#AI paywall model

[themorningnewsinformer]

Cloudflare AI Bot Blocker: A Game-Changer for Web Publishers

Introduction The digital publishing world is fighting back against unauthorized AI data scraping. With the launch of the Cloudflare AI bot blocker, over a million websites—including media giants like Sky News and Buzzfeed—can now block AI bots from collecting content without consent. This transformative tool gives creators the control they’ve long demanded over their digital work. Why Is…

[dandelionsresilience]

whether the internet becomes an intolerable surveillance state, ubiquitous subscription model, or unusably ad- or AI-ridden shithole, I think we need to remember

how to do things offline

either on your personal hard drive (just because it’s an app doesn’t mean the information is stored in your device) or on paper. I’m not saying the collapse of the internet is imminent, and I’m not suggesting we do everything completely without technology, or even stop using it until we have to. (to be clear, I also don’t think the internet will just blink out of existence, suddenly stop being a thing at all; rather I think it might continue to lose its usefulness to the point where it’s impossible to get anything done. anyway) but some people may have forgotten how we got by before the internet (I almost have!), and the younger generation might not have experienced it at all.

I figure most people probably use the internet mainly for communication with friends and family, entertainment and creation (eg. writing), and looking up how to do things, so here’s how to do those things offline:

First and most importantly, download everything important to you onto at least one hard drive and at least one flashdrive! files can get corrupted and hardware can get damaged or lost, but as long as you keep backup copies, you have much-closer-to-guaranteed access versus hoping a business doesn’t decide to paywall, purge, or otherwise revoke your access. I would recommend getting irreplaceable photos printed as well

download and/or print/write down:

anything important to you - photos/videos, journals, certificates, college transcripts

contact info - phone numbers and/or addresses of friends/family (know how to contact them if you can’t use your favourite messaging app), doctors (open hours would be good too), veterinarians if you have pets, and work

how-to’s - recipes (one, two), emergency preparedness (what do I do if… eg. I smell gas)

other things you might google: cleaning chemicals to NOT mix, what laundry tag symbols mean, people food dogs and cats can and can’t eat, plant toxicity to pets

and know offline ways to find things out - local radio station, newspaper, a nearby highway rest area might have a region map, public libraries usually have a bunch of resources

also, those of you who get periods should strongly consider not using period tracking apps! here’s how to track your period manually

free printable period tracker templates (no printer? public libraries usually charge a few cents per page, or you can recreate it by hand)

moving on to entertainment, you can still get most media for free! it’s completely legal to download your favourite movies to your own personal hard drive, you just can’t sell or distribute copies (not legal advice)

movies: wcostream.tv (right click the player) - the url changes every once in a while but usually redirects; I recently noticed that it’s hiding a lot of movies behind “premium,” so it may or may not work anymore | download youtube videos

music: how to get music without streaming it | legal free downloads

games: steamunlocked.net - doesn’t have every game and can be slow to update, but very reliable

books: free online libraries | legal free downloads

otherwise passing time:

active outdoor games

for road trips (social verbal games)

for when power’s out

for sheltering in place (not all offline, but good ideas)

board games (often found at thrift stores)

ad-free customisable games collection (mobile)

read, write, draw, or whatever your craft is, sing, dance, clean, reorganise, take a bath

go outside - excuses include napping (if safe), eating, reading, finding cool plants/animals/rocks, playing with the dog

places to go include:

zoos and museums can be surprisingly cheap

parks and nature preserves

library, mall, or game shop

and a few miscellaneous things for good measure:

time budgeting | household management

how to use a planner | I’ve had success with visually blocked-out schedules like these

please add on if you have any other offline alternatives to common uses of the internet!

[cleolinda]

Weekend links, July 6, 2025

My posts

Guess what? I'm going to be having a chat with my spinal clinic about some side effects from that epidural pain block a couple weeks ago. Thus, we didn't have a linkspam last Sunday, and I'm working from a larger pool of posts this week. Also, I am behind on everything. Enjoy. 

Side note, Ian's Silent Hill 2 stream of Toluca Prison (and an hour's discussion of storytelling with Vic Frederick) went up two Wednesdays ago. (He's now taking a month off while I pick up the [my] slack.) I made it to chat, despite shaking off anesthesia. And I'm glad I did because the first major fight was... something I've never seen before, I'll put it that way. I now have a new goal for when my videos get there. 

