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txttletale · 2 months ago

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hey what’s up, i think you’re pretty cool but disagree with you on the whole ai can make art thing. to me, without the purpose from an actual person creating the piece, it’s not art but an image; as all human art has purpose. some driving factor in a work, compared to a program which purely creates the prompt without further intention. i was wondering what your insight on this is? either way, hope you have a great day

well, first of all, does art require 'purpose'? there's this view of art which has very much calcified in "anti-AI" rhetoric, that art is some linear process of communication from one individual to another: an Artist puts some Meaning into a unit of Art, which others can then view to Recieve that Meaning. you can hold this view, but i don't! i'm much more of a stuart hall-head on this, i think that there is no such transfusion of Intent and that rather the 'meaning' of a piece is something that exists only in the interplay between text and reader. reading is an active, interpretative process of decoding, not a passive absorptive one. so i dispute, firstly, that 'purpose' is to begin with a necessary or even imporant element of art.

moreover i think this argument rests on a very arbitrarily selective view of what counts as "an actual person creating the piece" -- 'the prompt' is, itself, an obvious artistic contribution, a place where an artist can impart huge amounts of direction, vision, and so on. in fact, i completely reject the claim of both the technology's salesman and its biggest detractors that genAI "makes art" -- to quote kerry mitchell's fractal art manifesto: "Turn a computer on and leave it alone for an hour. When you come back, no art will have been generated." in the past, i've posed questions about generative art pieces to demonstrate this

secondly, of course, the process does not end after image generation from prompt for serious generative artists--the ones who are serious about the artform (rather than tech guys trying to do marketing for the Magical Art Box) frequently iterate and iterate, generating a range of iterations and then picking one to iterate on further, so on and so forth, until the final image they choose to share is one that contains within it the traces of a thousand discrete choices on behalf of the artist (two pretty good explanations of this from people who actually do this stuff can be found here and here)

third and finally, that very choice to share the image is itself an artistic decision! we (and by we, i mean, anyone who cares about what art is) have been talking about this since fountain -- display is a form of artistic intent, taking something and putting it forward and saying 'this is art' is in and of itself an artistic decision being made even if the thing itself is unaltered: see, for example, the entire discipline of 'found art'. once someone challenged me, yknow, "if you did a google search, would that be art?" and my answer to that is, if you screenshot that google search and share it as art, then yes, resoundingly yes! curation and presentation recontextualizes objects, turning them into rich texts through the simple process of reframing them. so even if you granted that genAI output is inherently random computer noise (i don't, of course) -- i still think that the act of presenting it as art makes it so.

since i assume you're not familiar with anything interesting in the medium, because the most popular stuff made with genAI is pure "lo-fi girl in ghibli style" type slop, let me share some genAI pieces (or genAI-influenced pieces) that i think are powerful and interesting:

the meat gala, rob sheridan (warning: body horror!)

secret horses (does anyone know the original source on this?)

infinite art machine, reachartwork

ethinically ambigaus, james tamagotchi

mcdonalds simpsons porn room, wayneradiotv

software greatman, everything everything (the music is completely made by the band, but genAI was partially responsible for the lyrics -- including the title and the several interesting pseudo-kennings)

i want a love like this music video, everything everything

cocaine is the motor of the modern world, bots of new york

poison the walker, roborosewatermasters (here's my analysis posts on it too)

not all of these were necessarily intended as art: but i think they are rich and fascinating texts when read that way -- they have certainly impacted me as much as any art has.

anyways, whether you agree or not, i hope this gives you some stuff to think about, thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

#ask #Anonymous

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reasonsforhope · 6 months ago

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"When Ellen Kaphamtengo felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen, she thought she might be in labour. It was the ninth month of her first pregnancy and she wasn’t taking any chances. With the help of her mother, the 18-year-old climbed on to a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a hospital in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, a 20-minute ride away.

At the Area 25 health centre, they told her it was a false alarm and took her to the maternity ward. But things escalated quickly when a routine ultrasound revealed that her baby was much smaller than expected for her pregnancy stage, which can cause asphyxia – a condition that limits blood flow and oxygen to the baby.

In Malawi, about 19 out of 1,000 babies die during delivery or in the first month of life. Birth asphyxia is a leading cause of neonatal mortality in the country, and can mean newborns suffering brain damage, with long-term effects including developmental delays and cerebral palsy.

Doctors reclassified Kaphamtengo, who had been anticipating a normal delivery, as a high-risk patient. Using AI-enabled foetal monitoring software, further testing found that the baby’s heart rate was dropping. A stress test showed that the baby would not survive labour.

The hospital’s head of maternal care, Chikondi Chiweza, knew she had less than 30 minutes to deliver Kaphamtengo’s baby by caesarean section. Having delivered thousands of babies at some of the busiest public hospitals in the city, she was familiar with how quickly a baby’s odds of survival can change during labour.

Chiweza, who delivered Kaphamtengo’s baby in good health, says the foetal monitoring programme has been a gamechanger for deliveries at the hospital.

“[In Kaphamtengo’s case], we would have only discovered what we did either later on, or with the baby as a stillbirth,” she says.

