nyantoxic

[nyantoxic]

Your posts are in an AI model

and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.

Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.

but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.

Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?

They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.

It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.

I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.

They only ever pay for this shit because either:

they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying

They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.

ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...

but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"

Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote. * I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant

[nyantoxic]

#dunmeshi

[nyantoxic]

#my dad let me use his and i tried to get the warrior cats website to load </3 #then i found the poker apps and after showing that off i wasnt allowed to use the blackberry anymore

[nyantoxic]

I barely follow any serial media nowadays so I only ever encounter this in epistolary artifacts, like a found-footage horror movie, but one thing I really think is funny is when people are following along with something as it releases and talking about how it’s being really clever and setting up a rare, compelling thematic commentary, and then later on it turns out that none of that panned out and the ending was mediocre and everyone was just extrapolating an illusory better plot in their mind’s eye

#tma #i think i wouldve liked the ending better if it wasnt so abrupt though #as an aside i think sometimes fan theories arent good theorizing as much as well thought out fanfiction #'heres what i would do if i was writing it' ok youre not #sorry but this is cosmic horror your ship is getting killed off

[nyantoxic]

Wasn't sure what options you were looking for and distances can vary. Feel free to add an actual measurement in the comments or tags :)

#4th option #3rd if you count the great lakes

[nyantoxic]

we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better

[nyantoxic]

I hope every 19 year old is ok eventually I'm so fucking serious. If you're 19 stay safe out there it'll be ok love you

[nyantoxic]

Sometimes self-care is, actually, NOT getting onto the computer and little treats and watching youtube videos. Sometimes those things are self-care, but sometimes they're also avoidant behaviors.

Sometimes self care is waking up and just. Fucking getting in the car. And driving to the bank. And the store. And buying the cat litter. And changing the cat boxes you've been avoiding because your brains been stuck in a hole. And picking up the trash you've been piling up. And getting a load into the wash. And mowing the lawn before the village council sends you a formal complaint and potential-fines warning.

Like its hard and annoying to do because it sucks. It sucks so much. But if I don't start working on this pile of bullshit I've let build up because it stinks and i was stuck in deer-in-headlights mode, I risk letting it turn into fuckery. I do not have the patience for fuckery that I once - foolishly! - thought I had.

[nyantoxic]

She should be at the club

#fma

[nyantoxic]

Reblog for a bigger sample size.

Say in the tags what you voted for and if you live in or outside of the US

#shitty dilapidated rust belt cities #i live in the us midwest

[nyantoxic]

i'm actually fucking obsessed w this video

[nyantoxic]

just because im curious

#found it during lockdown and spent 6-8 hours a day listening to tma and playing acnh #tma

[nyantoxic]

Fascinated by this TERF on Twitter who runs half-marathons in a witch costume as some arcane way of supporting JK Rowling & who paid to get the Guinness Book of World Records to enshrine her 1:55 half marathon time as "the fastest half-marathon done in a witch costume"

And who scrawled the names of transphobes like JK Rowling, Dave Chapelle, and Graham Linehan on her legs since they're witches they (who? I don't know) can't burn. Even the men I guess

But this witch's wards did not give her the strength to pass over a "symbol of hatred" for women:

a progress pride flag crosswalk

Just before I could finish they nearly defeated me with their misogynistic crosswalk paint! I had to face down the great power of a two-dimensional flag to post a unremarkable half-marathon time I paid to put in a book to honor a millionaire author I don't know, or as you may call it, "equality for women everywhere".

Truly a hero speaking truth to power by winning a half-marathon in Madison, Wisconsin in the name of JK Rowling, clearly feminism's greatest struggle.

Oddly enough during her time in Wisconsin she didn't tweet about that state's abortion ban even once, but I'm sure she'll get around to talking about women's rights being restricted by laws passed in the 1800s when she's won the real battle of making a rich lady who hates trans people have more sub-two hour half-marathon times accomplished in her name

In conclusion this half-marathon was in November and she had four months to decide not to post this but never reconsidered even once

#1 year and another marathon later and the pride flag is still on state street <3 #transphobia

[nyantoxic]

I don't think anyone appreciates how funny Pope Franics actually is. Imagine being elected to the head of an over the top bad guy organization that would make you the final boss of a jrpg, and you spend your entire time there sitting around and saying things like "maybe we should reconsider our 'people dying is good' policy. I'm not saying we should reverse the 'people dying is good' policy, it's been our policy for thousands of years after all, but maybe we should, oh I don't know. Reconsider it." And every time you do so it causes half of a major world religion to get so pissed off that it almost causes a religious schism

[nyantoxic]

I’m not in the Monster High or Monster As Teenager adjacent fandoms, but has anyone done “Daughter of The Thing (1982)” and it looks like just a teenaged girl version of Kurt Russell? No tendrils, no tentacles, just a girl with this exact fit and hair

She swears that she isn’t the daughter of The Thing (1982). She’s a totally normal human you guys. She shouldn’t even be at this school. She likes normal human things like not having her blood tested.

[nyantoxic]

once i figure out how to undoom her from the narrative the wedding is BACK ON

[nyantoxic]

also someone else pointed this out in the notes of that other post but trans people are like one of the main fronts in the reactionary culture wars across the US, Canada, UK, all these bastions of democracy and freedom and humanitarianism, and you’re scaremongering about homophobia as this uniquely Palestinian affliction as a pretext to support a genocide? the fuck is wrong with you? like genuinely what the fuck is wrong with you?