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Clinging

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Window Reflections - Kristie Bretzke , 2024.

American , b. 1978 -

oil on linen panel , 20 x 16 in.

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you see a lot of "actually liberals/socialists hate socialists/liberals more than fascists" so it's nice to have a definitive example in France of them both definitely hating the far right more

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I'm not sure it counts as a proof and I've seen a lot of takes to that effect so I wanted to give my point of view. Although I'm definitely relieved by the results, I have not forgotten the weeks of targetting the left, both from the media and the center (I'll call center Macron's allies although it's not that accurate) politicians (Macron and the like talking about the "both extremes" being bad, comparing the left defending Palestine to actual holocaust denial). Sure, they *mostly* defected when there was three candidates in the second turn with the far right ahead, and I'm glad they did. But a few from the center didn't, again citing the left as being just as bad, in my family's electoral district for instance, it led to the far right candidate, a litteral white supremacist, winning over the left by a few hundred votes, yay. No one from the left did that.

And compare how the people who voted for the left in the first turn voted against far right vs people who voted for the center / the traditional right

it's in french sorry, but the way to read it is, when it was left vs far right, depending on which left party, people who voted for the center in the first turn voted 43 and 54% for the left party and 19 and 15% for the far right and people who voted for the traditional right voted only 26 and 29% for the left and way more (38/34%) for the far right. MEANWHILE, the left voted 75% for the center when they were against the far right and 70% for the traditional right (I really admire them, I'm glad I wasn't in this situation).

So I don't really like the narrative of "see the left and the center united against fascism and defeated it!". The center and the right have been using far right talking points for YEARS, the mainstream media have been opening their arms to Marine le Pen and Zemmour's parties, and now the far right has had a huge increase in its number of seats in the parliament in only a few years (8 in 2027, 88(lol) in 2022 and now 143). Sure they didn't get the most seats but the dynamic is scary. I'm glad we have a strong left but they didn't get enough seats to get anything done without strong compromises, so I'm not so optimistic.

(sorry for any typos I'm on my phone with french autocorrect)

you see a lot of "actually liberals/socialists hate socialists/liberals more than fascists" so it's nice to have a definitive example in France of them both definitely hating the far right more

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this is so much funnier as a french person, the text is a comedia dell arte - style scene with domestics planning a trick. Why would you kiss that

Might as well soak it in milk and slam it against the wall at this point. Love this violence

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How is bnha anime of the decade...... they aren’t even anime of the hour of the minute of the second

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Please don’t use midjourney it steals art from pretty much every artist out there without any compensation. I didn’t know this at first and tried it but then during the creation process i saw water marks and Getty image logos (though I’m sure they’ve hidden that now) so it’s definitely stealing.

No, it isn't. And you've taken the wrong lesson from the Getty watermark issue.

AI training on public facing, published work is fair use. Any published piece could be located, examined, and learned from by a human artist. This does not require the permission of the owner of said work. A mechanical apparatus does not change this principle.

All we, as artists, own, are specific expressions. We do not own styles, ideas, concepts, plots, or tropes. We do not even own the work we create in a proper sense. All our work flows from the commons, and all of it flows back to it. IP is a limited patent on specific expressions, and what constitutes infringement is the end result of the creative process. What goes into it is irrelevant, and upending that process to put inspiration and reference as infringement is the end of art as we know it.

The Getty watermark issue is an example of overfitting, wherein a repetitive element in the dataset over-emphasizes specific features to the point of disrupting the system's attempts at the creation of novel images.

No one denies that the SD dataset is trained on images Getty claims to own, but Getty has so polluted the image search functions of the internet with their watermarked images that the idea of a getty watermark has been picked up the same way the AI might pick up the idea of an eye or a tree branch. It is a systemic failure that Shutterstock and Getty can be so monopolistic and ubiquitous that a dateset trained on literally everything public facing on the internet would be polluted with their watermarks.

Watermarks that, by the way, they add to public domain images, and that google prioritizes over clean versions.

The lawsuits being brought against Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are copyright overreach being presented as a theft tissue. The facts of the matter are not as the litigants state. The images aren't stored, the SD weights are a 4 gig file trained on 250 terabytes, roughly 4 bytes per image. It runs local, does not reach out to image sources over IP. All you've got are mathematical patterns and ratios. I would go so far as to say that the class action suit is based on outright lies.

But for a moment, let's entertain the idea that what goes into a work, as inspiration, can be copyrighted. That styles can be stolen. That what goes in defines infringement, rather than what comes out. What happens then?

Well, the bad news is that if Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were shut down tomorrow, Stable Diffusion is in the wild. It runs local, it's user-trainable. In short, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. Plus, the way diffusion AI works, there's no way to trace a gen to its sources. The weights don't work like that. The indexing would be larger than the entire set of stored patterns.

Well good news, there's an AI for that. The current version is called CLIP Interrogator And it works on everything. Not just AI generated, but any image. It can find what style it closely matches, reverse engineer a prompt. It's crude now, but it will improve.

Now, you've already established that using the same patterns as another work is infringement. You've already established that inspiration is theft. And now there's a robot that tells lawyers who you draw like.

Sure, you can fight it in court. If it goes go to court. But who's to say they won't just staplegun that AI to a monetization re-direction bot like youtube has going with their content ID? Awesome T-shirt design you uploaded to your print-on-demand shop... too bad your art style resembles that from a cartoon from 1973 that Universal got as part of an acquisition and they've claimed all your cash. Sure you can file a DMCA counter-notice, but we all know how that goes.

