#midjourney garbage

[nerdlog]

Not only have you never picked up a pencil but it seems you've never picked up a Players Handbook either. First, there's no classes, so the spell automatically can't be used by any classes. Second, there's no concentration and it is an instant cast; this means the spell will play out in its entirety even if the cleric dies or teleports away. This means that for 10 rounds the target will gain 1d6 hp automatically, essentially making PCs immortal since even at 1 hp you can take your turn. In 4 turns you can cast this on the entire party and outlast any combat the DM has made.

Outside of combat, it heals 3d8+10d6 hp, or around 46 hp. For context, mass cure wounds is a level higher and gives only 5d8 (20) hp to multiple targets, so it heals 2 people less than the AI spell.

It's fitting you brand yourself as a mimic

Life Burst - Level 4 Abjuration

Unleash a surge of vitality, restoring health, granting vigor, and sparking recovery. Perfect for rallying allies in the thick of battle, this spell turns the tide with a powerful pulse of life itself!

Art by Midjourney

[mangor]

[fshoulders]

The other day someone on Mastodon (I have not managed to re-discover the post. Decentralization plays merry hell with search.) posted simply “CrabGPT”. And I couldn’t help thinking about how natural evolutionary pressures lead to carcinization: how over and over again, different lineages of organism become crabs.

I wondered, could we assist the large language models and large image models to evolve into nature’s perfect form? Could we help the “AIs” become crabs?

They don’t have any factual basis. They don’t know what anything is. Why not teach them that crabs are everything?

Probably we would need to refrain from helpful organizing tags (to facilitate the models believing everything is crab), and it might therefore be a little annoying to fellow users who would prefer to be able to block, say, fanart of the cast of Star Trek as crabs, or slash about your blorbos getting vulnerable with each other during their exoskeletal molts. However, the entire situation is already pretty annoying. And at least this way we would be taking it into our own claws. *clack clack*

🦀

[daydreamerwonderkid]

Having to constantly copy and paste-

-"open art" -"ai" -"stable diffusion" -"prompt hunt" -"midjourney"

-to the end of every single image search so I can get actual references instead of an endless wall of AI garbage is fucking insane.

I hate it here.

[breeyn]

PSA for artists:

I had a very frustrating time tonight trying to find simple images of animals for art references - everything everywhere is just ai bullshit. Thankfully I have old folders ("old" lol, from two years ago) of images I could refer to to help me, but not everyone does.

Someone shared this with me - eliminating certain things in searches might help:

thing-you-want-to-search -"stable diffusion" -"ai" -"midjourney" -"open art" -"prompt hunt"

This will help filter out garbage.

If you're pro-AI, get away from me. AI is the burning of Alexandria. The poisoning of the world's well. We used to have all the information in the world in our pockets, and now it's just incomprehensible nonsense. It's devolution of everything good about humanity in every way.

Thank everything libraries still exist. They'll soon be the only place we can go to research anything.

[talenlee]

The Whole Sort of General Mish Mosh of AI

I’m not typing this.

January this year, I injured myself on a bike and it infringed on a couple of things I needed to do in particular working on my PhD. Because I had effectively one hand, I was temporarily disabled and it finally put it in my head to consider examining accessibility tools.

One of the accessibility tools I started using was Microsoft’s own text to speech that’s built into the operating system I used, which is Windows Not-The-Current-One-That-Everyone-Complains-About. I’m not actually sure which version I have. It wasn’t good but it was usable, and being usable meant spending a week or so thinking out what I was going to write a phrase at a time and then specifying my punctuation marks period.

I’m making this article — or the draft of it to be wholly honest — without touching my computer at all.

What I am doing right now is playing my voice into Audacity. Then I’m going to use Audacity to export what I say as an MP3, which I will then take to any one of a few dozen sites that offer free transcription of voice to text conversion. After that, I take the text output, check it for mistakes, fill in sentences I missed when coming off the top of my head, like this one, and then put it into WordPress.

