#that's theft

[vanyamired]

Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.

(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)

[nando161mando]

There are now over 15 million empty homes in the US, and 650,000 homeless per the very bias official numbers, or 23 houses per person

[sniperct]

If true we HAVE to make this the biggest flop in gaming history, as in 'destroys the company' levels of gaming flop as in a 'lesson must be taught' gaming flop, as in 'E.T. destroyed atari' gaming flop

[boimann]

ATTENTION ARTISTS OF TUMBLR

since tumblr is going to start scraping blogs to train ai be sure to glaze and nightshade your art!! Not only will both of these programs protect your art from being copied but nightshade also poisons any ai that tries to steal it

here is some more info on these tools and where you can download them:

Nightshade: Protecting Copyright (uchicago.edu)

Nightshade: Downloads (uchicago.edu)

Glaze - What is Glaze (uchicago.edu)

Glaze - Downloads (uchicago.edu)

[troythecatfish]

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[mistbornthief]

starting a collection

[hasufin]

Shrinkflation

So, I found out a fun fact this last weekend!

Every state has a Department of Weights and Measures. One of their jobs is to make sure that companies are actually selling you the quantities they claim they're selling. For example, this is the department which tests gas pumps and makes sure they're really pumping out a gallon of gas when they charge you for a gallon of gas.

So....

If you happen to, just as an example, notice that your 1lb (16 ounce) box of San Giorgio spaghetti actually only has 10oz of noodles, and you weigh your other boxes of spaghetti to discover they run from 10 to 14 ounces but never the full pound they're supposed to have, and that's why you never seem to have enough pasta for leftovers the next day, then you can report that to the Department of Weights and Measures.

They will want to know where you bought the item, and then will investigate whether the store or the manufacturer is routinely shorting customers. If they do, they will issue a fine to the offending party, you will be eligible for a refund, and under some circumstances lawsuits may follow.

Now, I don't know the outcome of the complaint I just initiated, but they did not want to know specific receipts or times of purchase. Which is good for me as I didn't keep any of those things, at the time I just said "Wow, fuck San Giorgio" and switched brands. But this is still enough to get an inspector out.

[lynayru]

@staff

OUR CONTENT SHOULD BE OPTED OUT OF AI TRAINING BY DEFAULT!

[8pxl]

so a huge list of artists that was used to train midjourney’s model got leaked and i’m on it

literally there is no reason to support AI generators, they can’t ethically exist. my art has been used to train every single major one without consent lmfao 🤪

link to the archive

[nando161mando]

If you want to know why people have lost faith in capitalism, this might help

[silveringofrose]

For anyone who uses the bird app for any reason:

Text from Tweet by '@easybakedoven:

"Twitter just activated a setting by default for everyone that gives them the right to use your data to train grok. They never announced it. You can disable this using the web but it's hidden. You can't disable using the mobile app

Direct link: https://x.com/settings/grok_settings"

Additional screenshot of grok settings option with checkbox from tweet reads:

"Data Sharing

Allow your posts as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok to be used for training and fine-tuning

To continuously improve your experience, we may utilize your X posts as well as your user interactions, inputs and results with Grok for training and fine-tuning purposes. This also means that your interactions, inputs, and results may also be shared with our service provider xAI for these purposes. Learn more

Delete conversation history"

[louistonehill]

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

Continue reading article here

[b0tster]

back to the drawing board (studying mml expressions)

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]