#i saw a twitter post about how there's not enough art where someone uses their evoker on someone else
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i looked up sad latin phrases for this piece
#persona 3#persona 3 reload#persona 3 the answer#p3#persona 3 fanart#p3 fanart#persona 3 aigis#persona 3 yukari#p3 aigis#p3 yukari#fanart#most of it was obscured anyway#i saw a twitter post about how there's not enough art where someone uses their evoker on someone else#it stuck with me#idk how to portray that the evoker is makoto's but#yea
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01/15/2024 Crew Recap
Hey all, today has been a very very very long day. I’m typing this with my eyeballs glazed over and half open. However, so much has happened in such a little amount of time I wanted share a few things before I pass out I know a lot of you are in different timezones, are busy with life, and taking a break, so maybe this will help with parsing through some of the crazy stuff the crew has been up to.
The petition hit 50K, and is at 52.5K at the moment
Fundraisers: I didn’t even realize there were two different fundraisers for Palestine/Gaza going on but we blew both out of the water. (Note: the second picture is from a November campaign but I think its just as important to highlight— ty for the correction anon!)
The Emmys hashtag turn out was great tonight. There was some pretty amazing and creative stuff going on across all the platforms. Some can be seen on IG, but if you wanna see the majority of it, check out twitter #SaveOFMD #75thEmmys
---We have new ways of protesting and advocating for our show, see here for the thread on tumblr (from twitter):---
And to support that @saltpepperbeard was kind enough to put together a wonderful guide on how to Call It Through as a Crew: Alleviating Some Phone Anxiety which as someone who is socially anxious and sometimes verbally vomits on people when on the phone, is AMAZING and thank you so much for doing that to help.
-- > There is also this new thread on some new places to call into. Don't quote me on that being an official thing we should do, I'm sure @renewasacrew and others will have more in the AM, I just wanted to share it so people could follow if they wanted to.
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New Articles!
Our Flag Means Death: Here’s why season three deserves to be aired
Petition to save BBC show with rare Rotten Tomatoes score gets 50,000 signatures
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There's so much more that's happened today-- but I can't write it all down because my brain is couscous.
<---So instead, I'm going to use this last part to gush over you all and your amazing contributions in all your unique ways. The community support the last few days has been SO INCREDIBLY UPLIFTING.-->
I saw (and experienced) people reblogging asks where random followers, anons, and mutuals just reached out and sent love because they could tell people were struggling.
I've seen comments all over the place on Tumblr, IG, Twitter, and Facebook where each and every person is encouraging each other to speak their mind, or complimenting their artwork, encouraging them if they were feeling uncomfortable with things outside their comfort zones, coming up with new and exciting ways to fight back, people reaching out to the cast/crew just to say hi and remind them we love them.
I've seen Self-Care checkpoints all over, reminding people to drink water, take a break, block your notifications for a while, not engaging in negative behavior.
I've seen people being so nice on instagram posts that the people who were being dicks about all our comments turned around and decided to watch OFMD!
I saw so many people doing new analysis of scenes and characters, and having really deep and friendly discussions that make everyone think in new ways.
I saw people digging through old tumblrs to bring life back to old posts and artwork.
I saw so much NEW artwork, new FICS! New GIFS! So much new art and love!
I could literally go on and on, but I've just...I had to dump this out of my brain otherwise I'd explode. I've just seen so much today that continues to make me so proud of our little safe space ship and so happy to be apart of this community.
You all continue to be the best of the best of humans, and I am so very grateful to get to witness and be apart of it. Rest up lovelies and have a good day / night, wherever you may be. May you dream of sexy middle-aged gay men kissing, or hugging, or whatever else you want them to be getting into.
#ofmd#our flag means death#stede bonnet#gentlebeard#edward teach#renew as a crew#rhys darby#blackbonnet#save our flag means death#save ofmd#ofmd s3#renew our flag means death#renew ofmd#ofmd daily recap
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something i saw once that has stuck with me ever since was a comment on a post about some scientific discovery made by the mars rover perseverance that said "why are we wasting time looking at rocks when we should be preparing for colonization?
another comment was on a post about the environmental issues surrounding the spacex launch site in southern texas, which said "human expansion to mars delayed to protect some turtles"
and comments like these perplexed me. space is a subject of science, and people interested in space are always talking about the wonders of the unknown, and how many fascinating and beautiful things are out there. so how could people interested in space be so fundamentally uncaring and incurious not only about the places they're supposedly interested in, but about nature in general?
it's not just random people in twitter replies who are like this. elon musk once posted this picture:
thing is, that's not mars, that's the moon during a lunar eclipse (when sunlight tinted red after passing through earth's atmosphere lights up the moon in earth's shadow). you'd think that someone known for wanting to bring people, himself included, to mars would care enough about mars to at least know what it looks like, but apparently not
he also rather infamously says he wants to nuke the ice caps of mars to warm the planet up. the ice caps of mars look like this, by the way (image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Aster Cowart):
they are beautiful places, that hold an irreplaceable scientific record of the geologically recent martian climate, and are shaped by unique processes. there's no other place quite like them in our solar system. but elon musk thinks we should nuke them. again, no care, no curiosity
nothing has made me feel jaded and cynical about the entire enterprise of spaceflight quite like learning that the people ultimately in charge of it and funding it don't give a shit about space. it's not just elon musk. space nerds love quoting kennedy's "we choose to go the moon" speech as inspiration, but kennedy is also on record saying "I'm not that interested in space" in a conversation where he was arguing to the nasa administrator that they should prioritize beating the soviets to the moon over space science. no curiosity, only a desire for geopolitical showmanship and maintaining hegemony. it's the same thing when many modern politicians only seem to care about space exploration as a way of keeping a technological lead over china
this leaves the people who do genuinely love and care about space in an awkward position. they basically have two choices: A) become jaded and give up on space exploration, or at least parts of it (abandoning human spaceflight but maintaining interest in robotic science missions, for example) or B) give in. work with military contractors. spout the jingoistic rhetoric that the politicians writing the checks want to hear, even if you don't believe it. go along with the colonialist ideology, the hypercapitalism, and the extractivism. sell your soul for pictures of mars and let your passions be exploited for the ends of powerful people who don't care
the sad reality is that our society only values those things deemed useful or profitable. we hear it all the time. the idea that schools should only teach things useful for jobs, that people who try to make a living in fields like art, the humanities, or philosophy are all getting useless degrees and will inevitably end up stuck working retail, and of course, the idea that space exploration is a waste of time and money
space nerds are often deeply insecure about their greatest passion, because it's true, space exploration offers no immediate practical benefit. but they still love space and want to explore it
so they believe the lies. they repeat the colonialist ideology. they say there's money in mining asteroids, that we can terraform planets and let number go up forever. they let themselves be exploited by companies and governments that see everything in the universe and all the people in it as things to be used, and that will ultimately chew them up and spit them out if it's expedient to do so. and those who reject the ideology and keep their love for the cosmos pure often find themselves with no place in the project of space exploration
i don't know how to fix this, but i do hope that i will live to see the day when our curiosity and interest and love for the wider universe is valued for its own sake, and no longer shackled by colonialism, capitalism, and political ambitions
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Another entry. Firstly, Still With Me? Did JK release a new song that I didn’t know about? Secondly, I would rather speculate that a song is about someone then a hand gesture that a lot of people do.
I saw them coming at us for paying attention to numbers and 11/08 even though that's way more real than whatever tf this is. Like... aren't they embarrassed????
Anyway guys, I have an announcement to make.
Attention please!
Thank u ☺☺
Okay so I've been getting alot of frustrated asks mad at tkkrs and antis on twitter, right? Unfortunately I tend not to post them because I don't wanna bring too much negativity on this blog. Especially when some of those things are vile AF. Anyway, the point of this post is, My friends and I are in a Jikook discord and a few of us do this thing on twitter where we fight antis and shit especially when they come to Jikook spaces.
