#where to get free datasets

[analyticspursuit]

The 5 Free Dataset Sources for Data Analytics Projects

In this video, I'm sharing the five free dataset sources that are perfect for data analytics projects. By using these free datasets, you'll be able to create powerful data analytics projects in no time! Dataset sources are essential for data analytics projects, and these five free dataset sources will help you get started quickly.

By using these sources, you'll be able to collect data from a variety of sources and crunch the numbers with ease. So be sure to check out this video to learn about the five free dataset sources for data analytics projects!

[staff]

We Asked an Expert...in Herpetology!

People on Tumblr come from all walks of life and all areas of expertise to grace our dashboards with paragraphs and photographs of the things they want to share with the world. Whether it's an artist uploading their speed art, a fanfic writer posting their WIPs, a language expert expounding on the origin of a specific word, or a historian ready to lay down the secrets of Ea-nasir, the hallways of Tumblr are filled with specialists sharing their knowledge with the world. We Asked an Expert is a deep dive into those expert brains on tumblr dot com. Today, we’re talking to Dr. Mark D. Scherz (@markscherz), an expert in Herpetology. Read on for some ribbeting frog facts, including what kind of frog the viral frog bread may be based on.

Reptiles v Amphibians. You have to choose one.

In a battle for my heart, I think amphibians beat out the reptiles. There is just something incredibly good about beholding a nice plump frog.

In a battle to the death, I have to give it to the reptiles—the number of reptiles that eat amphibians far, far outstrips the number of amphibians that eat reptiles.

In terms of ecological importance, I would give it to the amphibians again, though. Okay, reptiles may keep some insects and rodents in check, but many amphibians live a dual life, starting as herbivores and graduating to carnivory after metamorphosis, and as adults they are critical for keeping mosquitos and other pest insects in check.

What is the most recent exciting fact you discovered about herps?

This doesn’t really answer your question, but did you know that tadpole arms usually develop inside the body and later burst through the body wall fully formed? I learned about this as a Master’s student many years ago, but it still blows my mind. What’s curious is that this apparently does not happen in some of the species of frogs that don’t have tadpoles—oh yeah, like a third of all frogs or something don’t have free-living tadpoles; crazy, right? They just develop forelimbs on the outside of the body like all other four-legged beasties. But this has only really been examined in a couple species, so there is just so much we don’t know about development, especially in direct-developing frogs. Like, how the hell does it just… swap from chest-burster to ‘normal’ limb development? Is that the recovery of the ancestral programming, or is it newly generated? When in frog evolution did the chest-burster mode even evolve?

How can people contribute to conservation efforts for their local herps?

You can get involved with your local herpetological societies if they exist—and they probably do, as herpetologists are everywhere. You can upload observations of animals to iNaturalist, where you can get them identified while also contributing to datasets on species distribution and annual activity used by research scientists.

You can see if there are local conservation organizations that are doing any work locally, and if you find they are not, then you can get involved to try to get them started. For example, if you notice areas of particularly frequent roadkill, talking to your local council or national or local conservation organizations can get things like rescue programs or road protectors set up. You should also make sure you travel carefully and responsibly. Carefully wash and disinfect your hiking boots, especially between locations, as you do not want to be carrying chytrid or other nasty infectious diseases across the world, where they can cause population collapses and extinctions.

Here are some recent headlines. Quick question, what the frog is going on in the frog world? 

Click through for Mark’s response to these absolutely wild headlines, more about his day-to-day job, his opinion on frog bread, and his favorite Tumblr.

✨D I S C O V E R Y✨

There are more people on Earth than ever before, with the most incredible technology that advances daily at their disposal, and they disperse that knowledge instantly. That means more eyes and ears observing, recording, and sharing than ever before. And so we are making big new discoveries all the time, and are able to document them and reach huge audiences with them.

That being said, these headlines also showcase how bad some media reporting has gotten. The frogs that scream actually scream mostly in the audible range—they just have harmonics that stretch up into ultrasound. So, we can hear them scream, we just can’t hear all of it. Because the harmonics are just multiples of the fundamental, they would anyway only add to the overall ‘quality’ of the sound, not anything different. The mushroom was sprouting from the flank of the frog, and scientists are not really worried about it because this is not how parasitic fungi work, and this is probably a very weird fluke. And finally, the Cuban tree frogs (Osteocephalus septentrionalis) are not really cannibals per se; they are just generalist predators who will just as happily eat a frog as they will a grasshopper, but the frogs they are eating are usually other species. People seem to forget that cannibalism is, by definition, within a species. The fact that they are generalist predators makes them a much bigger problem than if they were cannibals—a cannibal would actually kind of keep itself in check, which would be useful. The press just uses this to get people’s hackles up because Westerners are often equal parts disgusted and fascinated by cannibalism. 

What does an average day look like for the curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark?

No two days are the same, and that is one of the joys of the job. I could spend a whole day in meetings, where we might be discussing anything from which budget is going to pay for 1000 magnets to how we could attract big research funding, to what a label is going to say in our new museum exhibits (we are in the process of building a new museum). Equally, I might spend a day accompanying or facilitating a visitor dissecting a crocodile or photographing a hundred snakes. Or it might be divided into one-hour segments that cover a full spectrum: working with one of my students on a project, training volunteers in the collection, hunting down a lizard that someone wants to borrow from the museum, working on one of a dozen research projects of my own, writing funding proposals, or teaching classes. It is a job with a great deal of freedom, which really suits my work style and brain.

Oh yeah, and then every now and then, I get to go to the field and spend anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months tracking down reptiles and amphibians, usually in the rainforest. These are also work days—with work conditions you couldn’t sell to anyone: 18-hour work days, no weekends, no real rest, uncomfortable living conditions, sometimes dangerous locations or working conditions, field kitchen with limited options, and more leeches and other biting beasties than most health and welfare officers would tolerate—but the reward is the opportunity to make new discoveries and observations, collect critical data, and the privilege of getting to be in some of the most beautiful and biodiverse places left on the planet. So, I am humbled by the fact that I have the privilege and opportunity to undertake such expeditions, and grateful for the incredible teams I collaborate with that make all of this work—from the museum to the field—possible.

The Tibetan Blackbird is also known as Turdus maximus. What’s your favorite chortle-inducing scientific name in the world of herpetology?

Among reptiles and amphibians, there aren’t actually that many to choose from, but I must give great credit to my friend Oliver Hawlitschek and his team, who named the snake Lycodryas cococola, which actually means ‘Coco dweller’ in Latin, referring to its occurrence in coconut trees. When we were naming Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature, I was inspired by the incredible list that Mark Isaac has compiled of punning species names, particularly by the extinct parrot Vini vidivici, and the beetles Gelae baen, Gelae belae, Gelae donut, Gelae fish, and Gelae rol. I have known about these since high school, and it has always been my ambition to get a species on this list.

If you were a frog, what frog would you be and why?

I think I would be a Phasmahyla because they’re weird and awkward, long-limbed, and look like they’re wearing glasses. As a 186 cm (6’3) glasses-wearing human with no coordination, they quite resonate with me.

