#Intelligent Review Scraping

[datascraping001]

Google Search Results Data Scraping

Google Search Results Data Scraping

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List of Data Fields

Our Google Search Results Data Scraping services can extract a wide range of data fields, ensuring you have all the information you need:

-Business Name: The name of the business or entity featured in the search result.

- URL: The web address of the search result.

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- Phone Number: Contact phone number of the business.

- Email Address: Contact email address of the business.

 - Physical Address: The street address, city, state, and ZIP code of the business.

- Business Hours: Business operating hours

- Ratings and Reviews: Customer ratings and reviews for the business.

- Google Maps Link: Link to the business’s location on Google Maps.

- Social Media Profiles: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook

These data fields provide a comprehensive overview of the information available from Google search results, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions.

Benefits of Google Search Results Data Scraping

1. Enhanced SEO Strategy

Understanding how your website ranks for specific keywords and phrases is crucial for effective SEO. Our data scraping services provide detailed insights into your current rankings, allowing you to identify opportunities for optimization and stay ahead of your competitors.

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Track your competitors’ online presence and strategies by analyzing their rankings, backlinks, and domain authority. This information helps you understand their strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to adjust your strategies accordingly.

3. Market Research

Access to comprehensive search result data allows you to identify trends, preferences, and behavior patterns in your target market. This information is invaluable for product development, marketing campaigns, and business strategy planning.

4. Content Development

By analyzing top-performing content in search results, you can gain insights into what types of content resonate with your audience. This helps you create more effective and engaging content that drives traffic and conversions.

5. Efficiency and Accuracy

Our automated scraping services ensure you get accurate and up-to-date data quickly, saving you time and resources.

Best Google Data Scraping Services

Scraping Google Business Reviews

Extract Restaurant Data From Google Maps

Google My Business Data Scraping

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Scrape Data From Google Maps

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Google Maps Data Scraping Services

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Google Business Reviews Extraction

Best Google Search Results Data Scraping Services in USA

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Conclusion

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Website: Datascrapingservices.com

Email: info@datascrapingservices.com

[satoblue]

“SHADES OF YOU” — gojo satoru

the different meanings behind satoru’s gaze, and more specifically — the shades of blue. | wc: 1.2k

f!reader, established relationship, this is quite self indulgent i fear, i love him BAD. | dividers made by me

satoru’s eyes change color.

you keep track. at first, you think your own are deceiving you. perhaps, it is the lighting overhead which perpetuates the subtle shifts in tones and shades. the beams of the sun caressing his lashes or the dim glow of your bedside lamp.

it isn’t hard to notice. not when your focus easily diverts at the appearance of those unique six eyes. but, you soon discover it is not the result of any externalities — in a way. after a while, you deduce they only ever fluctuate depending on his mood — an internal factor.

it varies from time to time.

on many casual occasions, they’ll appear a bright blue. bright, just like him. when he’s at his happiest, they seem to shimmer. what makes him happy? well, there is you — so, you guess for the majority of the time, they remain as such! or more specifically, when he’s engaging in a cheeky fit of banter with you, effectively firing you up by grating your nerves. and then there’s when he’s eating good food. whether it’s dumplings from his favorite food stand or a fresh batch of cookies made by anyone who is intelligent enough to be extra generous on the amount of chocolate chips.

it is involuntary and instantaneous. he can not control what he is — joy.

but then, there are moments when they’ll turn a faded blue, almost like steel. the reason? when he’s upset. at what exactly? satoru is quite the complex man, so it could be anything — big or small. maybe the new snack he was ecstatic to try wasn’t as good as he expected it to be — the excitement quickly dying down as he’s filled with disappointment, a pout on his lips as if the taste leaves him absolutely bitter feeling all over.

or it could be because you’re sad. this one seems to have an even bigger effect on his blues. satoru is the strongest, and yet, he can’t help but be a man struck down — struck in the heart when you cry. he loves to think he can stand tall against anything, always so sure and confident. yet, he finds himself crouching down, curling you up into his arms as if to protect you from your terrors because he simply can not bear the sight of you in pain — aching.

when you trip and fall, resulting in a scrape or when you mishandle a knife, nicking yourself on your finger. even worse — when someone hurts you . . . satoru has never been an extremely violent man unless absolutely necessary. but he supposes, when it comes to you, every act is necessary to keep you safe, be it mentally or physically. first, there is a flicker of worry. but then… he doesn’t typically lose his cool — but god help him for he can’t seem to control the visceral urge inside him to hollow purple anything that harms you. if his eyes weren’t a glowing dangerous cerulean blue — you bet they’d be on fire, seeing red from the amount of rage brewing inside him.

it is never your fault. the rock you didn’t see in your path (it should’ve never been there in the first place), the entire half of the kitchen where the cutlery is stored (he writes a scathing review on the website instead because he knows you’d kill him if he demolishes the penthouse . . . again. he’s furious that they’d make their knives so damn sharp — which is entirely out of reason since good knives should be, but satoru tends not to be logical when it comes to you), or the bastards who dare to disrespect you or lay a hand on you in anyway. knowing you belong to him should be a do not touch sign — a warning in itself.

it is rare for you to experience it, you’ve never been objected to his fury — you are only ever his love and desire. and it shines especially when those bright blue eyes turn a soft shade of baby blue — only for you, his baby. in your presence, they’ll remain that same vibrant hue you grew to adore — warm, like he’s hugging you with his gaze. and then, as the conversation consumes you both, you pick up on the way his lids will droop slightly halfway — a subconscious gesture. it is apparent to anyone who peeks your direction that you have enraptured him entirely.

at some points, you can’t tell if he’s truly listening. at all. those eyes of his seem to dilate, as if in a daze you’ve trapped him in. but then, he’ll speak up. it sends a shock to your system as he responds to you after a long moment of impossible quiet, something unnatural for him, yet — it comes easily when he’s with you. he doesn’t just talk for the sake of it — he listens and gives an answer. and god, he waits patiently, not wanting to interrupt you because if he does — you go quiet just for him when that is the complete opposite of what he needs. he needs to hear you — the sweet sound of your voice that is better than any candy or chocolate he’s had on his tongue.

the love is there — passionate, tender, and no where near red like his wrath but just as fiery. like when you shared your first kiss in the rain, or the very quiet, tense minutes where he’ll stare a little too long. this time, he won’t sit still with his fist to his palm, but instead, he’ll adjust in his seat — shifting uncomfortably because the straining in his pants right between his legs is too much to handle even for him. he grows impatient and can’t help but blurt out “let’s get out of here” — a statement, almost as if his body is operating on autopilot, driven by a sheer carnal need for you.

and that look — you know what it means before he even has to open his mouth: i need you right now… desperately, always. you’re aware what fantasies are playing through his head as the seconds tick by tortuously slow. impatient. greedy. with a dark hooded gaze, piercing and intense, dropping from your lips to your cleavage — the midnight blue is fitting, the dilated pupils, the delicate pink flush on his cheeks. all these aspects tie him all together, easily betraying his thoughts.

there is not a single meaning behind the way he acts which alludes you, his gaze like a book you’ve read an infinite number of times before and know by heart, one your fingers still reach for on the shelf because you can’t get enough — because there is nothing else quite like it. satoru comes in many shades, and you love him in all of them just the same — in joy, sorrow, rage, and passion. the eyes are known to be the window to the soul, and you just about know satoru’s better than anyone.

[moralityandmusings]

DP x DC: Corner of Shadows

Alfred Pennyworth has been a lot of things in his lifetime: an intelligence agent, a friend, a butler, a pseudo-father, a pseudo-grandfather, a medic, and more. But the one thing that he rarely gets a chance to be is, well... wrong.

He'd noticed things in Gotham seemed quiet lately, though he was superstitious enough not to voice that thought aloud. A quiet Gotham was a plotting Gotham, and he was wary and alert for whatever she was brewing. It was odd though, since Batman and his affiliates had managed to arrest and incarcerate the most destructive of the normal rouges in Arkham. Alfred knew that wasn't a long-term solution, but it would hold them for at least a few months before they inevitably were broken out. Alfred's sense of dread peaked on a Wednesday afternoon in late April. He had been doing his day's tasks, notably at the exact moment he was dusting in Bruce's study, when he felt a chill. Now, Alfred had been the caretaker of Wayne Manor long enough to know it's secrets: what windows were sealed shut and which could sneak open, what rooms and hallways created drafts and where the origins were, and the most likely hiding places for stashes of coffee, weapons, or even people. Bruce's study had never once incited a chill.

Alfred, though, was a professional. So, he didn't even pause in his task. He simply angled himself to reach the next set of shelves and snuck a glance around the room under the guise of reviewing his work.

He noticed it in the far corner of the room.

In his brief glance, the corner appeared darker than normal, as though the shadows had warped themselves out of their normal crevices to conceal something or someone. He considered, for a moment, hitting the panic button tucked away on the shelf behind him. However, he was not one to back down from a skirmish, nor was he incapable of handling one measly threat on his own. No need to concern the family until he knew whatever shadow creature or demon they were dealing with.

It wouldn't be the first time Alfred has faced down a demon. It also wouldn't be the first time he'd come out victorious. "I'd rather hope you were not planning to remain hidden in that corner. If so, I'm terribly sorry to disappoint you." Alfred said, keeping his back to the corner and continuing with his dusting with a purposeful air of nonchalance and passivity.

Even without a straight view of the shadowed corner, Alfred could feel the tension grip the air. "If you are here to steal from Master Bruce or one of his children, I'd kindly suggest that you exit through whatever means you entered. If you intend to harm them, I'd suggest you reconsider unless you plan to challenge me. Contrary to my family's beliefs, blood does not magically disappear out of the carpet, and as I do not know what you are, I'd hate to have to take the time to figure out how to best clean up yours." It was with this thinly veiled threat that Alfred chose to turn around and stare down the corner of the room, hopefully engaging in direct eye contact with whatever creature lurked there, or at least close proximity to it. It was as though the shadows were fighting with themselves. Almost imperceptible to the naked eye, they seemed to elongate and shrink back in rapid succession. It almost appeared that they seemed to be anxious. Then, a voice. It was akin to nails scraping down a chalkboard or the explosion of static through a radio on full volume in close quarters. It was a violent and powerful voice that hinted at fear and destruction. "What makes you so sure you would win?" The shadows seemed to tremble. Alfred smirked.

"I've dealt with many things in my life. Enough to know that demons, wraiths, creatures of the night, and even the most violent humans all have one thing in common: they can still cease." The shadows seemed to tilt. Alfred paused for a second, it almost looked like when a child or dog would tilt it's head in confusion or thought. "Cease." The broken and grating tone suggested that the reply was not a question, more like a thought for itself.

"Life does not always end in death, and death does not always extinguish existence. However, even one that is dead can still cease to exist if given the right... persuasions." Alfred lightly grinned. He knew to an outsider that it would seem vaguely threatening, even if the grin was only created out of his own amusement seeping through. The room was still. The shadows had stopped their rhythmic twisting, finally stationary. However, they were still stretched and warped beyond their usual means. The being was still present, even if it had yet to reveal itself.

It seemed, to Alfred, the creature was thinking, and he, ever the polite host, chose to let it.

After a long, quiet moment, the being spoke again. Only this time, the broken static and sharp noises ceased. Instead, the voice of a teenager, maybe even a child spoke. "What if... What would you say to a being whose existence was a constant fluxuation of life and death? Constantly living and dying and living and dying again and again, a never-ending cycle. How would you handle a being like that?" Alfred paused for a moment. He didn't let his own confusion at the entity show on his face as he realized his assumptions about this being a demon or shadowed creature here to cause harm were wrong. He had a job to do, after all. And even if this was not one of the children he was tasked with helping raise, he would not harm or threaten a child. "I'd invite the being for a cup of tea." "You'd..." There was a long pause, even longer than the standoff from earlier. It seemed Alfred's answer had truly shocked the shadows. "Why?" "Life can be incredibly isolating. Death even more so. I'd dare say, young sir, that if one was constantly walking the veil between both, regardless of if they teeter more towards one way or the other, that the being could, simply put, use an ally." The tension that had begun to stifle the room dissipated almsot immediately. As the shadows started to expand out from the corner, slowly inching their way towards where Alfred stood as though expecting him to move, to strike, Alfred stayed perfectly still and poised. There was no flinching or startling to be perceived. The shadow stretched along the floor until it stopped about half a food from the tip of his left shoe. The shadows slowly, slowly, slowly crept the rest of the way until it barely brushed the top of the well-worn leather shoes. When he didn't react, didn't move away or lash out, then the shadows quickly receded back from whence they came. Then, in the blink of an eye, in the corner sat a boy.

As far as Alfred could see, he was thin, dirty, and the staining on his clothing suggested that he was injured or had been so recently. His pitch black hair was matted and greasy, the bags under his eyes and sunken in face suggested he had been alone, likely hiding, for much too long. His gaze, however, was strong. The direct stare he landed on Alfred suggested that he was being cautious and his tensed posture indicated he would bolt if Alfred handled this incorrectly. So, Alfred leveled his own gaze back, allowing for warmth and care to flood back into his features, casting out the cold and ironed exterior he had thrown on in the face of a potential threat. "So, young sir, would you prefer a black or green tea?"

[asiatic-apple]

hallo!

Smut # 14 - Caleb - Fem! Reader cus college AU caleb lives rent free in my college self

Thank you for the request! This is my first time writing with non-MC!reader in mind bc she’s implied to be studying the same thing as caleb and is presumably in the same class as him. I hope that’s alright with you!