And then there's this fantasy that upending the system would help artists. But who would "own" that style? Is that piece stealing the style of Stephen Silver, or Disney's Kim Possible(TM)? When you work for Disney their contracts say everything you make is theirs. Every doodle. Every drawing. If the styles are copyrightable, a company could hire an artist straight out of school, publish their work under work-for-hire, fire them, and then go after them for "stealing" the style they developed while working for said corp.

Not to mention that a handful of companies own so much media that it is going to be impossible to find an artist that hasn't been influenced by something under their control.

Oh, and that stock of source images that companies like Disney and Universal have? These kinds of lawsuits won't stop them from building AIs with that material that they "own". The power goes into corp hands, they can down staff to their heart's content and everyone else is denied the ability to compete with them. Worst of all possible worlds.

Be careful what wishes you make when holding the copyright monkey's paw.

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Jonathan Gleason was my friend who committed suicide just over a month ago… and I just found out that he wrote this 800+ page analysis textbook. By himself. Because he was teaching analysis and he was dissatisfied with the textbook he was assigned so he just…. wrote his own.

Even if you haven’t done any math… please just take a look at this. Scroll through it as fast as you like. It’s incredible that he put so much work and so much free time into this… I’m still in awe and I really want everyone to see it. In particular, if you want a good laugh, look at chapter 5 of the analysis textbook. The opening paragraph is SO Johnny.

He also wrote a linear algebra textbook, here. 

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2023

COLLECT PHYSICAL MEDIA

SAVE RECEIPTS AS ROOM DECOR

READ AND REREAD AND REREAD AND REREAD

LOSE YOUR PHONE

ORANGE

LOSE AMBITION

KILL THE SHAME MAN

DANCE IN THE KITCHEN

WINE AND ESSAYS

BUSES ARE ALIVE

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(…) the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge. This is why I was suddenly so hyper-alert to criticism, and why I felt so perpetually exposed, hunching in on myself even as I walked anonymously through the streets, my flip-flops slapping on the ground.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

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the two sentence horror story subreddit literally has some of the most sublime, funniest content you will ever read in your life if you sort by controversial

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Come with me, friends…

To this house. Not a contemporary house, and the pentagons of those two windows on the left are a little unusual, but not particularly notable.

The sides of the steps to the front entrances are painted purple. That’s a little interesting.

Oh?

OHHHH YEEEESSSSSSS

POUR THAT PURPLE CARPET ON ME BABY (also that fireplace FUCKS)

You thought you’d bring your own furniture to this house? No. Only built-in seating covered with orange-pattered carpet in the purple living room.

This is where things start to get a little surreal to me. This house was built in 1975. But look how bright and new that carpet looks! It still matches the light fixture! And it’s in the kitchen! It looks like it was never used (weird), or that it was REPLACED recently (WEIRDER BY FAR).

This is actually a lovely bright dining space, if you can ignore the purple carpet of the living room running up against the blue carpet of the kitchen. As sometimes happens in a house.

That’s a new toilet. And that’s purple carpet in the bathroom. And a pink sink where the material reminds me of tiny independent movie theaters or hole-in the wall restaurants.

The only way to move between the three floors of this house, friends and foes. I have one drink and I’m sleeping on the orange built-in seating for my safety.

And now…pink. (And some sliding doors which I hope open onto a balcony but I don’t SEE anything like a balcony railing.)

Stepping back, I’m still having trouble interpreting this room. My best guess is that it’s the main bedroom, with a semi-public area at the top of the stairs and then this is the more private area where the bed would go. But it’s not actually walled off. The decorative light switch cover shaped like a regular house is a nice touch.

Friends…

This is a lot. I genuinely now start to think that this house was inhabited by beings that DID NOT USE BATHROOMS nor did they UNDERSTAND what bathrooms were used for. That carpet is so bright! So fluffy! It shouldn’t look that way if it’s original, and WHO WOULD HAVE MADE THIS DECISION MORE THAN ONCE??? And it. It doesn’t even match the shade of pink around the tub. And the blue tile in the tub doesn’t match anything. Th…the shower head. Is there. But there is no place to hang a curtain around the tub. IN A CARPETED BATHROOM. There are so many signs of remodeling, and yet…the bathroom is still…this. 

Non-Euclidian closet. First non-carpeted room we have seen.

I run from the non-Euclidean closet to face the stairs, which I fall down headfirst, dying instantly.

Ah, the lower level. There’s another sink in another carpeted area, but at least the built-in furniture isn’t carpeted. It’s fine.

IT’S FINE

This bedroom makes me think of dorm rooms, but from a bad alternate timeline.

This bedroom doesn’t have carpet, but rather a portal to a different alternate universe.

Your best chance for normality in this house.

At least the children’s toilet room isn’t carpeted? I’ve gotta count this as a win at this point. I’m blocking the sink and counter from my mind. I do not see it.

It’s fine. Oh THERE’S the balcony. …it has no railing. Friends and foes, I really think I’d need my balcony to have railings in this house. But I guess if you’re an incorporeal being from another dimension who loves carpet, it wouldn’t really matter.

Thank you for journeying with me. 

(Btw it sold for about $160,000.)

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thinking about how an anonymous group (WHO DOESN’T SEEM TO BE AFFILIATED W/ SESAME STREET!!!) found out where jon armond lived and made him swear he wouldn’t show anyone cracks before they gave it to him

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OSCAR ISAAC in INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS 2013 | dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

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If you follow Selmers to the poetry society meeting in Night In The Woods, this is her poem. I loved it and the themes of the game, and wanted to use it as practice to see if i can control the way readers ‘hear’ the words through images.