Needs to be said everywhere.
Gonna @ a bunch of ppl so this takes off
@maryland-no-rabies @maryland-officially @yes-im-youtube-kids @queen-eliz-2 @what-even-is-thiss @evil-apple-mail @randomitemdrop
Rb to spread the msg pls we need to kill ai art
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
no, spotify, i don't want to use ai to "turn my ideas into playlists". i already fucking do that with my brain and hands and i do it for fun. what, should i get ai to pet my cat for me? to play my silly games for me? to spend time with my beautiful wife for me? how about i rend you asunder
will the ai listen to the music for me too? will it listen to the lyrics and think about the song for me? shit man, ai can do anything. why even bother paying for your service if your ai can just replace the human impulse to listen to, analyze, and find patterns in music and collect favourites for fun to share with friends. like should i leave? if you're just gonna jack yourself off? like i can go, seeing as you don't need me to engage with what you're doing at all.
like what are we fucking doing here. yknow?
I used this post for practicing constructing an argument (I teach English and I'm prepping this person for essay writing) and was in utter shock when my student just said 'yeah some people are so scared of new things, they need to get with the program'. I stg keeping a straight face then and there ranks in the top 10 biggest challenges I've faced in my career as an English teacher.
i'm literally so flattered by this. i wish i'd come up with a more thought-out argument so i could properly fight your student. i can do the counterargument now if you'd like.
i'm not scared of generative ai. i'm genuinely concerned for the impact it'll have on the neurological development of young people if they become overexposed to the instant gratification of "bringing their ideas to life" and never practice or develop the skills and labour actually associated with creating something from nothing. it means that if the ai gives you dogshit (and it will), you don't have the ability to fix it, because you're so alienated from the process of creating (writing an essay, drawing a picture, organizing a playlist, composing a song, listening to and analyzing and summarizing the art you're examining) that you don't know what isn't working or how to make it work correctly. if you don't learn how to analyze, if you don't train your brain to do these things, they don't stop needing to be done. you will be dependant on ai, or on others to do these things for you. others, you can sometimes trust, but it really helps to be able to really grok the difference between a grifter, an ignorant person, and a person who knows what they're talking about -- and again, the more you alienate yourself from the construction of their arguments, the less you are able to take them apart and see what isn't adding up. and ai is dogshit, frequently incorrect and incapable of doing the small calculus the human brain can do (if you train it to) to tell the difference between quality of sources and reliability of data, so it should never be trusted, period.
the only part of this "new technology" that i'm scared of is based on a history of ideas that i have actually studied. historically, the more we alienate ourselves from the process of labour, the less we are able to grasp it as a reality, and the more people are able to use that fact to exploit us. if you look at, say, the paper coffee cup on your desk, really look at it. where did that come from? it didn't spring fully formed from someone's imagination. someone had to design the shape of that cup, engineer it so it could contain a hot beverage and keep it hot, come up with the sleeve to make sure the drinker could actually hold it, but there's even more to it than that. someone had to make the cup. someone had to source the paper (or the compound) for the body, the material for the lid, the glue that holds it together. someone had to harvest those materials, in whichever country they were sourced, and someone had to package them and transport them to the company responsible for assembling the cup. someone designed the logo and the pattern on the outside, and someone is monitoring the machine that prints those images on the cup. someone will be responsible for picking up the waste and transporting it to a recycling plant, or to the landfill where it'll end up. let's not even start on the drink inside it. farming, harvesting, shipping, receiving, assembling, serving. it takes time to manifest something, and you are in a position of immense privilege to not have to think about where it all comes from on a regular basis. but what happens when the supply lines get shut down? what happens when there's a failure of irrigation or something in the paper mill and the glue holding the paper together doesn't work? do you know? i don't, personally. but there is someone along the line whose job it is to know, and i appreciate the work they (probably aren't paid enough to) do so that i can grab a coffee on my way into my own work. i have to appreciate it because i know that if the process goes wrong somewhere, i have no fucking idea what to do about the problem.
but i'm not pretending to know. i'm not applying for a job at the papermill to work for pennies instead of someone who does know the perfect chemical makeup of coffee cup cardboard because i can order a ton of coffee cups online from amazon in bulk. that's why generative ai offends me. the work that goes into creating art and writing still has to be done, because all generative ai knows how to do is steal, and it doesn't steal like an artist. artists look at the works of others and think, oh, i see how they did that, i want to try doing that, and then they can, because they learned how to appreciate the process. they've actually worked, and practiced, and spent time engaging with the process step by step to create something they find pleasing. generative ai looks at art and spits out a copy by comparing one image to another and assuming based on Uncredited Data that sometimes, pictures have hands in them, and hands sort of look like this. and the computer doesn't have a goddamn clue how many fingers the hand has, or how to translate that data into a visual. you know what does? the human brain. you know what you can do instead of bemoaning that you, a high school junior, can't produce a rembrandt on your first try? you can actually try drawing something.