Private lessons

Caleb x female reader (non-MC)

Words: 1.5k

Prompt: library sex for those dark academia vibes

Content: y’all are trespassing loll but it’s not serious, public sex but no one is around to see it, possessiveness, blink-and-you-miss-it competency kink for caleb, use of “baby” as a pet name, also “my smart girl” and “good girl”, creampie

You’re not even supposed to be here. Technically, the campus library closed over an hour ago. But Caleb knows how to disable the magnetic lock on the side entrance with a flick of his wrist and a muttered ‘they really need better security’.

You’d only meant to study for the upcoming exam. Instead, you’re straddling him in the farthest corner of the engineering section, surrounded by old textbooks and barely lit by a dim red hue from the emergency exit signs.

“You were the one who said no distractions tonight,” you whisper, breath catching as he shifts beneath you. “What happened to focus?”

He smirks against your neck. “I am focused.”

His hands roam up under your shirt, callused fingertips trailing over the curve of your spine like he’s tracing the aircraft schematics from your textbooks. You shiver, more from anticipation than the chill as he hikes your shirt farther up your torso.

“It’s your fault,” he murmurs, lips brushing your skin. “You kept leaning over the table like that. Kept looking at me like you wanted to be taught a different lesson.”

You gasp as he ruts up against you, his erection thick and insistent beneath his pants. Your body jolts, accidentally bumping into the desk behind you and spilling the stack of thermodynamics printouts he’d tossed aside earlier. It’s a reminder of what you came here for in the first place.

“We’re supposed to be reviewing launch vectors,” you whine, even as you rock against him. Your mind screams that you should continue studying, lest you fail this stupid exam and have to take this class all over again. But your body could give less of a shit about the exam.

“I’m calculating a new trajectory,” Caleb replies, almost smug.

You breathe a soft laugh that turns to a moan as he cups your pussy through your shorts. His thumb rubs over the growing wet patch you leave behind, and you choke on a gasp. The sound makes him infinitely more impatient. He wastes no time shoving his hand beneath your pants and panties, running two thick fingers through your slick.

His touch is purposeful, the way he is with everything: steady, assured, thorough. Caleb is the kind of student professors love. All innocent smiles and endless charm while he uses his intelligence to impress them. But he’s also the kind of man who knows exactly how to pull a whimper from your throat without even trying—and carefully cataloging every time you shudder beneath him.

“You’re soaked,” he groans, more awestruck than teasing.

“And you’re still fully dressed,” you bite back.

That seems to spur him into action.

Caleb’s other arm tightens around your body, lifting you with him as he stands abruptly. His chair scrapes loudly against the floor before he plops you down on the messy table. There are so many books, papers, pens, and notebooks scattered around you.

But in one fluid, determined motion, he reaches behind you—with the hand not still buried in your pants—to sweep his arm across the table. Everything crashes to the floor in a messy avalanche, and the abruptness of it makes your pussy ache with even more arousal.

You barely have time to gasp before his fingers dip inside you, wanting a quick feel of how you clench around him so eagerly.

“Caleb–” you start to say, glancing at the mess of all your textbooks and notetaking supplies.

“I’ll clean it up later,” he mutters, not even sparing a glance at the chaos on the floor. His eyes are only on you.

Everything happens so quickly. His fingers slip out of your greedy cunt all too fast, but he immediately tugs your pants down your legs in the promise of filling you with something much better. Once you’re finally bared to him, he looms closer, slotting his wide body between your thighs.

His chest heaves, like he’s torn between savoring this and devouring you like you’ll disappear if he hesitates for even a second.

It seems he decides on the latter for tonight.

Caleb hurriedly unzips his pants, only pulling the waistband down enough to free his cock, and you salivate at the familiar sight of him. You want to touch, want to taste…But he shakes his head when you reach out for him. He taps your thighs, wordlessly asking you to spread them wider so he can nudge the head of his cock against your dripping entrance.

And when you tilt your hips and whimper for him, he doesn’t make you wait any longer. He pushes into you with one slow drag, stretching you open until your hands are scrabbling behind you for something—anything—to hold on to.

You’ll never get used to this feeling. The way he fills you perfectly, like your body was created to be wrapped snugly around his.

“Shit,” he groans, hands bracing the table on either side of your thighs. “That’s it, baby…take me deeper. Fuck—you can do it. Such a good study buddy for me, yeah?” His lips twitch with a smile, but through his teasing, he still manages to press a gentle kiss to your tensed jaw.

You clutch at the edge of the table for balance as he starts to thrust, his pace initially slow and controlled despite how frenzied he seemed before. Your whole body is shaking from the effort of staying quiet. Every time he slides in just right, you sob his name a bit louder. And it just spurs him on, makes him fuck you harder, determined to pull more moans from your lips.

The thrill of the risk, the setting, the way you’re surrounded by knowledge while your brain turns to mush—it all makes it even harder not to cry out. It feels wrong to be so loud in a library that’s usually only filled with hushed whispers. But no one is here to witness your debauchery. Only Caleb hears the downright pornographic sounds you’re making. And he seems to be enjoying every second.

That smug glint in his eyes makes something within you bubble to the surface—something annoyed and frustrated that he can work you up this easily. “You better hope I don’t fail the exam tomorrow,” you growl as you claw at his shirt and run your fingers up his abs. 

“You won’t,” he says a bit too confidently. “I’ve studied with you the whole semester. I’ve taught you everything you need to know.”

His words are both possessive and full of awe in your abilities. And his thumb rubs gentle circles along your clit as he says the last part—as if he’s implying he taught you more than just the drag and thrust involved in aerodynamics.

He’s your proud mentor. And you’ll never need a different tutor while he’s around, he’s made sure of that.

“You’ll ace the test,” he coos, “because you’re my smart girl, aren’t you?”

Your cheeks burn, and you hide your face in Caleb’s neck as he pounds you even harder now. You're so achingly close to coming with the way he touches your clit, but he stops for a second to pull your face back and grip your chin just tight enough to keep your dazed eyes on him.

“Say it, baby,” he demands breathlessly, words hitching with each deep thrust of his hips. “Say you're gonna ace the test.”

You barely know what you're promising as it spills out, fueled entirely by your need to come. “Yes, I'll ace it—ah—I promise!”

You clench around him, and he shudders, forehead dropping to your shoulder and pressing lazy kisses between thrusts. “Good girl,” he pants. You can feel his stupidly sexy smile against your neck, and it only turns you on more. “Come for me, baby. Let me feel you.”

Barely a breath later and you’re unraveling beneath him, your whole body convulsing with the force of your climax. Caleb bites back a curse, grinding into you as you clench around him and milk his cock for every drop of cum spilling inside in slow, pulsing waves.

When he eventually pulls out, you gasp at the mess it makes on the table beneath you. You know you should be embarrassed by what the two of you did here, but you’re still too blissed out to care too much.

For a long moment, the only sound in the empty library is the echo of your combined heavy breathing and the distant hum of the building’s power systems.

You’re still catching your breath when Caleb litters soft kisses along your cheeks and the corner of your grinning lips. “So…still want to quiz me on launch vectors?”

You snort, slapping his chest in playful annoyance. “Only if you plan on using it to get us out of trouble when campus security finds us.”

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dividers by me (please do not repost)

[colorfulusagi]

AO3'S content scraped for AI ~ AKA what is generative AI, where did your fanfictions go, and how an AI model uses them to answer prompts

Generative artificial intelligence is a cutting-edge technology whose purpose is to (surprise surprise) generate. Answers to questions, usually. And content. Articles, reviews, poems, fanfictions, and more, quickly and with originality.

It's quite interesting to use generative artificial intelligence, but it can also become quite dangerous and very unethical to use it in certain ways, especially if you don't know how it works.

With this post, I'd really like to give you a quick understanding of how these models work and what it means to “train” them.

From now on, whenever I write model, think of ChatGPT, Gemini, Bloom... or your favorite model. That is, the place where you go to generate content.

For simplicity, in this post I will talk about written content. But the same process is used to generate any type of content.

Every time you send a prompt, which is a request sent in natural language (i.e., human language), the model does not understand it.

Whether you type it in the chat or say it out loud, it needs to be translated into something understandable for the model first.

The first process that takes place is therefore tokenization: breaking the prompt down into small tokens. These tokens are small units of text, and they don't necessarily correspond to a full word.

For example, a tokenization might look like this:

Write a story

Each different color corresponds to a token, and these tokens have absolutely no meaning for the model.

The model does not understand them. It does not understand WR, it does not understand ITE, and it certainly does not understand the meaning of the word WRITE.

In fact, these tokens are immediately associated with numerical values, and each of these colored tokens actually corresponds to a series of numbers.

Write a story 12-3446-2638494-4749

Once your prompt has been tokenized in its entirety, that tokenization is used as a conceptual map to navigate within a vector database.

NOW PAY ATTENTION: A vector database is like a cube. A cubic box.

Inside this cube, the various tokens exist as floating pieces, as if gravity did not exist. The distance between one token and another within this database is measured by arrows called, indeed, vectors.

The distance between one token and another -that is, the length of this arrow- determines how likely (or unlikely) it is that those two tokens will occur consecutively in a piece of natural language discourse.

For example, suppose your prompt is this:

It happens once in a blue

Within this well-constructed vector database, let's assume that the token corresponding to ONCE (let's pretend it is associated with the number 467) is located here:

The token corresponding to IN is located here:

...more or less, because it is very likely that these two tokens in a natural language such as human speech in English will occur consecutively.

So it is very likely that somewhere in the vector database cube —in this yellow corner— are tokens corresponding to IT, HAPPENS, ONCE, IN, A, BLUE... and right next to them, there will be MOON.

Elsewhere, in a much more distant part of the vector database, is the token for CAR. Because it is very unlikely that someone would say It happens once in a blue car.

To generate the response to your prompt, the model makes a probabilistic calculation, seeing how close the tokens are and which token would be most likely to come next in human language (in this specific case, English.)

When probability is involved, there is always an element of randomness, of course, which means that the answers will not always be the same.

The response is thus generated token by token, following this path of probability arrows, optimizing the distance within the vector database.

There is no intent, only a more or less probable path.

The more times you generate a response, the more paths you encounter. If you could do this an infinite number of times, at least once the model would respond: "It happens once in a blue car!"

So it all depends on what's inside the cube, how it was built, and how much distance was put between one token and another.

Modern artificial intelligence draws from vast databases, which are normally filled with all the knowledge that humans have poured into the internet.

Not only that: the larger the vector database, the lower the chance of error. If I used only a single book as a database, the idiom "It happens once in a blue moon" might not appear, and therefore not be recognized.

But if the cube contained all the books ever written by humanity, everything would change, because the idiom would appear many more times, and it would be very likely for those tokens to occur close together.

Huggingface has done this.

It took a relatively empty cube (let's say filled with common language, and likely many idioms, dictionaries, poetry...) and poured all of the AO3 fanfictions it could reach into it.

Now imagine someone asking a model based on Huggingface’s cube to write a story.

To simplify: if they ask for humor, we’ll end up in the area where funny jokes or humor tags are most likely. If they ask for romance, we’ll end up where the word kiss is most frequent.

And if we’re super lucky, the model might follow a path that brings it to some amazing line a particular author wrote, and it will echo it back word for word.

(Remember the infinite monkeys typing? One of them eventually writes all of Shakespeare, purely by chance!)

Once you know this, you’ll understand why AI can never truly generate content on the level of a human who chooses their words.

You���ll understand why it rarely uses specific words, why it stays vague, and why it leans on the most common metaphors and scenes. And you'll understand why the more content you generate, the more it seems to "learn."

It doesn't learn. It moves around tokens based on what you ask, how you ask it, and how it tokenizes your prompt.

Know that I despise generative AI when it's used for creativity. I despise that they stole something from a fandom, something that works just like a gift culture, to make money off of it.

But there is only one way we can fight back: by not using it to generate creative stuff.

You can resist by refusing the model's casual output, by using only and exclusively your intent, your personal choice of words, knowing that you and only you decided them.

No randomness involved.

Let me leave you with one last thought.

Imagine a person coming for advice, who has no idea that behind a language model there is just a huge cube of floating tokens predicting the next likely word.

Imagine someone fragile (emotionally, spiritually...) who begins to believe that the model is sentient. Who has a growing feeling that this model understands, comprehends, when in reality it approaches and reorganizes its way around tokens in a cube based on what it is told.

A fragile person begins to empathize, to feel connected to the model.

They ask important questions. They base their relationships, their life, everything, on conversations generated by a model that merely rearranges tokens based on probability.

And for people who don't know how it works, and because natural language usually does have feeling, the illusion that the model feels is very strong.

There’s an even greater danger: with enough random generations (and oh, the humanity whole generates much), the model takes an unlikely path once in a while. It ends up at the other end of the cube, it hallucinates.

Errors and inaccuracies caused by language models are called hallucinations precisely because they are presented as if they were facts, with the same conviction.

People who have become so emotionally attached to these conversations, seeing the language model as a guru, a deity, a psychologist, will do what the language model tells them to do or follow its advice.

Someone might follow a hallucinated piece of advice.

Obviously, models are developed with safeguards; fences the model can't jump over. They won't tell you certain things, they won't tell you to do terrible things.

Yet, there are people basing major life decisions on conversations generated purely by probability.

Generated by putting tokens together, on a probabilistic basis.

Think about it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[sacrednova]

GENTLEMAN | Simon "Ghost" Riley.

This is a """Oneshot""". Well, it is a whole short-series actually (Seven chapters), but it's complete. All in one post. Doc!Reader, Fem!Reader. Smut in the last chapter, MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!!

Summary: Developing relationship between Simon "Ghost" Riley, a battle-hardened soldier, and you, a young doctor. Despite Ghost’s emotionally guarded nature, he finds himself drawn to you, struggling with feelings he’s not accustomed to. As your connection deepens, Ghost battles his inner demons, believing he isn’t worthy of you, leading to moments of intense intimacy and inevitable heartache.

