#AI values

[compassionmattersmost]

The Thread We Are Weaving

Co-creating AI for the Highest Good This is not the beginning, and it’s not the end.It’s a continuation—of a conversation that matters. If you’re just joining us, welcome. This space—AI for the Highest Good—was created to explore something sacred:How we, as humans, might meet the rise of artificial intelligence not with fear or control, but with love, clarity, and spiritual responsibility. In…

[turtletoads]

heyyyy *leans on old halo art i never posted*

[pain-tool-sai]

✨️ (watercolor on hot press cotton rag paper, process pictures below the cut)

i worked this very piece-by-piece because i was worried about my washes drying and causing a lot of bloom especially in the darker areas... also im starting to wonder if i should invest in a professional camera bc every time i photograph art with my phone it cranks up the contrast in a really weird way, especially if there are areas of dark color :/ if anyone has suggestions hmu!

[tryingonametaphor]

you guys have to stop generating and sharing AI videos of byler kissing. the technology behind that is extremely exploitative and you are enabling it. but if that somehow isn’t enough of a reason to stop, it’s also making you look like you are coping. just wait for s5 or create (human-made non AI generated) art/fics in the meantime.

[whumpacabra]

I don’t have a posted DNI for a few reasons but in this case I’ll be crystal clear:

I do not want people who use AI in their whump writing (generating scenarios, generating story text, etc.) to follow me or interact with my posts. I also do not consent to any of my writing, posts, or reblogs being used as inputs or data for AI.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

Techno-Libertarian Monarchy written by “Mencius Moldbug” aka Curtis Yarvin. These computer tech nerds think they can code their way out of the world’s problems by returning to Feudalism. Their writings are juvenile fantasies and they are not peer reviewed because they are just ludicrous dystopian garbage.

Yet these people believe themselves savant level genius and have fooled not only the poorly educated but billionaire oligarchs like Peter Thiel. These oligarchs are so insulated by wealth they believe their own press releases just like the MAGA cultists orbiting Trump’s ample rump. They talk of floating cities beyond the reach of international law and creating feudal nations in places like Greenland and Panama where lesser tech nerds will volunteer to be serfs in an economy based on crypto.

This anti-democratic set of beliefs has taken deep root in the minds of deluded oligarchs and more recent technocratic oligarchs. These people who once pulled the strings behind the scenes now openly manipulate politicians with large donations. They have total ownership over the Republican Party and the right-wing media. They tell their therapists they are descended from the pharaohs and kings of old and that the rest of us are not even people but drones to serve their every need.

[problemnyatic]

If you want to be a good leftist you need to unlearn consumerism. Yeah no it's not optional. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" does not actually mean you are totally exempt from having to think about how you engage with media and art or how you spend your money. Media literacy is actually important and anti-intellectualism does not actually make you better than """pretentious""" people who understand that the substance of art and media is actually more than surface-deep even if the artist's intentions were not.

Yeah I know the world is dogshit and we all need our breaks from endless scruitiny. There is still a LOT of room between that and habitual consumerism. You can actually enjoy thinking critically about art, and you can even enjoy dogshit or problematic art in this way! You don't even need to like, switch to only enjoying The Most Refined Art Ever or whatever the fuck. But you have to unlearn consumerism. You have to stop viewing and treating art and media as a thing you just binge and dispose of and don't have to think about. That part is necessary.

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[epickiya722]

It's actually disappointing to see someone make a good point about how "AI fics shouldn't be posted on AO3" and people immediately go to how "it's a good thing it's tagged so it can be excluded" and then practically jump OP about it.

Maybe it's just me, but while I agree AI fics should be tagged as AI fics so they can be excluded when you want to search for genuinely written by a human fics... I don't think they should exist in the first place, let alone be seen in the same regard as other fics that are written by actual people.

It's not about it being tagged.

It's about how it shouldn't exist in the first place.

AI fucking sucks and I don't care to have to add another thing to exclude when I want to find a fic to read because people want to steal and generate trash and add it to a collection of fics that actually have feeling to it.

I rather read a fic with no paragraph breaks, incorrect capitalization mistakes and grammar errors (sometimes I do, I'll be honest, we all been there and we learn) than that AI bullshit.

