briannapuppet

[briannapuppet]

Video Retraction: Generative AI (Slop)

Recently, I made a video about generative AI, and I've made it private because I feel like it went a little too hard. It wasn't getting a ton of traction anyway. I'm going to redo the video with a little more sensitivity.

In general, I feel like generative AI's acceptability varies:

Code: Low-level coding is pretty tedious and no one is harmed by generative coding

Prose: I would prefer if authors got paid, but I essentially don't have a problem with prose AI

Poetry: No competition here, AI sucks at poetry

Visual art/movies/music: Artists should be able to register and receive robust royalties for their contributions

Still, even in the case of visual art, music and movies, I think that artists should bear in mind that almost all of the money in the arts goes to non-artists (marketers, managers, plutocrats, etc), and the remainder goes to a small number of artists, often curated because they further the agendas of capitalists.

I know it's a bitter pill to swallow, but I'd encourage my comrades with more traditional/industry-oriented art careers than mine to recognize the long tail of fan artists, comic authors, Patreon creators, shitposters and people who otherwise pretty much give away their art for free; as meager as your take is, ours is less, and I think there are more of us.

In general, I think open platforms with art curated by unbiased, publicly disclosed algorithms is the future, because as we're seeing on many venues like YouTube, anything exposed to capitalists eventually gets enshittified, with the majority of revenue going to capitalists and the bones thrown to a few hand-picked, politically inert winners.

If you are one of the winners, though I know none of you live luxuriously off your sales, please take stock:

Art is "Capital I" Important, an indispensible and necessary part of our spirit, and it's being sold as "content": a narcotic commodity

An artist need only affect a single person to change the world; sometimes that person is the artist themself

Art that is broadly popular is usually less radical and controversial by its very nature

Maybe there's an artist who could truly change all our lives for the better buried in that long tail

Historically, the arts have flourished with copyright terms as short as 14 years, and copyright extension has been almost completely motivated by capitalists, with little expansion of creator's rights to important things such as control & ownership

Capitalism and authoritarianism have us all in the crosshairs, whether we are full-time creators, coders moonlighting as furry porn artists, or vegetable-pickers making sculptures out of found materials

[briannapuppet]

What goes into this selfie

Here's the best webcam selfie I can pull:

This was my outfit for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. By the way, the goth scene feels really healthy right now, although they really need to have more young spooky woman actors than Jenna Ortega. She did an impeccable job here and I haven't seen Wednesday but everyone seems to love her there too, but I just wish there was a broader pool of roles and actors.

Anyway, A lot of trauma recovery went into just taking an okay selfie here:

The adorable cuddle dress was too wide in the waist, but I didn't have a place set aside for sewing/alteration

For years, I have avoided presenting as goth as I wanted to out of fear of ridicule, so just wearing a black lip, a tiny bit of white powder and occult jewelry feels like a big step

My weird nerve thing makes it hard to make a symmetrical, attractive face or move my face deliberately

Many of the activities that help with my nerve problems, like masturbation but also general self-touch, are taboo

Because I so often look wonky, I avoid taking selfies or practicing facial expressions

I shouldn't feel ashamed of engineering my selfies and facial expressions, since I'm pro-aesthetics so I think looking good is just good, and because I have nerve damage.

All the trauma and the inauthenticity is like a big tangle of rope: once it's at a certain level of chaos, it's more efficient to gently tease it apart than to free the ropes one at a time. I think some people are just bad at this type of problem, or at recognizing the chaotic nature of trauma recovery, and this adds more trauma because now you're also scared of "fidgeting" - like, in the body, the small, pseudo-random movements that help our nerves reconnect, but also, behaviorally, flitting from project to project, or doing lots of small experiments rather than a cohesive project.