#ben robot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

verrixstudios · 17 days

Text

Just another Treasure Planet X Wings of Fire doodle

This is James and Ben rn

#wings of fire #dragons #james pleiades hawkins #ben robot #ben #treasure planet #design #art #sketches #doodles #don’t question the color #hes mad #Ben’s not #ben is very loud

56 notes · View notes

drawnfamiliarfaces · 10 months

Text

i was a (pre)teen hero once, but then i took some trauma to my psyche

8K notes · View notes

fandomfuntimem · 1 month

Text

"There are more of us than you think"

The ghost boy floated infront on Batman. All he wanted was to offer this kid some help. He has been deffending this town for a little over two years now with no help. So Batman just thought offering some training and other teen heros to help would be nice. But all he was met with was a cold hard stare. It wasn't a lookxof hatred, or anger, just disappointment.

"What?" He asked. For once in his life he didn't get it. What did he mean? 'There are more of us' more half ghosts like him? Multiples of him?

"What I mean Batman, is there are far more teen heros than you think. There are so many kids who were left to deffend their homes by themselves. I'm in contact with plenty of people like me. I don't need your charity work. We dont need it," Phantom took a deap breth, "so many kids had to save the world while the Justice League sat back and did nothing. Ben Tennyson has been saving the world since he was ten, a child soldier and the only effective weapon the Plumbers have. The Ninja over in Norrisville was given his powers at fourteen. Max Steel was fused with an alien and born with nuclear levels of power. The list goes on bats. Kim Possible, Jenny, Generator Rex, Zak Saturday. We all did just fine without you and your League."

Batman was speechless. That many? That many kids left to deffend their homes? Phantom obviously seemed to have contact with them, maybe they help eachother out, but still. How did the Justice League not know?

Phantom disappeared and left Batman to ponder his words alone. How many world ending events did thease kids fight? How many of them did they fight alone? How much help did each of them have? Phantom only has a niche group of allies, how small are their support groups?

He'll have to research this when he returns to the bat cave. Hopefully he can get all thease kids get the help they need. Set up Zeta Tubes in their cities, and end this awful epidemic of teen heros.

#dp x dc #dp x dc prompt #dpxdc #dc x dp #dc x dp prompt #dcxdp #ben ten #randy cunningham 9th grade ninja #max steel #kim possible #my life as a teenage robot #zak saturday #generator rex #prompt #writing #one shot #batman #dc comics #text post

934 notes · View notes

semisomnosres · 3 months

Text

Randy was accepted into the hom team:

✧author AU-@drawnfamiliarfaces I’ve been wanting to draw something with them for a long time, but I never got around to it, and when I saw this scene in Hazbin, I couldn’t help but want to edit it

#semisomnosres #crossover fanart #redraw #hom au #ben 10 ditto #kim possible #danny phantom #my life as a teenage robot #american dragon jake long #the life and times of juniper lee #rc9gn #secret saturdays #ben 10 #generator rex

1K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

Text

How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

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/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

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

CC BY 3.0

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

#pluralistic #chatbots #plausible sentence generators #robot lawyers #robolawyers #ai #ml #machine learning #artificial intelligence #stochastic parrots #bullshit #bullshit generators #the bullshit wars #llms #large language models #writing #Ben Levinstein

2K notes · View notes

alebriije · 6 months

Text

tumblr is the only app where do you talk abt cartoon/serie that has been around for like 10 years or more and you're still going to get fans here to talk abt

#slugterra #ben 10 #sofia the first #strawberry shortcake #wakfu #lalaloopsy #danny phantom #my life as a teenage robot #the secret saturdays #juniper lee #randy cunningham 9th grade ninja

1K notes · View notes

awesome-normal-heroes · 5 months

Text

The Hero befriending the Villain's Child is the Ultimate Power Move:

290 notes · View notes

the-no-name-of-nowhere · 1 year

Text

Does anyone one else think the power to travel through dimensions would be cool?

Not to check out your alternate self, because that could be depressing.

No. There’s only one right way to use a power like this.

And that is to watch the shows were canceled!

Just think about it! Shows that we loved taken from us far too soon, maybe even never getting a proper ending.

In another dimension, it continued on. Something you probably watched for hours on end is back in life and the story goes on.

Hell! It doesn’t just have to be TV series. It could a book series, YouTube series, A MOVIE YOU THOUGHT SUCKED IN THIS DIMENSION COULD BE BETTER IN ANOTHER!

SKY’S THE LIMIT!

Well, that’s all I have to say.

If you have a series of something you would love to see the full story of, put it in the tags below.

1K notes · View notes

latenightwestern · 5 months

Text

“We could be like Batman and Robin!”

but what if he actually took him up on that offer

bonus:

#rick and morty #rick prime #evil morty #morty smith #rick sanchez #art #partly inspired by en-bens au where rick prime adopts morty prime #but like what if it was the other guy instead #why would evil morty do this? HE WOULDNT I JUST THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUNNY #idk maybe he wants an improved robot butler in his snowglobe #or maybe he wasnt able to extract the weapon plans so he just carries him around like a living hard drive #not that anyone cares but im done with my finals btw #totally bombed my last one but nothing a little rick and morty cant fix

219 notes · View notes

haknamindustries · 4 months

Text

Beyond Bladerunner - a list of cyberpunk(ish) records

A selection of lesser known cyberpunk(ish) records that goes beyond the usual suspects of Bladerunner and Ghost In The Shell. Each of the individual artists has more releases that are worth checking out. I added the Bandcamp link to the titles if available.

Ben Prunty - Cipher

Mac Quayle - Mr. Robot Volume 1

Yan van der Cruyssen - Stray

Ed Harrison - Neotokyo GSDF

Michael McCann/Sascha Dikiciyan/Ed Harrison - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Paul Leonard Morgan - Dredd

#cyberpunk #scifi #futurism #ben prunty #mac quayle #mr robot #stray #neotokyo #deus ex mankind divided #dredd #ed harrison #paul leonard morgan #yan van der cruyssen

105 notes · View notes

c-m-li · 6 months

Text

My Roman empire are the early 2000's cartoons that went super hard but didn't have to: