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quicklythisway · 3 days
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Ron DeSantis hurt himself in confusion!
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Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel (6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage.
In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies,” which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge.
The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."
Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”
At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar.
The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive.”
Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at.
That was true but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait:
Which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?
Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes.
Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate.
That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline.
The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides.
Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews.
Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class.
She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.
After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously.
The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job:
To turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner.
This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art.
A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.
Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality.
Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite.
Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted?
The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.
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The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty.
The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema, or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged.
When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character,” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist.
In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit.
In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect.
Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.
Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character,” meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others.
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In recent years, the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health.
The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story:
“People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague.
In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.
Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers.
Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it.
There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser,” but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends.
Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children.
Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood.
She seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide.
Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox.
Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.
In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men.
Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations.
As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it:
“Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her.
When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”
In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee,” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”
Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends.
The dramatic collided with the dutiful and was kept alive by it.
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From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys.
Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage, and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic.
She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution:
Hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon.
The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem.
In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.
With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations.
What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency.
It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery and was taking time to recover.
And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed.
According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions.
Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.
Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty.
Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks.
Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”
In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice:
Her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama.
With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.
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NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.
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greencheekconure27 · 21 hours
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Another one for the blocklist, @ theendnews
An antisemitic antivaxx conspiracy theorist spreading russian propaganda, quelle surprise
And even if you don't care about Ukraine they should still be blocked and reported for THIS:
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Combined with this:
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The aforementioned russian propaganda below:
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amalasdraws · 5 months
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https://www.tumblr.com/bigmammallama5/732632789726478336?source=share do you have any tips on how to detect ai and deepfakes?
Good question and I'm gonna be honest, it's not always easy and it will only get harder and harder. I'm just an artist who has spent their personal time to dive into this topic and study images. I'm still learning and there is a lot I don't know. But let me show what I know. This will be long, but I will make a summary at the end! So far, even with ai having become better and better there are still almost always some things wrong with an image, and they all have a very specific look to them. So let me try to show you some and point out some of them.
As we all know, a biggest struggle ai had were hands. And even though here and there we still see messed up hands, I say "had", because the hands is actual a good example on how ai is improving and will only get better. Still, looking at pictures that show more hands is always worth it, because somewhere in the back there will be most likely at least one messed up hand.
Another issue a lot of ai still has is hair though!
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It's very obvious still in many ai "drawings" and in those otherwise well rendered portraits. Hair starts to blend with the ears a lot, or with the clothes.
There is also often this very odd look between something too sharp and way too blurry
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There is often a very specific texture to the hair. I actually do not know the artistic or specific name for it. I can only describe it as this weird sharp feeling that makes it look oddly pixely, and then you have areas where it's very blurry. And the kind of loops and almost flame like looking hair we see in the last pic out of the three here is also something very common with ai.
As an artist I know we make mistakes too! The way I draw hair is flawed too! But it's not only that it's flawed here, but it's following always the same pattern and falls into the same issues over and over again, no matter who is "creating" the image. Those flame like loops are a common one, next to the odd blends and weird sharp and blurry textures.
But ai is getting better, and we not only have "art" and something that tries to be a drawing/painting, but photos too.
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A lot of those "photos" have a very specific texture and look to them! Again, it's not always the mistakes, but the very specific optic too. A lot of the images are oddly smooth, too rendered, with always blurry backgrounds. And when you look closer at the background you will see the mistakes! The crowd behind Jesus is a hot mess once you look closer. Bob Marley's hair has the same issue than I described before. Lincoln is surrounded by people with messed up hands and don't even get me started on the faces behind Caesar.
So a lot of ai images look alright on a first and quick glance, but as more time you spend with them, as more mistakes you will notice. The wehre is Waldo of ai horror.
And those "photos" shared here are still very obvious. Not just the mistakes and messed up details but the very specific aesthetic too.
Those images get better and better and as less details you have, as less mistakes you have!
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With photos like this it becomes harder and harder. There are not many details and no hands. Not many mistakes can be made. Also the very obvious plastic looking smoothness isn't so much here anymore. It kinda still is...but differently. And always the blurry background!! Sometimes the hair is still a giveaway. Collars and clothe straps are also often still a giveaway upon close look. As is jewelry. Earrings will be different and necklaces often don't go all the way around, just end, or blend with the hair or clothes.
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Often details on jewelry is also blurry and not shown properly. This is a trick with many details. With jewelry, batches, hair, ears, text. So it's often blurred out and not shown properly because ai doesn't know what to really show here.
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It's often really just the small details and when we scroll down quickly we will miss them. Like the wedding ring on the middle finger, the pens on top of a closed pocket, the batches that are always blurry, messed up faces that blend with a blurry background.
And sometimes it's so subtle that I could only really tell that right is the ai image in comparison to the real photo on the left. The real photo shows hands clearly and even when things are blurred out it doesn't feel that it's done to hide things. The ai image on the right hides the hands. There is also a very dead look in the eyes :D
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And here I could only tell because the text in the back doesn't make sense. Even blurred out we should be able to make out something here
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And after seeing a lot of ai images I recognize the kind of blurred out bg in combination with a very smooth and well rendered foreground/characters.
And here the only giveaway is a closer look at the backgrounds as well
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To summarize it:
Ai and fake news rely on a fast living world. We are being bombarded with tons of information and messages daily and we scroll past quickly. But the best tool, for now, in detecting ai is taking our time! Those images get better and better but so far there are still always some things off!! Especially in the background!
Hair. Often weirdly smoothed out and oddly sharp at the same time
Hair often blends with the ears or the clothes
Details are blurred out.
