#Leveraging Generative AI

[orsonblogger]

Adastra Signs Strategic Collaboration Agreement With AWS To Drive AI-Powered Solutions Globally

Adastra, a prominent Data and Analytics solutions provider, has entered a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to advance the development and deployment of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions using generative AI. Adastra, known for its tailored solutions across various industries, now harnesses Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon Bedrock to meet customer demands.

Amazon Bedrock offers a fully managed service providing access to foundation models for generative AI applications, while Amazon SageMaker JumpStart provides pre-trained models and algorithms for machine learning. This collaboration aims to drive global digital innovation, empower organizations to make informed decisions, enhance customer outcomes, and achieve sustainable growth.

The three-year SCA will focus on fostering growth in key regions such as North America, Europe, and the Middle East, with an emphasis on Germany. Adastra's partnersArtificial Intelligencehip with AWS aims to accelerate AI innovation and reshape business landscapes, combining AI expertise with AWS's global cloud capabilities. This collaboration marks a milestone in Adastra's journey to transform industries through AI-driven innovation.

Read More - https://www.techdogs.com/tech-news/business-wire/adastra-signs-strategic-collaboration-agreement-with-aws-to-drive-ai-powered-solutions-globally

[nyokuro]

I just wanted to know who played Tim/Frank 🤣

[rimouskis]

:) someone is presenting to my company about AI and god strengthen me to hold my tongue in the chat because I want to unleash every single opinion I have

[dwtdog]

if all this is such an "open secret" then fine. someone leak what happened then. or what? scared dream will debunk you with the receipts he has? like all of these ccs are just as terrible for holding onto that information for so long and now teasing us with that information without the victims consent(assuming there is a victim) all for fucking morality points.

my guess would be that dteam r men who like to fuck around with a variety of women, and realistically some of the women they fuck around with expect more, or don't appreciate dismissal after the fact. obviously total speculation, but it does seem like the kind of baseline douchebaggery that would give them a reputation behind the scenes with nothing concrete to really 'cancel' them for

[thisselflovecamebacktome]

let me guess. thinking that from platform that doesn't pay its artists and that's a known fact, we deserve a professional analysis of our listening habits, is entitled behaviour?

Nope. It's not really about wrapped itself, and the people I would offend are a much smaller subsection of listeners. Simply put, I think the fact that Spotify has all but been caught just making up shit for our wrapped may have certain... implications (and those implications may piss off said smaller group of listeners, so take that as you will) and is not a good look when one of the biggest artists in the world is currently accusing them of falsifying statistics.

[rage-cupcakes]

I think this post ignores two fundamental things:

1. The Internet let you do something *nobody* could do before. LLMs don't--they let non-experts appear to approximate what experts can do. If the Internet went away, all the benefits it brought have no substitute. If LLMs go away, we always have the option of going back to paying experts or developing expertise ourselves. Same applies to smartphones.

2. LLMs are massively subsidized at this point and make no economic sense, with no path to making economic sense with the current pricing, and the pricing that does make the economics work changes fundamentally who the technology is available to in ways I don't think people are ready for.

The analogue for LLMs isn't the Internet or smartphones, it's Uber: decimating an existing thing by doing the same thing for cheaper by burning unfathomable amounts of investor cash, and once you've destroyed the existing version, making the new thing worse and more expensive. But it doesn't matter at that point because you've already displaced your competition.

And you absolutely can argue people out of engaging with companies engaging in monopolistic behavior. This is how strikes and boycotts work. Not everyone will participate, but if you're lucky and persuasive, enough people will to threaten the profits of capital for long enough that they give up trying to burn cash to kill competition.

LLMs aren't a new technology, both in that they've been around for a while and at my most generous I'd call them an evolution of technology we've had for decades, but also in that what's being sold isn't really a technology. It's a war against labor perpetrated by capital masquerading as a technology and the arguing against it is don't fucking buy the propaganda.

