#artists to look out for in 2021 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gootarts · 9 months

Text

as of 8/3, the most recently updated version of this post is here (it's a reblog of this exact post with more info added)

as a lot of you know, limbus company recently fired its CG illustrator for being a feminist, at 11 pm, via phone call, after a bunch of misogynists walked into the office earlier that day and demanded she be fired. on top of this, as per korean fans, her firing went against labor laws---in korea, you must have your dismissal in writing.

the korean fandom on twitter is, understandably, going scorched earth on project moon due to this. there's a lot currently going on to protest the decision, so i'm posting a list here of what's going on for those who want to limit their time on elon musk's $44 billion midlife crisis impulse purchase website (if you are on twitter, domuk is a good person to follow, as they translate important updates to english). a lot of the links are in korean, but generally they play nicely with machine translators. this should be current as of 8/2.

Statements condemning the decision have been issued by The Gyeonggi Youth Union and IT Union.

A press conference at the Gyeonggido Assembly will occur on 8/3, with lawmakers of the Gyeonggi province (where Project Moon is based) in attendance. This appears driven by the leader of the Gyeonggi Youth Union.

The vice chairman of the IT union--who has a good amount of experience with labor negotiations like these--has expressed strong support for the artist and is working to get media coverage due to the ongoing feminist witch hunts in the gaming industry. Project Moon isn't union to my knowledge, but he's noted that he's taken on nonunion companies such as Netmarble (largest mobile game dev in South Korea) by getting the issue in front of the National Assembly (Korea's congress).

Articles on the incident published in The Daily Labor News, Korean Daily, multiple articles on Hankyoreh (one of which made it to the print edition), and other news outlets.

Segments about the termination on the MBN 7 o' clock news and MBC's morning news

Comments by Youth Union leaders about looking into a loan made to Project Moon via Devsisters Ventures, a venture capital firm. Tax money from Gyeonggi province was invested in Devsisters in 2017, and in 2021, Devsisters gave money to Project Moon. The Gyeonggi Youth Union is asking why hard-earned tax money was indirectly given to a company who violates ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles.

Almost nonstop signage truck protests outside Project Moon's physical office during business hours until 8/22 or the company makes a statement. This occurs alongside a coordinated hashtag campaign to get the issue trending on Twitter in Korea. The signage campaign was crowd-funded in about 3 hours.

A full boycott of the Limbus Company app, on both mobile and PC (steam) platforms. Overseas fans are highly encouraged to participate, regardless if whether they're F2P or not. Not opening the app at all is arguably the biggest thing any one person can do to protest the decision, as the app logs the number of accounts that log on daily. For a new gacha such as Limbus, a high number of F2P daily active users, but a small number of paying users is often preferable to having a smaller userbase but more paying users. If the company sees the number of daily users remain stable, they will likely decide to wait out any backlash rather than apologize.

Digging up verified reviews from previous employees regarding the company's poor management practices

Due to the firing, the Leviathan artist has posted about poor working conditions when making the story. As per a bilingual speaker, they were working on a storyboard revision, and thought 'if I ran into the street right now and got hit by a car and died, I wouldn't have to keep working.' They contacted Project Moon because they didn't want their work to be like that, and proposed changes to serialization/reduction in amount of work per picture/to build up a buffer of finished images (they did not have any buffer while working on Leviathan to my knowledge). They were shut out, and had to suck it up and accept the situation.

Hamhampangpang has a 'shrine' section of the restaurant for fans to leave fan-created merch and other items. They also allow the fans to take this merch back if they can prove it's theirs. Fans are now doing just that.

To boost all of the above, a large number of Korean fanartists with thousands of followers have deleted their works and/or converted their accounts from fanart accounts to accounts supporting the protests. Many of them are bilingual, and they're where I got the majority of this information.

[note 1: there's a targeted english-language disinformation campaign by the website that started the hate mob. i have read the artist's tweets with machine translation, and they're talked about in the second hankyoreh article linked above: nowhere does she express any transphobic or similarly awful beliefs. likewise, be wary of any claims that she supported anything whose description makes you raise eyebrows--those claims are likely in reference to megalia, a korean feminist movement. for information on that, i'd recommend the NPR/BBC articles below and this google drive link of english-language scholarly papers on them. for the love of god don't get your information about a feminist movement from guys going on witch hunts for feminists.]