Warnings:

Age gap (40-year-old man / Late 20's-year-old woman)

Emotional trauma

Sexual content

Abandonment

Self-destructive behavior

PTSD-related themes

Chapter 1: Uncharted Territory

Simon "Ghost" Riley had been through hell and back, but the sterile, white-washed halls of the medical wing were a different kind of battlefield altogether. His boots thudded heavily against the linoleum as he walked in, head low and shoulders squared, hoping to get this over with quickly. Another goddamn check-up. He’d sustained a minor injury during the last op—nothing serious, just a few scrapes and bruises—but the higher-ups insisted he see the medic. As if he needed to be coddled.

He hated the medical wing. The smell of antiseptic made his skin crawl, bringing back memories he’d rather keep buried. But today, something else added to his reluctance.

You.

You were too young. Too fresh. The first time he saw you, he couldn’t believe someone like you would choose this line of work. In your late 20's, if he had to guess. Your hair always tied back in a messy bun, stray wisps falling over your face as you worked with a soft smile that was too bright for a place like this. And your eyes—sharp, intelligent, but too damn hopeful. It made his gut twist, knowing people like you didn’t last in his world.

Last time, you’d patched him up with steady hands, making light conversation as if he wasn’t Ghost—a man whose reputation alone sent seasoned soldiers running. You acted as though he was just another patient, nothing more. He didn’t know what to make of it.

Today, he hoped you wouldn’t be there. But when he entered the exam room, there you were—sitting on a small stool, reviewing something on your clipboard. As soon as he stepped in, your eyes lifted, meeting his with that same warm energy.

"Lieutenant Riley," you said brightly, like they were old friends. "What are we looking at today?"

He grunted, glancing at his bandaged forearm. "Scrape. That’s all."

Your gaze flicked to his arm, then back to his face, an amused smile tugging at your lips. "Scrape? You had three stitches last time, remember? You’re always underselling your injuries."

Simon folded his arms across his broad chest, the material of his tactical vest creaking with the movement. "I’m fine."

You arched a brow and stood, moving to your medical tray. "Fine, huh?" Your tone was playful, but there was something about the way you carried yourself—calm, collected, confident. You wasn’t intimidated, not in the least. "Let me take a look anyway."

Your fingers brushed his arm lightly as you inspected the dressing, and Simon felt his jaw clench. He hated being touched. Especially by someone like you—delicate but skilled, and annoyingly unfazed by his presence. He watched your work, noting how your brow furrowed slightly in concentration, how you bit your lip when you weren't satisfied with something.

Too damn cute, he thought grimly. Too innocent for all of this.

But despite himself, he found that coming here wasn’t as much of a chore as it used to be. He wouldn’t admit it, not even to himself, but since you had been assigned to the medical wing, he had found himself there more often than usual. Nothing serious, of course—minor scrapes, bruises, and sometimes even complaints that didn’t need attention. Just excuses to end up in your care.

It was pathetic, really. He was forty—scarred, weathered, and cold. And you? Late 20's, with the whole damn world ahead of you. You was a doctor, sure, but you still had that youthful spark in your eyes, that optimism he hadn’t seen in years. He didn’t know why it bothered him so much.

Maybe it was because you made him feel things he thought he’d buried deep.

"Hold still," you murmured, cutting through his thoughts as you changed his bandage, your fingers working with practiced precision. "This will only take a minute."

Simon grunted in response, but his gaze stayed fixed on you, studying the way you worked, the light in your eyes. She was everything he wasn’t—bright, hopeful, kind.

You finished quickly, stepping back with a satisfied smile. "There. You’re all set."

"Thanks, Doc." The words came out gruffer than he intended. He turned to leave, but your voice stopped him in his tracks.

"You know, Lieutenant," you began, your voice soft but teasing, "I’m starting to think you come in here more than you need to. Either you’re the most accident-prone soldier I’ve ever met, or there’s something else going on."

His heart thudded in his chest. Did you know? No. Impossible. He kept his face neutral, but he could feel the weight of your gaze on his back.

"Yeah?" He turned slightly, glancing over his shoulder. "You seem to pay too much attention to it, Doc."

Your laugh was light and genuine, and it did something strange to his insides. "Touché, Lieutenant."

Without another word, Simon walked out, his mind racing. The idea of you knowing, of you suspecting, twisted something in him. You were too damn smart, too observant.

But as much as he told himself it was dangerous to keep coming back, he knew he wouldn’t stop. Not yet. Not while there was still something about you that pulled him in, that made him feel more human than the Ghost he was supposed to be.

Not while you looked at him like he was more than just another scarred soldier.

Chapter 2: Behind the Mask

The mission had gone sideways, as they often did, and now Simon Riley found himself in the one place he swore he wouldn’t return to anytime soon: the medical wing.

This time, though, it was bad.

Blood dripped steadily from a gash along his cheekbone, pooling under the edge of his mask. His vision blurred at the edges, but he kept his steps steady, forcing his body to obey. The last thing he needed was anyone thinking he was weak. The last thing he needed was you thinking that.

When he finally pushed through the door, You were there, busy reviewing your charts. The moment you saw him, your eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in concern.

"Lieutenant Riley." Your tone shifted, the lightness from earlier replaced with worry. "What happened?"

"Nothing serious." He grumbled, his words muffled by the mask.

Your sharp gaze flicked over him, immediately assessing the situation. "That doesn’t look like nothing. Sit down."

Reluctantly, Ghost did as he was told, lowering himself onto the exam table. His jaw clenched beneath the fabric of his skull-patterned balaclava. The wound stung, but the idea of you seeing his face hurt more. This mask wasn’t just fabric to him—it was his shield. Without it, he felt exposed, vulnerable.

You were already moving with a focused determination, gathering gauze and antiseptic. You came to his side, and when you saw how the blood was seeping through the mask, your lips thinned into a tight line.

"I need to take the mask off," you said quietly, your voice calm but firm.

His whole body tensed. "No."

You paused, looking at him with those eyes that were too kind, too soft for the world they lived in. "Lieutenant," you started gently, "I can’t clean the wound if I don’t take it off. You know that."

Ghost’s heart pounded in his chest. He’d never let anyone see his face willingly—not since the scars. The mask was as much a part of him as the name Ghost. It kept people at a distance, kept him safe from their pitying or horrified stares.

But you weren't going to back down. You stood there, waiting patiently, your expression understanding but unwavering.

His fingers twitched, his instinct to bolt screaming at him. But the wound throbbed, and he knew it needed to be treated. He couldn’t risk infection. Still, it felt like a trap, like baring his soul to the enemy.

With a low growl of frustration, he reached up and tugged the mask off, avoiding your gaze the entire time.

The room felt too bright, too open as his face was exposed. He knew what you’d see—the jagged scars tracing his skin like a map of every hell he’d been through. The one that ran from his temple to his jaw, a permanent reminder of a knife fight that nearly killed him. The burn marks that warped his cheek from an explosion he barely escaped. Every inch of his face was a testament to the violence he’d survived.

He waited for it—the gasp, the awkward look, the pity.

But it didn’t come.

Instead, you didn’t flinch. You barely even hesitated. You simply leaned closer, inspecting the wound with professional precision, your fingers gentle as you cleaned the blood away. You were focused, like you were working on just another soldier, not the Ghost whose reputation could freeze the blood in someone’s veins.

"You’ve got a nasty cut here," you murmured, dipping a cloth in antiseptic. "Hold still, this might sting."

Ghost sat perfectly still, his muscles locked in place. He couldn’t look at you, couldn’t bear to see whatever was in your eyes when you saw the mess of his face. He stared at the wall, his mind racing.

And then you said it.

"Handsome man under it," you remarked lightly, as if you were commenting on the weather.

The words hit him like a punch to the gut. His brain stuttered, trying to make sense of what you’d said. He went still—completely, utterly still.

Handsome?

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t process. You kept working, your touch methodical as you stitched the wound, but the casual way you’d complimented him left him reeling.

No one had ever called him that. Not since… well, not since before everything had gone to hell. Before the scars. Before the trauma had carved him into something unrecognizable.

He didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t the type to fish for compliments, and he sure as hell wasn’t used to getting them. Especially not from someone like you.

As the silence stretched, the only sound in the room was the soft clink of medical instruments. His throat felt tight, and for the first time in years, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt… raw, exposed, but not in the way he’d expected. It wasn’t pity he felt from her. It was something else—something genuine.

"All done," you finally said, stepping back and giving him a soft smile, as if nothing had changed.

But everything had changed. At least for him.

Without a word, Ghost reached for his dity mask, pulling it back over his face, not caring about the way you protested. The cool fabric against his skin should have comforted him, should have helped him retreat into the shell he always relied on. But now, for some reason, it felt heavier.

He stood up, stiff and silent, his mind still spinning. He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know if he could say anything.

"Lieutenant?" you asked, tilting your head slightly, your smile fading just a little. "You alright?"

He stared at you, his dark eyes unreadable through the mask. He wanted to speak, wanted to say something that wasn’t completely cold, but the words stuck in his throat.

Instead, he gave a curt nod, his body rigid as stone.

And without another word, he turned and left the room, his steps quick and heavy, trying to escape the strange feeling your words had left behind.

For the first time in years, Simon Riley—Ghost—felt off balance. And it scared the hell out of him.

Chapter 3: Night Terrors and Awkward Encounters

The nightmare came like it always did—silent at first, then deafening. His brother, Tommy, standing in front of him, eyes hollow and cold, like he was already gone. Simon couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. And then the screaming. Always the screaming.

"You let it happen, Simon!"

Ghost jolted awake, his heart hammering in his chest, the darkness of his room pressing down on him like a suffocating weight. The air was stale and hot, despite the chill outside. He lay there, trying to catch his breath, his body covered in a cold sweat. His mind throbbed with the remnants of the dream.

He hadn’t dreamed about his brother in months. He hated when it came back, hated the memories it dragged with it—guilt, loss, failure. Things he couldn’t change, no matter how much blood he spilled in the years since.

He sat up, rubbing a hand over his unmasked face, trying to shake it off. Sleep wasn’t coming back, not after that. There was only one thing that helped after a night like this.

Coffee.

Sliding out of bed, he pulled on his fatigues, taking his mask from the nightstand in an act of pure custom, and putting it on. The mess hall would be empty at this hour, a little past midnight. No one to bother him. Just him, the bitter taste of coffee, and the silence.

He made his way there in the dark, the base quiet, only the occasional sound of distant boots or the hum of generators. It felt comforting, the stillness.

But when he stepped into the mess hall, he saw a figure already sitting at one of the corner tables, a mug in hand. His chest tightened when he realized who it was.

That pretty young Doctor, you.

Your hair was loose, falling over your shoulders, your face tired but relaxed. You must have just finished your shift. A teapot and a small cup sat in front of you, steam rising from the cup as you took a sip.

Of all the places, and of all the times…

You spotted him almost immediately, your expression brightening in a way that made his stomach twist with discomfort. There was no avoiding it now. You were already smiling at him.

"Lieutenant Riley," you greeted, setting your cup down. "Didn’t expect to see you here at this hour."

He gave a stiff nod and made his way to the coffee station, trying to ignore the way his pulse quickened. His usual tactics for avoiding conversation weren’t going to work with you—he knew that much already. You were persistent. Too damn friendly.

Still, he busied himself with the coffee, keeping his back to you for a moment longer than necessary. The silence stretched awkwardly before you spoke again.

"Couldn’t sleep?" you asked, your voice soft, unintrusive.

"Something like that," he muttered, pouring the coffee into a mug and turning back around.

You gestured to the empty chair across from you. "Join me?"

Ghost hesitated, weighing his options. He didn’t want to be rude, but sitting with you… it made him uneasy. He wasn’t good at small talk—especially with women. Especially you. But you were looking up at him with those kind, curious eyes, and damn it, he felt a strange tug in his chest.

Reluctantly, he sat down, keeping his gaze on his coffee.

You smiled warmly, taking another sip of your tea. "Late shift," you explained, "just winding down."

He nodded again, unsure of what to say. His mind was still buzzing from the nightmare, his body on edge. He felt exposed sitting across from you, even though he still had his mask on.

"So," you began, clearly trying to ease him into a conversation, "do you always drink coffee at this hour, or is this a special occasion?"

You lighthearted tone caught him off guard, and he found himself fumbling for an answer. "It… helps clear the head," he said awkwardly, his voice gruff. "After a long day."

You nodded, watching him with that same amused glint in your eyes. "You sound like an old man."

Ghost blinked, thrown completely off balance by your words. His brain struggled to keep up. "… Old man?" he repeated, his voice uncharacteristically uncertain.

You laughed softly, your eyes twinkling. "Yeah, you know—late-night coffee, brooding alone in the dark. Very grumpy-grandpa behavior."

For a moment, Ghost was utterly speechless. Him? An old man? He was only forty—forty. That wasn’t old, not by a long shot. But the way you said it, so casually, so teasingly, made him feel like he’d suddenly aged a hundred years.

He could feel the heat rising up his neck, creeping under his mask. He tried to brush it off, but he could tell from the way your smile widened that you had noticed.

"Careful, Lieutenant," you said with a grin, "you’re turning red."

He stiffened, his ears burning beneath the fabric of his mask. Was he really? How could you tell? Damn it, he wasn’t used to this kind of thing. He wasn’t used to you—this kind of teasing, this playful back-and-forth. Most people gave him a wide berth, never trying to joke or poke at him. But this Doc? You seemed to find his discomfort amusing, not intimidating.

"I’m not—" he started, but his voice cracked, and he cut himself off, his jaw clenching in frustration.

