#but taking someone's artwork and making an AI of it is not right

[sketchmew]

AI ART CAN STEAL!

AI like Stable Diffusion is a big threat to artists like me and you, (Trust me I have played around with the AI, even trained it on my artwork before)

But AI art should only be used as inspiration, not for full on art.

If I ever catch you using my art to train an AI on it I will:

Block you

Report you

Let everyone in the Commewnity be wary of you

Thank You,

Mod Haycoat

#pokemon #art #artists on tumblr #commewnity #mew #ai art is stolen art #ai art should only be used as concepts #i love ai i really do #but taking someone's artwork and making an AI of it is not right

[narsh-poptarts]

⁕ HIIIIII WINTER COMMISSIONS!!!!!! ⁕

As mentioned above, I will only be accepting payment through Kofi or Paypal, and payment must be made upfront. Once I receive payment, only then will I begin work on your commission. I will be sure to ask you lots of questions beforehand and during the process to ensure that both of us are happy with the outcome!!

If you have any questions or are interested, please shoot me a DM!!! I will not be able to start working on commissions until 12/29/2023, but you are more than welcome to shoot me a DM regardless!!!

Commissions will only be open until late January, as I have to start up school again!!!

Thank you so much!! Reblogs are much appreciated!!!

Some additional information/disclaimers/rules under the cut!!!

General Commission Rules:

Please tell me what you want BEFORE you pay me! That way I can properly calculate pricing!!

No refunds!

I have the right to refuse any commission for any reason!! Please respect this. It is likely nothing against you personally, just my own personal preferences for what I'm willing and able to draw.

Both the time I take and the price I charge will vary due to complexity, but I will do my best to inform you of any changes or delays!!

Life stuff happens. As mentioned in the above point, I will do my best to inform you of any delays that occur

Artwork is for personal use only. Do not resell or make profit off of my work without my permission. Additionally, my artwork is strictly forbidden from being used for Artificial Image (AI) Generation or anything similar.

Light blood/gore is okay!! If you're worried that something might be too heavy, don't be afraid to ask!!

I will do light nudity! LIGHT. Pretty much chest only and very little uncovered female presenting breasts. However, I will allow for censored and/or covered up nudity. I must express tho: No NSFW/suggestive, please and thank you. I just don't feel comfy drawing it. Please use what art I have already posted as reference for what I'm willing to draw (my drawing of my dnd character, Jack, is a perfect example).

Some of my rules are bendable and/or negotiable! Please just ask!!

I will default to using my grainy brush, so if you don't want that, say something!

If you don't care about the specifics of what I draw and just simply want me to draw your blorbo, I'm okay with that!! I might ask for the kind of vibe you're looking for tho

I will not be doing comic commissions, but I will do single scene commissions

Specific Commission Content Information:

I do accept furry comms!! Please be aware that I don't typically draw furry art so I am pretty inexperienced in that field. Regardless! I really want to try anyways and do my best, so I appreciate your patience with me!!

Additionally with furry comms: I will only do anthro/humanoid!! I'm not all that confident in my abilities to draw animals in the way I want to, but maybe someday in the future!

Yes I will draw your DnD character!! You must already have a visual reference for them, or at the very least, an assembly of reference images that I can use! I will not be designing your DnD character from scratch. It takes way too long for me to do something like that and I wish to respect both my time and effort and also yours.

I will draw most all DnD races. Please be aware the more animalistic races are not entirely within my expertise, but I will do my best!!

This goes for general OCs as well!! You must have an adequate visual reference of your OC for me or else I can't help you.

I don't want to draw irl people, but if you have someone specific or traits from someone specific that you want me to use as a reference for a character, I'm fine with that.

Yes I will draw fanart of any sort!! That includes fanart with all your headcanons!! (with ample reference) Just lemme know B)

The line between complex and simple background, at the end of the day, is up to my ruling, but for a general guideline: - No background: colors and/or gradients only, simple shapes and designs. No linework. - Simple background: concrete but not overly detailed. Does not especially matter where elements are coming from (if applicable). Ornate borders. - Complex background: detailed with heavy thought put into their design. Detailed linework. I will be doing a 70/30 rule. 70% character, 30% background. If i have to break out the perspective tool, it's complex. Refer to the examples for a general idea!!

Commission Process Rundown:

You go into my DMs and you say something like "hello! I would like to commission you for x, y, z!"

We talk over what you want, what you're looking for, how many characters, color or just lined, if you want shading, style, etc.

You give me a reference image if applicable.

I approve or deny the commission details and total up the price of your commission.

You confirm or deny the price and add or subtract any details to your order.

Upon your confirmation, I give you the link to my kofi or send you a paypal invoice (I would prefer kofi since it is easier and friendlier).

Once payment goes through, I start work on your commission at my next convenience!

I will send you a screenshot of the general sketch. You may change pose or any other detail at this stage. After your confirmation, I continue work.

I then send you a screenshot of the lines nearly finished. You may change minor details at this stage. If I made a mistake in design or otherwise, please let me know and I will be more than happy to fix it. If lines is all you asked for, then I will screenshot one last time once it's done, you confirm any last tweaks, and then I will send you the final image file!! I will ask if you want it to be a transparent image/blank background/specific color background/etc.

If that's the end of your commission details then yay!! If not, the process repeats for the colors and/or shading stages.

I will ask if you mind if I post the artwork! If you don't want me to post it, I won't.

Thank you for commissioning me!!

#my commissions #commissions open #commission #commission sheet #winter commissions #thank you for the support!!! #oh my god this took literally 2 hours to post cuz tumblr hated the last image

[shadowmaat]

Creative theft

I don’t think I’ll ever fully wrap my head around the rank entitlement some people have. Specifically in regards to paying artists, writers, crafters, etc.

* I want thing. * I can’t afford thing. * I’ll steal thing because I deserve it and the person who made it is a rich greedy asshole.

Stealing food and vital supplies from big box stores is one thing, but stealing from individual creative types who are probably also broke is fucking horrifying. No, you don’t “deserve” someone’s lovingly-crafted story or artwork without paying for all the time and effort they put into it. Sure, you deserve nice things once in a while, but not at the expense of someone else.

