aph-japan reblogged
fan service is ok when i like it
aph-japan reblogged
Babygirl I know fandom history that you wouldn’t even care about
i know fandom history that even I don’t care about
aph-japan reblogged
Violence set to happy music will never get old to me. Blood splattering to an 80s pop song is like a sister to me because I'm not allergic to fun.
aph-japan reblogged
“Stop romanticizing autism” No my autism is great and makes me 20% sexier than allistic people
aph-japan reblogged
i must not stir the pot. stirring the pot is the notifications-killer. participation in the discourse is the little-death that brings total activity obliteration. i will face the bad opinions on the internet. i will permit them to pass over me and through me. and when they have gone past, i will turn the block button onto their source. where the discourse has come from there will be nothing. only i will remain.
aph-japan reblogged
You’ve heard of competing access needs. Now consider:
Competing representation needs.
But no, seriously. This is one of the biggest things that pits people against each other in fandom spaces.
You’ve got people who need stories where men get to have completely platonic deep friendships with other men, need stories where men can be affectionate and support each other emotionally without it having to be romance. You’ve also got people who need stories about men being romantic with men. Both of these are valid. Whether either is canon doesn’t really matter because transformative works are allowed to be transformative and transformative works are works in their own right. It’s right there in the name.
But because there can only be One True Fanon, instead of acknowledging that different people have different needs and taking a live-and-let-live approach, you usually end up with both groups fighting to throw the other one under the bus first for trying to “steal” their representation.
Please no Oppression Olympics clowning on this post. Everyone needs stories. It’s an immutable part of the human condition.
aph-japan reblogged
Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.
I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:
- Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.
- While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.
- The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.
- Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.
- The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.
- In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.
- That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.
- The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).
All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.
Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:
Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.
Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.
Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).
#informative#artificial intelligence#ai issues#ai discourse#fandom wanks#fandom misinformation#misinformation campaigns#nightshade#glaze#program: glaze#glaze program#stable diffusion#copyright#us copyright law#us law#copyright laws#intellectual property#us capitalism#us corporations#us poverty#capitalism#disney: company#disney co#us strikes#disney strikes#do not derail#(tags all relevant)
aph-japan reblogged
"AO3 doesn't need a "dislike" button"
Um, actually, it already has one. Depending on your specs, it might look a little different but over all it looks kinda like this:
You can find it at the corner of your screen, which corner is dependent on your layout.
Anyway, if you dislike a fic, you can hit this Dislike Button until the fic goes away. It really is pretty amazing actually.
aph-japan reblogged
blackheartbiohazards
"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.
"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.
"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.
aph-japan reblogged
If someone online requires you to share personally-identifying information in order to interact with them, you’re better off not interacting with them.
I keep hearing about fandom spaces requiring photo ID in order to gain access, and I can’t emphasize enough how bad that is.
Giving someone your ID, even with everything but the date of birth blacked out, is still giving them information.
Government-issued ID is still identifiable based on fonts, colours, backgrounds etc. That means someone could use your ID to track you to your country or region. People who are determined could then use other information that you’ve shared to track you further.
The issue isn’t just them being able to show up at your house (or send someone else), either. It’s the fact that they could sign up for credit cards in your name and trap you in thousands of dollars of debt that impacts your whole life. They could steal your identity.
Anyone who wants some kind of “legal protection” against minors seeking out NSFW materials should just do what the porn sites do. “By checking this box, you acknowledge that you’re 18 years of age or older.” Much simpler and safer for everyone involved.
Anyone you provide personal information to needs to be able to both protect that information and reliably destroy it.
In the words of Gandalf, “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”
aph-japan reblogged
mintcarousel
critiquing madoka magica for being “shock value tragedy porn” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the series actually did. and it is clear that anyone who believes this only watched it once, if that. ive watched it dozens of times. i know more than you.
its also not madoka’s fault a hundred copycats didn’t understand what it was doing either
trust me, if “girl suffering” was all you got out of Madoka Magica, you missed something.
not to say whether that something is actually valuable to you. it might not be. but thats an opinion, while different from my own, i can at least respect.
mintcarousel
get screenshotted lol
#ME#madoka magica#madoka magica: fandom#madoka magica: fandom issues#fandom wanks#intentional misreadings#mischaracterization#madoka kaname#puella magi quintet#homura akemi#mami tomoe#sayaka miki#kyouko sakura#hitomi shizuki#nagisa momoe#ive watched madoka multiples of dozens of times#i know more than you#dont talk to me about madoka unless youve read on the whole of madoka canon+mangas & actually know what im referring to from it thankyou#madoka antis do not interact#(can we PLEASE get this post to 10k+ Please fandom FINALLY GOOD TAKES)#i was here when it aired#i liveblogged it as it aired#i was here when the finale of the original series aired#2011
aph-japan reblogged
if you spend all your time seething about people having gay ships then you are, in fact, homophobic, no matter how well you treat real life gay people which I’m willing to bet isn’t that well at all considering you send yourself into incoherent rages at the sight of teenagers saying two fictional characters who happen to be the same gender are kissing.
#fandom#fandom issues#fandom wanks#wider fandom issues#fandom homophobia#fandom queerphobia#internalized homophobia#internalized queerphobia#homophobia#queerphobia#shipping#shipwars#queer ships#queer characters#queer headcanons#gay ships#mlm#mlm ships#gay#*DO NOT REBLOG TO DISCOURSETM OR I BLOCK#*NOT UP For Debate I Am Just reblogging in Agreement#*Reblogging for Archival#SIGH