#the ai problem

[durnesque-esque]

This is their plan. They want to break the writers. They want to break this industry and everyone around it for their bottom lines. They do not care about anything, but profit.

And it will not stop here, it will impact EVERY CONTRACT DOWN THE LINE FOR EVERY UNION IN THE INDUSTRY. And the impact will ripple through every industry in entertainment hubs: LA, NY, ATL, etc.

"Convinced that “giving in,” as another insider put it, to the writers will result in every contract cycle from the WGA, IATSE, the Teamsters and more ending in a strike, the AMPTP is aiming for the bottom line."

Please continue to support the Writers. If SAG-AFTRA joins in tonight, support them too.

This is not just about the entertainment industry, this is about the impact and power of workers standing together. Everyone in this country is suffering from being underpaid. Unions are our power to fight against that.

The holdouts are NOT the workers on strike, it's the Producers & Executives. It's THEIR fault this is going on. It's THEIR fault the industry has ground to a halt because they won't pay fair wages and they would rather use AI to spin endless and souless profit than pay people to do the work.

Here's the article I quoted. Here's another discussing the AI issue.

July 12, 2023 9AM PST.

SOLIDARITY FOREVER!

[medusaspeach]

Ngl I'm not sure if I even want to post my artwork on Tumblr anymore, given that it seems like whether you toggle the switch or not, AI bots are likely to scrape your work regardless. On the other hand, it feels like no place is really safe from scraping anyway. But the whole AI deal Tumblr made continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I post over on IG too but it's really not my favorite to showcase artwork/comics. I've been thinking of migrating to Bluesky... I have an account there but it sits empty. I don't know... What do you think?

[mrsjdavis]

So, "we" are willing and able to put all this money and time and infrastructure and resources into what is essentially a bubble, but we can't just, I dunno, invest a tiny fraction of that into real improvements to human lives?

[writing-desk-rae]

Making the commitment to block and mute people on ao3 who post AI written fics

[tofiam]

oh my gods

[sunbentshadows]

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

[dontdenymeshakespeare]

I Quit NaNo (& Nov. writing plans)

CONTENT WARNING: There are brief mentions (and talk) of grooming in this blog post. Since 2011 my writing life in autumn has revolved around two things – Preptober and NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an event that takes place from 1-30 November every year with the original objective of writing 50,000 words in a month. Preptober is the name the community has given to…

[robinade]

Lmao can confirm this is still happening. I google “is there a snake fight for a thesis defense?”

Google AI Overview

Yes, some universities have a tradition of including a "snake fight" portion in thesis defenses, where students fight one of the university's snakes. The quality of the student's thesis determines the size of the snake they must fight, with better theses resulting in smaller snakes. After the committee reads the thesis, they tell the snake master how good it is, who then chooses the snake. In some northern European countries, an external examiner called the "opponent" fights the snake on the student's behalf, with the opponent's skill level based on the thesis's quality.

[slushy-sash]

why is bro in port ormos when he works at the akademiya

[ask-the-rag-dolly]

anyways good episode

[minamill]

since i've seen people being unaware or uncaring about the catastrophic toll generative ai has on both the environment and the workers behind it here's some information about what that toll is actually like. i'd encourage everyone to read the full articles, but i've highlighted some important parts for convenience

Q&A: Uncovering the labor exploitation that powers AI

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

How 'modern-day slavery' in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy

[medusaspeach]

I think you're right that there's, unfortunately, not many safe places to post artwork. Maybe, if you're comfortable with it, you could create a YT channel for speed drawing and maybe doing a voiceover about the mythology or something. That'd be considerably more work, but it also has the chance of earning your revenue which could be nice.

Anyway, I'd stick around on Tumblr if you're not comfortable with Instagram. You could start gradually switching over; posting a little there, a little here, plugging your Insta on these posts, and eventually migrating over, but if I'm going to be honest, I don't know that it matters much, considering many places are unsafe for artists in the AI sense. At least Tumblr gives the option of not having your work scraped, but unfortunately, no system is perfect, and there will always be that asshole who does it anyway. I think we can really only hope that AI ends up being a phase, similar to how NFTs have mostly died out by now. I see a lot of AI opposition these days, so fingers are crossed as an artist myself. 🤞

I've actually been toying with the idea of doing some drawing videos for a while now... maybe I'll actually get to it. 🫠

I don't mind Instagram for certain things, it's got a nice gallery format for phones. I will most likely continue to post my work here (for now), but plan to start gradually posting over on Bsky at some point.

I get so annoyed when I see AI art, it's fast and cheap compared to hiring artists and so I imagine some people/companies will continue to use it. I just hope for more regulation. I see people selling "their" Ai artwork on stickers and prints on Etsy all the time, and it drives me nuts.

[thevioletcaptain]

i genuinely don't care how good a piece of ai generated art or writing looks on the surface. i don't care if it emulates brush strokes and metaphor in a way indistinguishable from those created by a person.

it is not the product of thoughtful creation. it offers no insights into the creator's life or viewpoint. it has no connection to a moment in time or a place or an attitude. it has no perspective. it has no value.

it's empty, it's hollow, and it exists only to generate clicks (and by extension, ad revenue.)

it's just another revolting symptom of the disease that is late stage capitalism, and it fucking sucks.

[yaolmao]

simp

[notbecauseofvictories]

Last post, I promise, but I do think it’s good and important to see local art (defining that term as broadly as possible) but in my experience you have to put up with the little kick of embarrassment you feel witnessing something too earnest, a little clumsy, not polished within an inch of its life or in step with prevailing trends.

I’m thinking of the dance performances I saw this weekend, but also last week’s street festival, where I watched short films and walked through local art exhibits; I’m thinking about Chicago’s outsider art museum, and even the elaborately decorated (ostensibly tacky) yards I see in rural Illinois, but South Carolina and Tennessee before that, and Michigan before that. Maybe I should cast an even broader net: my aunt’s cross stitch, my grand-aunt’s horrible poetry; the art they display at the nearby retirement community and the halfway house too, which comes from the residents.

If you’re not used to leaving space for that little kick, you might turn away or scoff at all this small, fumbling art. But I think there’s value in forcing yourself to look beyond that initial stab of secondhand embarrassment---to actually appreciate the art in front of you as an expression of something deeply human. You don’t have to think it’s objectively good, or even subjectively good. You don’t have to pretend that a local woman with a talent for oils is the next [INSERT FAMOUS ARTIST HERE]. But I do think you have to appreciate it, because otherwise there is no entrance into making art yourself.

And that, more than anything, is worth preserving.

[bi-writes]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?