Pirating a struggling author’s books isn’t a “win” against Capitalism, it’s a “fuck you” to the author you claim to love, who sees their sales drop so far that their publisher decides there’s no demand for their books and doesn’t renew their contract. And you’d be surprised how many authors are just barely keeping afloat, even when they’re well-known names.

Using an AI program to copy your favorite artist’s style isn’t a “compliment” to them, it’s an insult. “I like your stuff but you charge too much” isn’t a valid answer, it’s just a convenient excuse to not give them any money. Artists deserve to eat, too. And they deserve recognition for the hard work they’ve done.

Buying cheap knock-offs of a dicemaker’s design isn’t some “gotcha.” You’re ruining their life and making them less likely (or less able) to create more designs. Dice-making is fucking expensive and time-consuming, and then you add in the creative effort needed in order to come up with unique designs that haven’t been done by someone else and yeah, it’s gonna get pricey. They aren’t overcharging. If anything they’re undercharging in hopes of some sales.

I keep thinking of that one story that makes the rounds here on occasion. The knitter who had a potential customer get angry because the price of the afghan  they wanted was “too much.” The customer priced out the cost of the yarn and needles and decided that was more than fair. Except, y’know, that isn’t how it works. If you go to the store and buy the right amount of yarn and the needles to do it, are you going to be able to create the afghan on your own? Even if you know how to knit, can you follow the complex pattern you decided on? How long is it going to take you?

It isn’t just about the cost of the raw supplies, you’re paying for a person’s talent as well, and any skills/expertise they’ve developed in their field. Telling them that their effort, creativity, and time isn’t worth any money is fucking rude.

The only thing you’re proving by stealing from artists is that you’re a greedy, selfish bastard who cares more about your own petty needs than about the livelihoods of others.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,” which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

#pluralistic #infrastructure #broadband #linkdumps #fran drescher #labor #strikes #libraries #big tech #sag aftra #writer's strike #commercial surveillance #actor's strike #data brokers #ebooks #moats and walls #drm #licensing #glam #publishing #military privacy #copyfight #platform economics #nukes #adam conover #pentagon #birds #mergers #delightful creatures #hostile architecture

[apollo-gate]

These RO asks are putting my brain right into the gutter lol. So here, nsfw. Relationship stage

So, ROs are quite busy, going on their usual work, maybe subduing bad guys or messing with the good guys, perhaps having an exhausting meeting or dealing with a bunch of irritating people/hanger-ons when their phone suddenly vibrates/rings.

MC sent them a message.

"What time are you coming home?"

With an attachment.

A ✨risque✨ picture of MC on the bed, with wet hair and a small towel enough to show off their toned skin.

RO reactions?

MY lord just imagine haveing a serius meeting than getting that kind of picture. AND THE MC IS HOT LIKE ANYONE WOULD BE LIKE DAMN....

Alice: You're asking for like pentup gym guy energy. Like she's ready to just punch and slap anybody in her way like seriously hope you don't get in her way. Alice will be ready to drop her clothes as soon as she sees the front door.

Helena: She be doing dance practice and honestly wouldn't be able to focus she would definitely go take a few pictures and send them and be like wait till i get home use these till I'm there in person

Lisa: she.... she gasp so loud that it would draw attention and would be red face and throw her phone into the wall or out the window then would have the panic over shit I just threw my phone.

Becca: this woman you just gave the cat her creme. you messed up. Becca would say that the punishment will be worse when she got home and the MC isn't ready. And yes Becca is getting the blindfold.

Daniella: She would go and get off to it anywhere she can because she already knows she gonna get it. Shes a lawyer so shell have the time.

Vanessa: Vanessa might shoot out an ice shard just a tiny one. the phone would be destroyed then the frustration of I only had 2 seconds of happiness. (Not like she keep a damn photos in her office)

Azalea: She would just stare. The girl would in the middle of the Embissy and just study Mcs body-like artwork. and have a little bit of drool too just lost in the body.

Kent: Man would be in the middle of an interrogation and break some poor dude's bones simply because he wants the Mc like ima be there soon.

Naamah: On one hand she is impressed. Why are you ending pictures where someone else can see them. She's gonna be taking you into the dark room. and at the same time going to erase the picture from existence. No one can ever see Mc but her.

Blaze: Would do two things run to you immediately to see if the Mc is in fact dressed like that then would message be there in 2 seconds. After all, ever he's doing isn't that important.

Zero would be doing some R&D project and just be like wow. He had to leave because he just ended up putting your name in the code or somehow making a really big mistake like the time he had the Ai say I love you over and over.

RF RO: She is pissed.. like blood and a few other things. but not you no. no harm will come to you. but she is rough. like really rough later that night.

Rune: Aish you're asking for a whip and a few other things. She sends some very dirty naughty texts and it's not at all like Rune would be turned on before she gets to you.

Rene: She be like extra quiet and the only one who would notice is Rune. Rene is a big pillow princess, so she would overthink what to say and even think if that is ok to send. But overall she gets home as fast as she can. Just expect a hard crushing kiss and a tall girl being very neddy.

Jade: She probably screws up a spell she is practicing. Might make a moan sound who knows. But all her acolytes will know someone has her attention.

Psyche would be bouncing off the walls staring at the clock like a child ready to get out of school. She might forget she has a truck and run or get stuck on the subway in her rush. Not her fault you sent her something unexpected.

Atargatis. would start her siren song and not realize it and the MC would be in a state of bliss till she walks in. Yeah, she got you back and you get a state of bliss and pleasure.

Atlas: she is teleporting like a jumping frog to buildings and crash into the bedroom and just do the best sexy pose of I'm here.

#bear hug 🤗 for you anon #anonymous #ZeroRO #BlazeRO #NaamahRO #KentRO #AzaleaRO #VanessaRO #DaniellaRO #BeccaRO #LisaRO #HelenaRO #AliceRO #red flag ro #RuneRO #ReneRO #LadyJadeRO #PsycheRO #AtargatisRO #AtlasRO

[mitsurichan3s-art-corner]

Mitsurichan3 commissions information & Terms of Services

Contact:

Means of contact:

Tumblr DMS

Email: [email protected]

(please subject it as COMMISSION REQUEST - details).