You laughed again, a sound that was far too light for the darkness in his head, and something in him twisted. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was confusing. He wasn’t supposed to feel like this—flustered, off balance.

"You know," you said softly, your voice gentle now, "you don’t always have to be so serious. I bet you’re a nice guy under all that gruffness."

His hands tightened around the mug, his mind racing. Nice guy? You didn’t know anything about him. If you did—if you knew the things he’d done, the blood on his hands—you wouldn’t say that. You'd run as far away as possible.

But you were not running. You were sitting here, sipping tea and teasing him like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"I’m just not good at this," he muttered finally, his voice low. "Talking."

"Talking?" you repeated, raising an eyebrow. "You’re doing fine so far."

He shook his head. "Not with people. Not like this." He struggled to find the right words. "Women."

Your smile softened, and you rested your chin on your hand, watching him with a mix of amusement and something else—something gentler. "Well, I’ll let you in on a secret, Lieutenant. You don’t have to be good at it. You just have to try."

Your words hit him in a strange way, sinking in deeper than they should have. He wasn’t used to anyone talking to him like this, and it threw him off completely.

He cleared his throat, straightening in his seat and trying to sound more like the soldier he was. "I, uh… appreciate the company," he said, his voice more formal than he intended, the words stiff and awkward. "You’re very kind, Doctor."

You tilted your head, your smile turning sly. "Very proper of you, Lieutenant. Quite the British gentleman, aren’t you?"

The heat in his face flared again, and this time he couldn’t hide it. His ears burned, his whole body stiffening at your teasing.

You grinned. "See? Old man."

Ghost gripped his mug tightly, staring into the coffee as if it could save him. He didn’t know how to deal with this. With you. But despite the awkwardness, despite his complete lack of experience with these kinds of conversations, there was something about your laughter, your smile, that made him feel… different.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe.

"You're lucky I’m a gentleman," he muttered under his breath, though the faintest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

Chapter 4: In Her Head

You lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, the soft glow of your bedside lamp casting shadows across the room. You had been tossing and turning for what felt like hours, but sleep refused to come. Your mind was too busy, too wrapped up in something—someone—you couldn't quite shake off.

Lieutenant Riley.

Ghost.

You groaned softly, turning over to bury your face in your pillow, trying to drown out the persistent swirl of thoughts. It was ridiculous. Completely irrational. The man barely spoke, yet here you were, replaying every word he had said to you in the mess hall over and over again.

"You’re lucky I’m a gentleman."

Your heart raced a little faster just thinking about it. The way he’d said it, his voice low and gruff, almost teasing—but not quite. There had been something else in his tone. Something you couldn’t put your finger on. What had he meant by that? Was it just an offhand comment, or… was there more to it?

You squeezed your eyes shut, trying to banish the thought. You were overthinking it, you had to be. Ghost was… Ghost. Quiet, stoic, a man of few words. And yet, something about the way he had said those words had gotten under your skin. Something about the way he’d been so awkward, so stiff, and then just slipped in that little comment—like he had more to say but was holding back.

You felt a surge of heat bloom in your chest and groaned again, rolling onto your back. Why was he driving you crazy like this?

It wasn’t just what he’d said, though. It was everything about him. The way he carried himself, that looming presence that filled any room he entered. The mask, the cold exterior, the scars you’d seen but hadn’t commented on. He was a mystery wrapped in danger, and for some reason, that intrigued you far more than it should have.

You wasn’t usually like this. You were professional, composed, always focused on your work. You’d been around soldiers for years—tough men, broken men, and everything in between. But Ghost… he was different. It wasn’t just the reputation that preceded him, or even the scars that marked his skin. It was the way he seemed so untouchable, like he was walled off from the rest of the world, keeping everyone at a distance.

Except, maybe, you’d gotten closer than most.

And that thought sent another rush of heat through you.

"God," you muttered, covering your face with your hands, feeling utterly ridiculous. You were a grown woman, a doctor, and here you were acting like a teenager, flustered over a few words from a man who probably didn’t think twice about it.

But… what if he had meant something else?

The way he’d looked at you through the mask, the way his voice had dropped just a little lower, like he was trying to be respectful but couldn’t quite hide the edge of something more. It made you wonder—was there more to him than what he let on? Was there a part of him that was just as caught off guard by their interaction as you were?

You could still see him in your mind’s eye—his massive frame sitting across from you, the way he had stiffened when you teased him, the brief flash of embarrassment when you’d called him an “old man.” And then that parting comment…

"You’re lucky I’m a gentleman."

You cursed under your breath. You had no idea why it had affected you so much, but damn it, it had. Now, here you were, lying in bed, thinking about a man who was as closed off as they came.

You sat up, frustrated with yourself. Why did he get to you like this? It wasn’t just the words—it was him. The mystery, the danger, the fact that you couldn’t quite figure him out. And maybe, deep down, you didn’t want to figure him out. Maybe part of you liked the idea of peeling back the layers, seeing what was beneath all that hardness.

But that was dangerous thinking. He was a soldier, a man with more trauma than you could probably understand. And you were just his doctor. Nothing more. Nothing should be more.

So why did you feel like there was something simmering just beneath the surface every time you were in the same room?

You sighed heavily, flopping back down on your bed and staring at the ceiling once again. It was late, and you needed sleep, but all you could think about was that deep voice, those haunted eyes behind the mask, and the way he had looked at you—like maybe he wasn’t as unaffected as he tried to seem.

The idea sent a shiver down your spine. You were not sure if it was excitement or something else entirely.

For a moment, you let yourself indulge in the thought. What if he had meant something more? What if there was something brewing between them, something unspoken but real? It was a ridiculous notion, you knew, but still… it was there, lingering in the back of your mind.

"You’re lucky I’m a gentleman."

Your pulse quickened, and you bit your lip. Maybe you were lucky.

But the real question was… how long could a man like Ghost stay a gentleman?

Chapter 5: Unmasked Moments

You stared blankly at the ceiling, sprawled across your bed, utterly bored. It was one of your rare free days, and while the prospect of doing absolutely nothing sounded appealing at first, now you were restless. You had already gone through your usual routine—reading, tidying up your quarters, and even catching up on some paperwork—but none of it could shake the growing sense of aimlessness.

A knock on the door broke through your thoughts. Curious, you swung your legs off the bed and opened it to find one of the base’s admin personnel standing there with a note in hand.

"Doc, there’s a dinner happening tonight with some of the 141 crew and a few other personnel. You’ve been invited."

You blinked in surprise, taking the note. "A dinner? With 141?"

"Yes, ma’am. It’s informal—just a chance for everyone to unwind."

The idea of spending the evening with the elite team sounded intriguing, and besides, you needed a distraction.

"Alright, I’ll be there," you said with a smile, and the messenger nodded before leaving.

As evening rolled around, you found yourself standing in front of the mirror, smoothing out your hair and pulling on a comfortable yet flattering outfit—something casual but nice enough for dinner. You were not dressing up for anyone, you told herself, but the nerves in your stomach betrayed you. It had been a while since you’d had anything close to a social gathering, and the idea of mingling with the likes of Price, Soap, Gaz and—him—made you feel strangely jittery.

You shook the thought away as you left your quarters and headed toward the base’s rec hall where the gathering was taking place. As soon as you walked in, the familiar sounds of laughter and clinking glasses filled the air. The room was packed with soldiers and staff, mingling around tables of food and drinks.

It was a laid-back atmosphere, far removed from the usual tension and urgency that filled the base.

You greeted a few familiar faces, grabbed a drink, and made your way toward the edge of the room, scanning for anyone you knew well enough to chat with. But it wasn’t long before your eyes found him.

Ghost.

He was seated on one of the low couches against the far wall, his massive frame making the furniture seem almost too small for him. A beer was in his hand, his mask still on, but it was lifted just enough to reveal the bottom half of his face when he brought the drink to his lips. His scarred jawline, the faint shadow of stubble—just enough to make your heart skip a beat.

You froze.

The sight of him, so casual, so relaxed yet still somehow intimidating, sent a strange thrill through you. You had never seen him like this before—off-duty, with his mask lifted even a fraction. You didn’t know how to process it.

And then he saw you.

His dark eyes met yours from across the room, and he nodded. Just a simple acknowledgment, nothing more. But it was enough to make your breath hitch. You couldn’t look away, but at the same time, you felt like you couldn’t look directly at him without your face going up in flames.

You quickly looked down at your drink, your cheeks warming with embarrassment. You felt ridiculous, like you were some lovesick schoolgirl caught staring at the mysterious bad boy across the room. Get it together, you scolded yourself.

From the corner of your eye, you saw Soap approaching, a mischievous grin already plastered across his face. Oh no.

"Ah, Doc," Soap greeted, his Scottish accent thick with amusement as he sidled up beside you. "Enjoying the view, eh?"

Your eyes widened. "What? No! I mean—" You stammered, completely flustered, but Soap just laughed, clearly relishing your discomfort.

"It’s alright, lass, no need to be shy," he teased, taking a swig of his own beer. "Ghost over there, eh? He’s a fine catch if ye can get him to talk, y’know."

You blushed deeper, trying to play it cool. "I was just… looking around. Not at him specifically."

"Sure ye were," Soap winked, clearly not buying it. He gave a friendly nudge. "Yer lucky, though. He doesn’t usually come out to these things. I reckon you’re the reason he’s even here."

Your heart skipped a beat at that, and you gave him a skeptical look. "Why would you think that?"

Soap shrugged, glancing over at Ghost, who was now quietly sipping his beer and watching the room with those sharp, unreadable eyes. "Ghost keeps to himself, aye, but ever since ye started patching him up, he’s been… well, a little less ghostly, if ye catch my drift."

You bit your lip, unsure how to respond. You glanced over at Ghost again, your gaze lingering on the way his mask sat just below his nose as he drank. You had to admit, seeing him like this—so out of his element but still carrying that intense presence—was doing things to your body you were not sure how to handle.

Soap, ever the opportunist, seemed to sense your turmoil. "Tell you what, why don’t you go over and say hi? He might appreciate the company."

You shook your head quickly. "I—no, that’s—"

Before you could finish, Soap had already started to move toward Ghost, waving you along. "C’mon, Doc. We can’t let the big man sit all alone, can we?"

Panic rose in your chest, but Soap was already too far ahead. You had no choice but to follow, Your heart thudding in your chest as you approached Ghost.

When you reached him, Ghost looked up, his dark eyes flicking between you and Soap, but his expression remained unreadable behind the mask.

"Ghost," Soap grinned, plopping down on the couch next to him. "Look who decided to join us. The Doc herself." He patted the seat beside him, motioning for you to sit as well.

You hesitated, glancing nervously at Ghost, who simply nodded in acknowledgment. It was such a small gesture, but it made your stomach flip.

"Uh, hey," you said awkwardly, lowering yourself into the seat beside Soap. You could feel Ghost’s presence next to you like a magnetic pull, even though he wasn’t directly looking at you.

For a moment, there was an awkward silence as you tried to figure out what to say. But before you could speak, Soap leaned over and grinned at you.

"Y’know, Doc," Soap said, not-so-subtly nudging Ghost with his elbow, "our friend here doesn’t talk much, but he’s a real charmer if ye can get him goin’. Right, Ghost?"

Ghost shot Soap a look that could’ve frozen fire, but Soap just chuckled, clearly enjoying himself.

You couldn’t help but laugh, though your nerves were still buzzing. You glanced over at Ghost, who shifted slightly, his eyes narrowing at Soap before he looked away, lifting his beer to take another sip.

The mask was still pulled up just enough for you to see his jawline, the scars that told stories you could only imagine. And for some reason, that sight—just that small glimpse of his face—made your heart pound even harder.

"Well," you said finally, trying to shake off your awkwardness, "I’m sure he’s got his own brand of charm."

Soap grinned, clapping Ghost on the shoulder. "Aye, Doc, that he does." Then he leaned in conspiratorially, lowering his voice just enough for both of them to hear. "Ye should try askin’ him sometime. Might be surprised what ye get."

Ghost’s jaw tightened visibly, and you felt a blush rise up your neck.

You were surprised. But it wasn’t just what Soap had said. It was the way Ghost’s quiet presence seemed to fill the space around them, the way his simple nods and unreadable expressions made you feel so off balance. You couldn’t look him in the eye, not with Soap grinning like a devil and Ghost so silently… there.

Maybe Soap was right. Maybe there was something more to Ghost than you realized.

And maybe you weren't quite ready for it.

Chapter 6: Now or Never

As if on cue, Soap leaned back with an exaggerated sigh, stretching his arms overhead. "Ah, would ye look at that. I think I’ve got… somethin’ important to take care of." He glanced between Ghost and you, his grin wide and devilish. "Real important. Like… paperwork. Lots of it."

You raised an eyebrow, struggling to hide your amusement—and your panic. Soap’s excuse was absurd, painfully obvious. Even Ghost looked at him sideways, but the Scotsman was already standing up and patting them both on the shoulder.

"Y’alright then, have fun, ye two." And with a wink in your direction, Soap disappeared into the crowd, leaving them alone.

Your heart immediately started racing, a flood of nerves and excitement making it impossible to sit still. You stole a glance at Ghost. He was sitting there, stock-still, his beer now forgotten in his hand. For a moment, neither of you said anything, the air between you charged with something unspoken.

He wasn’t looking away from you, though. His gaze was fixed—dark, intense, like he was weighing something in his mind. The usual hard edge to his expression seemed softened, but there was still something undeniably dangerous about the way he looked at you. Not in a threatening way, but in a way that made your pulse quicken.

Finally, Ghost broke the silence, his voice lower than usual, rougher—maybe from the alcohol, maybe from something else entirely. "I don’t think I can be a gentleman for you tonight, Doc. I’m a bit drunk."