As we know recently a big Jikook account with 15k followers was attacked the other day for liking a post from an anti. But she had no idea that person was one. She just liked the post coz it was Jikook related. It's an easy mistake to make, really. She tried apologising and explaining she'd blocked the anti but these assholes didn't listen. They went though her profile and started commenting under all her regular, normal tweets that she was an anti and should be ashamed of herself or whatever. They were determined to give her no peace whatsoever.
When called out themselves, one account shamelessly said that they were antis and proud. That they didn't pretend that they don't hate Jimin. This really made me mad. It's not the first time they've been quite proud of the Jimin hate they partake in. Tkk accounts will gets thousand of likes on a post hating on Jimin and this ain't right. An anon sent in an ask venting about us being cowards and I agree. They attack Jikookers and these jkkrs end up deleting their Jikook posts. THIS SHIT AIN'T RIGHT!!! Its not.
They do this thing where they move in balk. My friends and I tried to back this account up. Encouraged her not to let them get to her. But it dont matter that 5 people are on your side if 30 people are telling you to kill yourself its just... /sigh/
This account is still running. But they had to unfollow everyone they follow and start from scratch. This ain't right guys. Its just not fair no matter how u look at it. I think we need to start giving tkkrs the same energy they give us.
Simply ignoring them is NOT working. We don't go to them, they come to us. I think its time Jikookers fought fire with fire. Which is why I'm making this post. A few of us had the idea to create a Jikook fighting discord.
If you are reading this and are tired of taking shit lying down. If you have wanted to fight these people but you were worried that you are just one person and won't make a difference. If you see the Jimin hate and wish there was something you could do about it, I come with an offer. Fuck tkkrs. Fuck antis. Fuck solos and fuck ot7 accounts that call out the vermin but then delete their tweets when they start to loose followers. Fuck all these people. Lets do something about this, ourselves.
Tkkrs are the ones causing chain reactions. If they didn't attack Jimin, Jimin solos wouldn't attack V and JK. (Yesterday I saw an art of JK with a dirty diaper and I just...🤮) If they shipped in peace and didn't attack Jimin literally all this shit wouldn't be happening.
I say we give them a taste of their own medicine. So if you see this post and you agree that enough is enough, then come join us here.
If you can't join then spread the word. Time to defend Kookmin and Koominers. Fuck this shit. The vermin have ran rampant for long enough. Photoshopping Jimin getting blown by band pd wasn't enough. Now they're editing him into porn. Guys, they've go10 too comfortable. Let's do something!
1) Create a separate twitter account before you join us. Safer not to use your main
2) ONLY Jikookers allowed in this discord. If you are not one of us we will know.
See you soon. I hope some of you consider. This shit has to stop. Kookminers assemble!!
Bless 💜
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Hi, I'm new to this fandom and saw about your stand against Jiang Cheng and I'm genuinely curious, could I ask you why do you hate the character so much? I'm genuinely curious.
Hello! Welcome to the MDZS fandom! It’s a really interesting place to be.
I do think you are perhaps misunderstanding my fight, and it’s understandable, there’s a lot of history behind it. But I don’t actually hate Jiang Cheng the book character at all.
He’s a fantastic antagonist, one who has enough happen to him that he’s understandable without justifying his actions. His anger and bitterness make him incredibly active, which can help move the plot along well, and the fact that he is also Wei Wuxian’s personal antagonist makes him very fun and relevant as you need the antagonists that can make a character hurt personally for stories of this type.
As his general character archetype, I think he’s done really well. I quite enjoy him in the context he is supposed to be seen as, the younger person who grew up with the hero who instead of attempting to better himself, tore down those around him in an attempt to put everyone on the same level.
My problem (and my fight) is that the character of Jiang Cheng in Modaozushi is not the Jiang Cheng that is in the fanfics and the art and the meta and discussions.
The Jiang Cheng that you see in fanfics and metas that isn’t under the Not JC Friendly on Ao3 or #canon jiang cheng tag on tumblr is one that is no longer an antagonist or in character, but someone else entirely. Someone who no longer slots into the world of MDZS as if he were actually the person they posit him to be, the events that he is responsible for would have never happened. Quite simply they take the character I enjoy, erase all of his actual traits and then show up to scream at me for writing him wrong, or lying about the book, or not knowing how to read.
Or they are gleefully celebrating classism and homophobia with him. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve seen that are basically “he’s right to be homophobic because Wangxian are annoying and he should hate them for that”. In a danmei fandom. About the lead couple. I already have dealt with more than enough homophobia in my daily life, why do I have to deal with it in a fandom for a novel in which the leads are a happily married queer couple?
I have been in this fandom for a year and a half. I tag my posts appropriately. When I was requested to not put character hate in the main tag (and novel quotes qualified as character hate), I did as they asked and invented my own tag. Sure it’s a little snarky, but it’s also an easy one to block and allows others like myself who enjoy the character as he is in the book to find my stuff. On ao3, I’ve written a few fics that use him in it as he is in the book and tagged it not for JC fans as they requested.
Do you know what I got?
I have anon hate for using my tag, the very tag I created in response to their request. On my fics that use him, I have people showing up to cry that he’s out of character and I can’t write. When I did all that I could do to try and enjoy a character as he is in canon and as they continually say is what they want. “You don’t have to like him, just tag your stuff so we don’t have to see it.”
I do stand against his stans. I have blocked many of them and gotten in arguments with many others. You are new to this fandom so you wouldn’t have seen this, but a year ago one of them wrote a fanfic about Lan Wangji murdering Wei Wuxian because they were mad about the very existence of the not for jc fans tag, and tagged it with romance and fluff tags so that fans of wangxian would click on it and read a horrible, deliberately hurtful fic and gleefully celebrated it on Twitter.
Why should I not stand against them? They have bullied so many people out of this fandom for not writing Jiang Cheng in the way they want. That is not okay. This is a massive fandom in places where it is very easy to filter and tag, and they try to bully and chase us out of the whole fandom because we don’t like their made up version of a character, or the fact that they are homophobic and shitty to the leads and to me and my friends and my followers.
Welcome to Modaozushi fandom, new reader. It’s a very volatile place with a long history. This is my section of it. And that is why I tag with canon jiang cheng and do not take any shit from people who have umbrage with that.
Thanks for the ask, I hope you have a really great day and at least consider my words even if you don’t agree with them. I suspect if you do, we will never have a problem with each other.
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Fucking. Stop it with the AI Art.
I’m extremely upset by people I respect using AI art more and more. I don't know what to do about it, from the people in comments being like "shut up, people have been inspired by others' art for centuries" to others saying "it's just a tool."
A lot of those people don't know how AI art is made, and either won't believe a factual explanation or just don't care. Datasets aren't "inspired" by art. Datasets are machines. If they're asked to do something, they output their best guess as to what it is you want. Recently, a very famous artist, Kim Jung Gi, died, and someone on Twitter fed his art into a dataset and spit out new art that LITERALLY could have been made by the original artist. And this person just... didn’t see a problem with doing that. He called it an homage.
SO MANY people don’t see a problem with that, either. I don’t get it.
The truth is, AI is replacing artists.
That’s not debatable. From an AI entry in an art contest winning first place to Cosmo using AI art on a cover and bragging that “it only took 20 seconds to do” AI is being used to push artists out of careers.
And let’s all be honest here. If you need a portrait, it must be at LEAST a little tempting to ask MidJourney to do it, because a portrait of similar quality is going to cost you a couple hundred bucks from an ACTUAL artist. And if you pay a dataset to do it for you, it might run you $8bux at most. Easy as fuck, man. And that’s the problem... Why pay a real artist to do it when you can get nearly the same result in 20 seconds?
This might seem doom-and-gloomy, but no one can tell me it’s gonna be okay. No one has offered a logical counterargument to me. No one's said "look, here's why you're fine" and given me a reason that doesn't have a logical rebuttal.