Payment methods

Paypal - through invoices sent via email

Ko-fi commissions page

Payment is done in US dollars, through paypal or Ko-fi. I am flexible in terms of payment, with 100% of the commission amount paid upfront, 50% upfront-50% once completed, or discuss multiple payment plans on a case by case basis. I am unable to provide refunds at this current time, so please keep this in mind.

General information:

Thank you so much for taking time to read through my TOS and commission information. I am Diana, aged 25, and am currently unemployed. I am open to answer questions, discuss details and talk about pricing so feel free to reach out!

I am opening commissions in order to pay my monthly bills

Please do not ask for updates every few hours, I also have a personal life and things pop up last minute.

Later this fall I will be going back to university, so commissions will stay open to help pay the costs of graduate school as well.

Commission price will also have tax applied to the final cost.

By commissioning me in any kind of way, you are agreeing to the terms of service above and below:

Detailed information:

Can draw:

Humans

Ocs / canon Characters

Ship Art

Nekomimi / Usamimi

Suggestive outfits

Please send me references, they are super helpful! Even a simple stick figure and a lot of written descriptions will go a long way!

Cannot/wont draw:

Hate art

Gore

NSFW

Mecha

Feral/anthro

Furry

Animals

Terms of Service:

Once the commission is paid for, I cannot do any refunds

I’ll only accept upfront Paypal payments through Paypal invoices, or my Ko-fi commissions page. Do NOT send me money independently. After receiving payment I will start on your commission

I reserve the rights to use/display your commission on a portfolio, artist website, and social media. However, if you wish to keep your commission private, please let me know ahead of time.

Turn around times vary between 3 weeks to 2 months, depending on complexity of the artwork requested.

I will give periodical updates at each step of the process (sketch, line art, flat colors, full rendered and email finished piece).

Sketching usually takes a week once payment has been received. I will contact you to approve the initial sketch. Clients can make 1 major change at this stage, before being charged an additional $5 per change afterwards. This will be added to the total price.

I will send the finished product through an email address of your choice.

I reserve the right to decline any commission I am not comfortable working on, for any reason.

My Art cannot be used to train AI or make NFTs.

You may NOT claim my work as your own, trace, recolor/redraw, or redistribute my work for profit.

You may NOT use or repost someone else’s commission piece without my and the buyer’s permission. If you receive permission, you must use/post with credit

Your commission piece is NOT for commercial use. This is for personal use only.

If you are the buyer, you may post the finished commission whenever you want but please credit properly, or share it from my social media accounts.

If the commission is a gift for someone else, you are allowed to share the piece with the receiving party. (PST! Let me know what they think too!)

I can accept requests if you don’t have the adequate visual reference of your/the character that you want me to draw. Do your best to communicate effectively and I will meet you halfway. I will ask a lot of questions to better understand your request.

Picrew/ Character creator images (for ocs) are accepted, as long as you have another actual reference to pair it with: i.e. using the picrew to outline an outfit you want, or a change in hair/eye color. I will accept a Picrew/Character creator image if it's exactly what you want.

Thank you so much for reading! And thank you for considering me for a commission!

#artists on tumblr #signal boost #ask me for commissions! #commissions open #commissions #please help a sis out #reblogs are very much appreciated

[unichrome]

AI and the value of labour (but only if it's yours)

Few of you have missed the whole AI/AI-art/ChatGPT-debate by now and even though few have the technical literacy to actually know what it is and its implementations, it hasn't stopped people from having opinions on it, and wow they sure are Opinions. It's mainly about how it's art-theft and will put already struggling artists out of business because now there's a chance that their dandelion found in a deviantart furry artwork they made using GIMP once will now be seen made sort of in the same style on a 250x250 pixel generated picture from a free online generator. And now I'm going to be snarky about it but also highlight a problem seen from the other end of this - the value of labour, and I'm not talking about the artists labour here.

But first let's look back a little bit for some well-needed perspective:

The logic for this is nothing we haven't seen before; you can't copy art and have it made available for just everyone to use like this! In the early 2000's it put musicians out of business and destroyed music forever with the introduction of napster. Pirate bay is why movies no longer are being made. It has destroyed art as we know it when people tauntingly right-clicked on a cryptobro's NFT and clicked "save as" (which I assume is also very problematic for the people who are vehemently against AI art? It's a literal 1-to-1 copy of your work). Media corporations are dying because intellectual properties are no longer protected under the copyright laws after 70 or so years. In the 90's there was even some video star who literally murdered a radio star. With the introduction of vinyl, it even killed live music forever.

So technology has been destroying just about all forms of art as we know it for a while now and each time it's the same doomsday predictions from the newly formed kind of art-christianity where some art has soul (Good, Skilled Laboured artists) and others hasn't (Evil, of course).

Now for the informative part of the post:

In the 1970's, computers as we know them today began forming, and with it, the value of a computer programmers skill and labour. Alongside with this, they saw a growing problem: Corporations owned everything they made, and corporations will also have the whole say about what will be present on a computer and the price of everything present on it.

This was not very appreciated by neither the programmers, and nor the customers (although few saw this growing problem coming). So in a weird twist of fate, programmers became one of the most left-wing labour-rights occupation you could find by forming Free Software Foundation, GNU, and essentially setting the stage for you to be able to use the free GIMP software instead of buying a staggering price for Adobe's Photoshop. It enabled you to download firefox instead of buying a copy of internet explorer. Because yes, before this kind of software activism formed, and the general environment of software development became to make it as freely available as possible - and having an outright despise for corporations like Novell and Microsoft for taking such huge amount of money to their own pockets instead of the developers, literally every piece of software cost money. A LOT of money.

This kind of 100% for free software usage we're used to has also led to us no longer being appreciative of the work and skill that goes behind keeping a software not only developed and updated continuously for decades, but also spending money on keeping it hosted and delivered to you for free. We even joke and scoff about the mere thought of having to pay 0.99 Euro for an app we'd use daily and a developer spent 2 years in the making. Meanwhile, when someone offers to pay someone merely 10 euro or so for a handmade blanket, there's an outrage about the value of labour and skill. And rightfully so! I support that, and so should you, even if it's labour that you weren't the one making.

And it doesn't end there either - we all know corporations has no trouble finding new ways to charge you money. Organisations like Free Software Foundation, various Linux projects and Mozilla have campaigned for a freer usage in general, leading to fair-use laws, campaigning for the right to repair your technology instead of having to buy new one all the time, as well as preventing corporations from banning every other piece of software on a computer that they don't want you to have (from a competitor or free alternative of their software).