[note 2: i've seen a couple people argue that the firing was for the physical safety of the employees, citing the kyoani incident in japan. as per this korean fan, most fans there strongly do not believe this was the case. we have english-translated transcripts of the meeting between the mob and project moon; the threats the mob was making were to......brand project moon as a feminist company online. yes, really. male korean gamers aren't normal about feminism, and there's been an ongoing witch hunt for feminists in the industry since about 2016, something you see noted in both the labor union statements. both NPR and the BBC this phenomenon to gamergate, and i'd say it's a pretty apt comparison.]

let me know if anything needs correction or if anything should be added.

#project moon #limbus company #obligatory text post tag #that's all i've got for now. highly encourage y'all to not open limbus until they make a statement

4K notes · View notes

hardswae · 3 days

Text

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HARDSWAE (Collection) ❀

Happy 3rd anniversary to my wonderful world of creativity, HARDSWAE✿!! I am grateful for another year of your unwavering support for me and my creations. Your support has been a source of strength for me through both the good and bad days, including my creative block periods. I deeply appreciate your understanding and encouragement during those times.

I also want to express my gratitude to those who provide constructive criticism, as it has played a crucial role in shaping my skills and growth as a 3D artist. To the amazing creators I collaborate with behind the scenes, thank you for your inspiration and guidance. Your input has been invaluable to me.

Special thanks to K's Kustomz for the beautiful custom blend scene that will be featured in upcoming ads it’s so pretty you guys ✿✿✿✿!!!

I am excited to share my new Discord server with you all, where we can connect on a more personal level and where you can request specific creations from me. This new era is all about better communication and skill improvement, and I look forward to sharing my work process through streaming and engaging with you all.

Thank you once again for your continued support. The 3 Years of SWAE Collection is out now, and REMINDER to join my Discord server for more updates and interactions. Let's continue to create and grow together ❀❀❀❀.

MY WEBSITE IS FULL UPDATED WITH EVERY FREE COLLECTION I HAVE EVER DROPPED FROM APRIL 2021 - MARCH 2024 ENJOY #ShopHARDSWAE 🌸

*Credits to the Louis Vuitton & Lefleur Brand for the inspiration behind the beautiful pieces apart of this collection *

- SWAE'S T.O.U. -

I OWN THE MESH 100%!!

I OWN THE TEXTURES 100%!!

DONT CLAIM AS YOUR OWN!!

FEEL FREE TO RECOLOR IF THE ITEMS ARE FREE ONLY!!

DO NOT PUT MY THINGS BEHIND A PAY WALL!!

DO NOT CONVERT MY THINGS TO OTHER GAMES WITHOUT ASKING ME!!

TAG ME IF YOU WEAR MY CONTENT I WANNA SEE >.<

SUPPORT MY FUTURE BELOW ⬇

SUPPORT ME FOR - COLLEGE -

DO NOT TAKE MY FILES AND RELEASE THEM FOR FREE, OR IN ANY SERVERS YOU WILL RECEIVE A DMCA!!

DOWNLOAD✿.

419 notes · View notes

38sr · 9 months

Text

My Adventures with Superman EP 4: Design Works

My goodness it feels so strange to see these designs two years later but I actually had a hand in Clark, Lois and Jimmy’s gala suits in episode 4 of My Adventures with Superman!

This happened WAY back in Sept 2021 but during my first week on the show I jokingly sent a piece of art to one of the design leads and well, one thing led to another:

This is kind of running gag with my work, but I somehow always predict things when I draw fanart haha. I truly didn’t know there was gonna be a gala episode and now I was tasked to do a pass for the main trio’s gala outfits.

CLARK KENT

Naturally since it started with Clark, he was the first one I did a pass on. I actually really like men’s suits design so this was the most fun to design out of the three. Overall, I drafted up four different suits that gave 4 different feels for our soft boi. Option A was a full 3 piece with slick backed hair (which honestly now feels very Bruce Wayne than Clark haha). Option B had a high school prom feel, Option C was more business casual (hence why his dress shirt was unbuttoned at top) and finally Option D was sleek turtleneck & suit combo. Honestly, I was rooting Option D ‘cause I’m a sucker for a turtleneck but if I remember correct they went with Option B ‘cause it felt the most Clark. But just know I tried haha.