you can actually try to turn your ideas into a drawing. you can do research into how to make it look the way you want it to. who knows? you might actually have fun doing it. because the creative process can be fun! it isn't for everyone, but unless you actually sit down and try, you won't find out, and if it's not for you, you'll never grasp on that physical experiential level that the creative process is actually a lot of fucking work, and we should respect artists for being able to sit down and do it so we don't have to, same as we respect the farmers who grow our food or the plant workers who mix the slurry that becomes our coffee cup cardboard.
i'm not scared of spotify for pushing ai bullshit down my throat. more than anything, i'm kind of offended, because i do put a lot of work into my playlists, and i have a lot of fun doing it, because i like listening to music and analyzing lyrics and relating the themes of songs to my little characters. i took it so personally because i Want to be involved in the process. i'm paying spotify a lot of my real adult money to have access to music and the tools i can use to entertain this pastime of mine, and it's kind of fucked up that they're raising their monthly fee to fund a tool that makes me, the user of their product, motivated to use their product less. insulting, even. why should i pay more for a computer to do a worse job than me at Having Fun? making a playlist isn't even that fucking hard.
i'm just tired. stuff takes work to make. it takes care and time and effort to create something from nothing, and a lot of the time, the process is necessary to make the thing good, because it forces you to take the time you need to spot and fix mistakes. i hope by now that it's self-explanatory why i don't want an entire society run by a dipshit program that doesn't know how to do what it's doing and doesn't know how to solve the problems it creates faster than human hands could ever manage, and i hope the dipshit machine and the grifters who push it are inextricable from each other in the minds of anyone who's read this whole post. i don't want them to run society either, because they Know that generative ai sucks and can't do anything right, and they're still trying to tack it on to everything to devalue the labour of artists and make a quick buck for themselves.
the best quote i've ever seen about generative ai is "why should i bother reading something nobody bothered to write".
we are a social species. alienation from labour alienates us from each other, from our communities, and makes us feel alone. when we're alone, we're vulnerable down to our core psychology, and there are a lot of people out there who know better who want to take advantage of vulnerable people to manipulate society at large. they want to make money off of your suffering. they want to reduce you to a number for their own convenience so they can use the One Life You Have On Earth to play their own personal tycoon game and get a slightly higher score. they want you to spend less time having fun, creating art, spending time with your family, thinking about what they're Doing to you, so you don't ruin their good time. i'm not scared because it's new, i'm pissed because it's the same old late capitalist shit i've already been dealing with, and i'm sick of seeing it everywhere because it stands a very real chance of turning everyone's brains to even more detached-from-reality mush than late-stage capitalism already has already.
And, on top of all of that, spotify's algorithm sucks shit already, so why on earth would i want it to make my playlists for me. the other day i saw it put zombie by the cranberries on a halloween playlist. she doesn't know dickety shit about my ideas or vibes or anything. so
'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
one thing that irks me about tech bros is that they fundamentally misunderstand how artists seek out tools to help their process
the thing about creating innovations and tools is figuring out how to streamline an annoying part of the process so you can get to the fun part of the process.
If I don't have to worry about drawing every strand of hair on a cat, that makes it easier for me to draw a cat: and so people in the community have made so so so many hair texture brushes with all these different and shapes to help me create that cat
in motion graphics animation, it'd be a massive time sink to manipulate a model Frame By Frame without keyframe interpolation. Keyframe interpolation is where you tell the computer to move an object from point A to C and the computer fills in what point B is. Its a feature and a tool that reduces the workload of a project and allows you to focus on what you really want to do instead!
which is why anytime I read and hear about a tech bro going off about the wOndERs oF Ai I wonder if they actually have any knowledge of the field they're trying to solve problems for, or if they're just moonlighting as Explorers of the New World granting Savages new technologies that they're too dumb to understand
#literally this#I don’t want a program to create a crappy derivative piece of ‘art’ for me#I want to have the tools to be able to learn and create stuff myself!#even ‘bad’ art is better than whatever ai spits out#because it’s made by a real person who put thought and emotion into it#art#ai art#anti ai#anti ai art#tech bros#technology#anti capitalism#anti corporations
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
Regardless of what you think about generative AI in general, NaNoWriMo allowing AI-generated works is beyond stupid because that completely defeats the purpose of the challenge, which is for you, a human being, to write 50,000 words in a month. Yeah, that's hard. That's why it's a challenge. Where is the challenge when you can ask a chatbot to spit out 50,000 words of whatthefuckever for you? Even if you think that is a legitimate way to produce fiction, even if you don't care about the ethics of training on stolen works... where's the challenge? What's left of NaNo at that point?