Meanwhile, remember how I posted about horror as comfort media? These people get it.

Reblogs of interest

Pride parade, Budapest, 100k+ people marching: "the perfect example of 'they can’t arrest all of us'" 

Niagara Falls lit up in rainbow; a lovely bisexual moon.

Important food recalls and news sources for the United States

How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox. Et tu, Mozilla?

After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad. No, I actually expected that from y'all. With links/recs for Libre Office. 

By the way, Shel Silverstein foresaw gen AI

"i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other," with bonus Narnia shell craters. That sounds flippant, but I really think everybody here is onto something. 

Disney Reportedly Planning Full Reboot of the Indiana Jones Franchise, and Bluesky has some ideas

"To be TRULY fluent in English you must know your SHITS"

"i am not immune to the bit. i’m gonna have to go full mingo aren’t i."

I remember these MTV Video Music Awards Posters from 1999. Yes, the late '90s were exactly Like That.

Putting the CERN back in "concerned," Molly Bair wearing Iris van Herpen inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Listen, you know shit ain't been the same since that weasel. You get out of there right now.

"a redditor has mushrooms growing out of his home's electrical sockets" and it's not good. It's Not Good!

"True Gym Bros while flexing their jaws: Come Bro, join us in the Gainshalla"

Prosper, feather beast

"Call me Cismale"

Go in the wet. The wet will love you. The wet doesn't have capitalism. Just go in the wet.

"IT WAS NOT THE FUCKING COLONIALISM THAT INVENTED THE FUCKING POTATO."

"Dude’s out here trying to solve House of Leaves. I give it to page 120 before the actual minotaur gets him." No one has read this book so purely in its own spirit as this one beleaguered guy reading it in French with graph paper and a middle finger.

I am pretty sure I will grab Date Everything if there's a good discount on Steam

"spn Fandom perfec t fun for put new fan in to e\njoy show! inside very Nice and Comfort new fan enjoy fun put new fan in Spn Fandom." (I never get my "mouth perfect size for meme" tag right on the first try)

Tag yourself, I'm the Taylor Swift lyric "some guy said my aura's moonstone, just 'cause he was high"

Art: "The important questions of what if bird were fruit"

"Girl help the pessimists are mistaking an inherently meaningless universe for an inhumane and joyless one rather than recognizing the opportunity to make one’s own meaning and joy and to spread those things to others"

"girl help they’re decoding my cat"

He's all in

A brooch of a fabulous creature

HONSE

Video

"Someday Amaury Guichon is going to release a video where creates a life sized statue of a human being, but as he adds detail, it becomes increasingly clear that the chocolate model is becoming more and more akin to a perfect replica of the viewer"

The painstaking restoration of a wedding dress from 1950

This is not how I expected you'd make magnolia blossom ice cream

"they removed capybara walking (1887) from letterboxd so i’m letting it live on my blog forever"

Knitted sheep, animated

One of the deans at Beijing Dance Academy shows you how it's done

Pre-Colonial Filipino clothing revivalists out on the town

The sacred texts

Children’s Hospital Colour Theory

Dogs in Elk

Personal tags of the week

I'm going to say food, but it was actually a good bit of #chocolate. Also, Pride Month, since it wrapped up while I was still recovering. 

[tialinffxiv]

TL;DR say no to generative AI, support human artists

Let me use this example to compile my stance on genAI once again. I will keep repeating this till you're sick of hearing it: genAI has NO PLACE in any form of art, Gpose included. Our community is filled to the brim with artists of many kinds and your "I'm fine using it, idc,lol" is spitting into their face.

Artists, writters, musicians, VAs etc all over the world are fighting against this abuse and the progressive cancer rotting and killing creativeness. By using/allowing/supporting genAI of any sort you are adding to that. "It's just for fun/for free so it's fine/idc"- each is a slap to human artists.

There's no existing ethical and fair for artists genAI models- all of them are build on theft and illegal practices. And there's no positive impact from it on anything- but a huge negative impact not only on creative spaces but also on environment. All of them tries to lure you in with their bs- it's your choice to mindlessly allow yourself to be abused as well by using it.

When you check the original post of mine you will find people who are supporting genAI. And there's more- paywalled tattoo mods using genAI graphics for example. This slop is seeping into Gpose spaces and it's up to us to not allow it. I will callout anyone who support this, hate me all you want.