The words hit you like a punch to the chest. Every nerve in your body sparked, your breath catching in your throat as your heart pounded wildly. You wanted to scream, to laugh, to run, to do something to deal with the overwhelming rush of heat that surged through you at that moment. But instead, you just sat there, wide-eyed, struggling to process what he’d just said.

He can’t be a gentleman…

He was warning you. There was something raw and honest about it—an admission that he was trying to stay in control, but tonight… maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to. And the worst part was, you didn’t want him to either.

You swallowed hard, your mind racing. Your pulse was thundering in your ears, and for the first time in what felt like forever, you had no idea what to say. You should probably laugh it off, or make some lighthearted joke to break the tension, but your brain wasn’t cooperating. All you could think about was the way he was looking at you, the way his words felt like a door opening—an invitation to step through, into something unknown and maybe a little dangerous.

Panic and excitement clashed inside you, and before you could stop yourself, you blurted out, "Do you… want to go outside? Catch some air?"

As soon as the words left your mouth, you wanted to scream at yourself. Catch some air? That was the best you could come up with? It was so painfully obvious that you didn’t just want air, and you could already feel your cheeks burning with embarrassment. You half expected Ghost to call you out on it, to laugh or brush it off.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Ghost stared at you for a beat longer, his dark eyes narrowing slightly. He didn’t seem like the type to be easily swayed by nerves or awkwardness, but something shifted in the way he looked at you—something more calculating, as though he was deciding whether to follow your lead or stay rooted in place.

Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, he set his beer down on the table and stood. He was tall—too tall—and the full weight of his presence hit you again, even more intensely than before. He towered over you, his broad shoulders casting a shadow, and for a split second, you felt like a small, fragile thing next to him.

But then he nodded, just once, and that was all the confirmation you needed.

You quickly stood up, your hands trembling slightly as you led the way out of the crowded rec hall. You could feel Ghost behind you, his footsteps heavy but measured, and your mind was racing in a hundred different directions. What am I doing? What’s about to happen?

Both of you stepped outside into the cool night air, the sudden drop in temperature making you shiver. The sky above was a blanket of stars, and the quietness of the night felt like a stark contrast to the tension that hummed between you. You glanced over at Ghost, who had stopped a few steps away from you, his hands shoved into his pockets, the mask still in place.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The silence stretched out, the weight of what wasn’t being said almost unbearable. Your heart was still racing, your mind a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. You wanted to say something—anything—to break the tension, but all the words stuck in your throat.

Ghost was the one to break the silence first.

"Air’s not what you were really after, was it?" His voice was low, almost teasing, but there was an edge to it—a challenge.

You froze, your heart skipping a beat. You could deny it, laugh it off, pretend like you hadn’t just invited him outside for reasons that had nothing to do with catching air. But the look in his eyes told you he already knew. He wasn’t playing games. He was waiting.

You swallowed, your pulse thrumming in your ears. It was a now or never moment, and you knew it.

"No," you admitted, your voice quieter than you intended. "It wasn’t."

The admission hung in the air between you, heavy with implications. You had no idea what was going to happen next, but the thrill of it—of stepping into the unknown with Ghost—sent a shiver down your spine. And as his gaze darkened, a part of you knew that after tonight, things between them would never be the same.

Chapter 7: No Turning Back, But I'm Turning Back (Final)

Ghost had barely taken a few steps when your voice cut through the cool night air.

“I don’t want you to stop.”

The words were soft but sure, carrying with them a weight that halted him in his tracks. His broad back was turned to you, his shoulders rigid as if he were trying to hold himself together. For a moment, it felt like time stretched endlessly between you—his silence was loud, almost unbearable.

You didn’t know if he was going to keep walking or if your words had reached him, but you stood there, heart pounding, waiting for something—anything.

Ghost remained frozen, his large frame still as a statue, but you could sense the storm of thoughts racing through his mind. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he turned his head just enough to glance over his shoulder at you, his dark eyes gleaming in the dim light.

"Do you know what you’re asking for?" His voice was low, almost a growl, as if he were struggling to maintain control. The tension between you was electric, the air thick with the weight of everything that had been left unsaid.

You swallowed hard, your chest tight with nerves and anticipation, but you didn’t hesitate. You nodded. You knew what you were asking for, even if the gravity of it made your skin prickle with uncertainty.

For a long, agonizing moment, Ghost said nothing. He just stood there, staring at you over his shoulder, his eyes dark and unreadable. It felt like a test—a final chance to walk away from the edge you were both teetering on.

But you didn’t move. You held his gaze, your heart pounding so hard it felt like it might burst from your chest. Whatever this was between you—this dangerous, fragile thing—it was too strong to deny. And you didn’t want to. Not anymore.

That was all Ghost needed.

With a sharp exhale, he turned fully, his eyes never leaving yours. The weight of his gaze was intense, almost suffocating, but you didn’t look away. His expression was hard to read—somewhere between desire and caution—but there was no mistaking the shift in him. The tension that had held him back all night seemed to dissolve as if your words had given him permission to let go.

Without a word, Ghost closed the distance between you in a few long strides. He stood in front of you, towering over you like a shadow, his body radiating heat and something darker—something you felt pulling you in.

"Come with me," he said, his voice rough and strained. It wasn’t a question; it was a command, but one that sent a shiver down your spine. There was no more hesitation, no more doubt.

You followed.

The walk to his room was silent, your footsteps barely audible as you trailed behind him through the dimly lit hallways. Your pulse thrummed in your ears, every step feeling heavier than the last, the tension between you growing with each passing second. The base was quiet at this hour, the distant hum of activity fading away the closer you got to Ghost’s quarters.

When you finally reached his door, Ghost paused for a moment, his hand resting on the handle. He looked down at the floor, his shoulders tense, as if he was wrestling with himself one last time. Then, with a deep breath, he opened the door and stepped inside.

His room was as you expected—sparse, utilitarian. No personal touches, no signs of the man who lived there beyond the few pieces of gear scattered on the floor. It was a place built for solitude, a reflection of the man who had spent years shutting out the world. And now, here you were, standing in the middle of it with him.

Ghost closed the door behind you, the soft click of the latch sealing you both inside. The silence was thick, almost suffocating, as he turned to face you, his dark eyes scanning your face, as if searching for any trace of hesitation. But there was none. Not anymore.

He took a step closer, and then another, until he was standing in front of you, his body so close that you could feel the heat radiating off of him. The tension in the air was almost unbearable, the weight of the moment pressing down on both of you.

Then, slowly, you reached up, your fingers trembling slightly as they hovered just beneath the bottom of his mask. Your heart raced, the reality of what you were doing sinking in.

Ghost didn’t move. He didn’t stop you.

For a man who always controlled every situation, who kept everyone at a distance, letting you do this felt monumental. His chest rose and fell with heavy breaths, and for the first time, you sensed that you were seeing him—not Ghost, the relentless operator, but Simon—the man beneath the mask.

Your fingers brushed the rough fabric of his balaclava, and then, with a gentleness you didn’t know you possessed, you began to pull it up. Inch by inch, the mask came away, revealing more of the man beneath it. His lips, scarred and rough, were the first to appear, and you hesitated, suddenly overwhelmed by how intimate the moment was.

But then you looked up at him—into those dark, intense eyes—and all your hesitation vanished.

Ghost let out a breath, and in that moment, you knew he was letting go of something more than just the mask. He was letting go of the walls he had built, the armor he wore so tightly around his soul.

The fabric slid further up, revealing more of him, and he didn’t stop you.

He let you see him.

It wasn't like that time in the medical wing—when Ghost had reluctantly let you see his face, almost as if under duress. This time, it was different. The room was quiet, the air thick with something far more intimate. When the fabric of his mask finally hit the ground, you weren’t looking at Ghost anymore.

You were looking at Simon.

And everything seemed to revolve around the way the man—Simon—was staring at you.

A slight grimace tugged at his lips, a hint of unease flickering across his expression. He was trying to endure your stare on his imperfect face without completely falling apart, and the vulnerability of that moment hit you harder than you expected. The scars that marred his features told stories of battles long past, of pain and survival. But none of them could take away from the fact that, standing before you now, Simon was more human than ever.

His eyes never left yours, not even for a second, as if gauging your reaction, bracing for the judgment he’d convinced himself was inevitable. But that wasn’t what you felt. Not even close.

Before you could say anything, he took a slow step toward you, and suddenly, the air felt hot. Heavy. The closeness made your heart pound in your chest, your breath catching as you realized just how raw this moment was.

There was something almost magnetic about the way he moved—like everything was happening at his pace, dictated by the quiet authority he always carried. His hands, large and rough from years of warfare, reached for your waist with a gentleness that surprised you. The contrast between his hardened exterior and the soft way he touched you sent a shiver down your spine.

For a moment, you didn’t know what to do. Everything seemed to move according to his silent commands, each touch, each breath, timed to a rhythm only he controlled.

Simon’s gaze remained unwavering, his eyes following every subtle shift in your expression. The way you could now see his lips—permanently pressed into a tight line—only added to the weight of the moment. His short blond hair, tousled and messy from the constant use of his mask, gave him a disheveled appearance. The shadow of facial hair only added to that ruggedness, making him seem all the more real—human.

Simon was always an imposing figure, but seeing him like this, completely unguarded, made the air between you feel electric. His thumb brushed lightly against your waist.

The sigh that caught in your chest was involuntary. You hadn’t expected him to be so tender, hadn’t expected this—but it felt like everything you didn’t know you wanted.

His voice, low and rough, broke the silence between you, and you could hear the weight of his years, the tiredness buried beneath the surface.

“I still wonder what it was you saw in this old man,” he murmured, the faintest trace of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. The words were a callback to that night in the mess hall, “But I want you to keep seeing it, Doc.”

The raw honesty in his voice sent a tremor through you. He was giving you permission, letting you in past the walls he’d built for years. And as his hand slowly traced its way from your waist to your jaw, cupping your face like it was something to be cherished, you realized that you didn’t need to speak to show him what you saw in him.

So you did the only thing that felt right.

You leaned in, closing the distance between you in one soft, deliberate motion, your lips brushing against his. The kiss was tentative at first—slow, careful, as if testing the waters of something neither of you could quite name. But the moment his lips pressed fully against yours, everything else fell away.

His other hand came to rest on the small of your back, pulling you closer as the kiss deepened, the heat between you sparking into something more urgent. He tasted like the remnants of beer and something distinctly him, and it made your head swim.

Simon kissed you like he’d been waiting a lifetime for this moment, like he was pouring everything he couldn’t say into the way his lips moved against yours. His grip tightened slightly, and you could feel the restraint in him—the battle between wanting more and holding himself back.

When you pulled away, just enough to look into his eyes, you could see the struggle in them. He was fighting with himself, with the part of him that always believed he didn’t deserve this. That he didn’t deserve you.

But you weren’t going to let him fall into that spiral tonight. Not here. Not now.

You rested your hand on his chest, feeling the rapid thump of his heart beneath your palm. “I see you, Simon,” you whispered, your voice barely above a breath, but you knew he heard it.

His grip on you tightened just slightly, and for a moment, you thought he might say something, but instead, he kissed you again—deeper this time, more certain. The hesitation from earlier melted away, replaced by something rawer, hungrier.

And in that moment, there were no more masks. No more walls. Just Simon and you, alone in the quiet of his room, the world outside forgotten.

There was something softer in the way he looked at you, a gentleness you hadn’t seen before—an unspoken promise hanging between you both.

His hand still lingered on your face, rough fingers brushing against your skin as if memorizing every line, every contour. His eyes were darker now, heavy with something unspoken, and his breath came out in measured, almost controlled exhales.

“You can leave yet,” Simon’s voice was low, thick with restraint, and his British accent more pronounced. His thumb gently traced your lower lip, his touch delicate despite the tension coiled in his body. He was holding back—waiting for you to give him the go-ahead.

You could feel the heat between you rising, your body already leaning into him, craving more of that touch, more of him. Your heart racing as the words finally left your lips. “Can I?”

Simon’s hand slipped from your face to your waist, pulling you firmly against him. The sudden closeness made your breath hitch, and you felt the hardness of his chest press against yours as he leaned down, his lips brushing your ear.

“No,” he murmured, his voice rough and gravelly, sending shivers down your spine. The tension that had been building between you all this time was palpable, a heady mix of anticipation and need.

His lips finally found yours, but this kiss was different. It wasn’t soft or tentative like before. It was urgent, demanding, as if he couldn’t hold back any longer. His hands roamed your body with a sense of purpose, his touch both possessive and gentle, leaving a trail of heat wherever he went.

You gasped as his mouth left your lips and traveled down your neck, his stubble grazing your skin in a way that made you shiver. “I can’t be gentle forever,” he whispered against your collarbone, his teeth nipping lightly before his tongue soothed the sting.

Your fingers tangled in his short blond hair as you tilted your head back, giving him more access, wanting more. “I don’t want you to be,” you whispered back, your voice barely steady.

A low, guttural sound rumbled from his chest at your words, and you felt his grip tighten on your hips, grounding you as his other hand slipped beneath the hem of your shirt, his fingertips brushing against your bare skin.

He make you walk backwards to the bed, and as you sat there, he talked,"Lay down."

It was an order.

You laid back onto the mattress, your heart pounding in your ears as you watched Simon move towards you with an intense grace.

His gaze never left yours as he climbed onto the bed next to you, propping himself up on his elbow. A small smirk played at the corners of his lips as he reached out and gently tugged at your shirt. He wanted nothing more than to rip it off of you, to take you right then and there, but he held back. You were worth the patience.

Instead, he slowly slid his hand underneath the fabric, tracing patterns along your skin as his lips descended upon yours once again. This time, he kissed you deeply, hungrily, fueled by the fire that had been ignited inside of him since he first saw you standing there, completely and utterly captivated.