You can't argue against a technology. No one has ever, ever, in the history of humanity, argued a technology out of existence. The closest we've come are nukes and human genetic engineering. Nukes exist and multiple countries have massive arsenals of them, but we've agreed not to use them because it would mean humanity's utter destruction. Human genetic engineering cuts right to the heart of a bunch of ethical questions about health, equality, identity, and so on, and also up until very recently genetic engineering has been a long and extremely expensive process. We'll see how long human genetic engineering remains taboo now that it's getting cheaper and easier. But these are absolute outliers. In the vast, vast majority of cases, I mean literally in virtually every single case, when people fight a new technology—for any reason—they loose.

There is no tenable "anti-AI art" position, just like there was never a tenable anti-loom position, or anti-railroad position, or anti-horseless carriage position. These things were doomed to fail absolutely from day one, as soon as the technology existed, and anti-AI art is doomed to fail just as utterly and completely. There is just no path here, if this is what you've hitched your wagon to I really do not know what to tell you.

[codeexpertinsights]

Artificial intelligence must be included into operational procedures in the modern world in order to remain competitive. Because generative AI, or systems that can generate text, images, and even sounds, has not yet been fully utilized at scale to enhance corporate operations, reduce expenses, and increase sales effectiveness, small businesses stand to gain enormously from this. Small businesses can enhance their sales strategies, expand their consumer base, and outperform larger companies by utilizing generative AI. Small firms may use generative AI to boost lead generation, customize consumer experiences, and fortify their sales strategies. From the automatic creation of text and graphics to the optimization of customer relationship management systems, generative AI offers a wide range of applications.

[maryhilton07]

Generative AI is transforming Product Management, enabling teams to quickly ideate, prototype and validate new products. As this generative ai for Product Management technology matures, understanding how to ethically leverage it to enhance products is critical. The GSDC Certified Generative AI Product Management certification validates expertise in using generative AI product Management models like DALL-E for ideation and GPT-3 for writing product requirements. By focusing on the real-world application of generative AI in Product Management, this certification helps professionals future proof their skills. Whether you're looking to level up your own abilities or ensure your team is generative ai Product Management capable, becoming GSDC certified signals your commitment to leading in this fast-moving field.

[txttletale]

What I don't get is that other your support of AI image generation, you're SO smart and well read and concerned with ethics. I genuinely looked up to you! So, what, ethics for everyone except for artists, or what? Is animation (my industry, so maybe I care more than the average person) too juvenile and simplistic a medium for you to care about its extinction at the hands of CEOs endorsing AI? This might sound juvenile too, but I'm kinda devastated, because I genuinely thought you were cool. You're either with artists or against us imho, on an issue as large as this, when already the layoffs in the industry are insurmountable for many, despite ongoing attempts to unionize. That user called someone a fascist for pointing this out, too. I guess both of you feel that way about those of us involved in class action lawsuits against AI image generation software.

i can't speak for anyone else or the things they've said or think of anyone. that said:

1. you should not look up to people on the computer. i'm just a girl running a silly little blog.

2. i am an artist across multiple mediums. the 'no true scotsman' bit where 'artists' are people who agree with you and you can discount anyone disagrees with you as 'not an artist' and therefore fundamentally unsympathetic to artists will make it very difficult to actually engage in substantive discussion.

3. i've stated my positions on this many times but i'll do it one more: i support unionization and industrial action. i support working class artists extracting safeguards from their employers against their immiseration by the introduction of AI technology into the work flow (i just made a post about this funnily enough). i think it is Bad for studio execs or publishers or whoever to replace artists with LLMs. However,

4. this is not a unique feature of AI or a unique evil built into the technology. this is just the nature of any technological advance under capitalism, that it will be used to increase productivity, which will push people out of work and use the increased competition for jobs to leverage that precarity into lower wages and worse conditions. the solution to this is not to oppose all advances in technology forever--the solution is to change the economic system under which technologies are leveraged for profit instead of general wellbeing.