A number of these sites are old enough that they can boast that they’ve been doing this for 10 years, 15 years, or served millions of customers. The one that transcribed this audio claims to have been founded in 2006, which suggests the technology in question is at least, you know, five. Seems odd then that the site claims its transcription is ‘powered by AI,’ because it certainly wasn’t back then, right? It’s not just the statements on the page, either, there’s a very deliberate aesthetic presentation that wants to look like the slickly boxless ‘website as application’ design many sites for the so-called AI folk favour.

This is one of those things that comes up whenever I want to talk about generative media and generative tools. Because a lot of stuff is right now being lumped together in a Whole Sort of General Mish Mosh of AI (WSOGMMOA). This lump, the WSOGMMOA, means that talking about any of it is used as if it’s talking about all of it in the way that the current speaker wants to be talked about even within a confrontational conversation from two different people.

For people who are advocates of AI, they will talk about how ChatGPT is an everythingamajig. It will summarize your emails and help you write your essays and it will generate you artwork that you want and it will give you the rules for games you can play and it will help you come up with strategies for succeeding at the games you’ve already got all while it generates code for you and diagnoses your medical needs and summarises images and turns photos of pages into transcriptions it will then read aloud to you, and all you have to focus on is having the best ideas. The notion is that all of these things, all of these services, are WSOGMMOA, and therefore, the same thing, and since any of that sounds good, the whole thing has to be good. It’s a conspiracy theory approach, sometimes referred to as the ‘stack of shit’ approach – you can pile up a lot of garbage very high and it can look impressive. Doesn’t stop it being garbage. But mixed in with the garbage, you have things that are useful to people who aren’t just professionally on twitter, and these services are not all the same thing.

They have some common threads amongst them. Many of them are functionally looking at math the same way. Many or even most of them are claiming to use LLMs, or large language models and I couldn’t explain the specifics of what that means, nor should you trust an explainer from me about them. This is the other end of the WSOGMMOA, where people will talk about things like image generation on midjourney and deepseek (pieces of software you can run on your computer) consumes the same power as the people building OpenAI’s data research centres (which is terrible and being done in terrible ways). This lumping can make the complaints about these tools seem unserious to people with more information and even frivolous to people with less.

Back to the transcription services though. Transcription services are an example of a thing that I think represents a good application of this math, the underlying software that these things are all relying on. For a start, transcription software doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of exactly this kind of experience. Someone who chooses or cannot use a keyboard to write with who wants to use an alternate means, converting speech into written text, which can be for access or archival purposes. You aren’t going to be doing much with that that isn’t exactly just that and we do want this software. We want transcriptions to be really good. We want people who can’t easily write to be able to archive their thoughts as text to play with them. Text is really efficient, and being able to write without your hands makes writing more available to more people. Similarly, there are people who can’t understand spoken speech – for a host of reasons! – and making spoken media more available is also good!

You might want to complain at this point that these services are doing a bad job or aren’t as good as human transcription and that’s probably true, but would you rather decent subtitles that work in most cases vs only the people who can pay transcription a living wage having subtitles? Similarly, these things in a lot of places refuse to use no-no words or transcribe ‘bad’ things like pornography and crimes or maybe even swears, and that’s a sign that the tool is being used badly and disrespects the author, and it’s usually because the people deploying the tool don’t care about the use case, they care about being seen deploying the tool.

This is the salami slicer through which bits of the WSOGMMOA is trying to wiggle. Tools whose application represent things that we want, for good reasons, that were being worked on independently of the WSOGMMOA, and now that the WSOGMMOA is here, being lampreyed onto in the name of pulling in a vast bubble of hypothetical investment money in a desperate time of tech industry centralisation.

As an example, phones have long since been using technology to isolate faces. That technology was used for a while to force the focus on a face. Privacy became more of a concern, then many phones were being made with software that could preemptively blur the faces of non-focal humans in a shot. This has since, with generative media, stepped up a next level, where you now have tools that can remove people from the background of photographs so that you can distribute photographs of things you saw or things you did without necessarily sharing the photos of people who didn’t consent to having their photo taken. That is a really interesting tool!