It's one thing to not know that something is genAI- but when you know it and still chose to use it, with your "idc, lol"- then you're standing in opposition to all artists in our community. It's a stance shared by many MANY Gpose folks, not just me- so you might want to update yours.

Yap all you want about my "arrogant opinion"- but go be brave and share exactly what you replied to me and let's see how folks will love your stance on it. Everyone is free to block me for this- nothing of value will be lost by me when you are among those supporting this mess.

I chose to support artists in our community and a part of that support is helping to weed out people who use/support genAI, or educate them on the matter- but some are not willing to let their slop-producing toys be taken away from them.

Once again: say no to generative AI, support human artists.

Edit: should I repeat it louder then? 📣 genAI HAS NO PLACE IN ANY FORM OF ART, GPOSE INCLUDED 📣

[valdevia]

Hi, I love your works!! I was wondering where you find the original, unedited pictures you use for your art? Do you take them yourself or find them online?

Hey there! I get them from many different sources! Whenever I can I use my own, and sometimes my followers send me cool pics to use (or put them up in the Sacrificial Altar channel in my Discord), but I find most of what I use through public domain sources online!

For the online part, I put this little list together with some of the common resources I use! Feel free to share it around and copy it:

For an easier experience, I'll copy the relevant part below:

STOCK SITES

- Unsplash: Usually the best quality out of the free stock sites. They’ll try to sell you a subscription plan but you can ignore that.

- Adobe Stock: Select “Free” on the dropdown menu next to the search bar. The free image selection here is big and high-quality, though they feel more like stock pictures than natural photos. Note: They limit how many pictures you can download per account per day, but you can make several accounts to circumvent this if you use it a lot.

- Texturelabs: lots of free, very high-quality textures!

- Pexels: Similar to Unsplash, but it has more pictures with people. If you need a photo with models, this is usually the best place.

- Pixabay: Widest selection, but worst quality control. Go here if you haven’t found anything in other sites and don’t mind sifting through a bunch of garbage pics and occasional AI images.

PUBLIC DOMAIN SOURCES

- Wikimedia Commons: an enormous selection of CC and public domain pictures. Super useful, especially for the really specific images that you'd expect to find on a Wikipedia article. Always check the copyright conditions! To filter by license, search something and then click on the License dropdown under the search bar. Select “No restrictions” for public domain images.

- Picryl: A repository of public domain sources, ranging from ancient historical books and artifacts to fairly modern pictures. If you're looking for something old/historical, chances are it's here! This website is probably one of the most complicated ones to use, so here are three important tips before you use it:

This site added a paywall that appears after the 3rd page of search results. To remove it, install uBlock Origin, go to the “My Filters” page (clicking on the gear icon after opening the extension), and paste this filter: picryl.com##._9oJ0c2

After searching, use the timeline on the top right to narrow down the result by year.

It won’t let you download the full picture without paying, but it always has a link to the source site below the description. Click on that, then copy-paste the image’s name to find it in the original source. That way you can get it for free, and often in better quality than Picryl offers.

National Archives Catalog, The Library of Congress, NASA, and Europeana have wide selections, but they are included in Picryl so it’s usually better to search there and then download them in the source as mentioned above!

- Flickr Search: a ton of usable pictures with a generally more amateur feel, just remember to filter by license using the “Any license” dropdown menu. When you find an image, make sure to check its specific license (you can find it below the image, on the right side).

- Openverse: The official Creative Commons archive, has many sources! Includes other sites on this list, but has a lot of clutter if you don’t filter.

- iNaturalist: a repository of user-submitted images of animals, plants, and fungi. Look for a genus or species, then navigate to the photo list and filter by license.

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

- The Met: An amazing selection of artifacts from all over the world, with top quality photographs of most of them (usually with several angles for each). You can filter images by material, location, and era.

- Getty Museum: Another smaller selection of museum pieces, but this one includes old photos as well as artifacts. You can also filter by dates, materials and cultures. Make sure you include the “Open Content” filter to only see public domain things!

- Smithsonian: Big selection of around 5 million museum pieces, with some 3D scans of museum pieces. Most pieces just have a single picture that can sometimes be low quality, but pieces with 3D models sometimes also include a lot of high quality photos from multiple angles. This collection also includes things from museums of natural history, so you can also use it to search for bones and specimens.

- Artvee: public domain classical art. They make you pay to download high-quality images.

If you guys got any others, please let me know and I'll add them to the collection!

[yesornopolls]

Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere.