I mentioned Adobe specifically, because in the wave of anti-AI-art outcry, artists are campaigning for a ban on making software that uses other peoples artistic similarities (not copies mind you, similarities, meaning making it a copyright infringement to have art that is similar to yours, since that's what AI-art algorithms create), and I'm sure right off the bat many of you can see the huge problem with that, but Adobe sure isn't. They're also gladly in on this, because that would mean that free alternatives of Photoshop like GIMP would also become a copyright infringement. So would a lot of our other free software we use daily and take for granted.

That's all I wanted to say about this I think. The TL;DR version is basically to value labour even if it isn't yours, and to not take it for granted. As a final part to remember about AI is that it is a tool, and like any tool it can be used for good or evil. AI is what made it possible for us to make sense of the large hadron collider data and made enormous leaps in scientific discovery in just a few years, that would otherwise had taken 500 years to sort through by humans, and with a much higher rate of error.

#datatag #AI #computer science #labour #copyright

[marabarl-and-marlbara]

what do you think about people copying your art style?

hi anonymous, notes from church;

to your question: about the same answer as the pinterest but more apathetic depending on how general you mean -- there is something incompatible-seeming to me regarding any-one interested in art to deny the aspect of influence in how we motivate ourselves; ie: often i see artists, animes, books, sentences, games, that just make me go "wow [they] did something amazing, i want to try to do that in the way they did" & i:ll imitate it pretty flagrantly, whether it be attempting to write cormac-like without punctuation, or outright ripping language from KJV bible, or pulling up an artbook for gate keepers and studying how the artist draws hairs and eyes, or looking at some AI amalgamate artwork of religious art and wanting to make something similar -- everything is just there to be eaten (dungeon meshi quote roughly, i watched the first episode day before last) and eating is the right of the living;

but, that:s all absconding from the Personal aspect of seeing art that seems extremely close to mine, and the weak personal part of me often feels a little hurt/wounded to see that, barring any credit: cause (like any other) i like recognition and even if some-times i make things lame, tepid: i still have a prideful spark that says mine! ~but i also think this isn:t a good-part of me, but it:s my flawed person-part of me. so: mostly i don:t care, even if it sometimes hurts me on a pride level; i feel worse if someone gets attacked over being influenced by me; but i:d feel absolute worse if i learned that they received money to fund the Warhammer Night Lords 40k Kill Team Fund off of work i made and i received nothing -- there:s nothing worse; there:s no hell deeper; there:s also no heaven higher than receiving money to fund the Warhammer Night Lords 40k Kill Team Fund but it:d be pale without the possibility of hell on the other side, too, you know? that:s art;

happy sabbath, by the way, anonymous: it:s hand-held sabbath when the 8th and seventh-day calendars overlap: yay, verily; consider observing and (if left handed) adopt a simple vow of chirality to only write mirrored excluding legal documents and when sinister-direction would hamper purpose (like addressing envelopes, packages); (sitting in church today i realized i struggled immensely visualizing how to write 'forwards' in my head, after writing backwards for so many years it finally flipped completely in my head); take care

[melyzard]

I was wondering if you have resources on how to explain (in good faith) to someone why AI created images are bad. I'm struggling how to explain to someone who uses AI to create fandom images, b/c I feel I can't justify my own use of photoshop to create manips also for fandom purposes, & they've implied to me they're hoping to use AI to take a photoshopped manip I made to create their own "version". I know one of the issues is stealing original artwork to make imitations fast and easy.

Hey anon. There are a lot of reasons that AI as it is used right now can be a huge problem - but the easiest ones to lean on are:

1) that it finds, reinforces, and in some cases even enforces biases and stereotypes that can cause actual harm to real people. (For example: a black character in fandom will consistently be depicted by AI as lighter and lighter skinned until they become white, or a character described as Jewish will...well, in most generators, gain some 'villain' characteristics, and so on. Consider someone putting a canonically transgender character through an AI bias, or a woman who is not perhaps well loved by fandom....)

2) it creates misinformation and passes it off as real (it can make blatant lies seem credible, because people believe what they see, and in fandom terms, this can mean people trying to 'prove' that the creator stole their content from elsewhere, or allow someone to create and sell their own 'version' of content that is functionally unidentifiable from canon

3) it's theft. The algorithm didn't come up with anything that it "makes," it just steals some real person's work and then mangles is a bit before regurgitating it with usually no credit to the original, actual creator. (In fandom terms: you have just done the equivalent of cropping out someone else's watermark and calling yourself the original artist. After all, the AI tool you used got that content from somewhere; it did not draw you a picture, it copy pasted a picture)

4) In some places, selling or distributing AI art is or may soon be illegal - and if it's not illegal, there are plenty of artists launching class action lawsuits against those who write the algorithm, and those who use it. Turns out artists don't like having their art stolen, mangled, and passed off as someone else's. Go figure.

Here are some articles that might help lay out more clear examples and arguments, from people more knowledgeable than me (I tried to imbed the links with anti-paywall and anti-tracker add ons, but if tumblr ate my formatting, just type "12ft.io/" in front of the url, or type the article name into your search engine and run it through your own ad-blocking, anti tracking set up):

These fake images reveal how AI amplifies our worst stereotypes [Source: Washington Post, Nov 2023]

Humans Are Biased; AI is even worse (Here's Why That Matters) [Source: Bloomburg, Dec 2023]

Why Artists Hate AI Art [Source: Tech Republic, Nov 2023]

Why Illustrators Are Furious About AI 'Art' [Source: The Guardian, Jan 2023]

Artists Are Losing The War Against AI [Source: The Atlantic, Oct 2023]

This tool lets you see for yourself how biased an AI can be [Source: MIT Technology Review, March 2023]

Midjourney's Class-Action lawsuit and what it could mean for future AI Image Generators [Source: Fortune Magazine, Jan 2024]

What the latest US Court rulings mean for AI Generated Copyright Status [Source: The Art Newspaper, Sep 2023]

AI-Generated Content and Copyright Law [Source: Built-in Magazine, Aug 2023 - take note that this is already outdated, it was just the most comprehensive recent article I could find quickly]