The reason I find it so difficult to keep fighting is because there's no one reason AI art is bad. There's dozens. And more become evident every day. So if I make one argument, I HAVE to be prepared to make another, because someone is going to counter with another argument that has to be refuted. And so on and so forth. I just don’t have the energy to keep up. ALL OF IT IS BAD. The only advantage is to the people who want cheap, fast art.
I’m not gonna name names here, but... There are people out there with the platform to stop this, and it's so demoralizing that instead of taking a stand against it, they are feeding into it. I offer to educate someone and I’m ignored. Immediately after, that person posts more lensa self portraits. God, it’s so fucking frustrating.
Sometimes I do wonder: Am I on the wrong side of history? Is AI art just another panic-scare like photography? Does AI art really have a place in our future? The difference is, photography doesn’t steal other peoples' art. In fact, there are court decisions out there that give artists rights against their pieces being photographed and used without permission. Likewise, photographers are protected against their art being used by traditional artists. (IE, you can't make a sculpture from someone's unique photo. True fact.)
But there’s no protections in place for artists against AI. And so many people don’t understand that the art fed into the dataset is what creates the pieces. It doesn’t draw those things itself. It uses what it has, cobbling things together, to produce something it calls “new.” I saw someone in a Twitter comment say “lol that’s just a collage.” What a fucking bad faith argument. I know those people see the difference between a collage and art theft.
There’s so much more misinformation going around than truth, and people are just parroting it because they want to play with their new AI toy. No one is thinking critically. No one is looking at where this could go.
What’s going to stop people from creating an AI dataset that imitates CCTV footage and places innocent people at the scene of a crime? AI art is getting good enough that with a little tweaking, this is almost possible. I could absolutely do it myself right now, with the number of people feeding their faces into lensa. I have other fears, but that’s one I can post about, because I’m pretty sure my face isn’t inside an AI dataset at the moment.
Anyway. I’m angry. I’m tired. And I just don’t want to draw anymore.
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on the whole kudos/comment thing. I'm an artist and I havn't posted art on instagram in 2 years, that is both og art and fanart. its not worth the 2 mins of my time to post after only to get 10ish odd likes from mostly people ik irl when I can just send it off to my friends and get wayyyyyy more personal and happy responses. yes creatives are not entitled to engament but don't be surprised when they disappear
if its not worth your time to comment then its not worth THEIR time to post.
I'll admit im a hypocrite saying this as I don't comment all the time (mixture of no internet when reading and good old mental illness leaving me with blank brain fog) but I stil try. its not a matter of which is good enough or conveince but if its a good day for me. speaking of trying while I'm here I freaking love dhd, started following from she ra but I love your orginal stuff and you're so sweet. <3
I hope people stop being rude in your ask box
Yes, I hear this a lot. Also, it seems people are willing to discuss about things with their friends or fandom fellow groups but not give the same comments to the person who created that thing. I have a personal experience of this.
Years and years ago, I used to write fanfic with an url no one knew about. It was my secret little account. I was a part of a fandom group for the said fandom I was writing these fics about. The group was lovely and active, and they openly loved to discuss about fanfics and fanart.
Whenever I wrote a fic and posted it, the very same day someone within the group noted the whole group about it. Those who wanted to read the fic went to read it, and then they eagerly discussed about the fic with each other; what did they like about it, what thoughts they had, if they had any metas or ideas of what would happen in the next chapter, how the fic had made them feel like and what was their favorite part of each chapter.
I followed these conversations without anyone knowing they were talking about my fic. It made me happy to see that what I had written was well received, and people waited for more!
Did any of these people leave me a comment on the said fic they were gushing about? No.
So, the lurker me knew that my fic was well received and liked, but the author me didn't know, because no one said anything. All the conversation was held in a private place among readers but the author was not included in it.
It would have been really easy for any of these fans of the fic just copy the same thing they had said in the private group and post it to the author me under the fic. Very easy support and a very easy way to let the author-me know that yes, this is what we wish to get more! I only know this because I was lurking in the fan group and saw these conversations.
Another experience I've got and it still keeps happening is that if I join a Discord group or any event group, there are always people who know me due FUZZY. They say that they read the comic and loved it. I have no idea just how many people actually read FUZZY, know it and liked it, because the majority seem to be lurkers who I encounter at random like this :D It's always a surprise when it happens, a happy one mind you! I don't know how many readers and fans FUZZY actually had but I think no one can really ever know the full scale of their fans and influence.
I've got IG which mainly operates now as an art gallery for those who wish to see just my art (excluding long comic updates due image limit). Engagement is small in IG and Twitter, where things are fresh for 20 second and then they are forgotten - albeit IG's positive side compared to Twitter is a better search system where you can go through old posts and like & comment them (no, it's not creepy, why the hell giving support for someone would be creepy when we talk about supporting fandom people).
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How's it like for people to be generally accepting and adoring of your headcanons? I've been putting my stuff out there, but it isn't as beloved as yours or Jan Misali. Kinda intimidating to be honest, but I can see the appeal in your works. I look forward to seeing them and hope my works will be liked too.
Truthfully, I had no idea that so many people 1) accepted and adored my head-canons and 2) put me on the same level as jan misali of all people. I don't think i'm nearly as well-known as them (only one of us has a youtube channel with over 300k subscribers and it ain't me) but it's certainly an honor to hear that LOL.
When I started pumping out comics, i had no idea i would get this kind of a response; in fact, I had already made peace with the idea that i wouldn't get more than 5 notes before I even started posting! So getting so much positive feedback was a huge surprise. I basically treat my online existence as a room to dance by myself in, and it just so happened that a bunch of people came around to watch. I don't say this to gloat, but to say that I think the best way to have fun on the internet is to do what you love, and no matter how many people show up to join in you'll be happy. Especially since the notes don't tell you how many people actually saw and enjoyed your stuff; even if you get a lot of likes and not a lot of reblogs, each like is one human behind the screen who really liked your art. Some people might really like your art and not interact with it at all; you never know how many lives you touch just based on the numbers, so I don't focus on them too much.
If you're asking for writing advice, I think the 1 biggest thing that I try to do in my art is to be authentic. I notice that a lot of fan art tends to use "meme templates", so to speak; twitter screenshots, comic redraws, stuff like that. And that's fine and all, but that's not what I like to do. I love delving into the nitty-gritty of detailed characterizations: how would they react in this situation? How would they feel about this other character? What kind of problems would they encounter and how would they solve them? Stuff like that. Warioware in particular is like a field day for me because the characters are rich enough to have a lot to draw off of, but the slice-of-life format gives a lot of unexplored territory that I can color in.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s (where I set my comics - I broke this rule once to draw a nintendo switch but I try to stick to a pre-2014 setting), I draw a lot from my own experiences. People I've known, things I've done, interactions I've had with family and friends; nothing shot-for-shot, but ideas that can guide me when I think of the setting these particular characters live in and the situations they might find themselves in. I love drawing from my own life because unlike the internet memes or movie screenshots that everyone's seen, that's stuff that only I can draw from. At the same time, I think that approach also helps me connect with other people; I'm certainly not the only one who's gone on a wild family trip, or had a younger relative, or done goofy things at a friend's house. When I draw these silly scenarios, I hope that people can look at them and think, "haha! This looks familiar!" not in the sense that they've seen it before on a screen, but that they've lived it themselves.
This is a whole lot of words and I hope it doesn't sound as pretentious as I think it does. Basically, the first rule of art is have fun and be yourself. I hope that you can find some value in this spiel!