5. this all said anyone involved in a class action lawsuit over AI is an enemy of art and everything i value in the world, because these lawsuits are all founded in ridiculous copyright claims that, if legitimated in court, would be cataclysmic for all transformative art--a victory for any of these spurious boondoggles would set a precedent that the bar for '''infringement''' is met by a process that is orders of magnitude less derivative than collage, sampling, found art, cut-ups, and even simple homage and reference. whatever windmills they think they are going to defeat, these people are crusading for the biggest expansion of copyright regime since mickey mouse and anyone who cares at all about art and creativity flourishing should hope they fail.

[dalniente]

Of course it isn't "designed to rework" anything. Generative AI is generative. It generates its own new output based on user inputs and whatever parameters and restrictions you (JSTOR) build into your tool-- but it generates that new output in ways humans can understand by training on & pulling from vast datasets of stolen information. It builds sandcastles all its own, every single grain of which was stolen from a person. There is no ethical workaround for this. We were not asked, we were not paid; neither OpenAI nor their contemporaries gave us the opportunity to have our words and works excluded from their datasets.

Generative AI is trained on hundreds of billions of points of scraped data encoded into "tokens" comprehensible to its algorithms. To give you an idea of scale, GPT-3's text datasets included 3 billion tokens from Wikipedia. 86 billion came from three other sources, and a whopping 410 billion tokens came from the 501(c)(3) nonprofit CommonCrawl, which completes Nutch crawls on a regular basis. I believe that until recently, the petabytes of data in CommonCrawl's sets and archives (which are available to the public despite containing copyrighted work, under fair use claims) were mostly used for research, corporate datamining, and what I'll call "targeted" app development-- people using specific subsets of the data. GPT-3 and GPT-3.5's training data, however, is all-encompassing, and it is being used to generate enormous profit across multiple industries for OpenAI Global. You, JSTOR, are not profiting directly off of this-- I assume-- but you're using GPT3.5 Turbo at least in part, so OpenAI very definitely is.

(Anyone remotely familiar with fair use should immediately see the problem here. Not with JSTOR specifically, to be clear. But overall.)

I understand the attractive opportunities arising as this technology develops. I understand JSTOR'S need to stay competitive. I understand perfectly why JSTOR is developing this tool, and based on a brief review of your FAQ, it seems like it is designed to work with a minimum of hallucinations. If I'm reading between the lines correctly, you're basically trying to make this into the conversational search engine many people already believe LLMs to be. Well done. You also reassure that you will not replace humans. Good!

But that's only part of the puzzle. The use of generative AI at this time is unethical at its core. You do seem committed to using AI responsibly, as you claim...but to use something like this ethically simply is not possible using current tools and methods. The data in the sets upon which OpenAI's tools are built and trained does not belong to them; to use it for profit is fundamentally unethical. I am sorry.

I would remove "ethical" from future assurances. Replace it with "conscientious," perhaps. Or "as ethically as possible." I do not know that I would call that better, since it's a fundamentally empty reassurance, but at least it would no longer be a factual impossibility.

Like I said, I fully understand why you're developing this tool. I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. But I will tell you flat-out: You can "commit" as hard as you like to building your sandcastle ethically. You won't make the sand any less stolen.

Why is JSTOR using AI? AI is deeply environmentally harmful and steals from creatives and academics.

Thanks for your question. We recognize the potential harm that AI can pose to the environment, creatives, and academics. We also recognize that AI tools, beyond our own, are emerging at a rapid rate inside and outside of academia.

We're committed to leveraging AI responsibly and ethically, ensuring it enhances, rather than replaces, human effort in research and education. Our use of AI aims to provide credible, scholarly support to our users, helping them engage more effectively with complex content. At this point, our tool isn't designed to rework content belonging to creatives and academics. It's designed to allow researchers to ask direct questions and deepen their understanding of complex texts.

Our approach here is a cautious one, mindful of ethical and environmental concerns, and we're dedicated to ongoing dialogue with our community to ensure our AI initiatives align with our core values and the needs of our users. Engagement and insight from the community, positive or negative, helps us learn how we might improve our approach. In this way, we hope to lead by example for responsible AI use.