Please rate this frog bread from 1/10. Can you tell us what frog it represents?

With the arms inside the body cavity like that, it can basically only be a brevicipitid rain frog. The roundness of the body fits, too. I’d say probably Breviceps macrops (or should I say Breadviceps?) based on those big eyes. 7/10, a little on the bumpy side and missing a finger and at least one toe.

Please follow Dr. Mark Scherz at @markscherz for even more incredibly educational, entertaining, and meaningful resources in the world of reptiles and amphibians.

[reachartwork]

How exactly do you advance AI ethically? Considering how much of the data sets that these tools use was sourced, wouldnt you have to start from scratch?

a: i don't agree with the assertion that "using someone else's images to train an ai" is inherently unethical - ai art is demonstrably "less copy-paste-y" for lack of a better word than collage, and nobody would argue that collage is illegal or ethically shady. i mean some people might but i don't think they're correct.

b: several people have done this alraedy - see, mitsua diffusion, et al.

c: this whole argument is a red herring. it is not long-term relevant adobe firefly is already built exclusively off images they have legal rights to. the dataset question is irrelevant to ethical ai use, because companies already have huge vaults full of media they can train on and do so effectively.

you can cheer all you want that the artist-job-eating-machine made by adobe or disney is ethically sourced, thank god! but it'll still eat everyone's jobs. that's what you need to be caring about.

the solution here obviously is unionization, fighting for increased labor rights for people who stand to be affected by ai (as the writer's guild demonstrated! they did it exactly right!), and fighting for UBI so that we can eventually decouple the act of creation from the act of survival at a fundamental level (so i can stop getting these sorts of dms).

if you're interested in actually advancing ai as a field and not devils advocating me you can also participate in the FOSS (free-and-open-source) ecosystem so that adobe and disney and openai can't develop a monopoly on black-box proprietary technology, and we can have a future where anyone can create any images they want, on their computer, for free, anywhere, instead of behind a paywall they can't control.

fun fact related to that last bit: remember when getty images sued stable diffusion and everybody cheered? yeah anyway they're releasing their own ai generator now. crazy how literally no large company has your interests in mind.

cheers

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Very specific request for recommendations:

One of the things I do with my students is owl pellet dissection to identify the small rodents and occasional birds contained within. I have two big sacks of the things, from two different sites. As one of their assessments, they analyse a set number of pellets each, then share their data to get a bigger dataset, then discuss the biodiversity difference between the two sites. All good and fun. One of them once took home a bird skull and made it into a necklace.

Here is the sticky part: the database where they share their data.

Now, I am currently using an Excel spreadsheet that I host on my work OneDrive, which I share to Moodle and allow editing access. This means I format the spreadsheet, then they can access and add their data. Central place, they can easily copy and paste the data into their own Excel file to manipulate as they want, and I can see who has uploaded and who hasn't; for each pellet, one column asks for their name, and then the others list the potential organisms and they simply number how many of each they found. Boom. Easy.

BUT, it carries the inherent risk of one of my intelligent, capable and highly skilled students accidentally deleting/overwriting other people's entries in a moment of digital clumsiness and stupidity. This year, one of them forgot it was the shared document, and so did all the data analysis in it where everyone could see/plagiarise. This is Not Ideal.

So, I'm looking for some sort of digital tool that I can use, very preferably link to Moodle for easy access, will allow the students to download the whole collaborated dataset, and won't let them delete anyone else's entries. It also needs to be free. It doesn't need to do anything fancy - they can download into Excel if they want to manipulate it. I just want an easy central repository for this data.

Any recommendations from anyone?

[onadarklingplain]

does alex save his thirst traps for his app? an investigation

it is a commonly held belief that since launching his app in February 2024, alex's sluttiest photos have been HIDDEN (accessible for free) on his EXCLUSIVE PLATFORM (available for all with an internet connection), leaving only the more (some would say) professional photos on his official instagram. in this post, i'm going to decide if it's true.

it is a notable data point that just before the launch of his app, we saw alex at perhaps his sluttiest of all time: the thailand photo dumps featured not one topless main grid pic, but THREE consecutively. he was serving shoulders. he was serving chest. he was serving BACK! the feet were for free.

THREE in a row lads

since the launch of his app, we have gotten only one single shirtless photo (discussed in detail below), and while i cherished it deeply and spent hours zooming in like a criminal, i think we can all agree that compared to the thailand photos, it was, as he writes, demure.

right: instagram summer break 2024; left: instagram thailand trip. both at a respectful distance and yet. his back.

an early data point to consider is the LA training camp. this is honestly a difficult one for me to assess because i think he looks hot in all of them (this is an ongoing weakness of the study). like do i think the app photos are thirstier merely because there are more of them? and then if you factor that instagram got a crotch shot? we'll call that one a tie.

left: instagram, middle: app, right: bonus babygirl (app) - thirst levels all high

the most overt case of alex saving the goods for his app came with the first mini-break of the year: the cayman island holiday. on instagram, we got sting rays and lily & alex being very cute. on THE APP however, he was fully displaying his crotch for all to zoom and we got THE cherry swim trunk arse shot. thank u god and also jesus

all the above from the app: need i say more?

and EYE believe, and will argue here, that we can see a similar pattern emerging with the summer break photosets. on instgram, as noted above, we did get a beautiful, distant shot of alex on a paddle board. on the APP however, we received a driving pic that has had me thinking about nothing but **** **** for hours. like, please compare these two photos and tell me the app photo isn't thirstier. i rest my case.

right: instagram, cute; left: app, searingly hot to me

i would be remiss in my duties if i didn't point out the one case where i believe instagram got the better pics: the launch of alex's monaco collection. while he was obviously fully dressed in all photos due to Repping the Brand, the instagram photos are, in my opinion, hotter. this is key. it's important to remember what you're selling, and in this case "please everyone in the world buy my linen button down" beat out "please download my app for thirst pics."

right: instagram, one of the hottest photos in the word; left: app, very hot still but like. not the same imo

due to the limited dataset, it isn't current possible to form a definitive conclusion, however further study is planned (if only alex would post more shirtless pics), and the research will be updated as new details emerge.

