everything yourself

[teethrotter]

this is one of the first things that comes up when you look into what it might be like to have a borderline partner. tell me again about how bpd is not among the most stigmatized mental conditions ?

[agnesandhilda]

every so often I think about how my sixteen year-old self would love my current lifestyle just because the place I live in now is safe

[skimblyshanks]

The lack of regard for actors in general when it comes to labor rights within the arts is galling, actually.

[nerdyfangirlingbooks]

At the time, I thought my teenage crushes were just crushes. Later, I realised some of them were 50% crush 50% gender envy. I have now reached enlightenment and realised that both are true - the gender envy half was still a crush, it was just a gay crush

[discoknack]

First episode of Trollhunters: this kid is way too chill. It's almost creepy. And that combined with some quality of his voice direction makes him seem much older than he is. Like I could probably hear something like that from a professor (?). Shrug. I also don't understand the full weight of things. Though that might be intentional.

Supremely annoyed with how fatness is picked on. It came up way too often and not only with the P.E. instructor. Like Jim, you're gonna tell the bully he'll be fat and bald when he grows up, when your seemingly-closest friend - or at least the classmate you tolerate enough to let him hang around you every day - is fat right now?

I dunno, product of the time perhaps. I felt like a fat kid growing up so I guess it pushed some buttons.