[reality-warp]

A word from Rella concerning AI, binding and selling fics, and Book 3 of Rávamë's Bane

Hey folks,

I’m treating this post as a bit of a blanket PSA for all those who read my work and follow me here, but I’ll also be copying the message over to AO3 once Book 3 of Rávamë's Bane goes up. Before anyone gets spooked, all is well, I am well, and I’m still happily working on the first 5 chapters of Amabilis Insania. However there are a few glaring subjects that have sprung up in the fandom space that I can’t really ignore. The fanfic community as a whole has changed a lot in the past decade I've been part of it, and given some of the unpleasant stuff I’ve seen going on in just the past year, I wanted to cover some housekeeping points ahead of posting the next RB book.

1.) Please don’t ever bind and sell fanfics.  Profiting from fanfiction in any way is completely illegal, and puts the entire community at risk.  I’m lucky enough that I’m a relatively small fish in the fanfic pond, so no one has sold bound copies of my story specifically (that I know of). However, I know several folks who have had their work bound and sold without their knowledge, and have had to take their fics down completely to stop it happening (which royally sucks). If you see any fanfics being sold on sites like Etsy, please do report them — they are absolutely not supposed to be there. And if you want a bound copy of a fic for personal use, I'd really encourage you to learn to bind them yourself. There's a tonne of tutorials out there, it’s pretty fun and easy to learn (I picked it up in a couple of weeks) and it doesn’t take as many materials as you’d imagine. Side note: I have made typesets of LM and CM for myself and friends, but honestly, I’m reluctant to share them publicly now given all the above. That said, if you really want a copy of LM or CM for personal use only, you can message me directly on Tumblr and I can maybe look into making a watermarked version to share on request.

2.) In light of the recent news that AO3 was scraped to create a generative AI dataset, I’ve decided I’ll only be posting the final RB book to AO3 from now on. On top of that, all my fics will be restricted to users with AO3 accounts only. I really don’t want to do this as it cuts off guest users from enjoying the story too, but for now it’s the only way to protect my work from being scrapped again. I don’t believe this will be a one-time occurrence given how carelessly AI is being used right now, and I feel very strongly that no one’s work should be used in model training without their consent.

The vast majority of you in my comments, asks and kudos are genuinely wonderful, and I’m so damned grateful that you aren’t a part of the issues above. However, with all that in mind, let me be absolutely clear just for the public record…

!!TRLD: This Is The Important Bit!! You do not, and will never have my consent to: - use any of my writing in generative AI (this includes making AI-generated fanworks, or scraping my fics for training AI models) - bind and sell any of my fanfics (profiting from fanfiction is completely illegal, and puts it at risk for us all)  - profit in any way from any of my work that I have publicly shared online (this includes putting my fics on recommendation lists behind paywalls, or selling my fics in the form of typesets or bound copies)

If you do any variation of the above despite knowing the risk it poses to the entire fanfic community, I respectfully hope you spend the rest of your life in clothes that smell damp no matter how much you run them through the dryer.

To the rest of you; a genuine thank you for making the community what it is. And thank you for making the RB comments section specifically such a joyful place to be.

I promise my next post/update will be less grim.

Until then,

Rella x

Edit: Since I literally just had to deal with this happening just earlier today 🙄 You also do not and never will have my consent to:

- advertise any generative AI apps in my review/comments section (Seriously? I firmly believe that generative AI has no place in the writing and publishing world, and more often than not, using it makes you both worse at writing and is no better than stealing from people who took the time to learn to do it well. Keep all that trash out of my comments section.)

[mariacallous]

When tech companies first rolled out generative-AI products, some critics immediately feared a media collapse. Every bit of writing, imagery, and video became suspect. But for news publishers and journalists, another calamity was on the horizon.

Chatbots have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations. They do so by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers. Suddenly, fewer people are traveling outside the generative-AI sites—a development that poses an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.

According to one comprehensive study, Google’s AI Overviews—a feature that summarizes web pages above the site’s usual search results—has already reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent. The CEO of DotDash Meredith, which publishes People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Food & Wine, recently said the company is preparing for a possible “Google Zero” scenario. Some have speculated that traffic drops resulting from chatbots were part of the reason outlets such as Business Insider and the Daily Dot have recently had layoffs. “Business Insider was built for an internet that doesn’t exist anymore,” one former staffer recently told the media reporter Oliver Darcy.