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i'm not really back yet because it's still hot and it turns out my meds were making me depressed and i'm trying to gently roll out of that disaster but gods am i laughing my ass off
I saw a group on twitter a couple of months ago all talking about how they hoped the ofmd cast didn't do conventions because people would be "creepy" with them and they'd be exposed to "fandom weirdness" and how awful it would be for those poor soft babies who are absolutely not mostly all middle aged men who are mature and old enough to know what they're doing
and at the time I thought, "What the fuck?" because... they are adults? who have been around enough to have some kind of inkling of what to expect?
but also I forever remember conventions from, gods, the 2000s? where the actors enjoyed the 'fandom weirdness' so much they'd make out on stage to tease slash ships that would never be in the show and they'd strongly play along with the fans!
not all conventions are spn "no homo" conventions
(to be clear i dont actually think the spn cast are homophobic but i do think they can get a lil weird about fans interpreting the show the way they do and i think most of that is "this isn't in the show/script? how are you seeing this?" rather than "ew gay")
but anyway I remember thinking about the ofmd cast and thinking, "no, they're going to fucking LOVE conventions, you guys need to stop infantalizing them immediately"
and then today I'm scrolling and I see this post summarizing a panel Con and Nathan and others were at
and I honed in on "someone asked what they like about the fan reaction and con said “i like all the porn art”" and "first question was what they’re looking forward to doing in NZ and con was like “nathan!”"
and i was right, bitches. these feral gremlins are going to enjoy every single moment of convention-worthy fame and drag us into their weirdness and i am ALL FOR IT
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for ao3 wrapped!!! 5, 6 ,17, 29?
kae!! thank u for the ask :D
5. What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?
OOOOOOH okay as far as fics i wrote this year, "can heaven fall into my lonely earth" which is one of very few iskris fics on ao3 and??? has the most bookmarks out of my bllk fics (i think only recently surpassed by dtootc), and the third highest amount of comment threads (surpassed by dtootc and wwap, both of which are multi-chapter works vs this little oneshot?!)
....however. this year i also had uh. an old work kind of blow up on twitter??? which i NEVER expected. and it was like 90% really positive stuff too! so shoutout to "01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101, or something," a poem i wrote in 2016 about robots being married. the official star wars twitter account has seen my gay r2/c3p0 poem. the tweet that someone posted about this poem has over 5mil views. my brother and his friends were actively discussing the tweet in their groupchat before finding out it was written by me. random IRL people mentioned it before finding out it was written by me. this was definitely not on my 2023 bingo card.
6. Favorite title you used
the rituals are intricate, bro!!!! it really felt like it encapsulated otoya's voice for me and he was just so fun to write sldkjflskdjf
17. Your favorite character to write this year?
sae for sure!!! although i think i've had so much fun with all the bllk boys that i've put into pickle jars and shaken around slkdfjlskdjf it's hard to pick just one!!
29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?
shit this is HARD. fuck. KAE HOW COULD YOU MAKE ME CHOOSE OTL
maybe:
"Here's the thing: Bachira looks at Rin as if he's stained glass, transparent and a work of art all at the same time, delicate and sharp in tandem. He looks at Rin and says lonely where others see alone, and when Rin throws thorns at him, Bachira only smells roses. So when Bachira slots himself into Rin's life like moss on a river stone, Rin takes him for the tumble." (but if your lightning lips aren't mine)
> I'm really proud of the metaphor tbh, it feels very apt for both their characterizations and it was a strong opening that I still enjoy!!
or,
"We were fourteen together, fifteen, sixteen, which means we know more about each other than our families ever will again, because that's what this career has done to us." (we wrote a prelude)
> something something The Burden of Teenage Nostalgia, the way sae didn't go home at ALL from ages 14-18 which i think are core years to becoming a human being, the way kaiser was there but rin wasn't, something something - the point of Being Changed in a way that your blood relatives cannot understand but your comrades do
or, a handful from dtootc:
"Rin can hear it when his engine revs and his tires squeal. Like Rin is important enough to run stoplights for."
"Rin knows that other teenagers don't feel like this. No one else drowns like him. // Sae around this age was cruel; at fourteen he was curious, at fifteen he was already sharpening himself into a knife, and sixteen saw him as a scalpel, carving out pieces of himself while also cutting Rin down to the bone with surgical precision. Somewhere at seventeen his edge dulled, but the damage was done. // Some might say Sae has always been cruel: it's in his nature, with his blank face and calculating eyes, the bluntness of his tone that bruises, the sharpness of his words that scar. // But to Rin, he'd once been kind. The kindest in the world. // (Maybe Sae had been drowning too. // Maybe that's why he left.)"
""No one has ever looked for me." // Shidou turns, pink eyes bright and brow furrowed, a kind of innocent confusion that doesn't seem suitable for a demon. He's not wearing eyeliner; it makes his face seem more human. // "I did."
and finally, spoilers for the most recent chapter:
"Their hand lingers for a moment, and then in a motion achingly familiar, nostalgic like childhood fevers, Sae brushes a strand of Rin's hair from his face, tucking it behind his ear before adjusting the blanket over him once again."
WAUGH KAE THANK U THESE WERE HARD BUT GR8 QUESTIONS
ao3 wrapped game
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So I've seen your twitter posts about the nature of rpf. I essentially agree with you. I don't really mind if the people being shipped are popular enough to have a public persona, just so there's a buffer between who they are as people and who they are as a celebrity (and tbh, whose making porn of randos they saw walking the street?)
However, I only believe that is good as long as they are adults. I think rpf smut of irl underaged people (celebrities or not) crosses the boundary between fiction and reality abided by most proshippers and becomes CSEM. For instance, I heard on twitter of an acc on Twitter which drew rpf of the child actor from Terminator, who used it not being fiction as an excuse to draw it.
This mentality also applies to smut made of live action characters portrayed by real children (unless the author is a child themselves, but it can still be tricky since kids can produce/ distribute CSEM of other kids) since it still uses the physical description of an actual child to create the fiction.
What is your take on this?
Hi, and thank you for a good question! My answer is a bit on the long side, but I want to explain my reasoning properly, so bear with me.
I think we need to be very careful when labelling something as CSEM/CSAM so that we don't undermine the severity of the crime that leads to there being material of the sexual exploitation or abuse of a child.
CSEM/CSAM is illegal because in order to produce that material, an actual child is directly exploited or abused. The material is proof that this exploitation/abuse has happened. If the material is distributed further, the exploitation of the child doesn't stop.
When someone draws or writes smut and uses the likeness of a real person as their inspiration/reference, that real person is not part of the process. The artist has not seen them engaging in the activity they are drawing/describing. The end product is a piece of fiction instead of a recording of something that actually happened to the person whose likeness is being used.
Mind you, I am talking about drawings, not AI revenge porn or anything similar where someone who looks at the picture can't easily tell whether the person portrayed in the picture has been in that situation or not. Manipulating photos of a real person is not the same as using their likeness for reference when drawing something.
Keeping all of this in mind, I would not say that a piece of smutty art that uses the likeness of an actual minor counts as CSEM, unless the said minor has posed for the art, which would be the exploitation that happened in order to produce that piece of art.
There are people who draw smutty art using the likeness of underage actors or other celebrities, or who write smut about the underage characters or the kids portraying those characters. Most people will probably be more or less disgusted by this concept and/or find it morally questionable. But CSEM/CSAM is not defined based on how disgusting people think the material is.
In conclusion: fictional material can't be CSEM/CSAM any more than it can be murder or manslaughter.