Ideologically, I’m really in favor of the idea that you should be able to opt out of being included on the internet. It’s illegal in France, for example, to take a photo of someone without their permission, which means any group shot of a crowd, hypothetically, someone in that crowd who was not asked for permission, can approach the photographer and demand recompense. I don’t know how well that works, but it shows up in journalism courses at this point.

That’s probably why that software got made – regulations in governments led to the development of the tool and then it got refined to make it appealing to a consumer at the end point so it could be used as as a selling point. It wouldn’t surprise me if right now, under the hood, the tech works in some similar way to MidJourney or Dall-E or whatever, but it’s not a solution searching for a problem. I find that really interesting. Is this feature that, again, is running on your phone locally, still part of the concerns of the WSOGMMOA? What about the software being used to detect cancer in patients based on sophisticated scans I couldn’t explain and you wouldn’t understand? How about when a glamour model feeds her own images into the corpus of a Midjourney machine to create more pictures of herself to sell?

Because admit it, you kinda know the big reason as a person who dislikes ‘AI’ stuff that you want to oppose WSOGMMOA. It’s because the heart of it, the big loud centerpiece of it, is the worst people in the goddamn world, and they want to use these good uses of this whole landscape of technology as a figleaf to justify why they should be using ChatGPT to read their emails for them when that’s 80% of their job. It’s because it’s the worst people in the world’s whole personality these past two years, when it was NFTs before that, and it’s a term they can apply to everything to get investors to pay for it. Which is a problem because if you cede to the WSOGMMOA model, there are useful things with meaningful value that that guy gets to claim is the same as his desire to raise another couple of billions of dollars so he can promise you that he will make a god in a box that he definitely, definitely cannot fucking do while presenting himself as the hero opposing Harry Potter and the Protocols of Rationality.

The conversation gets flattened around the basically two poles:

All of these tools, everything that labels itself as AI is fundamentally an evil burning polar bears, and

Actually everyone who doesn’t like AI is a butt hurt loser who didn’t invest earlier and buy the dip because, again, these people were NFT dorks only a few years ago.

For all that I like using some of these tools, tools that have helped my students with disability and language barriers, the fact remains that talking about them and advocating for them usefully in public involves being seen as associating with the group of some of the worst fucking dickheads around. The tools drag along with them like a gooey wake bad actors with bad behaviours. Artists don’t want to see their work associated with generative images, and these people gloat about doing it while the artist tells them not to. An artist dies and out of ‘respect’ for the dead they feed his art into a machine to pump out glurgey thoughtless ‘tributes’ out of booru tags meant for collecting porn. Even me, I write nuanced articles about how these tools have some applications and we shouldn’t throw all the bathwater out with the babies, and then I post it on my blog that’s down because some total shitweasel is running a scraper bot that ignores the blog settings telling them to go fucking pound sand.

I should end here, after all, the transcription limit is about eight minutes.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[dreadlock-detective]

This is some horse shit, Tumblr. It's not surprising that you didn't but the very least you could do would be to warn us and give us the tools to remove our content before you scrape it to sell to those utter fuckholes that are Midjourney. But I get that it's probably the braindead higher ups and not the staff or whatever.

I know Tumblr is a money sink but these garbage ass machine learning companies (Calling it "AI" is just a marketing stunt by morons) are all going to crash and burn and latching yourself onto them is just going to get this place pulled down with it.

Ah well, fuck it, I never liked social media anyway. Tumblr might be a bit closer to a blog than social media but at this point let's just burn down the whole internet. Whole thing's turned into a dumpster fire.

I'm technically still here and on Bsky but man, didn't need more reasons to not be active on the internet.

[linesonwhite]

I struggle to draw a picture that truly and crisply captures how unwavering and intense my hatred is for generative AI like Open AI and Midjourney, and all the conniving, inhuman, dishonest pieces of shit that develop and support tech like it. It's trashy AI garbage like those that trample all over what it means to be human - it's a damn affront that spits in the face of art and human creativity, and any lazy and pathetic bastard using it has no love or respect for either.