Not all publishers are at equal risk: Those that primarily rely on general-interest readers who come in from search engines and social media may be in worse shape than specialized publishers with dedicated subscribers. Yet no one is totally safe. Released in May 2024, AI Overviews joins ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, and other AI-powered products that, combined, have replaced search for more than 25 percent of Americans, according to one study. Companies train chatbots on huge amounts of stolen books and articles, as my previous reporting has shown, and scrape news articles to generate responses with up-to-date information. Large language models also train on copious materials in the public domain—but much of what is most useful to these models, particularly as users seek real-time information from chatbots, is news that exists behind a paywall. Publishers are creating the value, but AI companies are intercepting their audiences, subscription fees, and ad revenue.

I asked Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI about this problem. Anthropic and xAI did not respond. Perplexity did not directly comment on the issue. Google argued that it was sending “higher-quality” traffic to publisher websites, meaning that users purportedly spend more time on the sites once they click over, but declined to offer any data in support of this claim. OpenAI referred me to an article showing that ChatGPT is sending more traffic to websites overall than it did previously, but the raw numbers are fairly modest. The BBC, for example, reportedly received 118,000 visits from ChatGPT in April, but that’s practically nothing relative to the hundreds of millions of visitors it receives each month. The article also shows that traffic from ChatGPT has in fact declined for some publishers.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with several news publishers, all of whom see AI as a near-term existential threat to their business. Rich Caccappolo, the vice chair of media at the company that publishes the Daily Mail—the U.K.’s largest newspaper by circulation—told me that all publishers “can see that Overviews are going to unravel the traffic that they get from search, undermining a key foundational pillar of the digital-revenue model.” AI companies have claimed that chatbots will continue to send readers to news publishers, but have not cited evidence to support this claim. I asked Caccappolo if he thought AI-generated answers could put his company out of business. “That is absolutely the fear,” he told me. “And my concern is it’s not going to happen in three or five years—I joke it’s going to happen next Tuesday.”

Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents. Publishers have tried to fight back, but my conversations revealed how much the deck is stacked against them. The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.

Publishers have been responding in two ways. First: legal action. At least 12 lawsuits involving more than 20 publishers have been filed against AI companies. Their outcomes are far from certain, and the cases might be decided only after irreparable damage has been done.

The second response is to make deals with AI companies, allowing their products to summarize articles or train on editorial content. Some publishers, such as The Atlantic, are pursuing both strategies (the company has a corporate partnership with OpenAI and is suing Cohere). At least 72 licensing deals have been made between publishers and AI companies in the past two years. But figuring out how to approach these deals is no easy task. Caccappolo told me he has “felt a tremendous imbalance at the negotiating table”—a sentiment shared by others I spoke with. One problem is that there is no standard price for training an LLM on a book or an article. The AI companies know what kinds of content they want, and having already demonstrated an ability and a willingness to take it without paying, they have extraordinary leverage when it comes to negotiating. I’ve learned that books have sometimes been licensed for only a couple hundred dollars each, and that a publisher that asks too much may be turned down, only for tech companies to take their material anyway.

Another issue is that different content appears to have different value for different LLMs. The digital-media company Ziff Davis has studied web-based AI training data sets and observed that content from “high-authority” sources, such as major newspapers and magazines, appears more desirable to AI companies than blog and social-media posts. (Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI for training on its articles without paying a licensing fee.) Researchers at Microsoft have also written publicly about “the importance of high-quality data” and have suggested that textbook-style content may be particularly desirable.

But beyond a few specific studies like these, there is little insight into what kind of content most improves an LLM, leaving a lot of unanswered questions. Are biographies more or less important than histories? Does high-quality fiction matter? Are old books worth anything? Amy Brand, the director and publisher of the MIT Press, told me that “a solution that promises to help determine the fair value of specific human-authored content within the active marketplace for LLM training data would be hugely beneficial.”

A publisher’s negotiating power is also limited by the degree to which it can stop an AI company from using its work without consent. There’s no surefire way to keep AI companies from scraping news websites; even the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the standard opt-out method available to news publishers, is easily circumvented. Because AI companies generally keep their training data a secret, and because there is no easy way for publishers to check which chatbots are summarizing their articles, publishers have difficulty figuring out which AI companies they might sue or try to strike a deal with. Some experts, such as Tim O’Reilly, have suggested that laws should require the disclosure of copyrighted training data, but no existing legislation requires companies to reveal specific authors or publishers that have been used for AI training material.