AI is making mincemeat out of art (not to mention intellectual property) [Source: The LA Times, Jan 2024]

Midjourney Allegedly Scraped Magic: The Gathering art for algorithm [Source: Kotaku, Jan 2024]

Leaked: the names of more than 16,000 non-consenting artists allegedly used to train Midjourney’s AI [Source: The Art Newpaper, Jan 2024]

#anti ai art #art theft #anti algorithms #sexism #classism #racism #stereotypes #lawsuits #midjourney #ethics #real human consequences #irresponsible use of algorithms #spicy autocomplete #sorry for the delayed answer

[canmom]

ai analogies

with photography, the 'inputs' or 'creative choices' include the subject, the framing, and technical qualities like exposure, focus, aperture and iso. the output, the thing that's judged, is then the qualities of the image - composition and colour and narrative. since photography is very quick, a photographer will typically take many shots of a subject, and then pick out the ones they like best to share with the wider world, so there is also a curative element.

with collage (and also photobashing, and even the limited space of a dollmaker game), the 'inputs' are the choices of existing images, and the composition created by arranging them. so there's a curative element in selecting what to collage, and then new meaning is created by juxtaposing two previously unrelated images, the spatial relationships between them, and so on. (see also graphic design!) the visual qualities of the original image are relevant insofar as they affect the composition, but you don't judge a collage containing a painting or photo on how well-painted the painting or well-shot the photo is, rather on how well it uses that painting or photo.

with 'readymades' and similar genres of conceptual art, it's kind of similar, right? you put the existing objects in a new context and create meaning through how they're arranged. people respond to whether the idea it communicates is interesting. (often these days they come with some text which gives a key to inform you how to interpret the artwork.)

anyway. with drawing and painting, which are comparatively laborious to create, you are constantly making thousands of creative choices, from the broad scale - composition, value structure, how you construct a figure - to the tiny, like line weight, rendering, shape design. to navigate this vast space of possibility, you will be informed by your memory of other pictures you've seen (your personal 'visual library') and techniques you've practiced, reference images you've gathered, and so on. the physical qualities of your body and the medium will also affect your picture - how you move your arm, how watercolor moves across the paper, etc etc.

broadly the same is true for other very involved media like sculpture or computer graphics or music (of all kinds!). more fine-grained control implies both more work and more scope for creative choices.

when someone sees an image created by whatever means, they take all of this in at once, for a gestalt impression - and if they feel like it, they can look closer and appreciate the particular details. many artists will think about trying to create a composition that 'leads the eye' to take in particular points of interest and convey the narrative of the picture.

so then, 'AI'. your inputs are the design of the neural net, the selection of training data, the text/image used as a prompt and then finally the selection of an image produced by the program. (you can modify that image of course but let's not get into that for now). chances are you don't have a lot of control over the first two since the computation involved is too unwieldy, though some image generators can be 'finetuned' with additional training data.

'AI art' is like photography in that you typically generate a lot of images and select the ones that 'come out well'. like a photographer looking for a subject, you might search around for an interesting prompt. it's unlike photography in that you have very limited control over all those other parameters (at best you can try to verbally describe what you want and hope the AI understands, or ask it to generate similar pictures and hope one has the qualities you want).

'AI art' is like collage in that you are taking existing images and creating new meaning of of them, by generating a latent space and transformation algorithm that approximates them. it's unlike collage in that you have no real knowledge of what specific images may be 'most' informing the corner of latent space you're probing. you can look at an AI generated image and say 'this looks kinda like a Nihei manga' but it's not using a specific image of Nihei. still, there is something similar to the relationship between images in collage when you do things like 'style transfer'.

'AI art' can be like conceptual art or for that matter political cartoons in that often it's just providing illustration to a concept or joke that can be expressed in words. 'Shrek in the style of The Dark Crystal' or 'cats that spell "gay sex"' is what you're getting across. but 'AI art' as a subculture places very high concern on the specific aesthetic qualities, so it's not that simple.

briefly, sampling in music often tends to foreground that it's a sample, either one the audience may recognise - the Amen break for example - or just by being noticeably different from the texture of the rest of the piece. even when the sample isn't easily recognised, though, the art of sampling is to place it in a new context which brings out different sonic qualities, e.g. by playing it rapidly in succession, or heavily filtering and distorting it, overlaying it with other sounds, or playing it right before the drop. it's similar to collage and photobashing.

paintings then. AI art rather obsessively tries to imitate paintings, drawings, 3D graphics etc. some of its proponents even try to position it as obsoleting these art forms, rather than a new derivative art form. a lot of the fear from artists who work in those media is that, even if the AI generated images are a poor substitute for what we make, it will be 'good enough' to satisfy the people with the money, or discourage people from learning how to paint with all its nuances.

so, 'AI' may make results that look like a painting, but the process of making it is hugely different. rather than gradually constructing a picture and making decisions at each turn, you try out successive prompts to get a page full of finished pictures, and generate variations on those pictures, until you find one you like. it's most similar to the client who describes an image they want and then makes requests to tweak it. there is still creativity in this, because it's kind of replicating the back-and-forth between an artist and client/art director/critique-giver/etc. however, in this analogy, it's hampered by the limited communication between you and the 'artist'. and it's a different sort of input, so we respond to it differently.

generating and posting AI art could also be compared to the kind of thing we do on this website, where we curate images we like and share them. you're all looking at the outputs of the same image generator and pointing and saying 'ooh, that one's cool'. what's kinda troublesome in this analogy is that AI obfuscates all that stuff about credit and inspiration, collapsing it all into one mass. unless their name was used in the prompt, you can't tell if the 'AI' image is 'drawing heavily' on any particular artist. this isn't a new problem - firstly websites full of uncredited images abound, secondly any creative process is inspired by loads of things that we can't enumerate or hope to divulge, so the idea of tracing the paths of inspiration is perhaps a mirage anyway. still, for me (sakuga fan type of person!), knowing what i can about the specific people involved in creating artwork and how they went about it is important, and that's heavily blackboxed by 'AI'.

none of this would be helped by harsher copyright laws. it's great that people can create derivative works and respond to existing art. that is the scaffold that launches us somewhere new and hopefully interesting. simply putting someone's work into an image generator to create similar pictures is not a very interesting statement in its own right, and a lot of AI illustration produced at the moment has a weirdly glossy, overproduced feeling that is offputting and leaves nowhere for the eye to settle (when it isn't just mush), but that's not to say AI is never going to be able to be used to say anything interesting or become a meaningful art form in its own right.