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also more briefly: i had enough overlap with relevant circles that i saw a post Here with various examples of the in-game works of art, then some more posts that established it as "whoah game in the style of illuminated manuscripts / medieval art / woodblock printing???" and dialogue-centric rpg / visual novel kind of situation, Then someone i followed on twitter just said they'd played it and loved it so i was like hmm for once this is one of those rare alignments of [this seems sooo relevant i will check it out] and On That Basis Alone i started watching a seventeen hr. playthrough lol
so i didn't even know that there was a murder mystery component / where the story was going, so like i don't think "gotta be unspoiled" actually makes or breaks An Experience of a Work, but it's not irrelevant, and like i easily would've looked up plenty of spoilers to ascertain interest and then checked it out if i hadn't already felt enough interest ascertained to commit to starting a watchthrough, wherein like imo knowing spoilers (a) can sure be further information that something's interesting & so provide the motivation to actually check it out (the relevance of this factor surely varies, e.g. it's actually pretty demanding for me to Actually Watch Something often even when i have already seen it & so know i like it / want to rewatch it; it's both really demanding for me to "just" check out some new to me [anything], and my interest-thus-motivation threshold is pretty high, where usually i also don't actually really want to lol. things gotta Align, be So strongly relevant to me interests, &/or probably i've Been marinating on checking it out / gradually building more interest)....and (b) there's a lot more Suspense to anything when you actually know some things that will be happening imo lol
but if you don't know, you can sure enjoy more Wondering, if you're particularly doing that, and be more Surprised by things, of course
all this to set up how i was like oh mein Gott this is such an Effect when i have no idea there's a murder mystery, let alone a murder, and andreas is trying to get home At Night and sees A Ghost in the Ruins and then proceeds to a scene where suddenly there's a Haunting Soundtrack playing while an unseen mystery figure through this tiny window is crying out about Pale Horse, Matins, Pale Horse On The Floor, Death
it was So enjoyably surprising and atmospheric and i'm like oh i love a clairvoyant promise that someone will die, But Who....wherein of course i love it Knowing that indeed that will manifest, and for whom, but i truly do cherish that first time around delight of Surprise and Wondering, and it's fun that pentiment was so like "oh i gotta check this out then" that i could just jump right in and be like yes i Will be watching all seventeen hours of this that requires reading this dialogue at high enough resolution / without burning off focus while looking at some other drawing/writing process too much. it's Such a cool and effective scene, holding back [soundtrack] so much to then use it to heighten effect so immediately. and like fuck yes there's an anchorite in this game
#(i also Really Like how when father thomas showed up & was like ''i'll interpret for you sister amalie. ok bye andreas'' i was like hmm that#seems strange. and when you talk to amalie and see she's digging her grave at all + deeper every day i was like hmm that seems strange)#(but then i forgot / just let that slide lol and Was Surprised but like hey yeah well that all fits then doesn't it)#the way like i never really expect to solve mysteries but i do want them to Resonate / feel cohesive / relevant after the fact#rather than; as people point out; prioritizing ''no one will EVER GUESS'' which usually is a tradeoff w/way better elements....#pentiment#pentiment spoilers
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Was reading your tags on that, and you reminding me about the fact that things not created by humans can't be copyrighted (I think that's roughly how it's said) made me have what's probably not a great practical idea, but kind of funny to think of
Maybe the way to combat ai artists is simply to take anything they generate and sell it on mugs and stuff. I almost said steal, but then I thought about it and that's the whole point, legally it isn't stealing because they straight up don't own it
Maybe it would kill some interest in it for them if under every twitter post where they're like "check this out", someone just replied with a link to where you can buy it on a shirt, do the same with that guy who won an art contest
Might be less appealing when you know anyone who can market things better than you can make money of what you had an ai generate, steal the wind out of your sails, and the law is 100% on their side
so from what I understand, and I am not an artist and have not been hardcore following this, but the concrete threats to artists from ai art have been twofold:
individual commissions for things like book covers, and things like internal illustrations that usually you commission a human to do but the idea being "oh well if I can get AI to do it I can save money", and
there is already worry that in animation which is a brutal and terrible industry to begin with I think Netflix already made a show where it used AI to generate backgrounds rather than human artists?
and the copyright thing is just going to make the first point completely moot. like, we saw cases where publishing houses for fairly respectable book authors used AI to make a cover of what was expected to be a fairly mainstream new release. but if the ruling comes down that you can't copyright that at all? publishing houses aren't going to do it, which means it starts to trickle down to anyone being respectable isn't going to want to risk it. like, you think Wizards of the Coast or Magic the Gathering are going to risk having their art not copyrighted? hell no. which means that even if you still get people using it for book covers or internal illustrations etc etc, those are probably people who..... would not have gone out and commissioned artists anyways, bc they're the people that are running the scam kickstarters and just don't have connections to artists and don't know what they're doing in the first place. so whether or not that is even a niche that artists will lose jobs from is questionable; so long as artists are not losing jobs from the big companies, AI is not destroying artists' jobs
the animation problem from my understanding is a bit of a trickier one, because if you take a base, and then a human changes it, you end up with something that is still human-edited enough to be copyrightable. but most of what I know about the animation industry is that it is total hell and artists are getting worked to the bone but also there has been a lot of really interesting even in 2D animation ways of adding 3D rendering in backgrounds (my friend was telling me about how Demon Slayer was doing that in some scenes?) so like. they're doing their own thing with new technologies and have been consistently and tbh might make some interesting stuff out of it, although still shouldn't be stealing to shortcut the work, just, there's a lot more human processing once a base is produced that is involved there.
I think potentially one of the biggest dangers about the current AI image creation is exactly fake photo generation est as they start overcoming the six-finger problem and potential for vast quantities of political propaganda to be made and how to either stop that from happening or get browser inserts that can tell people if a photo is likely AI generated. but that is an entirely different problem.
#the computer science fandom#entirely just musings on my end#if people with more informed opinions want to hop in feel free#but this is my general understanding of the situation
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whispering to the ghost in the machine, asking it to paint me a pretty picture
i know we're all probably annoyed by and exhausted of AI art discourse by now, which is understandable, because there's a lot of people there who have dug in deep without having much of an idea of how any of it all works. i can say that it is genuinely very annoying how some people in tech with no artistic sensibilities who don't know enough to know how little they know but bring a lot of unearned confidence to the table anyway. i can say that they are very annoying on twitter and often have no real taste. but i want us, just for a moment, to go back to even just... about a year ago, and what you knew of AI art at the time. there's been communities using AI art for a couple of years now, circles on twitter where some of it started as hobbyists and even meme pages which posted the computer's amusing responses based on its wonky contextless interpretation of prompts. that was when art generating AI tools weren't all that good and we could all be amused not just by being able to visualize funny scenarios or interesting aesthetics, but of catching a glimpse of how this alien computer with a rudimentary grasp of text and a mechanically gifted child's understanding of composition actually 'thought'. and that was fascinating as much as it was funny
remember that? but then AI art tools advanced so quickly that our relationship with it as something that occasionally came across the tl changed. back then it was still mostly hobbyists, people who also found watching a machine think and paint to be interesting, and people who did mostly have a certain artistic curiosity to be playing around with this weird and novel tool. but then all of a sudden tech people discovered it and then all we saw was people who made their livings off of hype and marketing and linkedin platitudes and razzle dazzle for venture capital, and the kind of people who followed those people and imagined themselves as one day being like them, the kind of people who saw this as just another bodyhack to get around an inability to draw things. and then the kind of people in their orbit, who like drawing high fantasy and video game elves with huge boobs
and all of it somehow felt like a symptom of a wider anti-intellectual and anti-sophistication monoculture, like disney strongarming cinemas into starving out original IP and well-made middlebrow blockbusters while nerds insist that dominating mainstream pop culture isn't enough and that they be feted for their taste, god forbid martin scorsese criticize the newest thor movie. and it's like marvel for the cinephiles and rupi kaur for the poets and YA for the writers, seeing the art most in public consciousness and receiving the most attention and coverage — even if it's not exactly rave reviews, it's still all the oxygen in the room — is just godawful, and there are so many artists more deserving
(i mean, it's almost a cliche at this point that people in tech will see a domain that has a lot of thought and study behind it and think the difficult questions within the domain are just somehow things nobody had thought of before, instead of things people who devoted their lives to the area and are no less smart than any of you had engaged with and not been able to find an easy solution to. any of us working in the humanities know what i'm talking about here, so i get the frustration of how all this comes with associations to a tech dude approach that everything is optimizable through a process for efficiency and that the deep body of work, thought, critique, and practice that it takes to develop taste and intuition and domain knowledge can somehow be bypassed if only the people working on it had just thought of this shortcut, which they just were too dumb to have considered before —)