[sexhaver]

are you a fan/supporter of AI-generated art, and if so, why? i've frankly never understood why people like it and i'm trying to wrap my head around it. thanks :)

asking if im a "fan" of AI art is like asking if im a "fan" of Photoshop. it's a tool that has the potential to be used for shitty things (i.e. photoshopping pictures of someone to make them look bad, or training an AI model specifically on one artist and then undercutting that artist on commissions), but it's also a really fucking powerful tool that has the potential to push art in directions it could never feasibly go before. like, how do you read "people without an artistic bone in their body will be able to spin up dozens of pictures of whatever arbitrary thing they want" and jump straight to the ethics of sourcing the datasets and "robbing artists" and supporting draconian IP law without even admitting that, at a base level, that's a really cool and useful piece of technology to have.

part of the reason i keep posting about it is because i work in warehouse automation. ive spent the last decade learning how to automate shitty tasks that nobody in their right mind would want to do for free, and people STILL get upset that robotics are inherently "stealing their jobs". this is literally only a problem because of capitalism; in any sane world, a machine that can do shitty jobs would be a godsend. but when you need to work for a living, these robots become competition instead of tools to make your life better. and yet people will still direct their outrage at the robots themselves and not their bosses or capitalism as a whole

the same thing is happening with AI art. without capitalism forcing artists to draw for survival, the ability for non-artists to create art at a whim would be a tool with a wide range of applications. under capitalism, however, these tools become competition. and yet again, people are directing their rage at the people making this good-in-a-vacuum technology instead of capitalism, or even more specifically, the miniscule percentage of AI artists who use the tech to financially harm artists by undercutting them on commissions.

of course, there's the added twist that, unlike stacking heavy cardboard boxes, art is something that a lot of people actually do enjoy intrinsically and would do for free. this has spawned an entirely separate branch of arguments against AI art based on ethics and philosophy instead of laws and finance. this branch argues that AI art is not just bad because it can directly financially harm artists who don't use it, but that it's actively eroding the concept of "art" itself. this is the branch that spawns soundbites like "AI art just copies from humans", "that's not art because it's soulless", and "what's even the point in making art when a robot can do it faster and better?"

i'm going to be blunt: this branch, just like any other train of thought that hinges on an unspecified definition of "true art" that ebbs and flows at the speaker's whim, is complete horseshit at best and outright reactionary at worst. unfortunately, it has also infected most of the anti-AI-art crowd to the point where it's almost impossible to find any arguments against AI art that don't eventually fall back on it

tl;dr: AI art is a powerful tool with the potential to benefit humanity at large, and desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle [by donating to Disney's IP lawyers] because it scares you is not going to work

[tangibletechnomancy]

Neural Nets, Walled Gardens, and Positive Vibes Only

the crystal spire at the center of the techno-utopian walled garden

Anyone who knows or even just follows me knows that as much as I love neural nets, I'm far from being a fan of AI as a corporate fad. Despite this, I am willing to use big-name fad-chasing tools...sometimes, particularly on a free basis. My reasons for this are twofold:

Many people don't realize this, but these tools are more expensive for the companies to operate than they earn from increased interest in the technology. Using many of these free tools can, in fact, be the opposite of "support" at this time. Corporate AI is dying, use it to kill it faster!

You can't give a full, educated critique of something's flaws and failings without engaging with it yourself, and I fully intend to rip Dall-E 3, or more accurately the companies behind it, a whole new asshole - so I want it to be a fair, nuanced, and most importantly personally informed new asshole.

Now, much has already been said about the biases inherent to current AI models. This isn't a problem exclusive to closed-source corporate models; any model is only as good as its dataset, and it turns out that people across the whole wide internet are...pretty biased. Most major models right now, trained primarily on the English-language internet, present a very western point of view - treating young conventionally attractive white people as a default at best, and presenting blatantly misinformative stereotypes at worst. While awareness of the issue can turn it into a valuable tool to study those biases and how they intertwine, the marketing and hype around AI combined with the popular idea that computers can't possibly be biased tends to make it so they're likely to perpetuate them instead.

This problem only gets magnified when introduced to my mortal enemy-

If I never see this FUCKING dog again it will be too soon-

Content filters.

Theoretically, content filters exist to prevent some of the worst-faith uses of AI - deepfakes, true plagiarism and forgery, sexual exploitation, and more. In practice, many of them block anything that can be remotely construed as potentially sexual, violent, or even negative in any way. Frequently banned subjects include artistic nudity or even partial nudity, fight scenes, anything even remotely adjacent to horror, and still more.

The problems with this expand fractally.

While the belief that AI is capable of supplanting all other art forms, let alone should do so, is...far less widespread among its users than the more reactionary subset of its critics seem to believe (and in fact arguably less common among AI users than non-users in the first place; see again: you cannot give a full, educated critique of something's failings without engaging with it yourself), it's not nonexistent - and the business majors who have rarely if ever engaged with other forms of art, who make up a good percentage of the executives of these companies, often do fall on that side, or at least claim to in order to make more sales (but let's keep the lid on that can of worms for now).

When this ties to existing online censorship issues, such as a billionaire manchild taking over Twitter to "help humanity" (read: boost US far-right voices and promote and/or redefine hate speech), or arcane algorithms on TikTok determining what to boost and deboost leading to proliferation of neologisms to soften and obfuscate "sensitive" subjects (of which "unalive" is frequently considered emblematic), including such horrible, traumatizing things as...the existence of fat people, disabled people, and queer people (where the censorship is claimed to be for their benefit, no less!), the potential impact is apparent: while the end goal is impossible, in part because AI is not, in fact, capable of supplanting all other forms of art, what we're seeing is yet another part of a continuing, ever more aggressive push for sanitizing what kinds of ideas people can express at all, with the law looking to only make it worse rather than better through bills such as KOSA (which you can sign a petition against here).

And just like the other forms of censorship before and alongside it, AI content filtering targets the most vulnerable in society far more readily than it targets those looking to harm them. The filters have no idea what makes something an expression of a marginalized identity vs. what makes it a derogatory statement against that group, or an attempt at creating superficially safe-for-work fetish art - so, they frequently err on the side of removing anything uncertain. Boys in skirts and dresses are frequently blocked, presumably because they're taken for fetish art. Results of prompts about sadness or loneliness are frequently blocked, presumably because they may promote self harm, somehow. In my (admittedly limited) experiment, attempts at generating dark-skinned characters were blocked more frequently than attempts at generating light-skinned ones, presumably because the filter decided that it was racist to [checks notes] ...acknowledge that a character has a different skin tone than the default white characters it wanted to give me. Facial and limb differences are often either erased from results, or blocked presumably on suspicion of "violent content".

But note that I say "presumably" - the error message doesn't say on what grounds the detected images are "unsafe". Users are left only to speculate on what grounds we're being warned.

But what makes censorship of AI generated work even more alarming, in the context of the executive belief that it can render all other art forms obsolete, is that other forms of censorship only target where a person can say such earth-shaking, controversial things as "I am disabled and I like existing" or "I am happy being queer" or "mental health is important" or "I survived a violent crime" - you can be prevented from posting it on TikTok, but not from saying it to a friend next to you, let alone your therapist. AI content filtering, on the other hand, aims to prevent you from expressing it at all.

This becomes particularly alarming when you recall one of the most valuable use cases for AI generation: enabling disabled people to express themselves more clearly, or in new forms. Most people can find other workarounds in the form of more conventional, manual modes of expression, sure, but no amount of desperation can reverse hand paralysis that prevents a person from holding a pen, nor a traumatic brain injury or mental disability that blocks them from speaking or writing in a way that's easy to understand. And who is one of the most frequently censored groups? Disabled people.

So, my question to Bing and OpenAI is this: in what FUCKING universe is banning me from expressing my very existence "protecting" me?