Of course, all of this raises a question. AI companies seem to have taken publishers’ content already. Why would they pay for it now, especially because some of these companies have argued in court that training LLMs on copyrighted books and articles is fair use?

Perhaps the deals are simply hedges against an unfavorable ruling in court. If AI companies are prevented from training on copyrighted work for free, then organizations that have existing deals with publishers might be ahead of their competition. Publisher deals are also a means of settling without litigation—which may be a more desirable path for publishers who are risk-averse or otherwise uncertain. But the legal scholar James Grimmelmann told me that AI companies could also respond to complaints like Ziff Davis’s by arguing that the deals involve more than training on a publisher’s content: They may also include access to cleaner versions of articles, ongoing access to a daily or real-time feed, or a release from liability for their chatbot’s plagiarism. Tech companies could argue that the money exchanged in these deals is exclusively for the nonlicensing elements, so they aren’t paying for training material. It’s worth noting that tech companies almost always refer to these deals as partnerships, not licensing deals, likely for this reason.

Regardless, the modest income from these arrangements is not going to save publishers: Even a good deal, one publisher told me, won’t come anywhere near recouping the revenue lost from decreased readership. Publishers that can figure out how to survive the generative-AI assault may need to invent different business models and find new streams of revenue. There may be viable strategies, but none of the publishers I spoke with has a clear idea of what they are.

Publishers have become accustomed to technological threats over the past two decades, perhaps most notably the loss of ad revenue to Facebook and Google, a company that was recently found to have an illegal monopoly in online advertising (though the company has said it will appeal the ruling). But the rise of generative AI may spell doom for the Fourth Estate: With AI, the tech industry even deprives publishers of an audience.

In the event of publisher mass extinction, some journalists will be able to endure. The so-called creator economy shows that it’s possible to provide high-quality news and information through Substack, YouTube, and even TikTok. But not all reporters can simply move to these platforms. Investigative journalism that exposes corruption and malfeasance by powerful people and companies comes with a serious risk of legal repercussions, and requires resources—such as time and money—that tend to be in short supply for freelancers.

If news publishers start going out of business, won’t AI companies suffer too? Their chatbots need access to journalism to answer questions about the world. Doesn’t the tech industry have an interest in the survival of newspapers and magazines?

In fact, there are signs that AI companies believe publishers are no longer needed. In December, at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked how writers should feel about their work being used for AI training. “I think we do need a new deal, standard, protocol, whatever you want to call it, for how creators are going to get rewarded.” He described an “opt-in” regime where an author could receive “micropayments” when their name, likeness, and style were used. But this could not be further from OpenAI’s current practice, in which products are already being used to imitate the styles of artists and writers, without compensation or even an effective opt-out.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also asked about writer compensation at the DealBook Summit. He suggested that a market solution would emerge, possibly one that wouldn’t involve publishers in the long run. This is typical. As in other industries they’ve “disrupted,” Silicon Valley moguls seem to perceive old, established institutions as middlemen to be removed for greater efficiency. Uber enticed drivers to work for it, crushed the traditional taxi industry, and now controls salaries, benefits, and workloads algorithmically. This has meant greater convenience for consumers, just as AI arguably does—but it has also proved ruinous for many people who were once able to earn a living wage from professional driving. Pichai seemed to envision a future that may have a similar consequence for journalists. “There’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think—there’ll be creators who will create for AI,” he said. “People will figure it out.”

[notchainedtotrauma]

Timnit Gebru, a brilliant computer scientist that became a headliner when she became ousted by Google AI Ethics' team. During her time there, she and other AI researchers indexed Amazon for selling a facial recognition system that would most likely target Black people as in women of color (amongst them Black women). After her exit from Google, she continued to relentlessy pursue independent research. She has also pointed out that most of the research in articifial intelligence is rooted in eugenics.

I wrote this paywalled essay to not only expand on the vacancy beyond "Listen to Black women", but to address the way Black women's voices are blotted out of existence. I'm going to use excerpts to contextualize the essay:

Timnit Gebru was again, the co-lead of Google's ethical AI team, and the coauthor of a paper about the failures of facial recognition when it comes to woman and people of color; or in the interstices, the failures of facial recognition when it comes to Black people; or, the horizon of excesses of dark pigment. While at Google, Timnit Gebru and her colleague Margaret Mitchell worked away at undoing a sundering work culture, only to be enmeshed in spite and mundane bigotry. She decided to cowrite a paper alongside Emily M. Bender, Margaret Mitchell, and three other people of her Google team titled: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?". And then, she was ousted. (h/t Tom Simonite). She strained towards being listened, towards the entryway of her utterance.