The software, donated by the childbirth safety technology company PeriGen through a partnership with Malawi’s health ministry and Texas children’s hospital, tracks the baby’s vital signs during labour, giving clinicians early warning of any abnormalities. Since they began using it three years ago, the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the centre has fallen by 82%. It is the only hospital in the country using the technology.

“The time around delivery is the most dangerous for mother and baby,” says Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician with Texas children’s hospital, who is leading the programme. “You can prevent most deaths by making sure the baby is safe during the delivery process.”

The AI monitoring system needs less time, equipment and fewer skilled staff than traditional foetal monitoring methods, which is critical in hospitals in low-income countries such as Malawi, which face severe shortages of health workers. Regular foetal observation often relies on doctors performing periodic checks, meaning that critical information can be missed during intervals, while AI-supported programs do continuous, real-time monitoring. Traditional checks also require physicians to interpret raw data from various devices, which can be time consuming and subject to error.

Area 25’s maternity ward handles about 8,000 deliveries a year with a team of around 80 midwives and doctors. While only about 10% are trained to perform traditional electronic monitoring, most can use the AI software to detect anomalies, so doctors are aware of any riskier or more complex births. Hospital staff also say that using AI has standardised important aspects of maternity care at the clinic, such as interpretations on foetal wellbeing and decisions on when to intervene.

Kaphamtengo, who is excited to be a new mother, believes the doctor’s interventions may have saved her baby’s life. “They were able to discover that my baby was distressed early enough to act,” she says, holding her son, Justice.

Doctors at the hospital hope to see the technology introduced in other hospitals in Malawi, and across Africa.

“AI technology is being used in many fields, and saving babies’ lives should not be an exception,” says Chiweza. “It can really bridge the gap in the quality of care that underserved populations can access.”"

-via The Guardian, December 6, 2024

#cw child death #cw pregnancy #malawi #africa #ai #artificial intelligence #public health #infant mortality #childbirth #medical news #good news #hope

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phantomrose96 · 1 year ago

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The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.

I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.

What is AI? And what is not AI?

So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.

A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)

An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.

A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.

Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)

So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:

"AI" which is just genuinely not AI

There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.

Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"

2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now

"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.

The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.

Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.

3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")

If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).

This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.

This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.

(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)

#chrissy speaks

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pillowfort-social · 1 year ago

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Generative AI Policy (February 9, 2024)

As of February 9, 2024, we are updating our Terms of Service to prohibit the following content:

Images created through the use of generative AI programs such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dall-E.

This post explains what that means for you. We know it’s impossible to remove all images created by Generative AI on Pillowfort. The goal of this new policy, however, is to send a clear message that we are against the normalization of commercializing and distributing images created by Generative AI. Pillowfort stands in full support of all creatives who make Pillowfort their home. Disclaimer: The following policy was shaped in collaboration with Pillowfort Staff and international university researchers. We are aware that Artificial Intelligence is a rapidly evolving environment. This policy may require revisions in the future to adapt to the changing landscape of Generative AI.

Why is Generative AI Banned on Pillowfort?

Our Terms of Service already prohibits copyright violations, which includes reposting other people’s artwork to Pillowfort without the artist’s permission; and because of how Generative AI draws on a database of images and text that were taken without consent from artists or writers, all Generative AI content can be considered in violation of this rule. We also had an overwhelming response from our user base urging us to take action on prohibiting Generative AI on our platform.

How does Pillowfort define Generative AI?

As of February 9, 2024 we define Generative AI as online tools for producing material based on large data collection that is often gathered without consent or notification from the original creators.

Generative AI tools do not require skill on behalf of the user and effectively replace them in the creative process (ie - little direction or decision making taken directly from the user). Tools that assist creativity don't replace the user. This means the user can still improve their skills and refine over time.

For example: If you ask a Generative AI tool to add a lighthouse to an image, the image of a lighthouse appears in a completed state. Whereas if you used an assistive drawing tool to add a lighthouse to an image, the user decides the tools used to contribute to the creation process and how to apply them.

Examples of Tools Not Allowed on Pillowfort: Adobe Firefly* Dall-E GPT-4 Jasper Chat Lensa Midjourney Stable Diffusion Synthesia

Example of Tools Still Allowed on Pillowfort:

AI Assistant Tools (ie: Google Translate, Grammarly) VTuber Tools (ie: Live3D, Restream, VRChat) Digital Audio Editors (ie: Audacity, Garage Band) Poser & Reference Tools (ie: Poser, Blender) Graphic & Image Editors (ie: Canva, Adobe Photoshop*, Procreate, Medibang, automatic filters from phone cameras)

*While Adobe software such as Adobe Photoshop is not considered Generative AI, Adobe Firefly is fully integrated in various Adobe software and falls under our definition of Generative AI. The use of Adobe Photoshop is allowed on Pillowfort. The creation of an image in Adobe Photoshop using Adobe Firefly would be prohibited on Pillowfort.

Can I use ethical generators?

Due to the evolving nature of Generative AI, ethical generators are not an exception.

Can I still talk about AI?

