azimuthalis

[azimuthalis]

My contribution to the @bbcmerlin-reversebang this year! I had the pleasure of working alongside the lovely @remaymberme and their story a single thread of fate(tied me to you) <3

Also a shoutout to the ever amazing @feuxx for betaing and helping me through the fest ^_^

[azimuthalis]

#it always strikes me how silent he is in the first half of the movie #loki

[azimuthalis]

BotFA post credit scene was so good i had to draw it ❤

#aaaaaaa #another perfect noodles animation 😭 #bagginshield #art

[azimuthalis]

A father and his son

#aw #loki

[azimuthalis]

Mugshot of a teenage girl arrested for protesting segregation, Mississippi, 1961.

[azimuthalis]

Guys. Stop turning Perry into a human just to ship him with Doofenshmirtz. That man is in love with a semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action and you can't deny it. I will accept temporary human-ification ONLY for shenanigans purposes!

#i'm not a coward #i'm an og perry x doofenshmirtz girlie at heart

[azimuthalis]

re: AI scraping etc.

The Bad Thing is not the scraping itself—that's already been happening. That's functionally unpreventable for anything posted publicly to the internet. If other people can view it then a bot can view it. The fact that the bot's eyes work differently can be to some degree weaponised, but the bottom line is that anything you show people can be seen by anything else that's capable of seeing, and replicated by anything capable of remembering it. Computers are v. good at this replication so they can do it more efficiently than if you put up a painting in a gallery and someone came in and painstakingly copied it, but that's it. It's not good but it's also not preventable within the constraints of the problem.

The thing you SHOULD be mad about is any company trying to sell, effectively, a licence for content they do not hold the copyright for. Yes yes it's in the TOS. Standard terms of service for websites that display user-submitted content notoriously overstep the claims they can actually make to your work. The idea of the "we can do whatever we want" clauses—which are ubiquitous—is that you can't then sue them for literally displaying the content, which they do not otherwise have a right to do. You're licencing the work to them as a condition of use. Trying to flip that into effectively sub-licencing content they do not by any possible means own is the part you should be furious about. They're selling shit you own from under you.

I am not the most massive fan of the concept of intellectual property but as the law stands you do fucking own anything you write or draw. Even shitposts. Even messages to your friends. You'd be livid if someone tried to sell your hoard of used envelopes, right? You might not have valued them especially highly but they're yours to use or discard as you please, and they're definitely not, say, your landlord's?

That's the problem with tumblr trying to flog your "data" to Midjourney. It's your landlord selling your used envelopes.

[azimuthalis]

Beginning Artist 🌻

#this is so wholesome <3 #you can always start making art!

[azimuthalis]

anyway i won't tell you how to vote in november but if you're campaigning for joe biden before he calls for a ceasefire you are campaigning for genocide and your sanctimonious "i don't like the genocide" remarks are unnecessary and do not absolve you of this. pressure him for a ceasefire before you have the nerve to list his accomplishments for your healthcare and your trains and your taxes. the blood isn't even dry yet. people are starving. you are all so fucking shameless, so fucking cowardly, and so intellectually dishonest in the name of your harm reduction. you do not believe in harm reduction—you believe in self-preservation. and i know that when i see your "we need a president we can pressure" comments—are you pressuring him right now? is there any evidence of pressure that works when he is hellbent on breaking international law? somehow you not only have less of a backbone than beto o'rourke, but you are even less convincing.

the only reason people are rushing to reblog your little liberal absolutions for bombs and starvation is because they, too, are desperate for self-preservation. the nerve of acting like you are all sucking it up and making a decision you don't want to make, the nerve of the "i hate them both too!" "i don't like either of them too!" when you are all just desperate to keep yourselves safe and very desperately convincing everyone else to keep you safe as well, as though people are trying to throw you under the bus instead of trying as desperately as they can to save the lives of people currently starving to death while you campaign for their exterminator

[azimuthalis]

Hi all! I'm making a pre-order run of these Witch Hat Atelier prints! I'll also be donating 20% of the profits to charity for Palestine. I was thinking of Care for Gaza, but I'm open to other appropriate suggestions too.

#boost

[azimuthalis]

gotta travel on (1/1, 9392 words) Pairing: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield Rating: General Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Bilbo Baggins, Wizard Bilbo, Quest of Erebor, Internal Conflict, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, lore what lore, Arkenstone is not an issue, Healing, Fluff and Humor, Romance, Falling in Love, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: In which Bilbo Baggins has always felt connected to living things, from tomato plants to squirrels scurrying around his doorstep. Odd, those in the Shire called him. Odd, he’s always felt and longed for something different.

On the road to Erebor, Bilbo is named something else, shaking the idea of his very foundation. But… maybe Thorin Oakenshield can help ground him. --- Raffle fic for @the-game-is-up ! 💜 I hope you enjoy it!

#LISA FIC #already kudosed but i'll read it later

[azimuthalis]

Tom Hiddleston behind the scenes of 'The Making of Loki S2'

#prev tags yeah #how do people act when there's nothing to act with? #no props or set design #it's so sad #loki

[azimuthalis]

i feel quite bad for people who are convinced nightshade and glaze are going to fix the balance of power in the art world because it really won't. they're quite useless and extremely easily circumvented, but trying to tell anyone this results in you getting shouted down. buddy i wish it worked too!

[azimuthalis]

nightshade is basically useless https://www.tumblr.com/billclintonsbeefarm/740236576484999168/even-if-you-dont-like-generative-models-this

I'm not a developer, but the creators of Nightshade do address some of this post's concerns in their FAQ. Obviously it's not a magic bullet to prevent AI image scraping, and obviously there's an arms race between AI developers and artists attempting to disrupt their data pools. But personally, I think it's an interesting project and is accessible to most people to try. Giving up on it at this stage seems really premature.

But if it's caption data that's truly valuable, Tumblr is an ... interesting ... place to be scraping it from. For one thing, users tend to get pretty creative with both image descriptions and tags. For another, I hope whichever bot scrapes my blog enjoys the many bird photos I have described as "Cheese." Genuinely curious if Tumblr data is actually valuable or if it's garbage.

That said, I find it pretty ironic that the OP of the post you linked seems to think nightshade and glaze specifically are an unreasonable waste of electricity. Both are software. Your personal computer's graphics card is doing the work, not an entire data center, so if your computer was going to be on anyway, the cost is a drop in the bucket compared to what AI generators are consuming.

Training a large language model like GPT-3, for example, is estimated to use just under 1,300 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity; about as much power as consumed annually by 130 US homes. To put that in context, streaming an hour of Netflix requires around 0.8 kWh (0.0008 MWh) of electricity. That means you’d have to watch 1,625,000 hours to consume the same amount of power it takes to train GPT-3. (source)

So, no, I don't think Nightshade or Glaze are useless just because they aren't going to immediately topple every AI image generator. There's not really much downside for the artists interested in using them so I hope they continue development.

#glaze works for lora's #nightshade works for base models made from scratch #i need people to understand that they are yet to be defeated (might happen in the future but not yet) #and anyone saying otherwise or telling you they are useless does not have your best interests at heart

[azimuthalis]

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

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

[azimuthalis]

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.

#im so fucking tired

[azimuthalis]

big fan of the way thorin holds bilbo after the carrock hug and inspects him for injuries

#bagginshield #art