It's not that Black women are seers, as their unattended to warnings, heavings, testimonies, shapeshift into wounded bodies, gluttonous arches of pleasurable hatred, inherited antiblack cannibalism, orgasmic queer torture. It's that Black women were listened to, static you cannot turn off but throw ouside, as far awar as can be.

[in-sufficientdata]

[remove paywall link]

“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.” In many cases, WikiProject AI Cleanup finds AI-generated content on Wikipedia with the same methods others have used to find AI-generated content in scientific journals and Google Books, namely by searching for phrases commonly used by ChatGPT. One egregious example is this Wikipedia article about the Chester Mental Health Center, which in November of 2023 included the phrase “As of my last knowledge update in January 2022,” referring to the last time the large language model was updated.  Other instances are harder to detect. Lebleu and another WikiProject AI Cleanup founding member who goes by Queen of Hearts told me that the most “impressive” examples they found of AI-generated content on Wikipedia so far is an article about the Ottoman fortress of Amberlisihar.

[...]

“One small detail, the fortress never existed,” Lebleu said. Aside from a few tangential facts mentioned in the article, like that Mehmed the Conqueror, or Mehmed II, was a real person, everything else in the article is fake. “The entire thing was an AI-generated hoax, with well-formatted citations referencing completely nonexistent works.” Fake citations, Lebleu said, are a more “pernicious” issue because they might stay undetected for months. Even if someone was using an LLM trained on a corpus of data relevant to the Wikipedia article, it could generate text that reads well and with correctly formatted citations of real sources, it still wouldn’t be able to correctly match a citation to a specific claim made in a specific body of work.

[aimzicr]

NaNoWriMo official statement: We want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

Translation: Disabled people and poor people can't write and they need the Theft Machines to actually be good writers, and disagreeing with us is means you're a fundamentally bad person.

Meanwhile, Ted Chiang: "Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium."

"Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art."

"The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying."

"Is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? ... Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?"

"The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

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I'm with Ted on this one. What the actual fuck, NaNoWriMo? Makes me wonder what the purpose behind the 'doublecheck your wordcount' box has been used for all these years, if not stealing for the Theft Machines.

Sources:

NaNo's original statement

NaNo's attempt at backtracking

Ted Chiang's New Yorker article (paywalled, but i hit refresh until it gave up)

Techcrunch article

[luvtonique]

We have a situation right now in the anti-AI-bro warzone where the original artists whose art was fed to AI (aka: the artists whose art was stolen in the first place to train the original models) are being accused of using AI because their art "looks like AI."

They have come full horseshoe theory in a way I never expected.

It's like a family got robbed and had their expensive jewelry stolen

And then a bunch of protesters started saying we need to punish the criminals who stole the jewelry

And then the protesters saw the victims of the robbery still wearing rings and necklaces and went "THERE THEY ARE! THERE'S THE THIEVES! THEY GOT THE STOLEN JEWELRY! GET EM!" and are now mobbing around the robbery victims and screaming at them.

(Quick added note before anyone puts any words in my mouth: I don't hate AI at all. Don't give a shit. Steal all my art and feed it to an AI model I really don't care. Generate art in my style. Go for it. Have fun. I don't care. I've never cared about people tracing my art, recoloring my art, making edits of my art, or even roleplaying my OCs on FList or some shit. I don't care. My art is put out there for free and I rarely ever sign my work, and I don't paywall anything I make or have any exclusives hidden away anywhere. Piracy is healthy for the gaming market, sayeth Gaben.)

[physalian]

On "Fiverr Go" | Their Pro-AI Freelancers

K so I logged into Fiverr today and I guess I never pay attention to the banner on the landing page because bold right up front is “Meet Fiverr Go: Choose a freelancer’s personal AI model and instantly generate work in their distinct style.”

Distinct??? Generative AI is the definition of indistinct. It cannot create anything new, it can only create based off its stolen catalogue of other people’s distinct work.

The suggestion here is that a creative has figured out how to make the AI create assembly line products based solely on their own work… cool. What am I paying you for? ‘Cause it’s certainly not all the hard work and effort that you aren’t putting in.