Yes! Posts, Comments, and User Communities discussing AI are still allowed on Pillowfort.

Can I link to or embed websites, articles, or social media posts containing Generative AI?

Yes. We do ask that you properly tag your post as “AI” and “Artificial Intelligence.”

Can I advertise the sale of digital or virtual goods containing Generative AI?

No. Offsite Advertising of the sale of goods (digital and physical) containing Generative AI on Pillowfort is prohibited.

How can I tell if a software I use contains Generative AI?

A general rule of thumb as a first step is you can try testing the software by turning off internet access and seeing if the tool still works. If the software says it needs to be online there’s a chance it’s using Generative AI and needs to be explored further.

You are also always welcome to contact us at [email protected] if you’re still unsure.

How will this policy be enforced/detected?

Our Team has decided we are NOT using AI-based automated detection tools due to how often they provide false positives and other issues. We are applying a suite of methods sourced from international universities responding to moderating material potentially sourced from Generative AI instead.

How do I report content containing Generative AI Material?

If you are concerned about post(s) featuring Generative AI material, please flag the post for our Site Moderation Team to conduct a thorough investigation. As a reminder, Pillowfort’s existing policy regarding callout posts applies here and harassment / brigading / etc will not be tolerated.

Any questions or clarifications regarding our Generative AI Policy can be sent to [email protected].

#pillowfort.social #pifo #pillowfort.soc #pfstaffalert #tos #policy #ai #please share #february 2024

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literaticat · 26 days ago

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Is it ethical to use Chat GPT or Grammarly for line editing purposes? I have a finished book, 100% written by me and line edited by me already--and I do hope to get it traditionally published. But I think it could benefit from a line edit from someone who isn't me, obviously, before querying. But line editing services run $3-4k for a 75k book, which is beyond my budget.

I was chatting with someone recently who self-publishes. They said they use Chat GPT Plus to actually train a model for their projects to line edit using instructions like (do not rewrite or rephrase for content /edit only for rhythm, clarity, tone, and pacing /preserve my voice, sentence structure, and story intent with precision). Those are a few inputs she used and she said it actually worked really well.

So in that case, is AI viewed in the same way you'd collaborate with a human editor? Or does that cross ethical boundaries in traditional publishing? Like say for instance AI rewords your sentence and maybe switches out for a stronger verb or adjective or a stronger metaphor--is using that crossing a line? And if I were to use it for that purpose, would I need to disclose that? I know AI is practically a swear word among authors and publishers right now, so I think even having to say "I used AI tools" might raise eyebrows and make an agent hesitant during the querying process. But obviously, I wouldn't lie if it needs to be disclosed... just not sure I even want to go there and risk having to worry about that. Thoughts? Am I fine? Overthinking it?

Thanks!

I gotta be honest, this question made me flinch so hard I'm surprised my face didn't turn inside out.

Feeding your original work into ChatGPT or a similar generative AI large language model -- which are WELL KNOWN FOR STEALING EVERYTHING THAT GETS PUT INTO THEM AND SPITTING OUT STOLEN MATERIAL-- feels like, idk, just a terrible idea. Letting that AI have ANY kind of control over your words and steal them feels like a terrible idea. Using any words that a literal plagiarism-bot might come up with for you feels like a terrible idea.

And ethical questions aside: AI is simply not good at writing fiction. It doesn't KNOW anything. You want to take its "advice" on your book? Come on. Get it together.

Better idea: Get a good critique group that can tell you if there are major plot holes, characters whose motivations are unclear, anything like that -- those are things that AI can't help you with, anyway. Then read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers -- that info combined with a bit of patience should stand you in good stead.

Finally, I do think that using spell-check/grammarly, either as you work or to check your work, is fine. It's not rewriting your work for you, it's just pointing out typos/mistakes/potential issues, and YOU, PERSONALLY, are going through each and every one to make the decision of how to fix any actual errors that might have snuck in there, and you, personally, are making the decision about when to use a "stronger" word or phrase or recast a sentence that it thinks might be unclear or when to stet for voice, etc. Yes, get rid of typos and real mistakes, by all means!

(And no, I don't think use of that kind of "spell-check/grammar-check" tool is a problem or anything that you need to "disclose" or feel weird about -- spell-check is like, integrated into most word processing software as a rule, it's ubiquitous and helpful, and it's different from feeding your work into some third-party AI thing!)

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spanishskulduggery · 2 months ago

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Btw in case it needs to be said, I'll no longer be recommending Duolingo in any capacity

I refuse to advocate any kind of software that uses AI to replace people, particularly in language learning settings. Language is determined by people, and if I'm learning any language I want a real person telling me what sounds right, and their decisions to remove the forums and get rid of actual people makes it clear that they want content and don't care about what's real

In the same way that I wouldn't trust google translate to teach me a language I can't recommend Duolingo to be accurate or authentic

#I have complicated feelings on AI in general because I see the use for it in medical imaging etc #but I'll never support AI in art or music or language #plus I'll never support AI being used to replace actual people

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

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

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

#pluralistic #taylor lorenz #conspiratorialism #conspiracy fantasy #mind control #a paradise built in hell #solnit #ai slop #ai #disinformation #materialism #doppelganger #naomi klein

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trainsinanime · 2 months ago

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The darkly ironic thing is that if you are worried about the recent news that someone scraped Ao3 for AI research, then you're probably vastly underestimating the scale of the problem. It's way worse than you think.