LOIS LANE

Lois’s outfit was quite challenging since I had no clue until I was given the assignment that she’s Korean (yes, Lois is canonically Korean in the show). I remember the design leads Jane Bak and Dou Hong showing me a rough concept of a modern hanbok. I spent so many days researching hanboks and the construction behind them...it truly was a learning experience for me haha. It was quite challenging trying to create and outfit that spoke to Lois’ heritage while still keeping her energy. This was my very first pass but I think ultimately the team did a great job to hone in the final look and balance both elements for her outfit (the backless top is just chef’s kiss). Also yes, I did try giving Lois slick back hair haha.

JIMMY OLSEN

There isn’t much to say about Jimmy’s outfit (sadly I left the production to work on Spiderman Freshman Year before seeing what they decided on). But from what I remember, I specifically was looking at men’s outfits from the Met Gala from that year and before (I think Chadwick Boseman was the biggest influence for me at the time). Though I think his final suit design aren’t like too far off from my initial thoughts, it’s still super cool to see how it evolved into the final look! But yeah! Just a little behind the scenes on the work I got to do on the show. Again, super brief since Spidey was calling my name but I truly had so much fun getting to design for this show. MAWS was my first ever time doing design work (since I primarily work as a 2D animator and board artist). I was so nervous but the team was welcoming and taught me so much! I really have to thank Dou Hong and Jake Wyatt for taking a chance on me and allowing me to draw hot anime characters for a DC show haha.

#long post #my adventures with superman #maws #maws spoilers #superman #lois lane #clark kent #jimmy olsen #digital art #character design

2K notes · View notes

blue-jisungs · 4 months

Note

Hii! I hope you're having a nice day or night I would like to request Skz reacting to their idol!s/o performing on MAMA Awards with a very cool and dark concept with their own group, something similar to Itzy's 2021 Mama performance or (G)I-DLE's MMA 2022 performance? Ty!!!

s/o performing on MAMA with dark concept ♡

author's note. thank u for the req!! i hope u like the outcome ^^ i tried my best, i added some like,, solo stage moments??

┆彡 CHAN [ 찬 ]

so so so soooo proud

staring at you in awe all the time like,, with all due respect to your members – he’s mesmerized

not only by your beauty, duh but your outfit is something that he just can’t help but stare

he’s extremely proud because he knew how nervous you were before the performance

but oh dude when you drop a diss at mama

the kids look at him in shock but he didn’t know either

the mischievous look in your eye makes him even more mesmerized

after the performance chan mentions it, not to make people suspect anything

"the performances were really, really good. personally, i enjoyed the dark ones"

mhm we all know which specific one !!

┆彡 MINHO [ 민호 ]

minho is as anxious as you — it’s first time performing such a dark concept and you’re going to have a solo in it

he knew it since he helped you practice

hence why he’s nervous. not to get him wrong, he knows you’ll slay but it’s a hard dance break

he gets chills the second you enter the stage, a powerful walk along your members

the performance is smooth-sailing and then there’s time for your solo

and keeping it short: you destroyed the stage

minho couldn’t be more proud, especially that you were on everyone’s lips in the industry even weeks after mama

┆彡 CHANGBIN [ 창빈 ]

mf can’t sit still in one place when he knows it’s your turn perform

his members have to calm him down 😭

you wouldn’t tell him what’s the concept – only that it’s dark and cool concept

he mouths the lyrics of the song, amazed by the stage and outfits

he’s kind of disappointed when it’s over and light go out

but then boom, suddenly there’s a light shining on you and your leader

changbin frowns, not sure what’s happening – and suddenly you have a solo stage, performing a quite sexy dance to tease your next album 🫣

(the members have to tug his clothes to remind him to close his mouth)

┆彡 HYUNJIN [ 현진 ]

he’s more excited than you 😭

asks you to send pics of your outfit and makes up and everything !!

absolutely stunned once you enter the stage w your members, dark and elegant suits on

he was sure that you told him everything mhmm

but when suddenly your members run up to you and seem to rip your clothes, he lets out a loud gasp (drawing attention from the idols nearby)

and suddenly there’s a reveal of gold shimmering dress underneath, your maknae putting a crown on your head

he’s so so confused but loves it, his inner artist is buzzing with excitement how to capture that on canvas once he’s home

and he grabs onto chan with tight grip when you hint the next album name, pointing at the crown

be ready to have a lecture ehh didn’t you spoil anything!! why he didn’t know!! and how proud he is<3