From Fiverr’s FAQ page.

For the love of all that is holy, if you, a creative, want to speed through the act of creation for profit you are not an artist, you're a grifter.

There is a massive, massive difference between an artist selling 50 prints of the same piece with no effort, and an artist having a robot print 50 different pieces while they sit back and watch the money roll in.

That’s no artist I want to support, sorry. I am paying you for something that you created, from sketch to finishing polish. Even if you draw one piece and color it 50 different ways with Photoshop’s masking tool, I can look at those very obvious color-swapped pieces and see the effort that’s gone into them.

This is a lie, creating the illusion of care, creativity, and time, where there is none.

In theory, everyone having their own, isolated content generator, that only learns off of what they put into it, therefore demanding actual creative effort up front to train the generator, isn't such a terrible thing, because it's putting the power back in the hands of creatives vs the big AI companies scalping the internet with wild abandon.

But it's empty creation. It's just content. It's just stuff. It's meaningless. Remember how quickly NFTs died? Endlessly, effortlessly generated AI content is one step behind them.

In any other scenario of profiting off someone else’s work, there is transparency and understanding as a buyer. Whether it’s the understanding that a designer isn’t personally sewing every dress you can buy at the department store or a paperweight you buy at Target, even if all were created entirely by machines from your one idea. The idea of mass-producing your creative work isn't the problem here.

Outsourcing the means of your production to a robot that employs and benefits no one, and costs us all dearly to function, and pretending like it’s only “helping” you succeed, is a lie. It's an entirely closed circuit that only consumes and gives nothing back. Why am I paying you, when your product costs you nothing, not even time, to produce?

As a creative worried out of my mind about my job being stolen by robots… why, oh why, would I pay a freelancer (and Fiverr) to outsource their creativity to the Robot?

The whole point of all these DIY AI programs is that I can do it myself at the click of a button. There’s a paywall for certain features and multiple uses, yeah, and it can have a little bit of a learning curve in terms of communicating what you want.

But here we have a clash of messaging that muddies both. Is GenAI powerful enough that I can generate an entire movie for myself, or not? Are creatives’ human minds and inspirations still necessary in the realm of GenAI, or not?

This is the world GenAI created, and now you want to cram freelancers back into it as if I’d trust a damn thing they could make me?

I don’t want a product of your plagiarism (and there is absolutely no guarantee that these sellers' "distinct" styles aren't stolen themselves) and I certainly don’t want to have to pay you for it. Robots are stealing my job, too, but I’m not footing your paycheck because you decided to bow down to them. And to then pay Fiverr’s hosting fees on top of it?

The moment I can stop using Fiverr, I will. I have one, old contact on there, and once we can leave it, I'm never going back.

[mountmortar]

hey, guys! i feel this post is kind of important to make given the sheer amount of people who use discord:

(and here's a link to the article that isn't paywalled, in an archive).

as per the first two paragraphs of the article:

An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website. The news is not only a brazen abuse of Discord’s platform, but also highlights that Discord messages may be more susceptible to monitoring than ordinary users assume. Typically, a Discord user’s activity is spread across disparate servers, with no one entity, except Discord itself, able to see what messages someone has sent across the platform more broadly. With Spy Pet, third-parties including stalkers or potentially police can look up specific users and see what messages they’ve posted on various servers at once.

here's another (brief) article about it:

news about this has just started reaching people en masse within the last couple days, but i didn't know if it had reached tumblr yet, so. yeah. here.

[oopsarboreal]

Character ai has been so abysmal lately that I’ve felt no motivation to write bots there. I’ve still been using and writing bots, but on different platforms whose bots actually, you know, consider what I’ve written and don’t just ignore it in favor of falling back on the most archetypal response possible.

But if this new “soft launch” model c.ai’s got sticks around, I really might consider returning. It’s a definite improvement from the base. I need to try it with more characters but I saw an immediate increase in creativity, longer replies.. more drawing from the definition/staying in character even when it meant harm came to the user. Really good stuff. I’m only concerned they’re going to paywall it, which they probably will.

[utopicwork]

"The 20-month-old startup [DeepSeek], which surprised Silicon Valley with the sophistication of its AI models last month, plans to make its code repositories available to all developers and researchers. That allows anyone to download and build on or improve the code behind the well-regarded R1 or other platforms, it said in a post on X."

DeepSeek will be open sourcing a good amount of the code behind their models