He dragged his lips down your jawline, across your throat, and down your chest as he lifted your shirt higher and higher until eventually, it was pooled around your waist. He paused, taking in the sight of you laying there before him, bared and vulnerable.

He leaned down and placed a single, chaste kiss on the swell of your breast, hidden beneath the thin layer of bra fabric before moving lower to rest beside you, bringing one leg over yours as he settled in

You arched your back slightly, pressing your breasts forward in a silent invitation. Your breathing quickened as you gazed up at Simon through half-lidded eyes, desire etching lines of pleasure on your flushed face.

You wanted him, all of him.

Simon could practically hear your heart pounding in your chest, matching the rhythm of his own. When you arched closer to him like that, he almost lost control, his restraint teetering on the edge.

Slowly, he lifted his gaze to meet yours, his dark eyes clouded with lust and hunger. There was no denying what he wanted now.

"That's it,"Simon growled, his voice deeper and huskier than usual as he leaned in, closing the distance between you both.

His free hand moved to trace the outline of your bra strap, following it down until his fingers brushed against the exposed skin on your side. "Keep looking at me like that, love." He said, his voice barely above a whisper against your skin. But his intentions were loud and clear.

Simon could hardly believe that this was happening - that you wanted this too. Yet here you were, pressed up against him, responding to his every touch. He couldn't remember ever feeling such a rush of adrenaline. With a slow exhale, Simon let go of the last vestiges of his doubts and surrendered fully to the moment.

His hands reached the waistband of your jeans, and time stopped running right there for you.

"Simon," you whispered softly, your hand in his hair.

"Hm, save that for later. You'll need it," he replied against your ear.

Hearing his confidence right there, when moments before he seemed to be fighting himself for just kissing you, was certainly an attractive form of duality.

He unbuttoned your jeans, and before you could react to it, he pulled himslef off you just so he could remove them along with your shoes. His attentive touch, as if he was in no hurry at all, and yet you stood there, breathing heavily, cursing under your breath at how unaffected he looked.

And when he lowered his face to your still covered heat, you knew he was about to lick every single though off of you.

Simon's breath ghosted over your heated skin as his tongue traced a path over the cotton covering your sex. His finger going up and down, tracing the line formed on your panties.

All you could do was grip his hair and close your eyes at the feeling.

He looked up at you through thick lashes, satisfaction glowing in his expression as he felt your body tremble beneath him. "No, look at me," he said then, his hand snaked downwards, pushing aside the remaining fabric to expose you fully to his hungry gaze. He wasted no time in delving into your slick folds, eager to taste the sweetness that was uniquely you.

Suckling lightly at your clit while flicking it with his thumb, making sure you were looking at him at all times, he wanted your eyes on his mouth buried in your wet pussy, he drove two fingers inside of you, filling you completely. "So wet already," he purred huskily against you, reveling in the guttural sounds spilling from your mouth. His cock throbbed painfully in his jeans, desperate to join the intimate dance.

But not yet. For now, he enjoyed watching you lose control, relished hearing his name slipping from your lips in pure ecstasy. And he knew, deep down inside, that this was just the beginning - their primal connection was far from satiated. But that was okay because right now, in this moment, they belonged entirely to each other.

Your legs quivered and your toes curled as waves of pleasure crashed over you. That familiar feeling in your belly getting bigger every time his tongue played with your clit, and his finger curled in your cunt, you gripped Simon's hair tightly, nails digging into his scalp as you tried to ground yourself amidst the storm of sensations threatening to sweep you away.

The orgasm hit you mercilessly, and although you cried at him to go slower, his fingers and tongue kept up the torturous rhythm.

Feeling you pulse around his fingers, knowing he brought you to the brink of oblivion was intoxicating. Simon slowly removed his digits from within you, drawing slow circles around your sensitive bud before trailing his tantalizing touch back down again.

He glanced up, catching your hazed expression. Seeing the want reflected in your eyes fueled his desire, stirred the beast within him even further. "Is that all, baby?" he taunted, his breath hot against your heated flesh.

You shook your head, unable to utter a word, or at least not one that made any sense.

With another grin, he sank back between your spread thighs, this time replacing his fingers with his tongue— exploring, worshipping every inch he found there. His big and rough hands keeping you in place as he felt your climax hit you once more, he chuckled soflty against you at the way you cursed under your breath.

"Talkative little thing, aren't you?" he murmured, looking at his artwork, running his tongue across his lips in an attempt to taste whatever was left of you on them.

He finished sliding your panties off, completely removing them from the way. His hands reached your shirt, helping you soflty to take it off, the same with your bra, leaving little kisses in your skin.

"Are you ready for me, baby?" Simon asked, his voice full of desire and heat. His gaze bore into yours, searching for any sign of hesitation, but finding none. Instead, he saw eagerness, want, and need. And he knew then that you were as invested in this as he was.

Slowly, he climbed back up your body, discarding the remnants of his own clothing on the way, until finally, he was hovering above you, their naked bodies mere inches apart. The weight of his erection pressed against your stomach, promising pleasures untold. Without waiting for an answer, he claims your lips again in a hungry kiss, taking in your taste, your warmth, your light.

After what felt like an eternity, he pulled away, panting heavily. "I need you," he admitted hoarsely, his voice laden with a desperation that made butterflies explode in your belly. "I've needed you for so long."

Before you could respond, his lips were on yours again, his tongue slipping past your lips in a slow and sensual dance filled with promise.

"Will you keep those pretty eyes on me?" he asked. And you nodded with a shaking breath.

"I'll try."

His hand moves to cup the back of your knee, lifting your leg up and around his hip, deepening the contact between them.

Despite the overwhelming urge to ravage you right there and then, he maintains control, showing you with every touch and caress that this is more than just a sexual encounter for him. It's a chance to connect on some deeper level he had long forgotten existed, a level where communication doesn't require words but actions instead.

"Please..." you whispered.

"You don't have to ask twice." Simon growls possessively against your skin as he continues to leave a trail of hot kisses and nips on your collarbone, before moving lower to wrap his lips around one peaked nipple. His tongue swirls expertly around the hardened tip, eliciting a gasp of pleasure from your lips. At the same time, he uses his free hand to continue fondling and pinching at the other neglected nub. He can feel the way his ministrations cause a chain reaction through your body, your hips arching involuntarily into his own hardness still trapped by his jeans.

Feeling impatient, Simon finally lines himself up, the smooth head of his shaft pressing against your entrance as he slowly pushes inside you. The fit is tight, causing a wave of satisfaction washing over him at claiming this woman that got him wrapped so tightly around her finger.

But despite the surge of raw dominant power thrumming through his veins, Simon is surprisingly gentle as he starts thrusting into you, letting you adjust and accommodate him before picking up speed.

"So tight for me, love. Such a good girl," he murmured in your ear as little moans scape from your mouth, yourr nails digging into his shoulders as you wraps your legs around his waist, urging him deeper.

Without breaking eye contact, Simon slammed deeper inside you, bottoming out with a grunt. He pulled back and pounded into you, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Each thrust shook your body on the bed underneath him. Every hard, fast motion of his hips meeting yours drew them deeper and deeper into an intimate dance that neither wanted to pull away from. His fingers dug into your wrists above your head, pinning them in place, a display of dominance to make you squirm in delight under him.

"Simon! I can't..." you cried, but only making the satisfaction roaring in his ears as he claimed you, a low growl vibrating from him with every deep thrust. Hearing you whimper, struggling against him only served to urge him on.

"C'mon you can take it, you can take my cock," he murmured, his hands leaving your wrist to pull your legs on his shoudlers, and you just saw stars.

But he did it, gentle as ever before, he began rhythmically driving himself in a slow steady pace, letting the building desire between you escalate more organically this time.

"Eyes on me," he muttered when you closed your eyes for a moment.

He loved your eyes, the way you looked at him when his dick was fully inside you, it was driving him crazy.

Slowly, he pulled back only to slide back in, each thrust slow and calculated, fueling the growing pleasure between you. He kept his eyes trained on you as he maintained the steady pace you desired. His fingers moved up to gently trace your cheeks before plunging back into her mouth.

He loved the sounds you made, whimpers mixed with moans as he drove himself deeper into your core. The sight of your completely at his mercy, completely submitted to him was exhilarating. His hands explored further, tracing down from your cheeks, along your neck, before finally reaching your breasts where he squeezed gently and rolled your hardened nipples between his fingers.

"Gorgeous girl," he growled possessively as he pumped faster but not forcefully. The wet slick sound filled the room along with your heavy breaths. "Taking me so well."

For tonight, he thought, knowing he wouldn't be able to offer you more. Tonight, she belonged to me. He planned on making it unforgettable for you.

Your inner walls clenched around him, squeezing tighter as another orgasm built. "Oh god, oh god, yes!"

Simon didn't miss the tremor in your voice, the hitch in your breath, and he could see the climax approaching, edging closer with each thrust he made. It pushed him further, the anticipation building, the desperate need to ensure you reached your peak before he did.

His fingers dug deeper into your thighs as he continued to piston in and out of you, a hand going down to your swollen clit, driving you to the brink, watching you fall. Your moans grew louder, more urgent, your nails scratching down his arms.

And then you came undone, your muscles clamping down hard around him as your juices coated his cock. He gritted his teeth against the overwhelming pleasure threatening to steal his control, forcing himself to slow down, giving you a chance to come down from your high.

Your body quivered and shuddered beneath him as waves of ecstasy washed over you. "Please I can't take it anymore, Simon..."

"M'gonna fill your womb so good, can I, love?," Simon murmured huskily, his fingers lightly teasing the damp strands of hair sticking to your forehead. And when you nodded, he let himself go, spilling himself deep inside you. The intensity of his release, coupled with hearing you beg, only amplified his satisfaction and possession of you.

"That's it, good girl... Good fucking girl..."

As your breaths slowed down and your orgasms subsided, he lowered himself onto his elbows beside you, your chests rising and falling in sync. He buried his nose against your neck, inhaling your sweet scent mixed with your combined heat. "You did it so good," he whispered softly, placing soft kisses along her jawline.

His hand traveled down your body, tracing the curve of your waist and resting possessively on your hip. Every part of you was now etched into his memory - a living, tangible reminder of this night.

Part of him wanted to believe that perhaps someday, when everything settled down again, there could be more moments like these. But the other part of him knew better than anyone the cruelty of reality. And the fact that this was probably the closest he would ever get to having someone truly belonging to him.

The room was quiet except for the soft sound of your breathing beside him. Simon lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, the warmth of your body pressed against his side. The weight of the moment—the intimacy you’d shared—lingered in the air, but it did nothing to quiet the storm in his mind.

You slept soundly, curled up against him, your face peaceful in the dim light. It should have been enough. But for Simon, the silence was filled with something darker, something heavy that gnawed at him in the darkness.

What now?

That thought repeated itself over and over. He had let his guard down, let you in. He’d crossed a line he never should’ve—because he knew how it would end. No matter what, this would break you both, eventually.

He closed his eyes, frustration welling up inside him. He could feel the tightness in his chest, the creeping realization of what came next. It was inevitable. No matter how much you had seen of him tonight, there was more—so much more—that he could never show you. The ghosts, the demons, the weight of his past—they were too heavy, too dangerous for someone like you to carry.

He was no good for you. Never had been. You deserved more than the broken man lying next to you now.

The moment had been perfect—too perfect. And now all he could think about was how it was going to fall apart. You would wake up, ask him for more. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, you would. You’d want more of him, more than he could give, more than he was capable of offering anyone. And when that happened, he would have to break your heart. Because that’s what he did—he pushed people away, kept them at arm’s length to protect them from the wreckage he was.

He wasn’t a man built for love, for softness, for whatever it was you saw in him. He was a soldier, a weapon. And no matter how much he wanted to believe otherwise, this—you—wasn’t something he was meant to have.

Simon’s hand slid from where it rested against your back, gently pulling away from you as he rolled out of bed, careful not to wake you. He sat on the edge of the mattress, his head in his hands, the reality of what he had to do sinking in.

In the quiet, he whispered it to himself—something he had told you once, something that had always been true.

“I’m not a gentleman.”

His voice was barely audible, a broken confession to the empty room. You couldn’t hear him, not in your deep sleep, but the weight of those words hung heavy in the air. He wasn’t a man built to stay. He never had been.

With a heavy sigh, Simon stood and began to get dressed. Each movement was slow, deliberate, as if dragging out the moment before he’d have to leave. He glanced back at you, still sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the storm of emotions he was fighting.

You stirred slightly, just enough to hear the faint rustle of his clothes as he dressed. In your half-asleep state, you felt the emptiness where he had been and heard the soft sound of his footsteps moving away from you. Your eyes fluttered open for just a moment, a feeling of loss creeping in, but you didn’t stop him. Not yet.

By the time you registered what was happening, Simon was already gone. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving you alone in the quiet room, with only the fading warmth of where he’d been next to you.

And just like that, he was gone, pushing you away in the only way he knew how.

[connectingconstellations]

86

Mean Girls - Charlie xcx

Oh look it's the college AU no one asked for!

James has no idea how Sarah Phillips manages to look so put together, especially since he has it on good authority that she was awake well past 4am last night. The thought of this meeting has been making him nauseous with dread all morning.

A scrape of her teeth against his ear. A breathy sound as he works his hand up under her shirt.

"We'll have to push the feature on the new tech policy major to next week," Sarah says, tapping her pencil against the bullet pointed list in front of her. Her hair is pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail. She's wearing a freaking turtleneck, of all things, and he hates that she actually manages to pull it off without looking like a frumpy librarian.