For more details, please see our Generative AI FAQ.

[whencyclopedia]

The Marduk Prophecy: A Historical Document of Mesopotamia

The Marduk Prophecy is an Assyrian document from between 713-612 BCE, found in the House of the Exorcist in Ashur. It narrates the travels of Marduk's statue from Babylon to lands like Hittite, Assyrian, and Elamite territories, prophesying its return by a strong Babylonian king. This prophecy was likely written during Nebuchadnezzar I's reign (1125-1104 BCE), celebrating his victory over the Elamites, who had captured the statue, and his subsequent return of it to Babylon.

Historical Context and Significance

Nebuchadnezzar I's Victory: The document was crafted to emphasize Nebuchadnezzar I's role in restoring Marduk to Babylon, highlighting the importance of a king's duty to his deity.

Political Themes: The prophecy leverages historical events to illustrate political themes, such as the alliance with Hatti and Assyria versus the rivalry with Elam.

Mesopotamian Naru Literature: It follows a common narrative technique where historical events are retold with poetic license to make a political or religious point.

Marduk in Mesopotamian Mythology

Marduk, son of Enki, became the king of the gods after leading them to victory over the forces of chaos, led by Tiamat. He established order and created humans as co-workers with the gods. Marduk was extremely important to Babylon, especially during the reign of Hammurabi and up until the Persian rule.

The Statue's Travels

The statue's journey included being taken by the Hittites, Assyrians, and Elamites at different times. It was returned to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar I and later by Esarhaddon. The statue remained a central figure in Babylonian festivals until its destruction by Xerxes I in 485 BCE.

The Significance of Marduk to Babylon

Marduk was not a distant deity; his presence was deeply felt in Babylon, and his statue was a symbol of his residence among the people. The absence of the statue during times of conquest led to significant cultural and religious disruption.

The Final Fate of the Statue

The final destruction of the statue is attributed to Xerxes I during his conquest of Babylon, a claim supported by Greek writers like Herodotus, despite their accounts being criticized for inaccuracies. The lack of further mention of the statue in historical records supports this narrative.

Learn More

The above summary was generated by AI using Perplexity Sonar. To read the orginial human-authored article, please visit The Marduk Prophecy.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

How to Tell If That Post of Advice Is AI Bullshit

Right, I wasn't going to write more on this, but every time I block an obvious AI-driven blog, five more clutter up the tags. So this is my current (April 2024) advice on how to spot AI posts passing themselves off as useful writing advice.

No Personality - Look up a long-running writing blog, you'll notice most people try to make their posts engaging and coming from a personal perspective. We do this because we're writers and, well, we want to convey a sense of ourselves to our readers. A lot of AI posts are straight-forward - no sense of an actual person writing them, no variation in tone or text.

No Examples - No attempts to show how pieces of advice would work in a story, or cite a work where you could see it in action. An AI post might tell you to describe a person by highlighting two or three features, and that's great, but it's hard to figure out how that works without an example.

Short, Unhelpful Definitions - A lot of what I've seen amount to two or three-sentence listicles. 'When you want to write foreshadowing, include a hint of what you want foreshadowed in an earlier chapter.' Cool beans, could've figured that out myself.

SEO/AI Prompt Language Included - I've seen way too many posts start with "this post is about..." or "now we will discuss..." or "in this post we will..." in every single blog. This language is meant to catch a search engine or is ChatGPT reframing the prompt question. It's not a natural way of writing a post for the average tumblr user.

Oddly Clinical Language - Right, I'm calling out that post that tried to give advice on writing gay characters that called us "homosexuals" the entire time. That's a generative machine trying to stay within certain parameters, not an actual person who knows that's not a word you'd use unless you were trying to be insulting or dunking on your own gay ass in the funniest way possible.