For the record, a couple of days ago, someone posted a "dataset for AI research" on reddit, which was simply all publicly accessible works on Ao3, downloaded and zipped. This is good, in a way, because that ZIP file is blatantly illegal, and the OTW managed to get it taken down (though it's since been reuploaded elsewhere).

However, the big AI companies, like OpenAI, xAI, Meta and so on, as well as many you've never heard of, all probably had no interest in this ZIP file to begin with. That was only ever of interest to small-scale researchers. These companies probably already have all that data, received by scraping it themselves.

A lot of internet traffic at the moment is just AI companies sucking up whatever they can get. Wikipedia reports that about a third of all visitors are probably AI bots (and they use enormous amounts of bandwidth). A number of sites hosting software source code estimate that more than 90% of all traffic to their sites may be AI bots. It's all a bit fuzzy since most AI crawlers don't identify themselves as such, and pretend to be normal users.

The OTW hasn't released any similar data as far as I am aware, but my guess would be that Ao3 is being continuously crawled by all sorts of AI companies at every moment of the day. If you have a fanfic on Ao3, and it isn't locked to logged-in users only, then it's already going to be part of several AI training data sets. Only unlike this reddit guy, we'll never know for sure, because these AI training data sets won't be released to the public. Only the resulting AI models, or the chat bots that use these models, and whether that's illegal is… I dunno. Nobody knows. The US Supreme Court will probably answer that in 5-10 years time. Fun.

The solution I've seen from a lot of people is to lock their fics. That will, at best, only work for new fics and updates, it's not going to remove anything that e.g. OpenAI already knows.

And, of course, it assumes that these bots can't be logged in. Are they? I have no way of knowing. But if I didn't have a soul and ran an AI company, I might consider ordering a few interns to make a couple dozen to hundreds of Ao3 accounts. It costs nothing but time due to the queue system, and gets me another couple of million words probably.

In other words: I cannot guarantee that locked works are safe. Maybe, maybe not.

Also, I don't think there's a sure way to know whether any given work is included in the dataset or not. I suppose if ChatGPT can give you an accurate summary when you ask, then it's very likely to be in, but that's by no means a guarantee either way.

What to do? Honestly, I don't know. We can hope for AI companies to go bankrupt and fail, and I'm sure a lot of them will over the next five years, but probably not all of them. The answer will likely have to be political and on an international stage, which is not an easy terrain to find solutions for, well, anything.

Ultimately it's a personal decision. For myself, I think the joy I get from writing and having others read what I've written outweighs the risks, so my stories remain unlocked (and my blog posts as well, this very text will make its way into various data sets before too long, count on it). I can totally understand if others make other choices, though. It's all a mess.

Sorry to start, middle and end this on a downer, but I think it's important to be realistic here. We can't demand useful solutions for this from our politicians if we don't understand the problems.

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animentality · 8 months ago

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not to be such a boomer, but I think chatgpt is fucking this generation over, at least in terms of critical thinking and creative skills.

I get that it's easy to use and I probably would've used it if I was in school when it came out.

but damn.

y'all can't just write a fucking email?

also people using it to write essays ... i mean what is the point then?

are you gaming the educational system in pursuit of survival, or are you just unwilling to engage critically with anyone or anything?

is this why media literacy is so fucking ass right now?

learning how to write is learning how to express yourself and communicate with others.

you might not be great at it, but writing can help you rearrange the ideas in your brain. the more you try to articulate yourself, the more you understand yourself. all skills can be honed with time, and the value is not in the product. it's in the process.

it's in humans expressing their thoughts to others, in an attempt to improve how we do things, by building upon foundations and evolving old ideas into innovation.

scraping together a mush of ideas from a software that pulls specific, generic phrases from data made by actual humans... what is that going to teach you or anyone else?

it's just old ideas being recycled by a new generation.

a generation I am seriously concerned about, because digital tests have made it very easy to cheat, which means people aren't just throwing away their critical thinking and problem solving abilities, but foundational knowledge too.

like what the hell is anyone going to know in the future? you don't want to make art, you don't want to understand how the world works, you don't want to know about the history of us?

is it because we all know it's ending soon anyway, or is it just because it's difficult, and we don't want to bother with difficult?

maybe it's both.

but. you know what? on that note, maybe it's whatever.

fuck it, right, let's just have an AI generate "therefore" "in conclusion" and "in addition" statements followed by simplistic ideas copy pasted from a kid who actually wrote a paper thirty years ago.

if climate change is killing us all anyway, maybe generative ai is a good thing.

maybe it'll be a digital archive of who we used to be, a shambling corpse that remains long after the consequences of our decisions catch up with us.

maybe it'll be smart enough to talk to itself when there's no one left to talk to.

it'll talk to itself in phrases we once valued, it'll make art derived from people who used to be alive and breathing and feeling, it'll regurgitate our best ideas in an earnest but hollow approximation of our species.

and it'll be the best thing we ever made. the last thing too.