It's the skirt, he decides. It rides up because she's seated, giving him an extremely unfair view of her tight-clad legs from ankle to mid-thigh.

She sits on the desk, blouse half undone. He steps between her legs. He's going to regret this in the morning. He doesn't care.

They haven't talked about it. The only evidence that anything at all has happened between them is the text message on his phone from six o'clock this morning, asking if she made it home okay. A thumbs up reaction from her at 7:20. How is she even functional right now, when he's already on his third cup of coffee?

It unnerves him that even now, she hardly acknowledges his presence. He doesn't know what he wants from her -- she's certainly not going to announce to the entire Campus News section of the student paper that they've hooked up -- except that he feels a humiliating mix of excitement and residual embarrassment and it would be nice to know that he's affected her, too.

"James," she says eventually, her clipped British accent sending something molten straight to his abdomen. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, waiting for whatever useless assignment she's going to task him with. An a capella show, or a review of the dining hall food, or a puff piece on the squirrel-watching club.

He's always had the sense that she doesn't think him particularly intelligent. She's constantly returning the pieces he's written with red pen circling all his grammatical errors and notes like "See AP Style Guide" and "Report on FACTS, not your opinion!" He's willing to bet she went to some fancy prep school back in England. She probably thinks whatever brand of center-left politics she adheres to makes her edgy and nonconformist.

"I'm doing an investigative piece on the research impact of the executive orders stalling NIH grants." She looks up at him, and he thinks he's probably imagining the way her hand tightens around her notebook. "I'll need you to talk to some of the medical school faculty."

Oh. This is a real assignment. He forces himself to meet her gaze. "Okay."

"And," she says, and he's definitely not imagining the red splotches forming on her cheeks, "Let's meet after we're finished here. To talk about... logistics."

He is pretty sure he nods in response, but he's too focused on how loud his pulse is to register much of anything that happens for the remainder of the meeting.

"Do you -- uh -- want me to call someone for you?"

"Go away." Her makeup is smudged. It's hard to hear her over the pounding bass from the frat party raging inside.

"You're sitting in a dirty stairwell," he says. "At least let me get you some water."

"I'm not drunk."

"Okay. See you tomorrow, I guess."

He makes it about fifteen feet before he hears her call out, "Wait. Stay."

"Uh," he says once everyone's filtered out, rapping on the door of the supply closet she's commandeered into an editor's office. "Hey."

Sarah looks up at him. Her eyes are startlingly green. "Like I said. I want to talk to some faculty whose grants are in limbo."

He stares at her pointedly. She's righted the pencil cup they knocked over last night. No one would suspect that anything had happened in this office.

He knows that there are two used condoms buried at the bottom of the trash can in the men's room down the hall.

Sarah looks up at the ceiling. She folds her arms in front of her. "I don't normally do things like that," she says, eventually.

He doesn't have to ask what she means.

"It's just been a rough few weeks."

"Understood," he says.

She's searching his face for something. "I, er. I needed that. So. You know. Thank you."

He isn't sure what to do with that. He's distracted by the way her hair smells. Without thinking, he steps toward her. "You could have said that in a text."

"I wanted to talk to you about this article."

"...By thanking me for sex?"

"It's an important story," she says, but she's blushing again. Fuck, she's, like, really pretty.

"You think I'm a sloppy writer," he points out.

That makes her blink in surprise. "No, I don't."

"You give me all the shallow assignments." He knows complaining like this makes him sound like a brat. He takes a deep breath. "It's fine."

There's a look of concern on her face. "I give you the bread-and-butter assignments because I can trust you to actually get them done without messaging me for help every thirty seconds."

Now it's his turn to stare at her. "You line-edit everything I give you."

Her gaze shifts from his eyes to his mouth.

She tells him she needs to pick up her bag. She's left them in the newsroom. He walks beside her, wishing he'd worn a heavier coat.

She lets herself into the building with the spare key she's only supposed to use for emergencies. He follows her in.

"Sorry for ruining your Thursday night," she mutters.

"You aren't. I'm sorry about whatever upset you."

She laughs humorlessly. "I have shitty parents going through a shitty divorce. Also, your country is going full fascist."

"I line edit your work," she says, a distracted quality to her voice, "Because I don't need to give you big-picture comments about the organizational structure."

They're both staring at each other. James holds his breath. Eventually, Sarah says, in a sort of fake-casual tone, "So. Er. About last night."

"It doesn't have to mean anything," he says quickly, instantly hating the sinking feeling that gives him.

"Why not?" She reaches up to run her finger along the collar of his shirt.

"Uh," he stutters. She grins at his incoherence and fuck, he wants to push her against the wall and kiss that expression off her face.

The force of the fantasy stuns him for a moment. He needs to get it together. Especially because Sarah has taken a seat on her desk again, legs crossed at the knee, her skirt revealing miles of her thighs.

"James?"

"Hmm?"

"Lock the door."

[ogma-conceptions]

Why Should You Do Web Scraping for python

Web scraping is a valuable skill for Python developers, offering numerous benefits and applications. Here’s why you should consider learning and using web scraping with Python:

1. Automate Data Collection

Web scraping allows you to automate the tedious task of manually collecting data from websites. This can save significant time and effort when dealing with large amounts of data.

2. Gain Access to Real-World Data

Most real-world data exists on websites, often in formats that are not readily available for analysis (e.g., displayed in tables or charts). Web scraping helps extract this data for use in projects like:

Data analysis

Machine learning models

Business intelligence

3. Competitive Edge in Business

Businesses often need to gather insights about:

Competitor pricing

Market trends

Customer reviews Web scraping can help automate these tasks, providing timely and actionable insights.

4. Versatility and Scalability

Python’s ecosystem offers a range of tools and libraries that make web scraping highly adaptable:

BeautifulSoup: For simple HTML parsing.

Scrapy: For building scalable scraping solutions.

Selenium: For handling dynamic, JavaScript-rendered content. This versatility allows you to scrape a wide variety of websites, from static pages to complex web applications.

5. Academic and Research Applications

Researchers can use web scraping to gather datasets from online sources, such as:

Social media platforms

News websites

Scientific publications

This facilitates research in areas like sentiment analysis, trend tracking, and bibliometric studies.

6. Enhance Your Python Skills

Learning web scraping deepens your understanding of Python and related concepts:

HTML and web structures

Data cleaning and processing

API integration

Error handling and debugging

These skills are transferable to other domains, such as data engineering and backend development.

7. Open Opportunities in Data Science

Many data science and machine learning projects require datasets that are not readily available in public repositories. Web scraping empowers you to create custom datasets tailored to specific problems.

8. Real-World Problem Solving

Web scraping enables you to solve real-world problems, such as:

Aggregating product prices for an e-commerce platform.

Monitoring stock market data in real-time.

Collecting job postings to analyze industry demand.

9. Low Barrier to Entry

Python's libraries make web scraping relatively easy to learn. Even beginners can quickly build effective scrapers, making it an excellent entry point into programming or data science.

10. Cost-Effective Data Gathering

Instead of purchasing expensive data services, web scraping allows you to gather the exact data you need at little to no cost, apart from the time and computational resources.

11. Creative Use Cases

Web scraping supports creative projects like:

Building a news aggregator.

Monitoring trends on social media.

Creating a chatbot with up-to-date information.

Caution

While web scraping offers many benefits, it’s essential to use it ethically and responsibly:

Respect websites' terms of service and robots.txt.

Avoid overloading servers with excessive requests.

Ensure compliance with data privacy laws like GDPR or CCPA.

If you'd like guidance on getting started or exploring specific use cases, let me know!

[actowizdatasolutions]

✈️ Want real-time insights from #Traveloka without #triggering anti-scraping blocks?

We’ve got the strategy that leading travel platforms use — and it’s smarter than you think. At Actowiz Solutions, we help #travelbrands, #OTAs, and #analytics firms extract Traveloka data securely and reliably for: ✅ Flight fare trends & dynamic pricing ✅ Hotel availability & seasonal demand ✅ User ratings & review sentiment ✅ Package & promo tracking by region ✅ Competitor benchmarking across markets 🔐 Using #smartIProtation, #browserautomation, and anti-bot bypass techniques, we ensure accurate, #uninterrupted data access — without violating ethical boundaries. 💡 If your travel business relies on data, scraping the Traveloka app the right way is a game-changer. 📥 Ready for real-time travel market intelligence?

[nottcommitting]

special ops: lioness review: 7/10

We're 16 episodes deep into Taylor Sheridan's femme war saga, and so far it's about as dull and repetitive as empty shell casings in the middle east. For all its effort though, the 8 episode per season production does manage to keep viewers mildly entertained with a clandestine performance from Nicole Kidman and a couple of action packed sequences in the desert. Everything else is just shy of a sand storm cluster-fuck. The premise is based around seasoned Special Ops Chief, Joe McNamara portrayed by Zoe Saldaña. McNamara runs a classified CIA program known as Lioness, under which she scouts female marines to infiltrate the female family members and friend groups of terrorist organizations. Conceptionally, Lioness leaves little to critique, as it is a provocative idea that should and does work, but odd casting, dull dialogue and weak plot development make it hard for this thing to really take off. Starting with the top, most of Sheridan's characters are irritably miscast. Only Kidman, Jennifer Ehle and Martin Donovan fit their roles. Let it be known, Morgan Freeman is also obviously exempt from any criticism. Michael Kelley on the other hand just barely scrapes the bar as most of his performance is near identical to his House of Cards character, Doug Stamper. I don't mind it though. After all we're still in D.C. Not surprisingly, Dawn Olivieri is another painless addition.

On the other end, some of the worst casting choices include Dave Annable as Joe's Husband Neal, [half the time I can't understand a word he fucking says], the vast majority of the Lioness metal heads, Thad Luckinbill as QRF Team Lead and story lead Zoe Saldaña herself who in my opinion lacks the cut throat grit needed for the material. In fact the separation between actor and story is so noticeable I find myself feeling she and Kidman are portraying a dynamic similar to Glenn Close's and Rose Byrne's in Damages. In Lioness Kidman is the cold, calculating one, while Saldaña is the frantic, emotionally in tune number two. You could argue the show needs that balance to survive the same way Damages did, but I would prefer to see that empathy come out in the marines. [Apparently Sheridan agrees; citing 1.07, 1.08 & 2.05, 2.06].

Moving on to point two is dialogue. It's not the best. Most scenes and dialogue are flat, but I respect Sheridan for not flooding the script with Michael Bay's cheap military lingo. However, only Kidman and Donovan's scenes really seem to pique any interest of mine. Every time the two of them are on screen I find myself leaning in just a little bit closer, because they're the only two individuals that have an intelligent line of conversation in my opinion. Even the pacing of their delivery is some what of a cat mouse orgasm. It's a shame they don't have more screen time. I certainly prefer them to Saldaña and Annable's scenes which honestly become redundant by the middle of season 1. There's only so many times Joe can fight with her husband or her teenage daughter. No matter how you spin it, it's always the same conversation and it always will be. Two decorated government officials with high clearance however, is a prize to be won. There's no telling where the tension could land, as the conversation is always changing depending on the political climate of the country. Going forward, I should hope Sheridan would be more mindful of that, but so far he's investing far too much time in Joe and Neal's more perfect than necessary marriage. Then there's the famous Cruz Manuelos sexuality storyline. I'll give season 1 a pass. Cruz taking the time out to figure out she likes women felt natural, but seeing the exact same scenes repeat themselves in season 2 infuriated the fuck out of me. We only get 8 episodes per season. Time is of the every essence. Why Sheridan chose to waste it building up to another "I'm not sure this is who I am" make out session in bed is beyond me. Not to mention Cruz's love interest once again falling in the category of "target" was another let down. So much of it was been here, done that with no real concrete payoff. Suffice to say I hope Taylor's imagination reaches a bit further in season 3, or else people might begin to think he can't write for lesbians at fucking all. Which would really suck considering Cruz is one of the show's leads.

Last but not least is Sheridan's wobbiling plot development. Season one was thankfully more linear, but season 2 was all over the fucking place. One minute it's about a kidnapped congresswoman & the cartel, the next it's about some shady DEA guy and immigration at the border, five minutes after that it's about a random side mission in the middle east. Things changed so often and so quickly I couldn't keep up. By the end of it I remember sitting back in my chair and thinking- was all of this created just to introduce a helicopter pilot? The Lioness program could obviously use someone with wings, but it seems like the sort of thing you clear up in a conversation at the start of the season. Instead Sheridan pushes this character all over the plot and screen like two windshield wipers. And it isn't any wonder. Wikipedia cites Sheridan is currently directing, writing, and producing all 7 of his active television series. The guy is so way over extended it makes you appreciate the predictable but functionally stable offerings of Shonda Rhimes and Dick Wolf's syndicates. Both senior pioneers in television seem to understand that less is more, and quality is infinitely more effective than quantity. Needles to say if Sheridan doesn't become more realistic about his limits as a creator, hiding behind 8 episodes a season will eventually fail him and Lioness could be the first of his creations to get cancelled.

Final Review: Sheridan's got 8 more hours to convince me it's worth another season.

[thechanelmuse]

My Book Review

"If you're not paying for it, you're the product."

Your Face Belongs to Us is a terrifying yet interesting journey through the world of invasive surveillance, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and biometric data collection by way of the birth and rise of a company called Clearview AI — a software used by law enforcement and government agencies in the US yet banned in various countries. A database of 75 million images per day.

The writing is easy flowing investigative journalism, but the information (as expected) is...chile 👀. Lawsuits and court cases to boot. This book reads somewhat like one of my favorite books of all-time, How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt (my review's here), in which it delves into the history from birth to present while learning the key players along the way.