If you hate AI crap as much as I do, by all means, feel free to repost this if you think it'll bother whatever idiots you see polluting the internet with AI images.

Need this on twitter? Aye, it's over there too.

[borbology]

I actually think it would be funny if we all started making garbage accounts and filling them with the most poorly drawn things and allowed the AI bots to skim that. We all opt out of the AI for our real art but then have one or two accounts on the side that just floods the bots with Ringo Starr art type shit so that any training Midjourney gets from this website is just absolute piss.

[stark-som-fan]

With the release of build 42 for Project Zomboid we also got more AI generated artwork to replace the ACTUAL art!! COOL!

I didn't even make the top ones. I got them from the games reddit page.

The AI garbage as since been removed from the update due to the controversy it stirred, and while that's absolutely a W, I wanna point out this particular response from one of the Indie Stone team members.

"As to whether there's AI used in any part of these images productions I could not say, I would hope not, but I will say however that in terms of the ethics of AI replacing artists in the industry, I feel confident that either way we have contracted an artist and paid them for the production of this art, it looks awesome, and even if AI was involved in the process in any way there'll have been plenty of and a majority of talented artists skill involved too."

Unfortunately that's exactly the issue. Other talented artists were involved: And they weren't paid. Their hard work was scraped off the internet and added to the AI grinder that spat out easily 95% of the product we got in the game update.

If someone took Project Zomboid and all of its assets, and then did a few minor changes to make the game a solo open world farming game, then repackaged and sold it with none of the money going to The Indie Stone, wouldn't that suck ass? Because that's what's wrong with AI art. Regardless of if you pay for AI art or not, you have not paid every artist involved in its inception. And to align yourself with AI art as being okay because you paid whoever typed the prompts into Midjourney is one hell of a stance to take.

[sandimexicola]

This is what a real Martian base would actually look like: garbage and debris and scattered everywhere.

Midjourney prompt: futuristic scene, Mars, terrain, colony, garbage and debris scattered around the Martian base --ar 8:5

[smieska]

When I moved here from deviantart and livejournal back in 2010 it was because tumblr was where it seemed all the fun was happening: blogging AND sharing others artwork and writings for all to see? Sure! It wasn't out of necessity, just where all the people I enjoy their blogs and art seemed to migrate.

This time around, with the looming presence of midjourney and other AI art garbage, I feel like I'm being forced out. I left deviantart in 2010 on my own accord, seeking other social groups; this? Tumblr 2024 (any popular social media website honestly) feels malicious and invasive. Why the ever loving fuck would I agree to have midjourney take my art? Anything of me? I would rather tumblr shut down due to lack of funds. This is so goddamn awful.

[artapir]

Still trying to convince Midjourney to nail something resembling my vision of what the offworld soldiers from Blade Runner should look like.

MORE AI GARBAGE

[gikairan]

Seeing an Etsy ad on TV that ends with the line "keep commerce human" showing ppl lovingly making crafts.....

DAYS after seeing a headline that Etsy are allowing genAi images on their website....

And, like, that's kinda deceptive!! Those images ARENT made by humans!! And I've already seen the place get swamped by this crap!!

Imagine going onto a site because an advert told you the things were ~human made~ and all you see is midjourney garbage......

[racefortheironthrone]

I'd rec putting search terms like this: -"alamy" -"stable diffusion" -"ai" -"midjourney" -"open art" -"prompthunt" -"freepik" -"lexica" -"dall-e". It cuts down drastically on the "A.I." garbage you find on Google.

Oh, that’s very helpful! I wonder if there’s a way to build a preset filter with those terms…

[missadelinecatgirl]

now i gotta start glazing and nightshading all my art because even though my stuff is okay at best and already poisons databases at worst i am not letting my art be in the genetics of whatever garbage midjourney is churning out without giving it cancer