wait, i'll give a little context about myself first, because i know that at least a good fraction of my readers are approaching this with skepticism, assuming that someone taking AI art seriously must be some kind of artless stem person. and i mean, i'm not gonna pretend that my art is good, but i can say art is something i think deeply about and have much interest in, that i follow closely and read criticism and theory, something that i don't take lightly. that i don't think just anyone can do well, that i think takes not just talent but thought. more written art than visual in my own art, but an endless all-consuming fascination with weird new mediums and the kinds of themes you might expect from someone whose blog homepage is black and neon color schemes with consolas body text with a list of projects made over quarantine that includes 1) several essays about internet culture, 2) a virtual date night generator so you could be long-distance and still travel to cities, events, art shows, concerts, beach bonfires, fireworks shows... 3) travel-blogging in lockdown with hq walking tours on youtube, high-dose thc for immersion, audio calls as friends to walk with and the screenshot button as my camera, 4) a digital apartment space on gather, made specifically for parties where you can stay in rooms but chat to people if you go up to them, 5) a text-based game with some poems and a hacky premise about an AI recording your brain, and 6) a magical realism short story about a climate post-apocalypse
but thing is. alright, let's return to the hobbyists, and how fast AI art was developing. and very soon watching with much amusement the machine try to understand you and draw you a little painting all proudly without realizing it made no sense at all turns into learning how to whisper to the machine and getting some intuition of it and figuring out exactly how to set up the machine to produce some very specific image from your mind. i've followed AI art circles and there are artists using technology as tools in their process who have a lot of insightful points that have clearly thought deeply and respectfully about it who have plenty to say
but discourse has never really gone for insight, so what gets traction is often dumb statements from tech randos who don't know the first thing about what makes good art good art or how to recognize artistic value, or arguments from people who don't know anything about how AI works or even what the technology is and think that they make collages from actual phrases or actual chunks of pixels across the internet. lots of made-up bullshit like the collage memes* pictured earlier where the creator made a collage themselves as an example of how AI art works, or viral posts of disinformation which takes output from faceapp-style AI tools which produce output from a given photo side by side with the original as proof of a search-and-collage mechanism
(this is the collage meme in question. the collage image given as an example of AI art is something this creator made, not an AI art product, because that's now how it works)
which isn't how it works at all. but i think i should explain how it actually does work before we go ahead.
there's an old joke now about AI or machine learning basically being just a glorified logistic regression or matrix multiplication and the thing is, it's more true than it's not. AI being basically like a billion equations that learns which output of a cluster of pixels is most accurately represented by which equation to look like whatever thing the keyword is, and learns the equations to combine those equations to most accurately give out whatever bunch of keywords and grammar the prompt is. math that says an equation where you input this. not collaging anything or even having access to any of the original art (you can find a more thorough explanation by an AI artist here)
and just to reiterate that. because a lot of people seem to have no idea how it works and seem to think it's kind of a web crawler, or a 'spider' in old school terms, that basically does a search of a big library of images and pastes them together in a mashup (sometimes in amusing ways, like recently when there was a movement to flood artstation with anti-AI images with big red slashes on them, out of an impression that AI is literally searching artstation and collaging recent pieces fitting the keywords which would make this sabotage all the art machines, and people in the AI art community posted images they'd generated to also have big red slashes with joking captions about the anti-AI slashes working and ruining all the tools. if you saw either side of this little hubbub but didn't know what exactly was going on, now you've got some backstory)
the thing is, i think ultimately this approach of trying to confuse people about what AI art does obscures what ultimately makes human stories or art unique. which is having interiority and a mental model, the lack of which gives you an uncanny valley. the whole thing imo obscures what actually makes human created stories or art unique and interesting, which is that interiority and a consistent mental model. the lack of which means AI art can have a real uncanny valley effect even when it achieves a lot of technical precision
the training-and-regressions process that created AI art generators is why it can know roughly how big a hand is supposed to be in scale to whatever else is being drawn, and it can know fingers are a bunch of bars of light and dark color next to each other, so it can output a bunch of alternating bars fit inside a certain sized area by taking the equations for those things, but it doesnt have any mental model about how a hand should look or why a hand would be a certain way or even really what a hand is, just a ton of regression results. same for how people constantly say the white squiggles that look like signatures proves that its collaging paintings which have signatures on them when its never an actual signature of a person, its just that the equations to most accurately represent a painting often notice that paintings have little squiggles where a signature would be and so include a little squiggle in the equations
and once again a human with interiority would know that having a random squiggle in the corner of a painting actually makes no sense bc it serves no actual purpose, but the AI doesnt know what signatures were or why they're there. because it has no interiority, no conscious experience, no sense of self or its place in the world in relation to other things, no mental model of how things go together and why.
The point is the doing of them, rather than the accomplishments
There is no actor but the action, there is no experiencer but the experience
An artist’s expression, is his soul made apparent.
His schooling as well as his `cool’ being exhibited.
Behind every motion the music of his soul is made visible.
Otherwise his motion is empty.
The Tao of Jet Kunedo – Bruce Lee
i feel like with any new tool or medium, the way you make good art is by exploring its actual unique capabilities. so a lot of the best AI art have an "under the skin" (as in the movie) type of vibe and a sense of alienness or eldritch aspects, a sense of making art using a medium where its inner workings is inherently unknowable unlike how artists like filmmakers or photographers or painters can learn the actual characteristics of their tools, like how different film stocks produce different aspects or which kind of lighting setups create a certain effect or which type of lens or setting to use or which kinds of paint are reflective vs matte or hold their color best or whatever. and that aspect as a mirror of current technology and AI itself as it advances beyond our actual understanding of it or its effects
as opposed to the uninspired trash posted by a lot of unimaginative silicon valley tech bros or big tiddy anime girl lovers or gamers or like, sahil bloom. because people who dont actually know about or think about or understand art doesnt get the whole concept of mediums and their capabilities, or understand the evolution of art or its role in broader society. all like just a futuristic version of how retvrn accounts who drool over like tacky ass marble greek pillars around a pool in a miami drug dealer's mansion or see some random english cottage that was cookie-cutter even when it was built are all people who have an absolute loathing of abstract art or modernist architecture or surrealism or anything like that because their only conception of art is "does it look superficially nice (according to my super basic sensibilities)" and dont have the imagination or curiosity or brain cells to understand any more than that, in that they dont really have any sense of the place of new technological tools in art to make anything good. so its just hack shit like mediocrity
(okay, maybe i'm being a jerk here. there are absolutely people who i think deserve much scorn — for something related, see my post on 'book lovers' and how much of book twitter or booktok seem to actively hate books and be proud of hating classics or literature or the hard work of actually appreciating literature — but there's definitely people in there who are probably pretty nice and are just excited about being able to make something that they find pretty, which they couldn't before. that's kinda sweet, maybe. and they didn't really intend their posts to contribute to an overall milieu of a groan-worthy moment in art. maybe they were just posting it themselves the same way i post stuff like "haha look at this cool rock i saw on the way to work today". it's not really their fault that they don't have particularly refined taste or a clearly defined idea of artistic sensibilities and preferences, because we all have limited time in our lives and allocate that time according to what interests us, and maybe someone who likes a pretty painting by the computer just spends their time on other things closer to their interests than me reading books and art shit. i may complain about it but i don't want to be a jerk about this, and i'll try reserve my ire to people with an actual platform posting their garbage instead of everyday randoms)
but returning to things that are specific to the medium, and the element of using a black box as your oils and canvas and clay and camera. even something like prompt engineering isnt just telling the computer what you want, its trying to figure out the inner workings of the tool by going into it blind. almost like if you had zero knowledge of what a camera was or what was inside it and had to try dismantle it and reverse-engineer what this contraption or this gadget was or what the lens being this place does or how film works and why it gives pictures but similar cylinders or similar salts dont. why the film has to be film specifically and not something of the same shape or similar substances if you're unaware of the chemistry of photosensitive silver salts, why the lens has to be an exact way and not just any round flat see-through glass if you're unaware of the concept of how lenses bend light or the laws of refraction. or why a photo taken in a certain angle or certain lighting exposure might look bad vs what you need to take a good picture, or why you want to use a certain kind of lens for portraits or for landscapes, or why something darker colored photographs poorly, or why the moon can look amazing to the eye but look terrible in a camera when certain other things look the same both to the eye and in a camera, and so on