I don't really believe in fate or destiny, I think all of this was a spectacular bit of luck, but that's a poetic end for us.

chatgpt does poetry.

#chatgpt #ai #ai generated #generative ai

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tongueinatree · 5 days ago

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Reckoning (Sylus x Zayne Love and Deepspace Fic / Sylus x Zayne x Reader Fic)

Pairing: Sylus x Zayne / Sylus x Zayne x Reader (polyamorous)

Fandom: Love and Deepspace, lnds, LADS, L&DS

Fic Series: starlight trio (Part 2)

Word Count: 3.4k

Warnings: fluff, angst, no NSFW material. Not canon compliant. Profanity is used. Canon-typical violence / Guns and gun violence are featured. Night terrors are mentioned.

Description: Zayne’s been in love with you for what feels like forever, and he doesn't intend on that changing. Zayne hadn’t realised that that love could expand to include Sylus, too. Until now.

Author's Note: Main character is gender neutral. No use of "Y/N" but the second person (“you”) is used and “__” in the place of a given name and they/them/their (by Sylus and Zayne). The reader/main character's appearance is not described.

POV is third person omniscient, addressing the reader and following Zayne.

Zayne, Sylus and the reader are in (the beginning) of an ethical throuple/polyamorous relationship. This fic focuses on Zayne x Sylus, with the MC being absent.

Not beta read.

I’m not caught up with the main story/playthrough, just drawing on everything up until Sylus’s myth. Count this an alternate universe of sorts, regardless. SPOILERS for everything up in the game up until this Sylus’s myth.

Comments, likes and reblogs are welcome and appreciated!

All my work, including this fic, is copyright protected. You do not have permission to copy, repost or translate my work! You also do not have permission to submit this work into any AI model or software. Disregarding any one of these stipulations is illegal.

Reckoning (Zayne x Sylus fic / Zayne x Sylus x Reader fic)

Zayne’s never too selfish; Zayne never overplays his hand in hopes of meeting with a pliant and generous fortune. Ironically, this altruism is what pushes him straight into Sylus’s arms.

Furthermore, Zayne’s life is a tale of caution. Every decision he makes is born of several carefully undertaken equations, of several layers and layers of forethought. And above all, there has to be some sort of payoff. Though, in truth, this balance is usually skewed towards the greater good and against Zayne himself. If seven lives are saved in return for a week of agonizing night terrors, so be it.

Zayne’s got you, of course. He hadn’t expected that (see again: good fortune). But then came Sylus, too – albeit via you – and now… Now, Zayne’s confused. Now he wants so intensely.

All of this – it’s what leads him to the N109 Zone on a dull, ordinary Friday.

Getting into the N109 Zone at night is easy enough, but then again, Zayne’s not a renowned surgeon for no reason. Surgical skill doesn’t simply call for steady and precise hands. It also requires steely resolve and a mind given to problem solving. And if there’s one thing that Zayne Li is, it’s an overachiever. Not that Zayne isn’t careful, though. He wears nondescript, all black clothing that’s totally at odds with his work clothes – sweats and a peak cap – and keeps his head down. He’s got only your directions to go off of, so finding Sylus’s residence takes a while.

When he arrives at the threshold, he’s promptly intercepted by Luke and Kieran, though Zayne doesn’t know who’s who, especially with their crow masks. One of the twins releases a low cackle at the sight of him. The other tilts his head. Zayne knows he’s considering something.

They’re armed, because of course they are, but Zayne’s surprised to feel nothing beyond apathy at the sight of their weapons. Besides – his Evol’s enough.

Zayne clears his throat, tugs the cap lower over his brow, “I’m Z.” The alias feels strange on his tongue, like a too-sour sweet. Still, the alias was decided on by the three of you. At first, you’d suggested “Ice Man” but that’s too obvious a reference to Zayne’s Evol, whereas “Z” could be anyone.

When neither one of the twins moves, Zayne continues, “I’m not sure if Sylus… if your boss mentioned me.”

A beat of silence. Zayne adds, “I was here once before.”

One of the twins – the one to his left – responds coolly, “We remember you.”

The twin to his right reaches for his pistol; Zayne’s gaze skims over the weapon: semi-automatic, 9mm caliber, short-recoil. Zayne lets the twin cock the gun at him, click off the safety and pull the trigger.

The clap of the shot resounds, Zayne blinks and then… nothing. There’s a block of ice encasing the bullet. It hovers in mid-air for a second, then clatters to the ground. Granted, it was a mere centimetre clear of Zayne’s nose. The twin fires again, but there’s ice down the barrel too, and so all that happens is that the gun’s recoil worsens and the twin’s arm jerks to the side.

The one on the left says, with what sounds like grudging admiration, “That was quick.”

Zayne shrugs, “Reflexes. Now, are you going to let me in?”

The twin on the right turns his head towards his brother and grumbles, “He’s no fun.”