'AI' is kinda like a bunch of things but not exactly like any of them. (this isn't to get into the economic questions at all, that would be a much longer post!). but since there are people very sincerely devoted to this being an art form... I want to know how to 'read' these works - what I'm looking for in there, what a meaningful comment would be. bc right now when I see an illustration and realise it's AI generated image it's like... a sense of disappointment because whatever I was picking up on isn't actually part of the 'statement' in the way i thought. so it's like oh... that's nice. the machine picked a cool perspective huh? all the things i would normally appreciate in an illustration are outside the artist's control, so responding to them feels irrelevant! so what is the right mode here? there's more to it than just the choice of subject. but I feel like I have more to say about even a picrew.

#ai #yet another one of these lol #it's been on my brain i guess

[killian-whump]

KW Does Shit So You Don't Have To

I know there's a lot of arguments and debates about AI generated art and how horrible it is, both for the artists it rampantly steals from and in the quality of art produced.

But, you know... I'm a curious person.

So I went and plugged Colin's name into a bunch of these things just to see what would happen and... absolutely nothing worthwhile happened. I mean, stuff happened... and you can hit the Keep Reading link to hear about it, but... I dunno, man.

These things have no clue what Colin actually looks like. It's bizarre. None of them got him right, yet they ALL seemed to get him... equally wrong? Like, there's some guy out there that AI thinks is Colin, but isn't actually Colin at all, and he looks about like this:

They did no better with Killian Jones, Colin O'Donoghue as Killian Jones or even Colin O'Donoghue as Killian Jones from Once Upon a Time. In fact, at that point, I was pretty much just throwing words at them that they were entirely ignoring.

Admittedly, one of the sites (Craiyon) actually got relatively close to Colin's appearance, but they also looked like they weren't making art so much as cutting and pasting his face onto art and blurring the edges. That, and they seem to think he has glowing blue laser eyes for some reason, and I swear I didn't tell them that but I kinda wish I had, because that would be a fun rumor to start. Anyway, this is the best approximation of Colin I was able to create on that site, using "Colin O'Donoghue as Killian Jones from Once Upon a Time" as the prompt:

I mean, that's not... THAT bad. But it sure as shit isn't about to take the place of fanart any time soon. And, mind you, this was the BEST of the bunch. The rest were... Well, here's a less-good example with the laser eyes in full effect:

Apparently, Once Upon a Time is now Game of Thrones and Killian Jones is Baelish and Colin has blue laser eyes pew pew pew. Again, the face is kinda spot-on, but I feel like that's because they just copy/pasted his actual face in there. Even the image quality and color depth differs on the face versus the rest of the "art". They just literally stuck his face in some art template and gave him laser eyes.

Mind you, my side piece (Tom Payne) fared no better. They seem to have him confused with that kid who played the elf-like boy in... Game of Thrones. Actually, I feel like all of these things are stuck in some kind of Game of Thrones time warp where that's all that exists and everything they don't understand must surely come from that... and there is very, very little they DO understand.

Now as a litmus test of sorts, I stuck Keanu Reeves' name in some of them, as well, and they did all seem to know what he looks like - so if you're looking to play with the face of some uber famous celebs, this might be fun for you to play with. But anybody with fewer than 5 mainstream memes devoted to them probably just makes the AI go, "Who? Must be someone from Game of Thrones."

Which makes it completely useless for those of us gathered here, even aside from the obvious ethical quandaries of art theft and the devaluing of human-made artwork.

As a final test, I asked Craiyon to show me "Colin O'Donoghue as James Bond" and it basically returned the exact same results as the Killian Jones prompt did. Though it did hilariously encourage me to try, "handsome scottish actor colin o'donoghue dressed in a tuxedo and carrying a gun as he attends a james bond movie" which is definitely not what I was looking for, but bonus points for creativity, I guess? Also, carrying guns in movie theaters is bad form and super illegal, even if it is a James Bond film, but I guess AI doesn't know that. And Colin isn't Scottish.

But he does have laser eyes. This is a rumor I'm starting right here in this post on this blog. Laser eyes. He's got 'em.

#i don't even know what to tag this #really #just #feel free to keep scrolling #pew pew pew

[kataraslove]

longing-for-rain doesn't do ai art. she tried to be honest by saying that the filter she uses can technically be considered ai, and people fixated on the ai and attacked her for it. be honest, you're just jumping on this hate train because she's a zutara shipper who responded to a braindead take your friend sent her. this is not a coincidence that she is the one you people chose to kick off your ai witch hunt

so you’re telling me that someone can rapidly improve their art like THAT in just 4 months? when it took other artists - actual artists - years to improve their art? please don’t insult all our intelligence by saying this is in any way a harmless ai filter. this is straight up ai.

again, the person who made this post explains it perfectly below, and i doubt that they’re a kataang shipper with the intent to “bring this person down” or whatever nonsense you came up with. and after reading this post, it makes perfectly sense, doesn’t it? why the eyes always looked like that, why the hair always looked like that, why it has that eerie ai feeling, why the art is always whitewashed. let’s just say it’s not ai - why were you all hyping up whitewashed art for months? do you not have any standards for the art you reblog? any common sense? you see a brunette with light skin and automatically go, “omg that’s literally katara!!!” even though it looks nothing like katara?

what longing-for-rain was doing (or continuing doing idk) is such a spit in the face to actual artists. do you know how much artists appreciate when you ask them to repost their artwork, merely because you asked for permission (which is the thing you should be doing)? on top of that, that fraud was asking people to send them money for ai artwork. who knows how many people donated. does that not enrage you? most likely not, because you don’t actually care about the ramifications of ai art on the artist community. you care about how this reflects on zutara shippers. well, my response to that is that tons of zutara shippers should’ve used their brains first before blindly reblogging ai art. especially reblogging whitewashed ai art?