Bad dog! Stop breaking my shit and get the FUCK out of my way!

Generated as a gift for a friend who was even more frustrated with that FUCKING dog than I was

All images - except the FUCKING dog - generated with Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[asliverofsun]

🚨ATTENTION ALL ARTISTS, WRITERS, & CREATIVES🚨 You have ‘til 10/30, 9PM PST TO LET THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT AI 🤖

They want answers on all kinds of questions, like training datasets ingesting creatives' works or the copyrightability of outputs. Here’s a guide I transcribed from my Twitter on how to get started:

On the comment submission page, there is the “Notice of Inquiry” document where the Office literally gives you what questions they want answers to (p12-21) - and there’s a LOT of them. Like, 50 at least. (It’s honestly so prohibitive to the average creative, which is why I made this guide). You DON’T have to answer every single question - just pick the ones that speak to you the most or ones you understand the best! To make it easier, here’s an edited list of questions that are most relevant for creatives

You DON’T have to be based in the US to submit a comment. In fact, the Office asks for examples of how other countries approach copyright & AI (Q#4), so if you live in places like Britain, Japan, etc. that have made major moves in those areas (for better or worse), leave a comment!

Below are some important questions for actors and VAs in particular. Though voice and likeness aren’t generally protected by copyright law, the Office is interested in hearing how AI may be impacted by state laws involving right of publicity or unfair competition (Q#30, Q#31).

📝WRITING TIPS📝

The Copyright Office’s goal is to create the best policy. Be clear, be constructive, and explain the reasoning behind your position. Wherever possible, counter the other side’s arguments. One well supported comment is more influential than 1000 copy paste ones!

Provide evidence - facts, expert opinions, your personal experience. How is AI already impacting you? Your industry? How will it impact you in the future? What are some stories you've seen in the news or social media about AI?

The Office is also VERY interested in any papers or studies relevant to AI and copyright (Q #3), so feel free to include a link to this incredibly informative paper on AI’s impact on artists

Be sure to mention any relevant personal or professional experience and credentials to lend more weight to your arguments, i.e. # of years drawing, years in the industry, major projects, awards won, union membership, etc

Here are some solid comments submitted by artist Kelly McKernan and screenwriter Bill Wolkoff if you want to see some examples

OTHER TIPS (courtesy of my ADHD brain): Schedule a block of time to write your thoughts out! Coordinate a little sesh with your friends! Keep a copy of your work in a separate doc! It’s so important that we get our concerns and ideas out there 💪

YOUR COMMENTS will not only inform the Office’s own work in determining what protections creatives may receive in the face of AI, but also inform their advice to Congress on potential generative AI legislation - so make your voices heard and SPREAD THE WORD! 📢📢📢

If you want to stay informed on this issue, particularly as it concerns visual artists, I highly recommend you follow @kortizart @ZakugaMignon @stealcase @chiefluddite @JonLamArt @ravenben @human_artistry on twitter and AI ML Advocacy on Insta (I don’t know of any tumblr blogs that actively follow this issue, so please reblog/comment below if you do!)

You also may know about the Concept Artist Association’s GoFundMe to represent artist voices in government - they made some big moves in the regulatory and congressional space, and are now fundraising for year two! 🙌🙌🙌

tagging some very cool creatives I follow that I believe care about how AI impacts their craft so this post doesn't die in the tumblr void 🫡

@neil-gaiman @geneslovee @anarchistfrogposting @pimientosdulces @sabertoothwalrus @simkjrs @loish @waneella @tunabuna @writing-prompt-s @logicalbookthief @bedupolker

[xidnaf]

Well, the possible solutions would either be: only use public domain and free for commercial use material, thus creating a gen ai with limited capabilities, or buying the rights to use the works from all of the artists. A third possibility I think might work for open source or charity drive projects would be to ask artists to donate their works, but that would necessitate ethically built datasets being the standard first

Now, if there were a gen AI project with an ethically sourced dataset that didn't make money (which would include not running ads and unless they received insane amounts of donations could not keep its servers running for long) they would also be able to use free for non-commercial use material, slightly widening the scope of data and thus capabilities of the gen ai

No existing gen ai applications are not creating revenue though. Even ones where all features are free (incredibly rare these days) show you ads, meaning they get money for stealing the art of, primarily, countless independent artists (since they're less likely to have the means to fight back in court) many of whom are significantly struggling financially

I know intellectual property is often associated with big shitty corporations like Disney but they have lawyers and lobbyists and money to spare either way. As usual under capitalism, people who are already in precarious situations are the ones suffering the most. We should change intellectual property laws, but if we get rid of them, we basically tell artists their work is worthless and doom them to poverty, even moreso than many already experience

i don't hate those proposals. but if you post art to the internet, i think anyone with the data storage to spare should be allowed to download it and save it forever if they want to. and if you've downloaded a massive pile of art, i think you should be allowed to train a model on it. and if you train a model, i think you should be allowed to sell that model for money. the neat thing about art is that for it to even count as art, it has to kind of be communication of some sort. it has to come from the vision of an agent that we can empathize with. if it doesn't feel to us like the kind of thing that was made on purpose by at least one individual, then we won't be able to see it as art. and if we like that art, if our lives are improved by it, we're going to naturally want to give something back. to reward the artist who improved our lives. disney can do whatever they want, money will find its way to musker and clements for making moana. reposting someone else's art and saying it's yours isn't theft. it's lying, possibly even fraud if you make money from it, but it's not theft. maybe it's theft legally, but not morally.

[xannerz]

100% rambling here but tbh i've known about cara for a while. atm i respect the platform enough, and the space it's trying to build for artists, but with all the chatter given the recent meta/ig AI bs-- idk. i don't like people treating it as the ai-free safe haven for Actual Artists when i'm seeing these 2 points on the site's FAQs. i feel like it's either being overlooked or there's a big game of telephone where people are urging each other to join b/c "oh finally! a space free of ai!!"

it's run by a creative for creatives and is supposed to be a space more hospitable towards artists' needs, but based on what i'm seeing it's still open to normalizing genAI ('ai art') to some extent. the language/attitude below seems contradictory or misleading at worst, and conveniently vague/noncommittal at best.*

overall disappointing because i personally don't think giving genai leeway -- even if there are filters or 'ethically sourced' datasets in place - should be normalized at all. i see it mention portfolios, but this type of approach is also putting the bar on the ground when employers are already undercutting artists and writers in favor of genai. someone can still gain momentum even if they're posting genai as regular posts.

i already see so many IG accounts that are nothing but genAi, but people don't know/don't care, and those posts get circulated here on tumblr. posting genai for discussion is one thing, but still providing some type of genuine platform is still feeding into the machines that are hurting artists (and, honestly, consumers, too!).

like okay, can't post genai in a portfolio, but i can still attract people and normalize genai use by treating my posts as a portfolio, instead. ik filters exist but i don't think that should be normalized (and we see how poorly they're moderated on artstation).

genuinely not trying to be a contrarian/split hairs, i'd like to see this platform succeed, but i'd like to see more of a hardline rule/statement on how genai would be moderated if posts including genai are just to be for reporting/discussion purposes.