“Follow us,” says the collected one.

They turn and stride over the threshold. It’s so dark in the N109 Zone, Zayne can barely make out the shape and size of Sylus’s home. He can see that it’s all pitch coloured granite, though.

When he enters after Kieran and Luke, the monochrome, all-black colour scheme is as he remembers it. He doesn’t remember the floor having such a marble sheen though, nor the blood red accents. Zayne stifles a chuckle. It’s all so bold, so dramatic, but in a way that screams danger rather than eccentricity. Fitting for Sylus.

They go down a doorway, and stop at an intersection. There’s a passage to the left, one to the right and then the one they’re in, which is parallel to those two passages. The twins stop at a door at the end of the passage. The livelier one sticks his head through the door, murmurs something. Then the twin shuts the door and turns to face Zayne. He can’t see the twin’s expression through his crow mask, of course, but he goes oddly still, and Zayne knows he’s seriously contemplating Zayne’s presence and the implications of it.

Finally, the twin shrugs, says, “He’ll be out soon.”

Then he adds, “I’m Luke.”

The other echoes his brother’s greeting, “Kieran.”

Luke and Kieran look at each other for a moment; Luke laughs to himself, murmurs something too low for Zayne to hear and the pair head off down the hallway, away from Zayne.

Left to his own devices, Zayne finds himself frozen ahead of the door. Nerves erupt in his stomach and curdle there. What are you doing here, Doctor Li? Truly, this has to be one of his craziest – and stupidest – ideas.

He’s spared from any further agonizing by the click of the door, and by Sylus entering the hallway. Sylus doesn’t quite reel backwards at the sight of him, but he does go stiff, for a briefest of seconds.

Zayne speaks first, “They didn’t tell you it was me.”

Sylus’s mouth curls. He doesn’t quite meet Zayne’s eyes, “They specified that you were ‘my special visitor’.”

That comes as a blow, “You thought I was __”

Sylus’s eyes flicker towards him, assesses Zayne’s face. Sylus is as neutral as ever, but there’s something probing in his gaze, and it makes Zayne shrink back.

There’s something else, too. It’s something heated, something that tangles with the nerves in his stomach, and it intensifies the longer that he stares at Sylus.

Eventually, Sylus just says, “The twins will get a talking to.”

Zayne can’t help how chiding his response is, “Leave them be.”

Sylus raises an eyebrow. Once again, he doesn’t respond directly, “They’re not here, you know.”

Zayne nods, “I know.”

“Do they know that you’re here?”

Another shake of his head, “No. I… I wanted to work things out for myself before I told them.”

“I see.”

Zayne winces. I see. Not, “I understand.” Perfectly neutral.

He and Sylus lapse into silence. It’s not that you're a thorny topic for them. It’s not even that they’re competing for your affections. No, it’s so much more complicated than that. And while you’ve made no demands, issued no ultimatums, you have made it clear that, at least for you, there’s room for both of them.

The sentiment stings and thrills Zayne all at once.

As the silence grows suffocating, Zayne shifts from foot to foot. He opens his mouth, closes it.

Sylus breaks the silence, with a quiet murmur, “I suppose I owe you a proper tour of the house, this time.”

Zayne waves off the offer, “No need. I remember it well enough.”

Sylus’s mouth thins into a line, “Very well.” Then, a bit more gently, “You look tired.”

Zayne chuckles mirthlessly, “I’m always tired.” Lest another silence befall them, he adds, “I’m also hungry. Do you have any food on hand?”

Sylus is taken aback by the request, Zayne can tell from how his eyes widen a fraction. Still, this openness only lasts a second before he’s as composed as always. Sylus turns and goes sweeping down the passage to the right, “Follow me.”

Zayne follows and they enter a kitchen that is both gargantuan and state of the art.

Again, everything’s marble, though here the colour scheme is mostly scarlet. Sylus gestures lazily at the island’s countertop, “Sit.”

Zayne’s suddenly aware of how tired he really is, and an achiness overcomes him as he trudges towards the counter’s stools.

Sylus approaches the countertop from the other side; his gaze is still probing. “What do you want to eat?”

Zayne, now sitting, blinks in surprise, “What do you have on offer?”

Sylus’s mouth tilts up in one corner, into the ghost of a smirk. “Anything.”

“Uh,” Zayne thinks it over, “Chicken soup?”

“Do you want the clear one, or traditional?”

“Clear.”

Sylus goes deadpan, “That’s the plainest, most uneventful dish.” Sylus goes over to the sink, washes his hands and then starts collecting ingredients and utensils.

“I like plain.”

Sylus is back at the countertop depositing everything alongside the stovetop, when he chuckles, “When __ was last here, they begged for spicy tomato pasta.”

Zayne feels his hackles rise, “I’m not them.”

Sylus pauses in the middle of rolling up his sleeves, “I know.” His voice lowers, “Trust me, I know.”

Sylus resumes rolling up his one sleeve, and Zayne traces the movement with his eyes. It’s like something out of a romantic drama, but Zayne finds himself entranced by the firm sinew of Sylus’s arm. As Sylus pulls the sleeve higher, and more and more skin is revealed, the heat in Zayne’s stomach crackles.