all i was going to do was reblog that post up there with the tags “i should’ve known omg” because that eerie feeling I got when I saw their art suddenly made sense. you transformed this into something so much bigger by not only sending me these asks, but falsely accusing another artist (an authentic, non-fraudulent one) of creating ai art. conveniently, this happens to be the very same artist that happened to be the one to respond to longing-for-rain’s initial anti aang response, which they felt was not a fair critique (and they are within their right to do so, because this is tumblr!)

this extends far beyond aang or shipping wars - what l-f-r was doing is considered scamming. interestingly enough, after my initial reblog, i never arrived at the conclusion that the zutara community were filled with ai enthusiasts, because unlike you, i don’t suffer from fandom brainrot and actually go outside.

you, on the other hand, managed to make it so much worse. for the fraudulent ai artist you’re trying and failing so hard to defend. for the zutara community. if there’s an ongoing hate campaign against the “artist” (which i’m not aware of, because i want nothing to do with them), then you are the one instrumental in leading it, not me. 🤷🏽‍♀️

#good lord anon #if you had more going on in life you wouldn’t be doing this #antizutara #anti ai

[creekfiend]

I love your response to the AI situation! I'm seeing so many people jump on the bandwagon, yet they do nothing to support artists the rest of the time. I look at a lot of these blogs who are posting very very frequently and very aggressively about AI "art", which... yeah, fine...? But they don't reblog artwork. They don't share commission/donation posts. They don't promote artists' work. They don't encourage others to do the same. They don't share any information on how to support artists.

And of course not everybody is in a position to commission/purchase artwork/merch or donate to kofi pages etc, but if someone's being extremely vitriolic about AI "art" and doing absolutely *nothing* to support the Actual Livelihood of Actual Artists then I can't help assuming that they aren't actually interested in helping. I guess my point is that scoring imaginary points in The Latest Internet Debate isn't activism lol.

Yeah. I'm really primarily interested in hearing informed opinions from people who are actually artists, particularly those whose work has been used without compensation -- but I'm also very interested in hearing from artists who are like "hey, if this tech was being used ethically, I think it could be a really useful tool in my work"!!! To me it's a lot like ... the tech used to make alexas or the boston dynamics robot dogs, where like capitalism and corporate surveillance & horrible militarized police states respectively are currently using that tech in horrific and totally ethically unacceptabke ways... but in a world that was better, both would be incredible tools to HELP people. Like damn I wish I had a robot dog to carry my groceries and load my dishwasher lol!

I'm an artist and most of my friends are also artists and I love. Art. I love thinking about it and talking about it and seeing what amazing stuff my friends are making. I hate that this tech is being used in ways that harm people. But this discussion has really become a way to no holds barred GO AFTER PEOPLE and feel justified bc AI art is the Bad Thing Of The Day. And I don't think that's ever healthy for anyone, and I think it takes away from serious conversations we could be having about this.

I guess, to quote my friend Elodie, I'm interested in discussing the ways this tech is used to harm people right now, but I think we should also be interested in talking about how it could be used for good in A Healed World. I think that's a beneficial exercise.

[autisticasgore]

I know AI art is scaring a lot of artists right now and it honestly is scaring me too but at the same time I really don’t think that the current situation is bad as it is right now, or that it’s going to be doom and gloom for a lot of artists and that we’ll all be replaced.

There’s people actually quitting professional art careers over this and it makes me really sad because I feel like just with NFTs, AI art is going to flop spectacularly and people will wonder why they even followed it as a trend. There’s hundreds of things that even beyond just AI, people commercialise pretty much anything that starts out as a unique or original idea, which is an unfortunate result of capitalism.

People buy fake gold all of the time, and yet it only made real gold more valuable.

Then there’s books. There’s thousands of fanfictions and digital audiobooks out there, and yet people still value books. Creation is inherently human and inherently irreplaceable, and there is nothing more valuable than that.

If all artists collectively stopped creating artwork, you are truly letting AI art ‘win’ and ‘take over’. Sometimes being an artist can be demotivating (largely due to the way social media works), but if we stop creating now, then we’re stopping the chances of someone appreciating our work for what it is.

It’s like if all the nurses and doctors in the world suddenly just stopped working because they were stressed and unmotivated by the deaths surrounding them in the world. If they quit, then there’d be no one in hospitals to save lives. Probably a bad example, but I hope I can convey my point well enough with it.

In short, there are hundreds of people who still value human work.

Don’t give up on them.

Don’t give into the fear and the negativity.

#pixie.txt

[glysaturn]

Your art has made me rethink the role of an "artist", because I don't use that word lightly and just art in general

Art is very subjective and I am just speaking about my own thoughts about it

Overwatch is a new fandom for me and finding your art and how I as a "viewer" interact with it made me think about how we perceive art in general

I think we take it as an objective thing, where theres "good" art and then theres "bad" art

But truth be told, I think all art is good as long as the right person is looking at it

I absolutely adore your artworks, they make me feel so happy and I keep coming back over and over again

Yet I see you doubting your arts worth

Which I entirely get as someone who used to create a lot

But it got me thinking about how something so meaningful to me, can to you as the artist seem very different as someone who actually creates it and judges it from an entirely different stand point

I never thought much about the "viewer" cuz I never had more than 30 eyes on any of my artworks

But thats all just to say

I haven't enjoyed creating art for a while now, so having taken the role of just a "viewer" and applying it to how I feel about my art

I may not like my art, but the thought of someone enjoying my artworks as much as I have enjoyed yours makes me believe that maybe my art isn't so worthless afterall

Because your art has not only inspired me to get back into drawing, but just in general has brightened up my days even if just a little bit

And my new definition of an artist I think is much healthier and forgiving

An artist is someone who creates from the heart

And if they manage to make someone feel with their art, especially if they manage to inspire or motivate them? Then thats art at it's finest

With all this AI talk and everything, I feel like we more than ever need to realize that art is the core of humanity

I believe theres nothing more beautiful than creating art and enjoying it, each person creating and interpreting art in their own unique ways

It's beautiful, it's why we are who and what we are

Nothing will ever be able to replace the joys of human creativity and passion, as horrible as the future looks I believe in a future where art is so much more than just another product, where it isn't so commercialized

And artworks like yours, with emotions, with depth and human touch, made from the heart, just fuel my hope even further