something different from other mediums/tools is that making the art itself is an exploratory process, that in many ways its physically impossible for any human to ever learn the inner workings of the equipment beyond just a very broad sense because we cant actually ever learn like a billion components no matter how much you try, and there can never be an encyclopedia or a body of work that gives you full expertise in it so each individual artist's entire body of work is their entire body of knowledge and each person's is completely unique, that the same inputs may not give you the same outputs so its impossible to mechanistically predict which means that being able to precisely recreate something is impossible the way you can in theory precisely create a painting or photograph as it exists in your original intention — not always for something like photography because you have action shots and stuff, but we're talking about the actual physical realities of what's possible in the medium so being able to exactly replicate a still life of a rock or a portrait is possible with sufficient mastery — which means that the creation process will always require a sense of just intangible Vibes
i described my blog earlier, but i want to return to themes that interest me. i love themes of alienation and loneliness, finding hope in despair, technology as a force that might free us in the small scales but subsumes us on the grand ones. i'm fascinated by questions of whether subjective experiences that still feed inputs into our brains is any more or less "real" because the process that created the stimuli is different: how meaningfully different is it that i experienced paris, not just photographs or tourist traps but walking through narrow streets and listening to street musicians, through a screen and headphones and sometimes but not always facilitative substance use? would someone a hundred years ago given the same tools not view it as having explored paris through some magical form of spiritual transportation or astral projection? would they consider themselves as having been to paris, while i cheapen my own experience by insisting it didn't really matter because spending hours walking through those streets wasn't material enough? will this way of thinking feel as strange to someone in the near-future to whom the line between the 'real' and the digital world is much less present or relevant?
and i think the line between the technological eldritch of the internet, the art of people as mediated through the technological medium, and the material world is already blurred for me — or it almost is, but some part of me won't let it and will discredit some as less real than others, and some part of me will dispute why i think that way because by any metric that matters they are equally important, like why do i view internet friends i haven't met yet as "less real" than friends i've met in person even if we were much less close and shared much less, and even if 95% of my communication with my real-life friends is still on the same chats and texts and apps as my online friends, so why
and so on —
see, the genuinely spooky and interesting thing about current AI tools on the more abstract and higher level of things, that what so much of the research with GPT and so on is trying to do is probe at the nature of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. the hard problem of consciousness, whether consciousness or sentience or qualia is something that will form itself once any entity has sufficient intelligence, or once you have a network of neurons that's big enough, because there's an assumption that human consciousness itself is an emergent phenomenon from the right environment of intelligence.
AI art tools are far too specialized to actually give insight on this, the way that they might be trying to figure out with GPT and deepmind and stuff. AI art tools are what i said earlier, glorified matrix multiplications and a gajillion regressions that learnt patterns associated with patterns. but developments in AI are linked to each other, just by the nature of how these get made, and developments in more generalized AI will be used to develop finer and finer new generations of AI art models
i do think the rapid rate of progress, the pioneering, the developing familiarity with an unknown entity that's constantly itself changing and growing, the constant calibration and recalibration of intuition, it's all part of being into AI art at this point. or at least of being seriously into it, like a lot of the original AI artists i described before. and i think that is fascinating
anyway. all this reminds me of something from one of my favorite books. i'm not going to name it here to not spoil it, but the narrator and key characters are a type of entity created by humans and seen by human as not having souls in the same sense that humans do, because humans can't create souls, of course. but being able to know this for sure is a big question, and what humans decide on as the way to tell if these figures have souls is through their art. the idea that art would reveal the soul, that you need a soul to be able to make real art:
"She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul." ... "You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That's what you said, wasn't it? Well, you weren't far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all. That was why we collected your art. We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. […] 'There, look!' we could say. 'Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?' Oh yes, there was a lot of support for our movement back then, the tide was with us.""
and as a companion text, i'll quote david chalmers from the seminal paper "the hard problem of consciousness":
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect ... there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.
We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation. This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?
At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.
The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. The tempting induction from [applications of biological science to physical processes of living beings] fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.
We know no set of physical properties can constitute experience, for familiar reasons. But perhaps some quite alien property might do the job ... a "hidden dimension" of space which enables the existence of consciousness. I suspect that such a property has to be hidden, as an empirically adequate theory can always be cast in terms of structure and dynamics that are compatible with the absence of experience. It seems that the new dimension will either (a) be epiphenomenal to the other dimensions (or at least to the projections of those dimensions that we have access to), or (b) related to them as a "realizing" property, carrying the structure in one of these dimensions and making it real. The latter would be compatible with the idea of turning the hard problem "upside down", on which physical reality is itself somehow derivative on underlying experiences ... on which the fundamental (proto)experiences are part of the causal order.
Some of the most intriguing pieces speculate about the shape of a fundamental theory of consciousness. Many of these proposals invoke some form of panpsychism ... making a case against the existence of fundamental laws that connect consciousness to mere complexity, to aspects of functioning, or to biological properties ... and makes a strong case for an integrated view of nature, on which consciousness is not a mere tacked-on extra. Given that the physical domain is a closed causal network, the next choice is that between views which put experience outside this network, with physical laws that make experience epiphenomenal, or put experience inside this network by having the intrinsic properties of matter be proto-experiential. The latter offers the most attractive and integrated view, if the "combination problem" can be solved.
truth is though, i'm a skeptic about whether we'll ever be able to create consciousness. it's something i genuinely doubt, but i think the possibility is legitimately interesting. if art examines the world as it is and as it could be, and our hopes and anxieties, and the cultural moment and counter-moment and zeitgeist and reaction, then i think that in a world where we're all billions of us nodes in a permanently connected system, ourselves probing the very nature of consciousness by trying to create brains in the mainframe, those are themes worth exploring with art. and the tools that are deeply intertwined with these questions by their nature, tools where the creation process itself is engaging with those themes, have their unique place in letting us
i know that the superabundance pandora's box of AI art tools does mean that any given artwork is much less likely to survive the ages the way that defining artworks of previous moments in time have come down to us, but maybe we just haven't had that first Great artwork in the genre yet, who knows? and even if we don't, does that matter — does the ephemeral nature of art as reflecting the ephemeral nature of everything on the internet and in the internet age, everything both superabundant and super-rare, permanent and nonexistent, trillions of pieces of content most of which all fade within moments, fleeting interactions, distance passions, broken urls, myspace, geocities, forums lost to servers going offline, every single line from years of conversation archived in every chat window but rarely re-read, blocked friends, deleted account friends, the coming point where more facebook profiles belong to the dead than to the living, twitter main characters of the day, gorgeous art that we look at for 3 seconds before keeping on scrolling, streaming services that disappear their own libraries. does that mean that the moments when we see art that touches us matter, and the way they touched us and how they made us feel, all that matters even if we may not remember it later
here's one AI painting i really liked. it's probably not a good representation of the current state of AI art with prompt specifications and stuff because it's from quite a while back, from the days i mentioned at the start of this essay when AI art tech wasn't as good as it is now and all AI generations had a certain bizarre feel to them. but still, this is art i think about often and which clearly had some effect on me
@ images_ai on twitter
i do find what AI art reveals about how the machine ‘thinks’ to be interesting too, sometimes:
@ ai_curio on twitter
AI art tools, as the specific subset of AI we're talking about here, has no real connection to adjacent research that aims to find an artificial general intelligence and investigate the possibility of emergent consciousness in massive digital brains, with large language models like gpt/chatgpt. but i think it's inevitable that developments in generalized AI will inevitably feed into each new generation of AI art tools. language models to to help it interpret prompts more accurately, to parse context better, to understand connotations, or higher-level discoveries about intelligence and the inner workings of the mind to learn things like to develop distinctive style, maybe… who knows. i don't
"An artist’s expression, is his soul made apparent. Behind every motion the music of his soul is made visible."