Too Perfect - Most generative AI does not make mistakes (this is how many a student gets caught trying to use it to cheat). You can find ways to make it sound more natural and have it make mistakes, but that takes time and effort, and neither of those are really a factor in these posts. They also tend to have really polished graphics and use the same format every time.

Maximized Tags (That Are Pointless) - Anyone who uses more than 10 one-word tags is a cop. Okay, fine, I'm joking, but there's a minimal amount of tags that are actually useful when promoting a post. More tags are not going to get a post noticed by the algorithm, there is no algorithm. Not everyone has to use their tags to make snarky comments, but if your tags look like a spambot, I'm gonna assume you're a spambot.

No Reblogs From The Rest of Writblr - I'm always finding new Writblr folks who have been around for awhile, but every real person I've seen reblogs posts from other people. We've all got other stuff to do, I'm writing this blog to help others and so are they, the whole point of tumblr is to pass along something you think is great.

While you'll probably see some variation in the future - as people get wise to obviously generated text, they'll try to make it look less generated - but overall, there's still going to be tells to when something is fake.

I don't have any real advice for what to do about this (other than block those blogs, which is what I do). Like most AI bullshit, I suspect most of these blogs are just another grift, attempting to build large follower counts to leverage or sell something to in the future. They may progress past these tattletale features, but I'm still going to block them when I see them. I don't see any value in writing advice compiled from the work of better writers who put the effort in when I can just go find those writers myself.

[reasonsforhope]

"For the first time in almost 60 years, a state has formally overturned a so-called “right to work” law, clearing the way for workers to organize new union locals, collectively bargain, and make their voices heard at election time.

This week, Michigan finalized the process of eliminating a decade-old “right to work” law, which began with the shift in control of the state legislature from anti-union Republicans to pro-union Democrats following the 2022 election. “This moment has been decades in the making,” declared Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber. “By standing up and taking their power back, at the ballot box and in the workplace, workers have made it clear Michigan is and always will be the beating heart of the modern American labor movement.”

[Note: The article doesn't actually explain it, so anyway, "right to work" laws are powerful and deceptively named pieces of anti-union legislation. What right to work laws do is ban "union shops," or companies where every worker that benefits from a union is required to pay dues to the union. Right-to-work laws really undermine the leverage and especially the funding of unions, by letting non-union members receive most of the benefits of a union without helping sustain them. Sources: x, x, x, x]

In addition to formally scrapping the anti-labor law on Tuesday [February 13, 2024], Michigan also restored prevailing-wage protections for construction workers, expanded collective bargaining rights for public school employees, and restored organizing rights for graduate student research assistants at the state’s public colleges and universities. But even amid all of these wins for labor, it was the overturning of the “right to work” law that caught the attention of unions nationwide...

Now, the tide has begun to turn—beginning in a state with a rich labor history. And that’s got the attention of union activists and working-class people nationwide...

At a time when the labor movement is showing renewed vigor—and notching a string of high-profile victories, including last year’s successful strike by the United Auto Workers union against the Big Three carmakers, the historic UPS contract victory by the Teamsters, the SAG-AFTRA strike win in a struggle over abuses of AI technology in particular and the future of work in general, and the explosion of grassroots union organizing at workplaces across the country—the overturning of Michigan’s “right to work” law and the implementation of a sweeping pro-union agenda provides tangible evidence of how much has changed in recent years for workers and their unions...

By the mid-2010s, 27 states had “right to work” laws on the books.

But then, as a new generation of workers embraced “Fight for 15” organizing to raise wages, and campaigns to sign up workers at Starbucks and Amazon began to take off, the corporate-sponsored crusade to enact “right to work” measures stalled. New Hampshire’s legislature blocked a proposed “right to work” law in 2017 (and again in 2021), despite the fact that the measure was promoted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu. And in 2018, Missouri voters rejected a “right to work” referendum by a 67-33 margin.

Preventing anti-union legislation from being enacted and implemented is one thing, however. Actually overturning an existing law is something else altogether.