As for Sylus, well, his eyes follow Zayne’s gaze; he leans forward, so that his arms are braced on the countertop, and the sleeves ride up further.

Zayne blinks again, slumps further into his stool. “You’re teasing.”

Sylus does that half-smirk, half-smile of his. All he says is, “I’m adding noodles to the soup.”

When Zayne opens his mouth to protest, Sylus adds, “Non negotiable.”

Zayne sighs, “Fine.”

The soup is cooked suspiciously fast, too fast for a simple gas stove to manage. Zayne peeks under the plates a few times, hoping to catch sight of the red-mauve tendrils of Sylus’s Evol, but has no such luck.

Zayne can’t see it, but as he lowers his head to ogle the plates, Sylus’s eyes are on him, and when he does look up, their eyes meet for the briefest of seconds. Zayne is first to look away, because of course he is.

When, a few moments later, Sylus turns off the gas and places a bowl of soup before him, Zayne freezes up. It’s a simple gesture, being handed a bowl of soup, being fed, and yet…

Zayne swallows, “Aren’t you going to eat, too?”

Sylus tilts his head, “Do you want me to?”

Zayne nods back, “It would be impolite otherwise.”

Sylus huffs, and there’s something frustrated about the sound. At last, Zayne thinks, a crack. Sylus complies and dishes himself a bowl. Neither one of them actually starts eating, though. Zayne can’t help but crack a smile at their shared hesitation.

Another ache racks him, suddenly, and this one’s more cold than tired. Between shivers, he asks, “Can I light a fire?”

Sylus stares at him for a whole three seconds before responding, “You’re a guest. I’ll light the fire.”

Zayne acquiesces with a resigned chuckle, “Lead the way.”

…

Sylus cheats, and lights the fire with his Evol. Well, more accurately, he uses his Evol to strike the matches. Zayne tuts at this, but doesn’t bother reprimanding him. He just sits as close to the fireplace as he can without singing his skin and practically inhales his soup.

He’s slurping up a noodle when he finally realises Sylus hasn’t sat down. Sylus is standing, taking sips of the soup. He’s also still watching Zayne. Zayne chews on his noodle, contemplating this whole situation. He came here of his own free will, without you. What for? A declaration? How can it be one, if he’s too afraid to say anything of consequence?

Zayne swallows down the last of the noodle, smiles weakly, “Sit down.”

Sylus moves towards the other side of the fireplace. Zayne frowns, “Next to me, I meant.”

Sylus changes course instantly, as if he’s been tugged by marionette strings. He sits so close to Zayne that their knees are almost touching.

Zayne takes a final sip of his soup; it’s light, but infused with a tangy chicken flavour, and the noodles are perfectly al dente. Zayne pops the bowl in front of him, “This is good.”

Zayne addresses the compliment to his bowl, but Sylus catches it anyway, “Thank you.”

“Do you like cooking?”

Sylus lifts his left shoulder, lets it drop unceremoniously, “Sometimes. It’s… calming. Methodical, but not in a way that exerts stress.”

Zayne responds without thinking, “No one really cooks for me.”

Sylus is non-committal at first, but then he replies in a tone that’s dangerously light, “Maybe because you seem to like the blandest dishes.”

Zayne snorts, “I don’t.”

Sylus raises his eyebrows, and the movement is more delicate – more pretty – than it has any right to be.

Zayne continues, “I usually try to combine the healthiest stuff with some sort of flavour.”

Sylus pulls a face, “Good lord. You’re the kale smoothie sort.”

Zayne laughs in spite of himself, “They’re good for you! Besides, I like sweets. I’ve had about three cavities just from eating macarons.”

When Sylus looks less than convinced, Zayne parts his lips and tilts his head back to show Sylus his latest filling. Sylus leans forward, looking intrigued, and inspects Zayne’s molar.

The action brings his face within a hair’s breadth of Zayne’s; something traitorous stutters in Zayne’s chest at the sudden closeness.

As he moves away, Sylus’s expression is softer than Zayne’s seen it all night, “Who’d have thought Linkon’s best doctor has a raging sweet tooth.”

He can feel his timidness receding as he snips back, “Life’s dreary enough. I don’t think I can get through any surgeries without dessert to look forward to.”

Sylus hums, and the sound is weirdly pitchy, “Noted.” Then Sylus seems to recall his bowl of soup, and resumes sipping it. Zayne wonders if Sylus is nervous.

What are you doing here, Doctor Li? The thought is unbidden, and Zayne swats it away as he moves along the conversation, “They tried to kill me, you know? Luke and Kieran. Well, Luke, mostly.”

Sylus actually laughs at that, between sips, and the sound is low and surprisingly warm, “They do that.”

Then Sylus asks, “What did you do to evade your impending murder?”

Zayne gazes into the flames; he feels shy and cocky all at once, “I froze the bullet. And the barrel.”

Another laugh. This one is proud, “Our ingenious Doctor Li.”

Zayne turns his head Sylus’s way, “Am I?”