I hope your passion for art never extinguishes, favorite artist

i mean i know i do take art as an objective thing 😂 when i apply it to my own art, but not art made by others, strangely enough. or maybe not that strange at all actually. but anyway that's just my first thought, my second thought that comes next is that it isn't right at all and that i should apply same standards to myself as i do to others. and it gets a bit easier. especially after i was finally able to feel like i can stand alongside all the other artists as an equal. i never used the word artist (again, applied to myself only) lightly either, that's kind of a known thing about me i'd assume, but like i've expressed before, the recent years made me kind of rethink that position. and even now every once in a while i get an epiphany that further cements this new notion. it's still hard for me to call myself an artist but if others see me that way then they are correct and that's fine. so yes, i entirely agree with your definition of an artist. that is how i think of myself, and anyone else who creates. artists need to be more kind to themselves.

i have an overarching goal. to get to the people what is important to me. hopefully you will see when the time comes. but for now, reading the things that you've said, hearing that my works made you get back into art, that seems like a goal of its own that i've apparently already accomplished. i could not imagine a better outcome. i really, really hope you will get to get to the point where you are able to love your own works, too.

about a/i, it's nice to see whenever people do come together to support each other in these extremely hard times. but at the same time it's not exactly the same as it used to be like a decade ago. or maybe that's just my personal experience, i don't know. i feel like the way creators are treated online has changed, a lot. which kills me because people do need to stay united now more than ever, make connections that are stronger than ever before. if we want artists to remain viable and if we as viewers want to continue enjoying our favourite creators' works. that being said (negative rant incoming), the looming dread of capitalism! my god! we can stay together all we want yet companies still just go ahead and feed our stuff to a/i, without us even having a chance or an option or anything. it just happens. like what, were we supposed to predict that in 10 years t/umblr would sell our everything to a/i companies to save its own skin (allegedly) and we had to stop sharing stuff to prevent that from happening? but if you kept on sharing then your works can and should be scraped, because it's the internet! it's kind of in the same vein as "if you've put your art on the internet then people are free to talk shit about it", which is like no dude there's still rules and boundaries, why must you suddenly forget to be polite and decent just because it's "the internet", unless you're the exact same way in real life :/

but i've gotten stronger over the years. i am strong enough to believe in this better future that you're talking about. i believe because i want it to be that way. and my desire for the better will make me keep going, will drag me if it has to, despite everything. and i hope others find that strength, too, if they haven't already. the evil cannot win, i simply refuse.

thanks, i intend to preserve my passion at all costs. i've got comics to make after all 🤠

#answer

[jesperfaheys-defenseattorney]

US Major Step In Fight Between AI vs. Artists

So, we all know that a bunch of the creator strikes in America and a multitude of other countries associated with WGA and AFTRA have been for a multitude of different reasons. These are money, treatment, being taken advantage of by powerful companies and corporations. However, one big reason, specifically for the WGA Strike, is the use of AI. Companies and show creators in the industries refused to agree to not use AI prior to the strike, and this became one of the listed reasons the WGA Strike started.

Those of us who are content creators, artists of any media, and consumers of that media who spend time in those communities know that there are a lot of problems with this. For one thing, AI steals from works that have already been created. It also isn't actually AI, just machine learning. These co-exist to mean that if someone creates work with AI, there is no argument without rebuttal to be made that they aren't stealing or committing plagiarism. Another issue with AI is that it is extremely biased and is both socially and culturally harmful.

This is a photo created by a man named Matthew Allen using Midjourney AI and editing tools.

The photo above was AI generated. However, it still won an art contest at the Colorado State Fair. This is despicable in its own right but that's a whole different thing that we don't have time for right now. Matthew Allen was denied to have his work allowed Copyright protection because it was AI generated.

This is an image generated by a man named Stephen Phaler that was also denied copy rights.

This was made by Stephen Phaler, who also tried to make the case that his work was copyrightable. The court ruled against him, another promising sign for the creator community. This means that despite making his own AI Art system, he's works with it are still not protected. The software is his, but the art is not.

This is a major step in taking action against AI in courts. We need laws against AI to protect creators, because many of these efforts to do so have so far been unsuccessful through strikes and protests. All in good time, but for this is beacon of hope for us.

Not only have regular people who are unaware or refuse to acknowledge the harm of AI been using it, but people in academics have also used AI to do their work or assignments for them. Artists, writers, and musicians have been more hesitant to post their work because of AI algorithms stealing from them. If you look on AO3, any fandom, any type of work, you'll notice a large spike in restricted fics. This is because it's harder for AI to steal when only users with registered accounts can view many of the sites works due to restricted access.

The refusal of a federal judge in the U.S against AI is so undeniably important because not only will it hopefully prevent future AI users from making money off other people's work, but it's also a better way to spread words. Not everyone had Tumblr, or Twitter, or Reddit, or Facebook where you might hear about the dangers of AI and the algorithm only feeds you certain posts and things it thinks you want to see. Actually taking a legal stance against AI use and forcing restrictions is an excellent way to draw attention to the dangers of AI.

You'll also note there's various signs that a piece of artwork or writing was made with AI, for it lacks humanity. There's a post that said something alone the likes of, "Calling yourself an artist when you use AI Art is like buying box mix brownies and calling yourself a chef". This is one of the best examples of how ridiculous the use of AI art in genuine creative processes' are. It's not modernizing, it's theft and it's dishonest and lazy. You're not doing the work yourself, you're typing words and descriptions into a computer so it can do all the heavy lifting. That is horrible and dishonest.

Ultimately this post is about how we need more of this. We need it in other counties, we need to support our WGA and AFTRA strikes, we need to protect online and local creators who may not have as much voice when speaking out against AI. This includes famous, big names as well. This is all a positive step forward, and I encourage everyone to spread the word. Thank you for reading.

Tagging some mutuals who might be interested, but no pressure to reblog guys <3: @iammadeofmemoriesforlife @justanormaldemon @violets-and-books @rinadragomir @laylax13s @all-this-panic-still-no-disco @wesperbrekkered @grace-lightwoodd

#wga strike #wga strong #support the wga #sag aftra strike #sag aftra #aftra strike #sag strike #sag strong #support content creators #support artists #support musicians #support writers #writblr #artblr #musicblr #anti ai #ai artwork #ai art #ai image #ai pictures #fight ai #no ai art #no ai writing #ai is theft #ai is not art #ai is a plague #ai issues #united states #federal judge #important lore