But that’s what happened in Michigan after 2022 voting saw the reelection of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a labor ally, and—thanks to the overturning of gerrymandered legislative district maps that had favored the GOP—the election of Democratic majorities in the state House and state Senate. For the first time in four decades, the Democrats controlled all the major levers of power in Michigan, and they used them to implement a sweeping pro-labor agenda. That was a significant shift for Michigan, to be sure. But it was also an indication of what could be done in other states across the Great Lakes region, and nationwide.

“Michigan Democrats took full control of the state government for the first time in 40 years. They used that power to repeal the state’s ‘right to work’ law,” explained a delighted former US secretary of labor Robert Reich, who added, “This is why we have to show up for our state and local elections.”"

-via The Nation, February 16, 2024

[villainintern]

... is an upcoming Choicescript interactive fiction game! You can follow development updates on the dev blog here, view the forum page here, and play the demo here.

Villain Intern is currently right at the end of Chapter One: Onboarding as of 5/18/25, sitting at just over 58,000 words.

[FAQ Here and character introductions here, for the newer villains!]

Play as an aspiring supervillain interning at UnderHand, a legacy criminal corporation. Start from the bottom and navigate a world where everyone has it out for you, leveraging your strange superhuman abilities and your knack for manipulation. Make a name for yourself as an executive villain (with your own swanky corner office!), or turn against your higher-ups and usurp the company,…or throw away your promising career for the greater good, I guess...

Powers and Customization:

Choose from two different ability trees. Play as either a homemade cyborg with (painful looking) mechanical augmentations of your own design, or a genetically mutated freak with mysterious, bizarre abilities derived from animal genes. Choose 3 of the 9 unique abilities available for each power type, which update (or mutate) to scale as you get stronger. Climb walls, perfectly mimic any voice, rotate your head 360 degrees, talk to the AI assistant in your brain, etc etc! As a rule, you start out villainous, but whether you’re charming or sinister, sniveling or demanding, and backstabbing or frontstabbing is up to you.

______________________________________________________________

Key Characters and Relationships

Relationship progression tracks two major stats- your connection with a character, and your rivalry, which are not mutually exclusive. So you can romance your greatest nemesis, backstab your closest friend, that kind of thing. Or both at once, with the same person, even..

Fellow Interns:

👾 Peter Hyde is your cubicle neighbor, a geeky slackoff who’s fond of novelty ties. Unlike you, Peter doesn’t really want to be here, but he seems for some reason unable to quit. Laid-back, conflict avoidant, and generally easy to manipulate, he’s easy minion material for the MC- but his attitude belies a volatile, monstrous secret. Which can be a great asset or a major risk, depending on if you can maintain your control over him.

🤖 T9-670 is a seven-foot tall ex-war machine. Once a military member conscripted to UnderHand’s private security decal, its contract didn’t end when it died- the soldier’s brain was transplanted into a humanoid steel frame with a dark glass plate for a face. T9 is doing some soul searching- it’s not totally sure if it even has one left, but it would like to have a purpose beyond fixing printers and mowing down UnderHand’s enemies with its plasma gun.

🔬 Dr. Dr. Elaine Foster is an up-and-coming mad scientist, assistant to the esteemed Dr. Shrink. Don’t bring up the fact that she has two doctorates and is still an intern. She’s a genius prodigy, but otherwise has no superhuman abilities, which causes her to be overlooked by your superiors. Passionate and inscrutable, she’s obsessed with making it to the top her own way, and will remain one step ahead of you if you aren’t careful.

🧪 Reid/Reney Sullivan (gender selectable, nb included) is your nemesis, or at least they think so. They’re employed by OverSight, the subsidized hero-corporation that works in tandem with the government. An interning hero with impressive telekinetic powers, they are nonetheless as much of an amateur as you, and so you find yourself on even footing with one of the most promising superheroes in the business. Earnest and witty, they genuinely just want to help people. Eventually, they become fixated on “figuring you out”, which can lead to them getting sucked into your schemes. That, or their meddling could be your downfall. Worst of all, they might even succeed in reforming you.