*[insert obligatory ethical ai tools developed by and for studios to make their workflows more efficient are distinct from genAI content and media disclaimer here]

[deepdreamnights]

Wonka was Just Joking About What he was Going to do With the Black Cloud

And other Jank: A Midjourney Secret Horse preserve.

I've mentioned Midjourney's /describe feature on more than one occasion. It's basically a Midjourney specific clip-interrogator, where you feed it a picture and it spits out four prompts that, in theory, produced something along the lines of what you presented.

Thing is, /describe never really worked.

And that's why I love it. I enjoyed taking random images, /describing them, and then combining the results, which were like this (base image is the wonka meme template above):

1️⃣ wonka was just joking about what he was going to do with the black cloud, in the style of light purple and light orange, stylish costume design, bronzepunk 2️⃣ a man in a purple shirt and hat smiling at a computer screen, in the style of fanciful costume design, whirly, blink-and-you-miss-it detail, gritty elegance, celebrity and pop culture references, glorious, polka dot madness 3️⃣ a beautiful young man who pretends to be waldorf, in the style of purple and bronze, polka dot madness, contemporary candy-coated, clowncore 4️⃣ can you name the top 10 funniest quotes ever?, in the style of light purple and gold, movie still, polka dot madness, groovy, handsome, neo-victorian, character

Beautiful madness across the board, and the results when run (clockwise from top left, 1, 2, 3, 4)-

-are like when Google Translate first hit the scene and it was dumb as rocks, so you could get fun stuff by looping text through multiple translations to get wacky stuff. Eventually all the translators got good enough that stopped working, and no one archived the stupid version.

Which brings us to now, as MJ has launched a better version of /describe. I'll do some posts on its capabilities and improvements soonish (it's brand new), but they told us a month ago it was coming, and I took action.

More than 54,000 prompts worth of action

I can't archive the /describe feature as it was, but I could build a stockpile of prompts before the system changed, and I did. About half of these are ones I /described myself, the other half were gleaned from Midjourney's public creation discords.

These are all fully machine-generated prompts, so they're public domain by definition. All shared on a google sheets file.

Caveats:

They are no longer associated with their base images.

They are organized alphabetically.

As above, what comes out does not always reflect what went in.

Not every prompt generated by Midjourney's bot will run on midjourney without editing as sometimes /describe makes prompts that trigger their prompt censor. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If anyone wants to make a text-diffusion AI that generates prompts using the above as a dataset, go for it. Feel free to show off your results in the reblogs as well.

[eponymous-rose]

I found it super useful to do this in a previous year, so here's all the stuff I've got going on for the next three-month quarter. Hope this is interesting to anyone thinking of going the academic route or just curious about what their professor does all day when they're not teaching!

Context: I'm a fifth-year assistant professor (tenure-track) at an R1 public university in a science field.

I'm just teaching the one class this quarter! It's a class I created myself and have taught on four previous occasions, so I have a lot of really great materials available to me. Its enrollment has also quadrupled since the first time I taught it. Womp-womp. Designing and giving lectures 3x/week, creating new assignments 1x/week (carefully ChatGPT-proofed when they're not integrating critical assessments of ChatGPT), writing two take-home midterms, grading all of the above, and, of course, innovating on the course. Trying out some fun new activities to replace the individual projects that have become unwieldy with this number of students. And, inevitably, the scheduled and unscheduled office hours.

I'm primary advisor for a great new grad student, but, in all the federal government's deadline-y wisdom, the grant proposal I was going to use to fund his research fell through. While we scramble to re-submit, the department has given me 9 months of funding, but that also means this student is going up for some highly competitive graduate fellowships to help fill the financial void. Lots of working with him to craft his very first proposal while we talk the undergrad to grad transition, classes, and These Winters Oh You Know (he's from the PNW, he's all set). His actual research is a little on hold for now, but we'll be doing some very cool stuff collaborating with a friend at another university as well as someone at a federal agency that I'm gonna sweet-talk into inviting us down for some in-person work in May. We meet for an hour every week.

As part of that, I'm meeting weekly with my co-PI on that failed proposal to craft a resubmission (we got very positive reviews, just didn't make the funding cutoff). It's a process!

My other active grad student is getting to the end of his PhD already! He just wrapped up two internships this summer and is full of ideas and new directions, which is great, but also: now is the time to find that finish line. He has his last pre-defense exam coming up soon, and my job is to make sure he has a solid story to tell that has a well-defined ending. I'd like to see him publish another paper before finishing as well, and I think he'll have no problems doing so. He's on a federal research grant and also needs to discharge some responsibilities there and make sure he has a transition plan in place for whoever takes over from him. Had a friend at another institution reach out expressing an interest in hiring him for a postdoc, and he's interested, so also going to try to get him a visit down there. We meet for an hour every week!

Said student has also initiated a collaboration with some of his friends from school back in China to do some truly wild stuff, and honestly in this case I'm just along for the ride and to gently steer them back on-course when they start getting a bit in the weeds. We're meeting every second week, and the biggest thing I have to do here is make sure he has open access to a supercomputer to do his thing. It's cool to have reached the stage where my main responsibility is to get out of his way.

Said student also independently reached out to someone with a really cool dataset, and after a meeting carefully smoothing over that e-mail from "blasé demand for free data" to "opportunity to collaborate as a team", we've got a pretty cool project lining up. Might have to wait until after his PhD defense, though.

I have another grad student who took a job elsewhere and really, really wanted to finish his Master's remotely, which is all well and good, but honestly, doing that while trying to start a new job is soul-crushingly difficult. Our department has recently created an option to get a Master's without writing a thesis, so I need to follow up on that and get him this Master's degree.

A former student has reached out about converting his Master's thesis to a journal article, and that'll be a long process, but sure? Maybe? We'll figure it out.

A colleague and I have decided to create a research project for an undergrad who reached out to us looking for opportunities to get more credits. We're still not 100% sure where we're going with this, and a lot will depend on her programming skills, but she's only a sophomore and so we'll ideally have several years to work together on this research. We meet once a week.

Said colleague and I are also working on blending our research groups a bit (mainly because it's awkward to have 3-person "group meetings"), and as part of that we're trying to find a time to have both groups do biweekly coffee-shop meetings where we discuss a cool paper in the field.

I'm participating in a weather forecasting competition that involves writing a forecast 4 days a week, occasionally sending out reminder e-mails, meeting weekly, and probably giving a briefing at some point.

Traveling in October to give an invited seminar at a very big-name university in my field. This has been happening more and more lately (I've now given invited seminars/keynotes in four different countries, to say nothing of the conference talks elsewhere) and I have a pretty solid template for a one-hour talk, but this is a group of people who specialize in my area of research, so I've gotta step up my game there. I'll also be meeting with folks there for a day and will have to figure out what to do with my course while I'm gone.