┆彡 JISUNG [ 지성 ]

flustered babyyyyy >.<

he thought it’s a cute concept because your latest album was lovey-dovey

but his mouth falls agape as soon as a mysterious melody reaches his ears and two of your members come in, dressed head to toe in black elegant outfits

he noticed there’s a ?? small podium ?? but didn’t pay any attention to it once you joined your members on stage, also dressed in a mind-blowing dark dress with silver jewelry

you performed one of your popular songs and then three of your members had a cute solo stage, a dance break with a song from your newest album

but the music got cut and the light focused on you, smokey makeup and… fake blood on your face?

you jumped from the podium (like that one wony stage hehe) and your members formed a regular ending position with screens hinting that’s a beginning of new era

dude was speechless and for a moment forgot he’s an idol,, fanboying over his cool n badass gf ^^

(all the fansites thought its adorable meanwhile his member were giggling at him hehe)

┆彡 FELIX [ 필릭스 ]

woah there do you want him (and your fans) dead??

you haven’t spoiled anything to him and now he’s shocked, flustered, amused, amazed and all the other things at once ;; his brain is going 28202729 km per hour like!!

because goddamn you look so hot in such concept…!

and when you start rapping at your solo stage, throwing a snarky comment at mama there and here

felix is just blushing and giggling like a teenage girl,, but also he’s kind of feeling intimidated by your sudden powerful aura

not that he minds tho~

will fight the haters of ur performance if he sees any, literally defending you like a lioness defends her cubs (on anon accs tho lol)

┆彡 SEUNGMIN [ 승민 ]

to be honest your performance is the only reason why he’s at mama …

he knew how excited you were abt it, saying it’s gonna tease your next comeback

so naturally, he was intrigued

but he wasn’t expecting that

you literally owned the stage,, all of your members too ofc

but there was just something so fresh seeing you in a dark concept with smokey makeup,, kicking a prop chair and loosening your tie…

he was stunned!!!

and seungmin couldn’t help but feel the overflowing sense of pride that it’s his girl right here, catching everyone’s attention

( especially after you cursed in a part of a song that was supposed to be censored )

┆彡 JEONGIN [ 정인 ]

this man almost made you spoil the whole performance for him 😭😭

he’s just as excited as you are, buzzing with excitement

he was even squeezing chan’s hand once you entered the stage

everything was so enchanting – the rock version of your newest song, the mysterious background, dark and elegant outfits

when suddenly a backup dancer handed you a guitar

and you had an electric guitar solo, the accessories you had shimmering in the light

literally everyone was focused at you and your skills, jeongin staring in awe and mouth hanging open

( he just wanted to scream at the top of his lungs that “that’s my gf y’all!!” but sadly he couldn’t !!!? <\\3 )

after the solo you joined your members in finishing the choreography,,, he even missed the big spoiler for the next album that your main rapper did in the choreo

bc he was so so focused at you,, he could see how proud you were

and so was he!! expect a lot of kisses n praises after the performance!!

masterlist <3

taglist. @primoppang ,, @l3visbby ,, @laylasbunbunny ,, @slytherinshua ,, @kazmura ,, @nicholasluvbot ,, @ameliesaysshoo ,, @weird-bookworm ,, @dazzlingligth ,, @litepowee ,, @ocean-minho ,, @lessthanpast ,, @s-e-s-a-I-e-n-e ,, @fire-08

493 notes · View notes

bad268 · 3 months

Text

Mr. Irrelevant Becomes Relevant (Brock Purdy X Reader)

Fandom: RPF/NFL

Requested: Nope, in honor of the Super Bowl

Warnings: hurt/comfort, insecurities, one sex joke at the end if you squint

Pronouns: Second Person (You/your and one use of ma’am)

W.C. 1356

Summary: When the weight of the Super Bowl gets too much, the reader takes it upon themself to show Brock why he's there.

As always, my requests are OPEN

MASTERLIST // HITLIST

~~(^Pinterest)

The road to the Super Bowl was long and tiring, but it was finally here. After being knocked out of the playoffs last year from a dirty play that ended in Brock being taken out of the game, he was back and on a roll. This was the first Super Bowl you had a personal connection with since you started your job as a Field Team Coordinator in 2021 after graduating from Iowa State. Your job was to plan the stage and work with the chosen artist to structure how the Apple Halftime Show would go.