There’s also 👁️ Blink, a rogue superhuman- some say vigilante, others say independent villain. Completely anonymous, they wear a unique suit of tactical gear that allows them to turn completely invisible, the first of its kind. Quippy, chipper, and sauntering, they tend to use their powers for ridiculous, showy things like popping up behind newscasters on TV. An invisible superhuman that loves the spotlight, Blink is full of contradictions. And secrets, big ones, that pertain to you.

… plus a cast of older, more established villains and heroes- including The Man, UnderHand’s enigmatic CEO. A faceless, hollow man in an empty suit. Actually, nobody’s ever seen anything but the suit, so he might just be the suit.

______________________________________________________________

FURTHER READING: 🌃THE PINTEREST BOARD 🎧THE PLAYLIST

TAG ORGANIZATION: VI Updates - The big stuff, new demo content VI Info - The info posts, development news VI Asks - Anything coming through the inbox VI Characters - Character related info/bonus content VI Sketches - Doodles and concept art Lore - What it says on the tin. Anything worldbuildy The Fridge - The place of honor for fan art! Pinned to my imaginary fridge with a digital magnet

[the-world-annealing]

The rise of AI has caused incredible damage to art, or: what ate up their brains and imagination?

(Surface Level, by me just now)

This used to be even longer, believe it or not. A bit more personal than I thought it was going to be and there's a few sections where I mostly talk about myself - the bored reader is invited to simply skip those.

I enjoy worldbuilding. I've written probably a small novel's worth of worldbuilding Tumblr posts by now (especially if we're including Dawn of Worlds, a collaborative worldbuilding RPG that I played in 2023 and 2024). Other creative hobbies of mine include writing one-page TTRPGs, or designing custom Magic: the Gathering cards, or designing fakemons, or fangames, or whatnot. None of this is good enough to sell, nor do I need it to be. I simply enjoy working on it.

As I understand it, 'art' is increasingly synonymous with 'creative expression', so I suppose I might be a capital-A Artist, but I don't really use that term for myself. 'Creative' feels more neutral, and more honest. 'Tinkerer' captures how it feels to me, having all these pieces and trying to crystallize them into an arrangement that makes sense. That's what I named myself after - the world annealing, see?

Back on topic: I might not call myself an artist (for visual arts specifically, the picture above is as good as it gets) but I think I share a lot of the key motivators. I enjoy creating. I enjoy displays of skill. I like making something that others can use and giving it to them for free. I want to make good, useful, or interesting things, and I want them to look nice. Most of all, I want to add my own ideas to the endless conversation that humans have been having since the dawn of time.

One of my favorite authors is Alexander Wales (whose tumblr you can find here), best known for giant-sized webnovels like the 1.6 million words Worth the Candle. In a post fittingly titled The AI Art Apocalypse, he writes:

["Art is a communicative act. It’s a conversation. You see a picture and it makes you feel a certain way, and yes, sometimes you silently process that art, but most of my favorite aspects of art as discussing it with other people, wrestling with the art in public, teasing out what it’s trying to do, or what it’s doing without trying. I generally think that this is one of the best parts of being an author or an artist, this very public back and forth."]

I agree with this completely.

-----------

That was as good a bridge as any, let's talk about AI now.

A lot of the points leveraged against AI art are kind of bad. Gaming for an hour on a decent consumer PC consumes about 0.5 kWh - generating a hundred images with stable diffusion takes 0.005 kWh (other models are less transparent due to their proprietary nature, but given that it's ultimately corporations paying the power bill I don't see why electricity costs would be needlessly higher). Arguments that focus on the training data being used without permission need to contend with the fact that fully licensed generators are a reality now.

But those arguments are also not why people are against AI art in the first place. That goes back to all the subjective, intangible values I brought up in my introduction - the desire to create something personal, or interesting, or new, or inspiring, or useful. The desire to have an audience, however small. The desire for individual expression, for something other than Extruded Corporate Media Product, forever. For art that speaks and invites response - for conversation.