One other bit of out-of-state travel in October is to attend a meeting of a national group I'm a part of - they've thrown in an early-career workshop, and the whole thing is being paid for, so I'll be there for one extra day learning me a thing. Excited that my grad school officemate will be there!

Final travel this quarter will be during the final exam week, when I go to a giant conference in my field along with my nearly-finished PhD student - we'll both be giving talks there, and since it isn't my usual professional organization hosting it, I get to avoid all of my usual wave of volunteer responsibilities. Phew.

This isn't happening until January, but I was invited to speak at the biggest student conference in my field, and while I can't travel there, they've set up an opportunity for me to do it virtually - I need to get my materials to them by November, I think.

I'm still on the editorial board for three different academic journals, which comes with a fair number of reviews (often "tiebreakers" when the other peer reviewers are in disagreement) every month. Genuinely really enjoy it, because otherwise when the heck am I gonna find time to deep-read any new papers in my field? Also writing reviews for federal funding agency grants now, which is a longer process but also very interesting and helpful.

I'm coordinating the charitable fundraising among the faculty in my department this year - I have a meeting coming up with the head honcho at the university level about what charity drives we'll be doing in the run-up to the holiday season and then I think I just mostly forward e-mails? This is a new position for me.

I'm one of four faculty (plus a grad student) on a new hire search committee for a tenure-track faculty member. It's been interesting thus far, but due to some financial tapdancing going on at the moment, we may delay the hire by a year. Our department typically gets 100+ highly qualified applications for each position (which is wild, we're not huge and have like 21 faculty total), so that's a huge time sink once the ball gets rolling on it. We did put together the ad we were going to send out.

I extended my term on the college's scholarship committee, which generally involves a couple meetings a year of giving out extra money to students. Good stuff, especially since we received a gift at the college level recently that means nearly everyone who applies gets something.

I'm working on a research project I got funded through a small internal grant - it's been weird to have a research project that's just me doing coding and writing. I really need to block out some protected time for that! It's a fun project and I think I budgeted for two publications. We'll see how it turns out!

A while ago, I was approached by a truly giant scientific journal to write a review article about my entire research focus. I brought on three colleagues who had written similar reviews in the past, got our proposal approved, and promptly had multiple freakouts trying to get a full draft written. Recently got most of that draft completed and sent it to the editor, who had AMAZING and detailed feedback. This is the kind of article where we have an art team at our beck and call to create graphics for us. We really want to do this right.

I got pulled into a research thing with a national lab a while ago and keep forgetting about it - my role appears to be mostly done, and now I mostly just occasionally get random e-mails with dire security clearance warnings that amount to "I wrote this whitepaper report, can you confirm I properly represented your contribution?" It would be lovely if a publication came out of this, it's fun work (not military), but who knows.

A colleague and I are waiting to hear back on a really, really cool grant proposal we submitted a couple months ago. We probably still have 6 months before we hear anything, but man, I think about it every day. It would be so neat and the program manager agreed that it was an awesome idea, but of course now we're in the reviewers' hands. We might do some preliminary work in anticipation of possibly having to resubmit next year.

Speaking of grant proposals, I need to at least put a draft together for a new project. As my grad students graduate, I need funding to bring new ones on! This is also the one thing my department chair has suggested is a little weak on my CV: number of grants obtained. It's SUCH a long process, with probably 80-100 hours of work for each grant proposal written. Ugh. It is fun when it's an idea I'm excited about, at least.

I'm on the committees of about a half-dozen grad students (and am anticipating possibly hearing from one more) - my role is mostly to provide very occasional guidance on the overall research project, providing specialized knowledge the student and their primary advisor may not have, and attending all exams. I also have to keep an eye out for and help mediate any issues between the student and their advisor. That can get messy.

We have 3 weekly seminars in the department! They're very interesting and I'm mostly just glad I'm not coordinating one of the seminar series this year.

I've started getting inquiries from potential graduate students. See above re: not knowing if I'll have funding for a new student next year. Why can't we just coordinate our deadlines?

I've started working with a science advisory board for a major organization within my field, which has been interesting so far! As a more junior member, my input isn't being super actively sought yet, so I get to just learn about the processes involved and nod sagely a lot. Thankfully the two-day meeting last week was remote.

I'm on another national committee that's currently working on organizing our next big conference in late 2024. There's always a lot that goes into that (and I don't have a super high opinion of the guy running the group after he posted some crappy stuff about students on social media), but thankfully I've managed to dodge some of the bigger responsibilities.

I'm part of a very cool peer-mentoring group where I chat weekly with scientists in different-but-comparable fields about any and all of the above. It's very nice to have a bit of a place to vent!

Oh yes, and the tenure/promotion-application process kicks off this year. I have a meeting next week with my mentoring committee to see if they feel I'm ready to go up. Here goes nothing...

I think that's mostly it? It's gonna be a busy 3 months. Time to make some lists...

[mapsontheweb]

Live and historic wind generation around Great Britain

by u/robhawkes

GB Renewables Map an energy experiment created entirely in my free time (day job is visualisation at Octopus Energy).

It's an interactive map showing live generation for major wind farms in Great Britain, showing what each wind farm is generating both now and in the past, and where that generation is physically located.

You can play with it here: https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com

Generation data comes from the Elexon balancing system, which is a public dataset. There's an "About" section on the site that goes into detail on the various public data sources and how some of the features work. I also document a lot of this on my Twitter @robhawkes if you're curious.

Animated weather data is from WeatherLayers and shows current and historic wind conditions on the map, providing context to wind generation around the country.

History mode allows you to go back in time and see wind generation and weather conditions for a particular date and time. It's great for exploring days of record generation, such as the 21.6GW record on January 10th, 2023!

Prediction mode lets you see what wind farms are estimated to be generating using current wind conditions and model based on historic generation and wind speeds. Is a wind farm generating as you expect, or is there something to look into?

An experimental feature allows you to see what future wind farms could be generating today (or in the past!) if they were already built and operational. If you click the "sparkle" button on the map you'll get to see what the upcoming 3.6GW Dogger Bank wind farm is estimated to generate if it was operational today.

This is just the start and there are many more features to come!