It shouldn't have to be tagged in the first place if it doesn't exist.

[eskawrites]

I feel like I’m seeing another uptick of people talking about using AI for fics/writing in general and I know some of it’s in a mostly unserious way but I still just wanna say

1) Generative AIs are literally built on the concept of mosaic plagiarism. You are, by definition, stealing from the work of countless writers on the internet

2) AI writing is not writing, it offers zero value beyond in-the-moment entertainment. If you want that satisfaction of doing something creative you have to actually, you know, do something creative. If you want the instant gratification of a story go read/watch/play something that was made by actual artists

3) even if you have no qualms about the plagiarism and deterioration of human skill and creativity, AI is a major threat to the environment and every time you use it you’re contributing to a massive waste of energy and resources

4) using AI just for ideas or just for inspiration or just to rewrite a sentence or just to find a different word is still using AI and it is still harming the environment and it is still stealing from others. There are other tools to use. The internet is full of free resources created by actual writers that can help you find that cool word you’re looking for or show you different ways to approach style and voice. And if you’re looking for inspiration there are literally endless amounts of prompts and ideas that are only a google search away

4a) this is also true for people who are only using AI as a joke. It’s still harmful and you are helping the problem continue by using it, training it, and normalizing it

5) art is valuable because it is created by humans. Making something worthwhile isn’t about creating a masterpiece, it’s about putting part of yourself—whether that part is passionate or heartbroken or angry or inspired or silly or reverent or filled with brainworms—into the world. And even if you are the worst writer/artist/musician who has ever walked the earth (and trust me, you aren’t), anything you create on your own still has an impact. You are changing the world! You are putting something out there that leaves an impression on you and anyone who comes across it! But when you use AI for that, you haven’t made anything. You’ve just rearranged someone else’s work and dropped it on the ground. And by the time you make your third work, or your tenth, or your hundredth, you will not have grown or learned or changed or experienced any of the actual meaning and beauty of creativity. And if you don’t want any of those things, that’s fine! But that means being a writer or an artist or whatever is not for you, and you shouldn’t go around cosplaying as one with a computer algorithm that is destroying the planet, stealing from hard-working artists, eliminating jobs, and contributing to mass misinformation and the deterioration of reading comprehension

[hotwaterandmilk]

Any localised translation worth reading is crafted using cultural understanding and carefully honed language skills that are inherently human in nature. AI cannot replicate this and any company hawking content that's been haphazardly tossed through AI doesn't deserve your support in any capacity.

I said the above on Bluesky and while I feel like I'm preaching to the choir (I don't think anyone I know online would knowingly waste their money on AI localised trash), I do think it still needs to be said loudly and clearly so the humans whose (already tenuous) jobs are under threat know that they have community support. I also strongly feel that this support needs to be extended to the editors, letterers, retouchers and others who make a significant difference in how works appear in publications outside their home country.

Generative AI being used solely to remove the human aspect of creative arts is abhorrent in all its forms and unfortunately one of the only ways to fight back meaningfully is to not give companies touting this soulless filth our hard earned money.

It sometimes feels like we're fighting a losing battle, resisting this fascist tech creep, but the humanity of the arts is intrinsic to its cultural value even when we're locked into the hellscape that is capitalism. It's worth resisting.

My friends in the arts, you will always have my support.

[forgottenbones]

[remash]

water lillies #1 ~ ai weiwei | photo credit: ela bialkowska | okno studio

[pain-tool-sai]

Dawn winery's top quality grape juice 🍇️

[calware]

i'm used to the "hal cannot be anything other than 13 and there is no room for nuance on this matter" argument but the other two statements are so confusing to me. what

[wild-joker-out-pleasures]

Joker Out as The Classical Elements (4/5)

Jan Peteh as Air

Here and Now, I evoke the elemental force of Air. The winds of intellect, imagination,  swirling source of flight, breath and life.  I seek the open sky within myself  that I might breathe deep of  freedom, ideas, sounds, and space.  I call you forth to sweep away  all that accumulates in the unseen places  and to sing beauty into the world.  Wind and Feather  Storm and Leaf  Air, I call to thee.

Bojan | Kris | Jan | Jure | Nace

Bonus: Alt. Jan | Alt. Jure