soricity

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stress relief still life

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autism

needed to get rid of some more ballpoint pens haha; sorry soundwave

it's gonna take another second month to go back and fill in all of the ones i had to skip but i'll keep up however I can!

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It rained the other day, so I drew a “looks like rain…” kogasa.

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yo hey US people who sent in absentee ballots, they are tossing mail-in ballots for no reason. i just had to call my county board of elections and demand a cure for my ballot because north carolina didn't send out any notices of issues with ballots, and the issues are fake. if you voted by mail-in make sure your ballot was actually counted

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I tried to disassemble a pen but ended up. Breaking it. But since the tip broke off i wanted to see what drawing with it would be like.

Also tried to make an impromptu dip pen from a skewer.

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I had some expiring clippy points so I got some hatching brushes. Miku volunteered to be my test subject. I might have slightly overdone it.

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I did another artfight! Here is Chai the tea witch, for @sweetkooky !

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Here’s my first (and hopefully not the last this time) drawing for artfight 2024! Reading these characters’ lore made me want to draw a movie poster-style piece to showcase their dynamic.

These characters belong to LACCAR1A on artfight!

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First ArtFight attack of the month! This silly guy belongs to daftpatience.

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my sewing skills are very bad but i am trying to make a shirt anyways 👍

i used fishing line to gather the ruffles but couldn’t get some of it back out, so it’ll just stay in there i guess.

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some silly robot designs

their silly lore:

Judicator is a Predacon who survived the Cataclysm with amnesia and a damaged T-Cog; he's vaguely aware that he used to have a different altmode, and also feels a bit...out of place among others, but he sets that aside in favor of focusing on his work. Hardly anyone knows his actual name; Judicator is his title.

Vent's just a normal musician, don't worry about it! The fact that he keeps singing songs about things he couldn't possibly know about or events that have yet to occur is just happenstance; he's a very good storyteller, you know.

Leafnode is a walking, talking terminal for Vector Sigma. This drew some unwanted attention from the High Council, who upon discovering her unique traits, quickly squirreled her away for "protection".

Tayef and Ahangar are, respectively, a clerk for the High Council and an architect. Both before and after the war, actually! Ahangar's not super happy that the planet had to get the scrap kicked out of it for him to get as much work as he does now; Tayef's just happy he managed to get his old job back.

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what if I made a shawl and it was so cozy and warm.

(there is no pile of unfinished objects in ba sing se)

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I’ve made a square (slightly swirly.)

The pattern is Floral Tiles 1 by Svetlana Rogatykh.

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Hey everyone!!!

I got to participate in this iteration of @cecilioque ‘s Pokémon sticker collab project! This time the theme was pokemon Black/White! It was super fun and there’s a ton of AWESOME stuff in there made by really cool and talented artists. The preorders open March 9th so if you want to grab some sticker sheets be sure to head over there then 💕

Also check out the designs I made as my part of the collab project:

Links and more information can be found here!!

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Automattic will sign a contract with OpenAI for Midjourney to learn off of Tumblr and Wordpress

Hello! Automattic, Tumblr's parent company, will sign a contract with OpenAI and Midjourney so Midjourney can learn off of Tumblr's and WordPress' art and other user data. :) (The full text of this article is copy/pasted in the cut below). You can opt out! but I truly cannot imagine a more idiotic or out of touch decision on the part of Tumblr's CEO.

First thing's first: When/if this goes live, opt out of this immediately. Do this even if you're not an artist. The more people opt out, the less valuable this contract is to Midjourney. in an ideal world, literally all of the active users would opt out, but if we can even get to 50% that's pretty delicious.

Second: Contact Tumblr Support. It's vital that you do this politely. Tumblr staff is not responsible for this decision and the point of doing this is to show the userbase's unwillingness to be involved in this, not harangue Tumblr staff. (Seriously, stop haranguing Tumblr staff). Here's a script:

Hi, I'm writing in to express my disappointment in Automattic's pending contract with OpenAI to sell user data. Midjourney is already embroiled in copyright lawsuits, and it is not possible to train it without compromising copyright, including violating the IP of artists on this site. I strongly protest this contract and will opt out if it goes live. Depending on the privacy terms around what user data is sold to OpenAI and why, it is possible I will leave the platform entirely. Thank you for your time.

Third: Download Glaze and start poisoning them prompts, my friends

Fourth: Stare into the middle distance for a second with me because holy fucking shit? How stupid can one decision be?

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. 

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent. 

Gage wrote:

“the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:

private posts on public blogs

posts on deleted or suspended blogs

unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)

private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)

posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)

content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.”

Gage’s post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.

Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states that “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.” 

404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldn’t share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI, but did not immediately hear back from the company. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either.

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?”

Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.” Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, “I'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.”

Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live post says, “i've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.” At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gage’s original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads “Cyle.” Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. 

Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that it’s “in the early stages of monetizing [its] user base” by training AI on users’ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.

OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment. 

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so I saw this picture by @memefo and the shapes were so nice and volume-y that I went, wow my drawings are pretty flat huh. Anyway I got some plastilina clay for cheap and tried to use it for studies. I am hoping for volume + simplicity eventually.

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dedicated to this fic that inserted this most precious mental image into my head