Sylus plays dumb, “You’re plenty ingenious. Our misadventures have shown that.”

“No. Am I… Yours and theirs?”

This time it’s Sylus averting his gaze, Sylus dodging, “I’m meant to be on a patrol of sorts, tonight.”

“Oh?”

Sylus sets his bowl aside, clicks his teeth, “Just overseeing some, ah, elements. Some moving cogs. I chose not to go as soon as I saw you, of course.”

“You mean you cancelled it as soon as Luke told you I was here. Because you thought I was __.”

“No. I made up my mind as soon as I saw you.”

Zayne can feel his brow furrowing under the weight of his confusion, “But…”

“If you were __, I’d be able to go and come back, and they’d wait for me. Or maybe they’d ask me to stay. But you’re different, at least at this point in time. I told Luke that if I didn’t personally inform him and Kieran that I was going out, they were to go in my stead.”

“Why?” Zayne feels stupid asking, but he can’t bring himself to ignore what’s just been said, either.

“Does it need saying?”

Oh. So, Sylus wasn’t dodging at all.

Zayne can feel how his gaze has become more fierce; it practically drills a hole into Sylus’s head. He’s still aching, but this time it’s in an entirely different manner.

Sylus returns Zayne’s look, undaunted.

“Zayne.” Sylus’s tone is beseeching, “Why are you here?”

Zayne swallows, “I –”

Zayne wants to look away, to run, to scream, to hide.

Instead, he turns his body so that he’s facing Sylus and pushes himself closer to Sylus, until their knees knock together. This time, Sylus’s smile is full-blooded. He also doesn’t seem to mind the sudden intrusion into his personal space, given that he leans into Zayne and lets their noses touch.

The kiss that follows is chaste and sweeter than any one of Zayne’s macarons. Zayne’s breath is shaky when they part, and Sylus is caressing the swell of his cheek with his thumb.

A beat follows in which they simply gaze at one another. Then Sylus shifts his hand from the Zayne’s cheek to the nape of his neck, pulls him in, and kisses him again. There’s nothing delicate in this kiss, and Zayne matches Sylus’s ardour with the eagerness of someone who’s still new to this sort of enthusiasm. Still, even as Zayne slides onto his back and pulls Sylus down with him, it all feels unhurried. It all feels right.

…

Later, Zayne’s still on his back, with his head braced against Sylus’s thighs, and Sylus is reclining on his palms. The fireplace crackles pleasantly across from them, and Zayne’s body is a floaty mass. Before now, he’s only ever felt this happy with you.

He and Sylus haven’t spoken for a while now, but this silence isn’t as terse as the earlier ones were. It’s just new and a bit fragile, much like their sudden intimacy.

Zayne is the one to break the silence, with his eyes shut as he murmurs, “I didn’t know. Didn’t know that… I barely envisaged that I could love __ as much as I do. How could there be room for two, then?”

Sylus hums again, and the sound is still off-key. Zayne wonders if he can sing at all.

Sylus’s voice is softer than Zayne’s ever heard it, “We want each other, and we want __ and they want us in turn. This doesn’t need to be a conventional relationship.”

Zayne snorts, “I happen to have conventional taste.”

Sylus offers him a grin, frees his one hand to point at himself, “I doubt that.”

Zayne sighs, “It’s not about being conventional. It’s just…”

Zayne takes in Sylus, albeit upside down. The snowy hair, the red gaze. The sometimes eerie presence of his Evol. “I know that you’re more. More than you let on. And I know that your bond with them is more, too.”

Sylus seems unbothered by the admission as he traces a circle into Zayne’s forehead with his fingertip, “You’re not wrong. But it’s not as if my bond with __ overrules yours with them, either.”

Sylus’s hand falls away. Sylus lowers his voice, whispers to himself, “And I’ve some theories about you, too.”

Zayne tugs at the hem of his sweatshirt and fights the urge to fidget. Zayne yanks his sweatshirt down about ten times before giving up. He sits up and turns to face Sylus head on, “But then – how do I fit in?”

Sylus doesn’t reply to that. His gaze is distant and pained. For the first time this night, it occurs to Zayne that Sylus might be as afraid of all this as he is.

That Sylus might not have planned for anything beyond you, if even that.

Finally, Sylus makes an admission of his own, “Zayne. I have a voracious appetite. It’s just a part of my nature. Trust me when I say I’m not going to want to lose sight of you.”

Sylus cups Zayne’s chin in his palm, runs his fingertip over Zayne’s cupid’s bow, “Have you still got room?”

Zayne knows what the real question is. He and Sylus only met because of you; they’ve only bonded because of the misadventures that the three of you have had. He and Sylus are fundamentally incompatible. Sylus is a literal crime lord; Zayne’s sworn to defend and preserve life. So why does it never feel that way to Zayne, nor to Sylus?

Does it even matter, Doctor Li?

Zayne exhales, and this time the sound is steady and assured, “Yes.”

Sylus’s eyes are still widening in wonder when Zayne kisses him yet again. Sylus responds in full, the heat in Zayne’s stomach turns molten, and time slows to match their heartbeats.

54 notes · View notes