-----------

Creation is compromise. As I said, my real interests lie in the directions of prose writing and game design. If I was also a skilled visual artist, I could create illustrations to accompany my stories and games and 180-card custom MtG sets, and this would almost certainly improve them.

But I'm not a skilled visual artist, and I don't have infinite free time, and even if I could draw real well I think I would prefer ten hours of writing over four hours of writing and six hours of illustrating it. Nor do I have the money that would make it realistic for me to commission a hundred and eighty digital paintings. So it goes.

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In Dawn of Worlds, each player takes the role of a god and helps shape the development of a world. My character was Haebarik, god of travel, a lanky red-haired giant with skin the color of slate, born from a tree on the world's first island. Distraught at the emptiness of the early world, he tore off his right arm, and cast it over the horizon, and where it landed it became the first continent. I liked this beat - it felt very mythic, not like a sanded-off modern fantasy narrative.

This was my own creation, and I am proud of it, even though it's irrevocably tainted.

See. when the game started I decided that I was going to need some kind of visual reference of my character, for the benefit of the other players if not myself. I spent some time prompting and tweaking the then-new stable diffusion, and eventually got an image I found acceptable - except that, in the wonkiness typical of such models, it'd only drawn a single arm. But seeing it, I was struck by inspiration, and in the end it made my work better.

(and to reflect the myth, the continent I drew on the map was shaped like an arm, and that shape inevitably influenced the other player's actions, and after a while I created a species that like their god only had one arm, and all of this enriched the conversation we were having and the art we were creating - or did AI poison it all?)

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As I mentioned, I'm in a lot of creative spaces that aren't for visual art per se but that are often adjacent to visual art. There's a lot of people there who've clearly put a lot of effort in their craft, whose work has genuine passion and genuine personality. And sometimes I see those people reach for AI art because they've decided that illustrations would improve their work, and then they get brigaded for it.

What are we even defending here? Not beauty (it doesn't have to look good, just don't use AI), not authenticity (it doesn't have to be yours, just don't use AI), not even individual vision (it doesn't have to look like you want to, just don't use AI). It's so depressingly negative - art not defined by the presence of a human, but the absence of a machine.

More charitably, I suppose these people are asking for 'effort' or 'personality', but by what standard does a 1-minute MS paint doodle count as effortful and personal, but not The Secret Origin of Wally ManMoth? Are we guarding individual expression, or forcing it into a straitjacket?

(TSOoWM of course also doubles of a beautiful example of how DALL-E's 'overcooked plastic' look is not inherent to AI - and how someone skilled at 90% of a creative process can use it to fill in the gaps)

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I'm not afraid that AI will kill art - it can't do that; nothing can. But this post's title wasn't a lie: I really do think that something awful has happened. There's an ever-sharpening divide between the communities willing to experiment with this new tool and those vehemently against it, a divide that might actually be sustainable in this age of algorithmic feeds and walled gardens.

Art is a communicative act. We are seeing the emergence of a side that would not merely cut off communication with the other, but deny they are worth listening to - deny they could speak, definitionally. If people actually started to believe that, it would betray a greater failure of imagination than any glassy-eyed slop ever could.

[storyofmychoices]

PB shared the announcement on their blog.

I googled "Series Entertainment" and found article about this news and the article starts with:

Series Entertainment – itself a game development company that "pioneer[s] the use of generative AI to transform imaginative ideas into unforgettable gaming experiences" – says the acquisition "signifies Series' strategy to build out its studio system to deliver a diverse catalog of different genres that leverage its world class development technology, the Rho Engine", the world’s first "AI-native, multimodal full-stack game creation platform". [X]

And here is another article

Series Entertainment, a fast-growing AI game development company, has acquired interactive fiction mobile game studio Pixelberry.

From the companies website...

So basically we told Choices we didn't want AI and they sold the company to an AI entertainment company 🤦‍♀️