Jewelry doesn't match (example earrings). Details on metal often blurred out and never shown. Necklaces blend with hair or the clothes, and don't go around the neck.
Background is always blurred out.
In this blurred mess there are often hidden very messed up faces and/or hands.
A very specific smooth and yet too sharp/too rendered aesthetic combines with an always blurry bg.
Text, especialyl in the background, is not legible and doesn't make sense.
Backgrounds are often (so far) the dead giveaway. Somewhere in the back things become muddled and messed up. This shows also very well in ai decor/architecture. There will be odd lines that don't align or align too well. Curtain poles that end in the furniture, a plant that is behind a lamp suddenly having leaves in front of the lamp. As longer you look as more you will notice.
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Conclusion:
Take your time with images! Sit with them! Especially when it's framed as important and political news. Is it ai and propaganda, or did it really happen? Don't fall for the quick buzz and outrage! Some things are obvious right away but with others you have to take your time. And it's time you have! If you are still unsure if a pic is real or not, do some research on top. Image reverse search. Can you find it anywhere else? Are other news outlets sharing it? Does the image/message make sense? For example there is now a deepfake of Bella Hadid voicing support for Israel. Ask yourself, does this make sense? If it feels out of line compared to previous behavior, do some research! Media literacy is not just as being able to recognize a fake or real right away, but being able to do research. To question things! Don't just take every post online for face value. Even when shared by a mutual you trust. They might have been tricked!
There are so many information online and it's great to have access to so information, but it's also difficult to wade through all of it. Media and truth are a weapon and it's being twisted and bend used to manipulate. Always has! But ai and so many people being able to post and share things, it becomes bigger and bigger and more dangerous. So don't just take everything that is handed to you and share it further no questions asked. Media literacy and being able to think for ourselves and do the research is important!! And as research becomes harder and harder, as sources are being messed up with ai and other fake news, it's even more important to sit with the images and study them. See the flaws, the mistakes. Compare it to other news and images.
This got long, and I started to ramble at the end. Sorry But I hope this helped
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A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza
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Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
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Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media
The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:
https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf
I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"
Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.
II. Know red flags for bullshit
The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:
High-frequency posting
Emotionally charged framing
Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original
The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)
III. Don't trust screenshots
Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.
IV. "Know your platform"
It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.
V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing
People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.
VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy
TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.
VII. Think before you post
Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.
There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition
The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:
https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html
Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.
It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford
There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html
It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
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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/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news
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dduane · 4 months
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I've found a new toy
Heh heh.
...And I can think of entirely too many things this could be used for. :)
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(the original post is here)
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anchorsnreignbows · 2 months
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mens-rights-activia · 11 months
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Don’t mind me, just spreading fake news
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rejectingrepublicans · 2 months
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F—king Republican lies! From the South African draft dodger who fled to Canada and then to the US.
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reality-detective · 3 months
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The Lord works in mysterious ways 🤔
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2ndbestalex · 8 months
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Crows as fake headlines I made up
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weirdlookindog · 3 months
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reashot · 1 month
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Suffering From Success.
Jaune: *walking & whistling on the street in peace*
Cardin: Hey~ What's up man. I just wanted to say I'm sorry for everything I ever did against you. I want you to know that I didn't know about your.... "Problems" before hand. And if I did know I would never do the things I did. So long story short I just want to apologize for all the bad things I did.
Jaune: Okay... Sure?
Cardin: Really! Thanks dude. By the way I always supported you people.
Jaune: WTH?
Back in dorm
Jaune: Hey guys. What happened to Cardin? He is acting weird all of a sudden.
Nora: *hugs Jaune* I'm sorry Jaune I didn't know...
Ren: *place his hand on Jaune's shoulder* It's okay Jaune. I know it's been hard for you and it's going to be harder in the future, but it's going to be okay. You have us.
Pyrrha: Jaune I'm sorry I didn't know. I shouldn't have trained you so hard... *tearing up*
Jaune: Okay guys this is not funny. What on Remnant are you talking about?
Everyone: *Shows Jaune an article on their scroll*
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Jaune: !!! .
Weiss: Well, that explains a lot.
Blake: Weiss, it's not cool, you are making fun of a disabled person right now.
Yang: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. OMG your big dick is the reason why you sucked.
Ruby: Jaune it's okay.... All I can say is that you're not alone. We will get through this together...
Jaune: @#$&-+-$) ¢¥^°¢¢÷!!!!!!!!!
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theremina · 8 months
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janky old roadside sign on a gravel n crabgrass drive on a cheerful sunny day reads in all caps:
FUCK FAKE MOANING
IF THE DICK IS BAD PULL
HIM CLOSE AND START
BOOING IN HIS EAR
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aiweirdness · 1 year
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"When the publisher of Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal announced last week that its magazines would start to publish AI-generated articles, its CEO assured readers that the practice wouldn’t result in a decline in quality."
Men's Journal's AI-generated article: 18 serious factual errors
CNET's AI-generated articles: rampant factual errors and also plagiarism
Using AI to generate articles is the modern journalistic equivalent of selling "strawberry jam" made of red dye and no strawberries
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bluemeetsyellowwest · 2 months
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hey everyone there’s an account that posts these types of videos ⬇️ if you come across it please stop what your doing and report them.
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This is a message to any of you who also think this is some funny stuff to lie about and make-up please know you aren’t only effecting noah you are involving his cast members. I know we taunt and bully celebrities especially if they’ve done problematic things, but there should be some boundaries cause Noah’s a real human being and these are real people. Please take the time to report the account
The username is @aymantwd REPORT AND BLOCK let’s get rid of the account
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