Maybe it was the fact that this was the first year you were doing it all on your own or maybe it was the fact that your boyfriend and his team were playing in the game, but you were beyond anxious and excited for everything.

You had to be in Las Vegas two weeks before the Super Bowl, so you left Brock in San Francisco right after the championship game (after storming the field and congratulating him of course). He had to stay back with the team, but he met you there the following week.

It was hard the week leading up to the Super Bowl. You knew he was having doubts and overanalyzing every game he had ever played, and you wanted to comfort him. You really did! However, he had training during the mornings, and you had to be at the stadium by noon to run through the halftime show every night, so you had to settle for the brief morning interactions.

A short “You’ve got this” or “I believe in you” in passing became the short-term norm. It was not much, but it got what you needed to say out there. It seemed like it did not really help with Brock’s nerves, unfortunately.

That’s why you were happy to find out that Kyle Shanahan made Saturday a rest day, so you called in and told your right hands that you would be available remotely. If it was an emergency and they really needed you, you would go in, but there were not any pressing matters. Everything with the halftime show had already been settled, and there were no more preparations you could physically do. Just a few emails and short meetings that could be done through the hotel WiFi.

Waking up that morning, you were surprised to not find Brock still in bed, but you should have guessed that. You climbed out of bed and made your way out of the bedroom to the lounge, stopping in the doorway. To your not surprise, Brock was sitting on one of the armchairs rewatching games with headphones on. He was just wearing a pair of sweatpants as he immersed himself in the film, not noticing you walk up behind him.

You stood behind the chair before running your hands across his shoulders as you wrapped your arms around them and leaned down, hiding your face in his neck. He did not turn his attention away from the screen but moved one of his arms up to hold your forearm as he continued watching, dropping his head a couple of times to kiss your knuckles. You placed small kisses on his neck and shoulders as you waited for the quarter to end and for his attention to be on you.

It did not take long since there were only a couple of minutes left, so when the quarter did end, he paused the recording and set the laptop on the coffee table. You walked around the chair and gently pulled Brock to stand with you. You wrapped your arms around his middle as he wrapped his around your shoulders and swayed you two back and forth. You ran your hands up and down his back, feeling the tense muscles before you pulled back to look up at him.

“You’re tense,” You whispered. “Stop psyching yourself out before the game even starts. That’s not gonna do you any good, babe.”

“I can’t really help it,” He chuckled under his breath. “Patrick Maholmes has done this before and he’s one of the best quarterbacks.”

“And how do you think he became one of the best?” You retorted sarcastically. “Oh yeah! Winning Super Bowls. Isn’t it crazy that you also happen to be in a Super Bowl right now, and you could win it? You did not get here through luck, Brock. You have a strong team behind you, and you’re a pretty good shot. It’s not some fluke that got you here. It was your hard work and dedication that got you in the Super Bowl. Don’t downgrade yourself like that.”

“You make that sound like a win already,” He laughed again as he left a kiss on your forehead. “We’ve still got a game to play.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like you’re mentally ready to face the Chiefs, Brock,” You sighed as you stopped swaying with him. You moved your hands to hold his face and make him look at you. “You’re never going to win if you’re already thinking like you’ve lost. Let me put it this way. Did Patrick get in the Super Bowl his first full year in the NFL?”

“No, he didn’t,” Brock admitted with a small smile.

“That’s right,” You praised. “And when he did get in the Super Bowl for the first time, did he come off of a UCL injury which also happened during his 8th game and the NFC Championship Game no less?”

“No, he didn’t,” Brock chuckled as his smile got bigger. “I think I get the point now.”

“I don’t think you do,” You joked with him. “I need you to understand your worth and your potential. This is your first full year, and you are playing against some of the best in the league. I need you to start thinking like a champ 'cause we’re doomed if you start thinking like you’ve lost it, and it hasn’t even started.”

“We’re doomed?” He asked in mock offense, “I think we’re forgetting who has the best offense in the league!”

“That’s the attitude I’m looking for, babe!” You cheered with him. You laughed as Brock jokingly walked around the room as if hyping himself up for the game that was scheduled for tomorrow. “Show them that this is where Mr. Irrelevant becomes relevant, and what better way to do that than to beat the reigning Super Bowl champs.”

