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Alfred Hitchcock, August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980.

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In the ask box

I'm posting this with the asker's name obscured, as I don't want to run the risk of embarrassing them, or of provoking others to some kind of backlash.

Numbered? Okay. Here are reasons number 1 through 186 for you, made available by putting my name into this master list of Meta--scraped works and pulling up the titles of those works of mine that over time made their way into LibGen without my permission, and which (after they were scraped from there) were then used to train AI at Meta.

That is pretty much my entire literary output for the last fifty years, scraped illegally from LibGen into Meta's LLM-training database. Those include numerous works from my own tiny online bookstore, the income from which is sometimes all that's kept @petermorwood and me alive.

It's often my great pleasure to donate ebooks (and regular print ones) to libraries on request. But to have work taken and posted online without permission strikes me as... not very nice. Donation of one's work to online sources should be a choice the individual artist makes. And I was never given the chance to make that choice. Others decided they were entitled to make it for me.

Anyway, I think Meta's actions should have consequences: as should other thefts of copyrighted material by Big Tech. That's what the class action lawsuits against Meta and Anthropic are about.

I hope the above data will be helpful in assisting you in your assessment of my possible state of misinformation, or my moral decrepitude.

And if you feel that my being angry about what Meta and Anthropic and their ilk have done with my work (and my dead husband's, and that of tens of thousands of our colleagues) makes me evil...

Well, that's a take. May others' assessment of your moral state be kinder.

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Well I guess that settles it, a hot dog is a sandwich.

The peaceful drink meets America’s favorite sandwich. Ad for Orange Crush soda - 1971.

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Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

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Janis Goodman, Breathing Space

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Artwork for 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury, 1977 (Enki Bilal)

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A 1968 sketch by Syd Mead depicting a space station under construction

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Odetta, Photo by Otto Hagel, 1958

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*Valley Girl voice*: I must, like, not fear. Fear is literally the mind-killer. Like it’s basically the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will totally face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and? When it’s gone? I’m gonna like turn the inner eye to see its path! Where the fear has gone there will be literally nothing. Only I will remain.

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ever since i learned that the flap of a butterfly’s wing could cause a hurricane on the other side of the earth, ive been doing nothing but nursing rare and endangered species of butterflies back to health. fuck the other side of the earth

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Robert Henri - Jessica Penn in Black with White Plumes (1908)

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hey so anyone else just, feel thin. sort of stretched. like butter scraped over too much bread. like you need a holiday. a very long holiday. and you don't expect you shall return? or is that just me and bilbo baggins

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...in which Elon Musk's own AI chatbot acknowledges that he's a liar and a hypocrite.

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Yuichi Inoue from PARTING THOUGHTS

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Yeah. It's starting to feel like Invasion of the Body Snatchers out here.

being anti ai is making me feel like in going insane. "you asked for thoughts about your characters backstory and i put it into chat gpt for ideas". studies have proven its making people dumber. "i asked ai to generate this meal plan". its causing water shortages where its data centers are built. "ill generate some pictures for the dnd campaign". its spreading misinformation. "meta, generate an image of this guy doing something stupid". its trained off stolen images, writing, video, audio. "i was talking with my snapchat ai-" theres no way to verify what its doing with the information it collects. "youtube is impletmenting ai based age verification". my work has an entire graphics media department and has still put ai generated motivational posters up everywhere. ai playlists. ai facial verification. google ai microsoft ai meta ai snapchat ai. everyone treats it as a novelty. every treats it as a mandatory part of life. am i the only one who sees it? am i paranoid? am i going insane? jesus fucking christ. if i have to hear one more "well at least-" "but it does-" "but you can-" im about to lose it. i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to avoid the evil machine. have you no principles? no goddamn spine? am i the weird one here?