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
That artist is the founder of Cara by the way (https://cara.app/zemotion/all).
Cara is the only art platform I have found that not only prohibits AI art from being uploaded on the site, but also offers their users to Glaze their art (which protects them from ai mimicry). They are also working on implementing Nightshade, which actively poisons ai training.
I have used Cara for a couple of months now, and I hope more people check it out. It's really nice. 💚
We need these kinds of places for artists, and it's also FREE (despite the staff paying out of their own pockets to keep it running).
reblogging this as I was just complaining about the rampant AI usage on pinterest yesterday lol
Even if you're not an artist, I highly recommend signing up just to lurk because it's been such a lovely wholesome experience free of the noise and brainrot that comes with the ads and reels on instagram. As a writer I think it has a niche for connecting authors with cover designers and illustrators. I'm documenting my experience in this thread if anyone wants to follow along!
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
The AI tech bubble finally bursting is going to be both catastrophic and very funny.
Like it’s going to be wild, it’s already starting to hit NVIDIA stock. The chain reaction will hit tech giants and everyone depending on them.
Line goes down.
It really is the perfect example of a bubble.
- Budding new technology shows the potential for promising new applications.
- Under late-capitalism, short-term profit always takes precedence over long-term gains because the assumption is that you can take the cash upfront and choose to A.) reinvest it into the original idea to make it a more viable investment, both by funding R&D and pulling more investors B.) run.
- Technology gets advertised, bought, and sold before any reliably useful applications can actually be developed. Pushing money into an unfinished technology does not mean it gets developed before investors want their return.
- Consumers and investors realize that without any viable applications, it’s a scam and they fell hard for it. The bubble deflates as investors try to minimize their losses. Those who took the money and ran reap massive profits from the misfortune they pushed on everyone else.
The nature of ai was ESPECIALLY seductive to investors because it promised to be the capitalist holy grail:
- Just like crypto, it’s too new to have any sort of government oversight. Right-wing clowns are still convinced this is a good thing (“Why won’t the police help me retrieve my stolen jpeg?”).
- Your “labor” would follow orders to the letter. You, wise, exalted executive, would never have your untrained artistic talent or unsolicited advice questioned again.
- Most importantly, you could have employees you don’t have to pay. Paint the backdrop for a cinematic masterpiece with only a prompt! Use ai to ghostwrite a new romance novel seven days a week! Lay off your entire customer service department! The possibilities are endless!
The ai bubble wasn’t just a representation of its own overpromised potential, it also inflated every major tech corporation as they all expectantly awaited their first financial quarter with a 95% reduction in labor costs. Some of them prepared to lay off significant chunks of their workforce, expecting a fully automated replacement any day. But customer service chatbots are giving away free flights, some lethally unreliable books on mushroom foraging got published on amazon, and the wonka spectacular guy practically got a public stoning. It’s apparent (and more so every day) that the ai hatchling was pushed out of the nest without any feathers.
#I’m laughing at the tech bros and rich pricks who are losing a shit ton of money but also#I feel really really bad for the average consumer whose everyday life is now made incredibly more difficult#people who relied on so many of these programs and services for work school etc#and now are left with glitchy unreliable shells of what they used to use#so much shit is hitting the fan here but unlike the people at the top not everyone can afford an umbrella#sigh#ai#anti ai#ai art#anti ai art#technology#anti capitalism#anti corporations#stocks#stock market#current events#important
AI disturbance overlays for those who don't have Ibis paint premium. found them on tiktok
how do you use these?
Put these on the top layer above everything, set layer to 'overlay' then adjust opacity. You can put it on whatever opacity you want but usually 30%+ is most effective.
The point is to obstruct the picture so AI can't read your image because AI counts every single pixel in your art
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
You know those aesthetic image posts that float around tumblr? I'm . . . starting to see a lot on my dash that are obviously ai-generated. Are non-artists having trouble telling the difference between AI images and real photos, or are people starting to stop care about the stolen art that gets fed into those programs?