Brock’s mood seemed to lift drastically the more he thought about showing the world that he could lead his team to a Super Bowl championship in just his first full year. He chuckled at the thought before walking up to you, lifting you, and spinning you around. When he finally set you back down, he pulled you into a messy kiss, clearly still running from the slight adrenaline. You chuckled against his lips as you returned the energy to the kiss and ran your fingers through his hair.

After a few minutes, he pulled away so you could both catch your breaths. You started chuckling lightly causing him to look at you questioninly. You loved one of your hands from his hair to hold his chin.

“We’re going to have a chill day, no film, no training. Just self-care and relaxation, just you and me,” You whispered, pulling him into one last kiss. “And don’t take offense to this, but you are going to go shave before you give me a burn. Then we’ll go get some breakfast.”

“I thought you said I would look good with a beard,” He chuckled, running his hand over the light stubble he had. “Though you said I would look hot.”

“That’s something we can experiment with during the off-season, champ, but right now, it’s irritating,” You laughed with him before patting his chest as you pushed away from him, “I’m also willing to bet we will do a lot more than kissing today, so go shave now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” He jokingly saluted as he took off toward the bathroom with a smile. Without a doubt, he was ready to show them that Mr. Irrelevant is relevant.

~~~~~

#brock purdy x reader #brock purdy #49ers #san francisco 49ers #brock x reader #nfl fan fic #nfl imagine #nfl #nfl football #nfl playoffs #super bowl lviii #national football league #bad268 #ship268 #thing268

398 notes · View notes

dr-spencer-reids-queen · 6 months

Text

The Best Kind of Blush

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~500

Warnings: fluff

Summary: Spencer helps you pick the best kind of blush for you.

Square Filled: roommate's best friend (2021) for @spencerreidbingo

Author’s Note: any and all comments are appreciated <3

Spencer doesn’t understand the hype around makeup or why women love it so much, but he sees the smile on your face whenever you can paint your face. When you both have the day of, he likes to sit on the bed and watch you expertly blend makeup products to create something flawless. You’re already flawless but he likes seeing how much time and effort you spend on one look. It helps that you’re a makeup artist for low-budget films and TV shows. You’re making your way up the chain to bigger and better projects, but it’s a slow climb.

Your roommate, JJ, doesn’t mind Spencer being over all the time since they work together. She likes seeing him happy, and if you make him happy, then she supports your relationship.

You’re running out of makeup for your job as well as a few products for your everyday use, so you drag Spencer along to the store so he can help you pick out the best ones. The first section you go to is the special effects makeup products to get a new supply of items. Your job comes first, and when you see you have money left over for personal use, you drag Spencer to the eyeshadows.

“Hold your hand out.”

Spencer does, and you grab the sparkly palette you had your eye on for a while. The color glides on smoothly on his skin, and it’s fantastically glittery. You use his hand for multiple palettes and decide on two of them. You’d use your hands but they are covered with tattoos and the color wouldn’t show right. The next product you move onto is the blushes, and you grab the one you use almost every day. However, you want to try different ones you think might compliment your skin tone.

“Help me decide what blush I should get next.”

Spencer smirks and looks around the store to see if anyone is around. He wants to make sure people aren’t staring at him when he does what he’s gonna do.

“If you want a blush, I can give you a blush. For free, I might add.”

“What place do you know that has free blushes?”

Spencer isn’t big on PDA but he will do it if he knows no one is watching. He gives you a childish grin as he hooks his fingers in your belt loops. He pulls you closer and plants his lips on yours. He kisses you slowly and passionately like he would in the bedroom. He slides his tongue on your bottom lip and you’re inclined to give him what he wants. His tongue massages your own gently and leaves no inch untouched by him. When you feel butterflies go straight to your pussy, you pull back from him. Your cheeks are hot and you can only imagine they’re dark, too. You turn away from him to calm yourself down and he chuckles lowly.

“There it is,” Spencer chuckles. “Anytime you want a blush, you come to me.”

“Okay, Fabio, calm down,” you smile. “Go wait in the car.”

Spencer laughs and allows you to calm down without him next to you. You’re almost done shopping, and then you’re going to take him home and show him he can get a blush, too.

Follow my library blog @aqueenslibrary where I reblog all my stories, so you can put notifications on there without the extra stuff :)

640 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

Text

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

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

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

2K notes · View notes