[wumblr]

let's have a hard talk. these insufferable takes on AI are not advancing the discussion. the discussion was miles beyond this "takes work from artist" "consumer boycott must be the answer" dead on arrival poor substitute for an analysis, years ago, when timnit gebru got fired from google, for making what is now, because of her, the trivially obvious observation that large datasets may be too large to manually analyse for bias.

like congratulations. you have hit upon the point of capek's RUR, origin of the word robot, from a hundred years ago. were you going to take another point from back before the dust bowl or was that it? it's not just automation that takes surplus value from labor, it's any increase in efficiency. this is the first textbook feature of the economic model we're living under. luddites genuinely had more sense for nuance when the loom threatened to extract value from their labor at a pace never before seen. this is not that. luddites were producing textiles that people actually bought. you aren't.

aside from that, the implication that this is on par with like, a museum heist, or art forgery (both of which are, by the way, through a lens that includes class analysis, badass) is laughable. you are not selected for exhibition by making posts online, you are participating in a social medium where your continued pageviews are the source of advertising revenue. you are not bourgeoise, you are proletarian. your deviantart was search engine optimized to the point that it was trivial to pull five billion carbon copies of you off google images with like a two-line API call. you are not unique, you are one drop in a lost generation's renaissance. maybe if you don't want your work "stolen" you shouldn't be posting an endlessly reproducible digital copy to the world wide web? it's been seven years since twitter killed vine for trying to set the precedent that collective action can produce wage, can we bring back that level of foresight yet? or are you happy settling for tiktok because they deign to curate a ""creators fund"" for white heterosexuals? go buy a lottery ticket

i've said it before but this is a structured argument, presented to you with two neatly-collimated "sides," one that says every possible piece of data should be available for free for capitalist class to build automation out of it, and one that says pirating endlessly reproducible goods belonging the capitalist class should have harsher punishment. this is intentional, not unique, not new. it's the perverse dialectic of capital. you can only argue a side that benefits it.

the absence of nuanced intersectional perspective here is embarrassing. beyond that it's painfully obvious people are taking it personally, as if you had any chance to make rent as an artist, regardless of what procedural generation or neural networks might do. it's a selfish, blindly individualistic, mass manufactured wholesale bargain basement opinion, one that does not serve to advance any collective good, because it's based in the pipe dream of suddenly jumping three tax brackets to become bourgeoise. beyond that, doesn't it cheapen your art to only ever make saleable products? beyond that, it's painfully obvious none of you have ever tried using a neural network. from computer science or statistical perspectives, these constructs are novel and fascinating (or, the advent of cheap processing power sufficient to allow decades-old theory to flourish, which let's be honest, this power relies on an exploitative global network of rare mineral resource extraction and high precision manufacturing, which is yet one more topic i haven't once seen broached in the months this stultifyingly dull conversation has been ongoing.)

blaming a novelty for the ills of capitalism is nonsense, and it's not why luddites opposed the loom.

and let me just tell you, working with a code construct also does not improve your chances as an artist, which is the main point i wish i could get across. aside from the absence of intersectionality there's also an absence of class analysis, in which context it's, again, painfully obvious that no capitalist has ever cared one whit about art. even when they deign to take on a patronage it's as a backhanded PR stunt, like the unpaid notre dame roof pledges, to offset the ill repute they've accrued from extracting value for personal gain, while contributing nothing except the directive power their birthright of wealth gave them. this is the main critique i had about age of surveillance capitalism -- zuboff seems to think a return to ford-era capitalism, where the rich bothered to endow museums (to curate what they exclude) or pay a livable wage (in order to recapture it as sales), would solve the fundamental problem of value extraction from labor and natural resources for the barefaced sake of the profit motive. unremarkable and unsurprising for tenured faculty of harvard, how else would she sell books? but for some foolhardy reason i expected better from my peers.

your aspirations of small business aren't going to flourish if you suddenly got everything you claim to want and they banned every code construct from competing with you. you are not in competition with capital. you are nothing to it, it will kill you in total indifference without blinking, surely you ought to know this by now, it will bus in scab slave labor from prison to ramp up production despite a boycott in solidarity with a strike, and it's going to remain this way as long as capital survives. whether or not an algorithm or a network or an artifice is involved is irrelevant to the fundamental problem that it's a winner-takes-all game that ended before you were born. unless and until you want to start challenging the police that uphold the state or the insurance trust that pays to replace its points of failure, you're doing surface level armchair analysis on a problem that only the extremely online care about. arguing over what color of icing is on the cake you're never going to be eating while you starve for lack of bread.

and like... i get it. after the pandemic that we're still going through, you want to refocus on the things that really make you happy. but i've got to say, refocusing on art until you starve because you didn't manage to figure out self-sufficience during a recession is a sad way to die. perhaps you should consider the necessity of survival as a precursor to contentment. and to be clear i am saying this specifically because i care whether you survive and because i am interested in the artworks you are making or in your future potential. but you can't focus on that to the exclusion of all else, dog eat dog world and that means every day i have to see someone get ate. now for the last time, for god's sake can you stop yelling "this is because of code constructs" every time a dog eats your purported art commission revenue because it's really hurting MY purported small business revenue, selling products of code constructs,

[mariacallous]

The open internet once seemed inevitable. Now, as global economic woes mount and interest rates climb, the dream of the 2000s feels like it’s on its last legs. After abruptly blocking access to unregistered users at the end of last month, Elon Musk announced unprecedented caps on the number of tweets—600 for those of us who aren’t paying $8 a month—that users can read per day on Twitter. The move follows the platform’s controversial choice to restrict third-party clients back in January.

This wasn’t a standalone event. Reddit announced in April that it would begin charging third-party developers for API calls this month. The Reddit client Apollo would have to pay more than $20 million a year under new pricing, so it closed down, triggering thousands of subreddits to go dark in protest against Reddit’s new policy. The company went ahead with its plan anyway.

Leaders at both companies have blamed this new restrictiveness on AI companies unfairly benefitting from open access to data. Musk has said that Twitter needs rate limits because AI companies are scraping its data to train large language models. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has cited similar reasons for the company’s decision to lock down its API ahead of a potential IPO this year.

These statements mark a major shift in the rhetoric and business calculus of Silicon Valley. AI serves as a convenient boogeyman, but it is a distraction from a more fundamental pivot in thinking. Whereas open data and protocols were once seen as the critical cornerstone of successful internet business, technology leaders now see these features as a threat to the continued profitability of their platforms.

It wasn’t always this way. The heady days of Web 2.0 were characterized by a celebration of the web as a channel through which data was abundant and widely available. Making data open through an API or some other means was considered a key way to increase a company’s value. Doing so could also help platforms flourish as developers integrated the data into their own apps, users enriched datasets with their own contributions, and fans shared products widely across the web. The rapid success of sites like Google Maps—which made expensive geospatial data widely available to the public for the first time—heralded an era where companies could profit through free, mass dissemination of information.

“Information Wants To Be Free” became a rallying cry. Publisher Tim O’Reilly would champion the idea that business success in Web 2.0 depended on companies “disagreeing with the consensus” and making data widely accessible rather than keeping it private. Kevin Kelly marveled in WIRED in 2005 that “when a company opens its databases to users … [t]he corporation’s data becomes part of the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they’re the company’s developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base.” Investors also perceived the opportunity to generate vast wealth. Google was “most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0,” and its wildly profitable model of monetizing free, open data was deeply influential to a whole generation of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Of course, the ideology of Web 2.0 would not have evolved the way it did were it not for the highly unusual macroeconomic conditions of the 2000s and early 2010s. Thanks to historically low interest rates, spending money on speculative ventures was uniquely possible. Financial institutions had the flexibility on their balance sheets to embrace the idea that the internet reversed the normal laws of commercial gravity: It was possible for a company to give away its most valuable data and still get rich quick. In short, a zero interest-rate policy, or ZIRP, subsidized investor risk-taking on the promise that open data would become the fundamental paradigm of many Google-scale companies, not just a handful.