I have no actual art training, so I want it known that if I ever DO reblog some ai stuff please let me know. It was unintentional and I would like to know. Thanks~
Yeah, I figure this is the case for most people. I’m going to put up a guide to spotting AI images after work!
I think people know by now how to tell if an image of a person is AI-generated. Count the fingers, count the knuckles, check the pupils, yadda yadda. I've seen several posts circulating about what to look for. However, I think people are a LOT less educated about backgrounds, and about the specific distinctions between human error and AI error. So that's what I'm going to cover.
Now, don't feel bad if you've reblogged or liked any of the images I'm about to show you guys. This is just what's crossed my blog, so it's what I have to work with. (Actually, thanks for providing the examples!)
I also generated a few images from crAIyon purely for demonstrational purposes, because I didn't have anything on-hand to show my thoughts.
Firstly — Keep in mind that AI has a difficult time replicating "simple" styles. Think colorless line-drawings, cartoony pieces with thick lines, and pixel art.
Looks unsettling, right?
Why is this? Well, when a human makes art, we're more prone to under-detailing by mistake than over-detailing, because adding detail in the first place place is more effort. A skilled artist should be good able to capture an idea with minimal, evocative shape language.
But when an AI makes art, it is the opposite. An AI doesn't understand what it's looking at, not in the way that you or I do. All it can do is search for and replicate patterns in the noise of pixels. As a result, it is prone to mushing together features in ways that a human artist . . . wouldn't intentionally think to do.
It also over-details, replicating what it knows over and over again because it doesn't know when it's supposed to stop. Blank spaces can confuse it! It likes having detail to work with! Detail Is Data!
Again, this is why we count fingers.
These general principles still apply when we're looking at styles that an AI is better equipped to imitate. So . . .
Secondly — AI's tendency to over-render details makes it easier for it to pick up heavily detailed styles, especially if the style will still hold up when certain details are indistinct or merge together unexpectedly.
Scrutinize images that utilize a painterly, heavily-rendered, or photo-realistic style. Such as this one.
Thirdly — An AI piece that looks pretty good from a distance falls apart up close.
The above image looks almost like a photograph, but there is architecture here that you wouldn't find in a real room, and mistakes that you wouldn't find in the work of an artist that is THIS good at rendering. Or most beginner artists, even.
Can you see what falls apart here? Hint; we're counting fingers again.
Check the window panes. Isn't the angle that they all meet up at a little off? Why are the panes sized so inconsistently? Why doesn't the view outside of them all line up into a cohesive background?
Count the furniture legs. Why does the farther-back case have a third leg? Why does the leg on the closer case vanish so strangely behind the flowery details?
Examine the curtain(?) fabric at the top of the window. What on earth IS that frilly stuff?
Another mistake that AI will make is drawing lines and merging details that a human artist would never think of as connected. See the lines crawling up the walls? See how some of the flower petals glop together at hard angles in some places? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
You can see more strange architecture in the outdoor setting of this image.
A lot of the AI's mistakes are almost art nouveau! We recognize that buildings are consistently angular, for stability reasons. An AI does not. (Also look at the trees in the background, and how they tend to warp and distort around the outline of the treehouse. They kinda melt into each other at some points. It's wild.)
Fourthly — An AI will replicate any carelessness that was introduced into its original data set.
Obviously, this means that AIs will make fake watermarks, but everybody already knows that. What I need you guys to look out for is something else. It's called artifacting.
Artifacting is defined as "the introduction of a visible or audible anomaly during the processing or transmission of digital data." To put it in layman's terms, you know how an image gets crunchy and pixelated if you save it as a jpg? Yeah. That. An AI with lots of crusty, crunchy jpgs fed into it will produce crunchy images.
Look at the floor at the bottom of our original example image;
See the speckles all along the glass panels, table legs, and flowers in shadow? Artifacted to hell and back! This shit is crunchier than my spine after spending half a day hunched over my laptop.
Again, legitimate art and photography may have artifacting too just because of file formatting reasons. But most artists don't intentionally artifact their own images, and furthermore, the artifacting will not be baked into the very composition of the image itself. The speckles will instead gather most notably on flat colors at the border of different color patches and/or outlines.
Cronchy memes; funny. Cronchy AI art; shitty jpg art theft caught red-handed.
That's probably all the lessons I can impart in one post. Class dismissed! As homework a bonus, consider these two sister images to our original flower room. Can you spot any signs of AI generation?
@wolven-writer I hope this helps!
All of this.
My biggest tip is to also look at decorative patterns. Since AI's don't know what they're actually making, things like a relief pattern on a throne or etchings on a piece of weapon will just be messy noise with no rhyme or reason to it.
