#the plagiarism

[through-rosey-glasses]

I forget that new readers weren't on tumblr in the 2010s and don't know the lore.

[motoenby]

Omg, I hate himm 😭😭

NEIL GAIMAN I AM SO SCARED THAT GOOD OMENS WON'T END HAPPILY☹️

It won't. It will have a very tragic ending. Crowley takes a sleeping potion, but Aziraphale thinks Crowley is dead and plunges a dagger deeply into his fair breast. Crowley wakes and, finding Aziraphale dead, becomes, in his heartbreak, a furniture delivery person and is crushed to death by a falling wardrobe. Then everybody cries.

[getrope1]

You cant make this shit up

[valtsv]

obviously people steal things from other people it's one of the oldest tricks in the book but it still always surprises me to learn that people plagiarise because my introduction to the concept was basically being told that if i ever plagiarised anything i would be executed by firing squad and my head would be removed and displayed on a spike outside the walls of the hallowed academic institution i was attending as a warning to others

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[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

[talaricula]

Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :

Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources

Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)

Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women

Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women

Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)

Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)

Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community

Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS

Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough

Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media

Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards

Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories

Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")

And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue

Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)

[girlblocker]

preserving this here bc op turned off reblogs

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I was forced to read a Donald Trump autobiography for one of my college courses. It was just the plot of Boss Baby. He thought nobody would notice. 

[robinsversion]

How I sleep knowing I always cite my sources:

(First image from the film Drip Dippy Donald (1948); second image from season 4, episode 3 of the Simpsons, “Homer the Heretic” (1992).)

[setaflow]

Gay pride happens in June and gay wrath happens whenever hbomberguy drops a 3+ hour video essay about a specific topic

[vanteaux]

Pride flag color picked from that one image in hbomberguy's plagiarism video

Edit: here's the version with more flags!

[coffinwoodx]

like witnessing the french revolution beheadings firsthand in the 1800s

[despazito]

Some of the palworld rig comparisons absolutely look sus but if something like this won a plagiarism lawsuit it would actually set a horrible legal precedent for artists please learn what plagiarism means and think very carefully when discussing copyright law

[very-gay-alkyrion]

Like to charge, reblog to cast

[gayshitanddadjokes]

Hbomberguy literally has me writing this assignment thinking "hey did I add any actual information to this topic or am I just rephrasing this article?" and now this fucking 12 slide PowerPoint has used eight sources that I'm using to draw from to get a varied sense of what actually happened and being able to make my own claims based off of multiple sources of information. This assignment would have taken three less hours if I'd done it five days ago. This is an improvement.