Web 2.0 ideologies normalized much of what we think of as foundational to the web today. User tagging and sharing features, freely syndicated and embeddable links to content, and an ecosystem of third-party apps all have their roots in the commitments made to build an open web. Indeed, one of the reasons that the recent maneuvers of Musk and Huffman seem so shocking is that we have come to expect data will be widely and freely available, and that platforms will be willing to support people that build on it.

But the marriage between the commercial interests of technology companies and the participatory web has always been one of convenience. The global campaign by central banks to curtail inflation through aggressive interest rate hikes changes the fundamental economics of technology. Rather than facing a landscape of investors willing to buy into a hazy dream of the open web, leaders like Musk and Huffman now confront a world where clear returns need to be seen today if not yesterday.

This presages major changes ahead for the design of the internet and the rights of users. Twitter and Reddit are pioneering an approach to platform management (or mismanagement) that will likely spread elsewhere across the web. It will become increasingly difficult to access content without logging in, verifying an identity, or paying a toll. User data will become less exportable and less shareable, and there will be increasingly fewer expectations that it will be preserved. Third-parties that have relied on the free flow of data online—from app-makers to journalists—will find APIs ever more expensive to access and scraping harder than ever before.

We should not let the open web die a quiet death. No doubt much of the foundational rhetoric of Web 2.0 is cringeworthy in the harsh light of 2023. But it is important to remember that the core project of building a participatory web where data can be shared, improved, critiqued, remixed, and widely disseminated by anyone is still genuinely worthwhile.

The way the global economic landscape is shifting right now creates short-sighted incentives toward closure. In response, the open web ought to be enshrined as a matter of law. New regulations that secure rights around the portability of user data, protect the continued accessibility of crucial APIs to third parties, and clarify the long-ambiguous rules surrounding scraping would all help ensure that the promise of a free, dynamic, competitive internet can be preserved in the coming decade.

For too long, advocates for the open web have implicitly relied on naive beliefs that the network is inherently open, or that web companies would serve as unshakable defenders of their stated values. The opening innings of the post-ZIRP world show how broader economic conditions have actually played the larger role in architecting how the internet looks and feels to this point. Believers in a participatory internet need to reach for stronger tools to mitigate the effects of these deep economic shifts, ensuring that openness can continue to be embedded into the spaces that we inhabit online.

WIRED Opinion publishes articles by outside contributors representing a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here. Submit an op-ed at ideas@wired.com.

[chaoskirin]

Have you found that you’ve been less motivated to create art now that AI has become so good?

I don’t really draw anymore because whenever I start a new drawing, I’m immediately plagued by thoughts like, why even bother? This piece is going to take hours when, theoretically, I could ask Mid-journey to do it for me and it would take about 10 seconds and probably look way better. So like, why should I even try?

I’m at college getting a degree in illustration but I’m afraid that by the time I graduate and get out into the field, I won’t have any job prospects. Human artists are becoming increasingly obsolete in the corporate world and I feel like nobody is going to want to hire me. I mean, from a shitty CEO’s perspective, why hire human artists when AI is right there? It’s faster and cheaper. Many established studio and corporate artists are already being fired in droves. We’re seeing it happen in real time.

I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle. AI has drained me of my creativity and my future job security. I’ve lost interest in one of my dearest hobbies and my degree may end up becoming completely useless. I loathe AI for the way it has stripped me of something I’ve dedicated so many years of my life to. Something that was once so precious to me.

I feel that I’ve spent thousands of hours honing a now useless skill. And that really sucks.

Sorry for ranting in your inbox, I hope you don’t mind… but since you are a working adult and do art and writing (of course writing AI has gotten stupid good as well and I’m bitter about that too) professionally, and as a hobby too, I figured that you would definitely understand.

Hey! This is a great question, and I have what I hope is a very hope-filled answer.

By the way, I don't call image generation "AI." It's not. There's no actual intelligence involved. It's an algorithm that averages images and combines them into something new. I refer to it as GenSlop.

First, the reason you're seeing such a proliferation of image generators attaching their dirty little claws into every website on the internet is due to what I call "just-in-casing." Rather than develop an ACTUAL ethical image generator (which would only use images from creative commons or pay artists for their use) generators like Deviantart's DreamUp and Twitter's Grok (?????? wtf is that name) have just stuffed LAION-5 into their code and called it a day.

Why? Why not wait and create an ethical dataset over several years?

Because it's become more likely than not than image generation is going to become strictly regulated by law, and companies like DA, Stability, Twitter, Adobe, and many others want to profit off it while it's still free and "legal."

I say "legal" in quotes, because at the moment, it's neither legal nor illegal. There are no laws in existence to govern this specific thing because it appeared so fast, there was literally no predicting it. So now it's in a legal grey area where it can't be prosecuted by US courts. (But it can be litigated--more on that in a bit.)

When laws are passed to govern the use of image generators, these companies that opted to use LAION-5 immediately without concern for the artists and communities they were harming will have to stop. but because of precedent, they will likely have their prior use of these generators forgiven, meaning they will not be forced to pay fines on their use before a certain date.

So while it seems they're popping up everywhere and taking over the art market, this is only so they can get in their share of profits from it before it becomes illegal to use them without compensation or consent.

But how do I know the law will support artists on this?

First, litigation. There are several huge lawsuits right now; one notable lawsuit against almost every major company using GenSlop technology with plaintiffs like Karla Ortiz and Grzegorz Rutkowski, among other high-profile artists. This lawsuit was recently """pared down""" or """mostly dismissed""" according to pro-GenSlop users, but what really happened is that the judge in the case asked the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to be more specific, which is generally a positive thing in cases like this. It means that precedent after a decision will be far clearer and have a longer reach than a more generalized complaint.

I don't know what pro-GenSloppers are insisting on spreading the "dismissal" tale on the internet, except to discourage actual artists. What they say has no bearing in the court, and it's looking more and more likely that the plaintiffs will be able to win this case and claim damages.

Getty Images, a huge image stock company, is also suing Stability AI for scraping its database. I'm not as well-versed on the case, though.

The other positive, despite what a lot of artists are saying, is the new SAG-AFTRA contract.

It's not perfect. It still allows GenSlop use. But it does require consent and compensation. Ideally, it would ban the use of artist images and voice entirely, but this contract is far better than what they would have gotten without striking. If you recall, before the strike, the AMPTP wanted to be able to use actor images and voices without any compensation or permission, without limitation.

And you can bet your ass that Hollywood isn't going to allow other organizations to have unregulated GenSlop use if they can't. They might even step in to argue against its use in front of congress, because their outlook is going to be "if we can't make money stealing art, no one else should be able to, either."

TL;DR: the huge proliferation of image generators and GenSlop right now is only because it's neither legal nor illegal. Regulations are coming, and artists will still be necessary and even required. Because the world is essentially built on a backbone or artistry.

I personally can't wait to drink the tears of all the techbros who can't steal art anymore.