Even though portraits often result in less artefacts since there's less variables for the AI to try and process, the overly crisp, highly rendered style can be easy to pick out after a while.
Does the artwork from far away look detailed, but feels like nothing at the same time? As in, there’s a lot of “stuff” to look at, but they kind of run into each other in an uninteresting way? Maybe give it a little more scrutiny and a second look c:
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
ngl it's driving me a little bit fucking insane that the whole conversation about image scraping for AI has settled on copyright and legality as a primary concern, and not consent. my shit should not be used without my consent. I will give it away for free, but I want to be asked.
I don't want to be included in studies without my knowledge or consent. I don't want my face captured for the training of facial recognition models without my knowledge or consent. I don't want my voice captured for the training of speech recognition models without my consent. I don't want my demographic or interest profile captured without my consent. I don't want my art harvested for visual model training without my consent. It's not about 'theft' (fake idea) or 'ownership' (fake idea) or 'inherent value' (fake idea). It's about my ability to opt out from being used as a data point. I object to being a commodity by default.
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
Saw someone argue that opposing AI art is ableist because this is the only way for some disabled people to make art afjagjsfh. Disabled people have been making art since the dawn of time and because making art is so varied there will always be tons of ways to create despite disability that doesn’t involve ripping artists off by using AI art
Disabled people are honestly so brave for not killing annoying ppl every day I swear to god the disrespect
#frida kahlo didnt paint exclusively from her bed for months while in extreme chronic pain from several injuries #for 'ai is the only way for disabled people to make art' to be an argument #TELL THAT TO MATISSE #Christy Browne #GOYA #beethoven was DEAF and still wrote music #a whole host of artists in the 80s continued creating while actively dying of AIDS #how dare people make this argument istg (via @morethanonepage)
Some really great threads on why AI art as it now stands is fundamentally unethical:
I wish people would stop feeding the panopticon their face-data so they can get generated artwork stolen from the artists whose paintings were plugged into the Art-Stealing-Algorithm without their consent. It’s really a terrible awful vile direction for art to be heading— both in that any art created by a mindless algorithm mashing pixels together is inherently soulless and devoid of care and intent and is guaranteed to be a generic copy of things that already exist, and also in that it threatens the lives of workers who are already overworked and underpaid.
The more time passes, the more I agree with Miyazaki when he was introduced to the concept of AI art a few years ago:
the-beacons-of-minas-tirith reblogged
i don’t know what else to say except that AI art is no longer simply a source of creativity or a wonder of human creation. it has become actively hostile and destructive toward the very thing it pretends to uplift and celebrate. it is void of any human element, any soul or ounce of emotion or self-expression. continuing to use AI art knowing that it comes from theft and robbing artists of their livelihood is disgusting. we need your support now more than ever. stop giving these thieves your money and admiration.
We've spent the past 20-30 years enjoying a brief time where artists were able to share their art with the world for little to no cost to themselves to audiences who never would have been able to see their works before. Artistic talent and creativity have exploded thanks to the web, with people are to share techniques and tools that would have been kept behind financial and academic barriers and create audiences in entirely new ways.
And now tech bros are out to plunder that wealth of artistry we've come to enjoy through brute force statistical modelling so they can cut the artists out of the business of selling art. Why would a company bother employing rosters of artists to produce for them when they can hire a handful of people to run the models and tweak the outputs to suit their needs?
There is nothing benevolent or celebratory in this, it is purely about theft and exploitation. It's about violating the copyright of artists in order to churn out content that's Good Enough to suit the needs of capitalists. Do you think that the publishing industry will continue to pay authors for their works if they can just hand an algorithm a prompt and get a completed work in a handful of minutes or hours, and then pay someone to edit it into something coherent (if they even need to)?
This is the end result of the commodification of art. The artistry of the works do not matter, only that they can be sold and generate profit. Capitalism has always been existed in opposition to art, Capital requires steady growth of returns and regular output, art demands innovation and risky endeavours to push the boundaries. Art is of use to capital only in so far as it is able to generate direct sales and intellectual property that can then itself be turned into a commodity. The moment Capital is able to cut artistry and artists out of the equation so that it can further maximize it's profits, it will. And what's worse, the art it produces will be stale and recycled.
Brute force statistical modelling by it's very nature is recycling, it will continue reusing old ideas and old techniques in new configurations. It is an artistic ouroboros, incapable of anything but accidental innovation through sheer volume of output, that will then be re-consumed and reconstituted all over again.