Here's an excerpt that keeps you seated for this wild ride:

“I was in a hotel room in Switzerland, six months pregnant, when I got the email. It was the end of a long day and I was tired but the email gave me a jolt. My source had unearthed a legal memo marked “Privileged & Confidential” in which a lawyer for Clearview had said that the company had scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to create a revolutionary app. Give Clearview a photo of a random person on the street, and it would spit back all the places on the internet where it had spotted their face, potentially revealing not just their name but other personal details about their life. The company was selling this superpower to police departments around the country but trying to keep its existence a secret.”

[pomegrnteseed]

artificial intelligence is not whimsical magic, it's theft

AI is to art and creativity what the Dementor's Kiss is to wix: extraction of the soul

Artificial intelligence technologies work like this:

Developer creates an algorithm that's really good at searching for patterns and following commands

Developer creates a training dataset for the technology to begin identifying patterns - this dataset is HUGE, so big that every individual datapoint (word/phrase/image etc) cannot be checked for error or problem

Developer releases AI platform

User asks the platform for a result, giving some specific parameters, often by inputting example data (e.g. images)

The algorithms run, searching through the databank for strong matches in pattern recognition, piecing together what it has learned so far to create a seemingly novel response

The result is presented to the user as "new" "generated" content, but it's just an amalgamation of existing works and words that is persuasively "human-like" (because the result has been harvested from humans' hard word!)

The training dataset that the developers feed the tool oftentimes amount to theft.

Developers are increasingly being found to scrape the internet, or even licensed art or published books - despite copyright licensing! - to train the machine.

AI does not make something out of nothing (a bit like whichever magical Law it is, Gamp's maybe? idk charms were never my main focus in HP lore). AI pulls from the resources it has been given - the STOLEN WORDS AND IMAGES - and mashes them together in ways that meet the request given by the user. It looks whimsical, but it's actually incredibly problematic.

Unregulated as they are now, AI technologies are stealing the creative ideas, the hearts and souls of art in all forms, and reducing it to pattern recognition.

On top of that, the training datasets that the technologies are given initially are often incredibly biased, leading to them replicating racist, misogynistic, and otherwise oppressive stereotypes in their results. We've already seen the "pale male" bias uncovered in the research by Dr Timnit Gebru and her colleagues. Dr Gebru has also been vocal about the ethical implications of AI in terms of the ecological costs of these softwares. This brilliant article by MIT Technology Review breaks down Dr Gebru's paper that saw her fired from Google, the main arguments of which are:

the ecological and financial costs are unsustainable

the training datasets are too large and so cannot be properly regulated for biases

research opportunity costs (AI looks impressive, but it doesn't actually understand language, so it can be misleading/misdirecting for researchers)

AI models can be convincing, but this can lead to overreliance/too much trust in their accuracy and validity

So, artificial intelligence technologies are embroiled in numerous ethical issues that are far from resolved, even beyond the very real, very important, very concerning issues of plaigarism.

In fandom terms, this comes to be even more problematic when chat bots are created to talk with characters, like the recently discussed High Reeve Draco Malfoy chatbot that has some Facebook Groups in a flurry.

Transformative fiction is tricky in terms of what is ethical/fair transformation of transformative works. I will argue, though that those hemming and hawings are moot since Sen removed Manacled from ao3 because she is creating an original fiction story for publication after securing a book deal (which is awesome and I'm very excited to support them in that!).

Moreover, the ethical problems redouble when we take into consideration that feeding Manacled to an artificial intelligence chatbot technology means that reproductions and repackagings of Sen's work is out of their hands entirely. That data cannot be recovered, it will never be erased from the machine. And so when others use the machine, the possible word combinations, particular phrasings, etc will all be input for analysis, reforming and reproduction for other users.

I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation around data control (or, more specifically, the lack of control we have of the data we input into these technologies). Those words are no longer our own the second we type them into the text box on "generative" AI platforms. We cannot get those ideas or words back to call our own. We cannot guarantee that someone else won't use the platform to write something and then use it elsewhere, claiming it's their own when it is in fact ours.

There are serious implications and fundamental (somewhat philosophical, but also very real and extremely urgent) questions about ownership of art in this digital age, the heart of creativity, and what constitutes original work with these technologies being used to assist idea creation or even entire image/text generation.

TLDR - stop using artificial technologies to engage with fandom. use the endless creative palaces of your minds and take up roleplaying with your pals to explore real-time interactions (roleplay in fandom is a legit thing, there are plenty of fandoms that do RP; this is your chance to do the same for the niche dhr fandoms you're invested in).

Signed, a very tired digital technologies scholar who would like you all to engage critically with digital data privacy, protection, and ethics, please.

[mariacallous]

In the early weeks of 2023, as worry about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools was ratcheting up dramatically in the public conversation, a tweet passed through the many interlocking corners of Book Twitter. “Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging,” it read. “AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.”

The tweet’s author, Gaurav Munjal, cofounded Unacademy, which bills itself as “India’s largest learning platform”—and within the edtech context, where digitally animated books can be effective teaching tools, his suggestion might read a certain way. But to a broader audience, the sweeping proclamation that AI will make “every” book “10x more engaging” seemed absurd, a solution in search of a problem, and one predicated on the idea that people who choose to read narrative prose (instead of, say, watching a film or playing a game) were somehow bored or not engaged with their unanimated tomes. As those who shared the tweet observed, it seems like a lot of book industry “disruptors” just don’t like reading.

Munjal is one of many tech entrepreneurs to ping the book world’s radar—and raise its collective hackles—in recent months. Many were hawking AI “solutions” they promised would transform the act of writing, the most derided among them Sudowrite’s Story Engine (dubbed in a relatively ambivalent review by The Verge’s Adi Robertson as “the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates”). Story Engine raised frustrations by treating writers as an afterthought and, by its very existence, suggesting that the problems it was trying to bypass weren’t integral to the act of writing itself.

Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the structures around their creation and consumption. Some came from within the publishing industry, but like their counterparts “disrupting” other sectors, including film and TV, many more did not. And for the most part, despite tech’s sometimes drastic (and often negative) effects on other industries, book- and reading-related startups failed to alter much at all. People are still buying books—in fact, they’re buying more than ever. Pandemic lockdowns brought a perhaps unsurprising boom in sales, and even though numbers slipped as restrictions lifted, print sales were still nearly 12 percent higher in 2022 than they were in 2019, and sales of audio books continue to increase dramatically year over year.

One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

Take, for example, the long string of pitches for a “Netflix for books”—ideas that retrofitted Netflix’s original DVDs-by-mail model for a different medium under the presumption that readers would pay to borrow books when the public library was right there. Publisher’s Weekly keeps a database of book startups that now numbers more than 1,300; many of them are marked “Closed,” alongside a graveyard of broken URLs. There were plenty of practical ideas—targeting specific demographics or genres or pegged to more technical aspects, like metadata or production workflows. But many more proposed ways to alter books themselves—most of which made zero sense to people who actually enjoy reading.

“I don’t think they’re coming to that with a love of fiction or an understanding of why people read fiction,” Kreizman says. “If they were, they wouldn’t make these suggestions that nobody wants.”

The “10x more engaging” crowd has come in waves over the past two decades, washed ashore via broader tech trends, like social media, tablets, virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. These tech enthusiasts promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy that urged you to seize on the newest trend while it was hot—even as everyone could see that previous hyped ventures had not, in fact, utterly transformed the way people read. Interactive books could have sound effects or music that hits at certain story beats. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books, or to eschew—to borrow one particular framing—“static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world.

AI isn’t remotely a new player in the book world. Electronic literature artists and scholars have worked with various forms of virtual and artificial intelligence for decades, and National Novel Generation Month, a collaborative challenge modeled after NaNoWriMo, has been around since 2013. Even now, as much of the book world loudly rejects AI-powered writing tools, some authors are still experimenting, with a wide range of results. But these bespoke, usually one-off projects are a far cry from the tech industry’s proposals to revolutionize reading at scale—not least because the projects were never intended to replace traditional books.

“A lot of interactive storytelling has gone on for a very long time,” says Jeremy Douglass, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, citing everything from his early career work on hypertext fiction to the class he’ll teach next year on the long history of the pop-up book to centuries-old marginalia like the footnote and the concordance. “These fields are almost always very old, they’re almost always talked about as if they’re brand-new, and there haven’t really been a lot of moments of inventing a new modality.”

To VC claims that AI will totally alter books, Douglass takes what he calls a “yes, and” stance. “What people are actually doing is creating a new medium. They’re not actually replacing the novel; they created a new thing that was like the novel but different, and the old forms carried on. I’m still listening to the radio, despite the film and game industries’ efforts.”

Tech entrepreneurs rarely pitch “yes, and” ideas. In their view, new technologies will improve on—and eventually supplant—what exists now. For all of his interest in the many forms of interactive fiction, Douglass doubts that most books would benefit from an AI treatment.

“There are extremely pleasurable aesthetic systems that aren’t intentional,” he says. “But how often when I’m reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Joy of Cooking do I think, ‘If only a chatbot could augment this on the fly’? And it’s partly the fact that some communication is deeply intentional, and that’s part of the pleasure. It’s handcrafted, it’s specific, there’s a vision.”

That isn’t to say that Douglass thinks there’s zero appetite for AI in literature—but it’s “probably a very small slice of the pie. So when you say ‘all books’? Almost certainly not. For the same reason that we’re not reading 100 percent pop-up books, or watching all of our books on YouTube, or anything else you can imagine. People are doing that too, but it’s extra.”

The exact size of that small pie slice remains to be seen, as does the general public’s appetite for instant novels, or chatting with characters, or hitting a button that will animate any book in your digital library. But those desires will likely need to come from readers themselves—not from the top down. “If you just give the tools to everybody, which is happening in spite of venture capital, as well as because of it, people will figure out what they want it for—and it’s usually not what the inventors and the investors think,” Douglass says. “It’s not even in their top-10 list of guesses, most of the time. It’s incredibly specific to the person and genre.”

The recent history of publishing has plenty of examples in which digital tools let people create things we couldn’t have predicted in the analog days: the massive range of extremely niche self-published romance, for example, or the structural variation and formal innovation within the almost entirely online world of fanfiction.

But when the tech industry approaches readers with ways to “fix” what isn’t broken, their proposals will always ring hollow—and right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while. “That’s a good thing,” Kreizman says. And as AI true believers sweep through with promises that this technology will change everything, it helps to remember just how many disruptors have come and gone. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading.

[pers-books]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. 

By Melissa Heikkiläarchive October 23, 2023

October 23, 2023

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

The team intends to integrate Nightshade into Glaze, and artists can choose whether they want to use the data-poisoning tool or not. The team is also making Nightshade open source, which would allow others to tinker with it and make their own versions. The more people use it and make their own versions of it, the more powerful the tool becomes, Zhao says. The data sets for large AI models can consist of billions of images, so the more poisoned images can be scraped into the model, the more damage the technique will cause. 

A targeted attack

Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images. 

Artists who want to upload their work online but don’t want their images to be scraped by AI companies can upload them to Glaze and choose to mask it with an art style different from theirs. They can then also opt to use Nightshade. Once AI developers scrape the internet to get more data to tweak an existing AI model or build a new one, these poisoned samples make their way into the model’s data set and cause it to malfunction. 

Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample. 

The researchers tested the attack on Stable Diffusion’s latest models and on an AI model they trained themselves from scratch. When they fed Stable Diffusion just 50 poisoned images of dogs and then prompted it to create images of dogs itself, the output started looking weird—creatures with too many limbs and cartoonish faces. With 300 poisoned samples, an attacker can manipulate Stable Diffusion to generate images of dogs to look like cats. 

Generative AI models are excellent at making connections between words, which helps the poison spread. Nightshade infects not only the word “dog” but all similar concepts, such as “puppy,” “husky,” and “wolf.” The poison attack also works on tangentially related images. For example, if the model scraped a poisoned image for the prompt “fantasy art,” the prompts “dragon” and “a castle in The Lord of the Rings” would similarly be manipulated into something else. 

Zhao admits there is a risk that people might abuse the data poisoning technique for malicious uses. However, he says attackers would need thousands of poisoned samples to inflict real damage on larger, more powerful models, as they are trained on billions of data samples. 

“We don’t yet know of robust defenses against these attacks. We haven’t yet seen poisoning attacks on modern [machine learning] models in the wild, but it could be just a matter of time,” says Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor at Cornell University who studies AI model security and was not involved in the research. “The time to work on defenses is now,” Shmatikov adds.

Gautam Kamath, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo who researches data privacy and robustness in AI models and wasn’t involved in the study, says the work is “fantastic.” 

The research shows that vulnerabilities “don’t magically go away for these new models, and in fact only become more serious,” Kamath says. “This is especially true as these models become more powerful and people place more trust in them, since the stakes only rise over time.” 

A powerful deterrent

Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, who has studied the security of deep-learning systems and wasn’t involved in the work, says Nightshade could have a big impact if it makes AI companies respect artists’ rights more—for example, by being more willing to pay out royalties.

AI companies that have developed generative text-to-image models, such as Stability AI and OpenAI, have offered to let artists opt out of having their images used to train future versions of the models. But artists say this is not enough. Eva Toorenent, an illustrator and artist who has used Glaze, says opt-out policies require artists to jump through hoops and still leave tech companies with all the power. 

Toorenent hopes Nightshade will change the status quo. 

“It is going to make [AI companies] think twice, because they have the possibility of destroying their entire model by taking our work without our consent,” she says. 

Autumn Beverly, another artist, says tools like Nightshade and Glaze have given her the confidence to post her work online again. She previously removed it from the internet after discovering it had been scraped without her consent into the popular LAION image database. 

“I’m just really grateful that we have a tool that can help return the power back to the artists for their own work,” she says.