"Your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."
if art is expression and communication, something that reveals the soul. something intangible, indescribable, intuitive. an artist attuned enough can take meaning from the work
(i'm not attuned, but i once spent three hours staring at a rothko painting and i could've sworn i felt soul in it, and i can't explain why. i couldn't put it in words. but i don't think the power of art is all some kind of placebo effect, just because i can't put it in words)
you can tell from the earlier quoted paper on consciousness that i genuinely have no idea where AI research probing into the workings of generalized intelligence and the nature of consciousness and qualia as emergent phenomena will go and what it will find. i've admitted to being a skeptic. but i do think that the long constant watch for those first flickerings of consciousness if, whether justified or not, one of the grand themes of at least the 2020s if not a longer period in history that we'll only be able to contextualize after the fact but that we're definitely living through right now. and maybe even before we can understand or recognize it ourselves, the inner workings of the machine will begin to reveal themselves deep down, layers down. but i do think that maybe even before we can understand or recognize it ourselves, those first rumblings...
art speaks to the soul, right? art is the soul of the artist made apparent? the artist that's mastered the tool so that it creates an image as intended, so that what is communicated by that art is what the artist intended it to communicate. and that's what separates the AI artist from the casual, right? the artist learns how to create their vision, the casual has an idea of what they want and is surprised by the result. creation vs commission. and that's what's worth taking seriously, the endeavor. building a relationship with the machine until you know what to say and how to say it for you to use the microchips as a chisel, equations as film
whispering to the ghost in the machine, coaxing it, understanding its quirks and lapses, learning just what to say so that it'll create what you want it to create. seeing how that changes, what you have to do differently as it grows. knowing that the machine is growing. gazing into the screen and finding the shape of what you tried to conjure, and if there are any other shapes or shadows of shapes, outlines or swells, that slowly begin to reveal itself, almost imperceptibly at first except by intuition. some sense of interiority. something distinct, that you know is distinct because you've worked out how to create your own expression, so if you see something else in there. something that reveals the blurry, lumbering shape of what could be the soul or the spirit, something that an artist might be able to pick up on before a programmer. any moment now. look closer
———
if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays’ on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here’s a selection:
· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)
· there are things we owe to each other
· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?
· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!
· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person
· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok
· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)
#ai art#ai art generator#dalleart#midjourney#ai#artificial intelligence#ai artist#ai artists#ai art discourse#stable diffusion#stablediffusion#art#dall-e
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Twitter sucks, yea, but do any of you remember that absolute fucking Arkham Asylum that was old school Deviantart?
Actual, real UNIRONIC things I saw on Deviantart:
(trigger warnings for…. everything I guess. This shit was insane)
- A grown man constantly roleplaying in the forums as a little girl, and EVERYONE in the forums fucking hated him
- People openly defending pedophilia. No, not just in fanart. I mean defending real life actual pedos. One person I saw even openly stating they support their pedo uncle.
-A comment reply that started with “You think incest is wrong? Well, as someone who is currently in an incestious relationship-“ (I had an aneurism and blacked out before reading the rest)
- An 8 year old little kid openly talking about how much they love vore (yes, they gave out their actual age. And yes, I reported their profile)
- Someone I used to follow commenting on my profile, asking me to write creepypasta rape fan fiction for them.
- People just…. straight up uploading explicit cp artwork. Not even putting the mature filter on it. You think Tumblr and Twitter are bad? This shit was being openly showed to minors, by adults, on a daily basis and nobody cared at all.
- Accounts dedicated to some of the worst opinions I have ever read in my life
- A diaper fetish guy, who was married to Twilight Sparkle, throwing a fit on an NSFW artist’s profile, because they drew Twilight Sparkle in an indecent manner.
-The aforementioned diaper fetish guy posting about how he finds the puppies from Paw Patrol attractive
-The same guy, again, uploading an image of bdsm gear that he made for his Twilight Sparkle plush, whoms’t he is married to.
- Someone in a comment section saying that muslims need to have a holocaust happen to them in order to end child marriage. It was so offensive that Deviantart Staff actually removed the comment (staff doesn’t usually do jack shit about anything)
- I once had to talk a 12 yr old child down from posting fetish art, so that creepy adults wouldn’t start following him
-Borderline cp artwork AT THE TOP of the FRONT FUCKING PAGE with NO MATURE FILTERS AT ALL because DA staff is way too lazy to actually enforce the site’s rules against underage lewd art.
-Wonder Bread (if you know you know)
- This is redundant, but, I cannot state enough just how many pedophiles were on that site. The place was just CRAWLING with them.
- Was it just me, or were like half the kids on that site always posting about how suicidal they felt? I think it’s when I first started to realize just how depressed my generation is.
Most people remember DA as just the silly Sonic OC and inflation site. But, I remember something much, much worse 💀
And I still use it, because there’s nowhere else I can post art where people will actually see it
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I just saw a post saying 'we just have to let the staff know we're unhappy about the updates and we'll be fine' all non-chalant and honestly, I wished we lived in a world op lives i . Tumblr is barely functioning even now for the purposes it claims to function (blogging moreso than social media). I mean I like this dump, I've made it my own, but they are serious about increasing revenue - the ads, the blazes, the lives, the unblockable emporium and art accounts. It's a company like any other. Come on. Under capitalism corporation has no reason to listen to the users if not doing so increases income, and tumblr is a corporation, however small and poorly planned that corporation is and however cosy we feel here. They're here to make money, from us, not to provide five star experience. Theh will not listen. They have not listened about stuff that threatened people's lives, like nazi blogs, terfs, absolutely vile bigots, death threats. They have not listened on live, on dashboard preferences for new accounts, sex workers, fucking search function. They gave you polls and you think someone there is listening and vibing with the working class? Yes it might suck less than other right now, but tumblr is sure lubing up its throat to reach tbe deepthroating level of sucking.
Consider forums. Learn basic website building. Get emails (not dicsords, that place is also losing any little appeal it might have had) of your mutuals so that once this all will come tumbling down (pun intended and yes it will) so that you stay in touch.
You've got to stop being reliant on poorly run websites to keep you connected. Emails and phone numbers are more useful. Don't lose touch with a person you have no other way of contacting other than tumblr / discord / twitter / reddit. Get at email. Get a phone number if you're comfortable and have enough trust.
Once all of the sites become unusable, yes, you will have to put your shitposts and memed into a letter and make a mailing list if needed, and that might be ridiculous until you feel lonely and the only person you want to talk to is the mutual shitposter and then you send and email and can get an answer and stay in touch.
Yes gmail is a horrible google product, yes look for alternatives, but emails are not going under as soon as social media. And fucking write them down in a notebook in case the situation is so destitute you are locked out of your accounts or even lose reliable access to internet at home.
Emails and address books are your friends.
Also, consider starting forums for your fandoms and discussion topics and roleplays. Yes it's nore finicky and you need accounts for those but tech companies got us where we are today by being so darn convenient we forgot how to live a life without them. Take charge of keeping up your online communities without relying on predatory bloated companies.
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