#Accurate Text Recognition

[devangriai]

Use Cases of OCR Translation. Which is the best Image to Text Converter Online?

Learn How Optical Character Recognition Can Make a Difference Discover how OCR with enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and automation is transforming finance, healthcare, logistics, and much more.

OCR Translation helps to read and transform the printed, written, or scribbled characters. The computer alters the image content into machine-encoded texts. This is a subcategory of image recognition. The character recognition application converts a digitized or scanned material into a written document.

In this in-depth write-up, we explore OCR use cases and the uses of OCR Translation technology and common and industry-specific applications that highlight the importance of text extraction. OCR APIs were developed to transcribe text coming from handwritten documents for better interpretation by machines. There are now increasing applications being used across industries.

There are common applications of OCR Translation such as:

Extracting text from scanned documents for digital archiving

Text recognition for images to automate data entry.

Convert readable PDFs into writable formats.

Increase accessibility by converting printed text into digital text for screen readers.

OCR technology improves data accuracy, manages workflows, and increases industry productivity.

 

Common Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications and use cases

1. Invoice processing

Data extraction: Retrieves invoice numbers, vendor information, amounts, and dates to ensure precise and error-free data capture.

Efficiency boost: It enhances overall efficiency in managing documents through ease of handling and organizing large volumes of documents.

Knowledge management: It assists the organization in better management and exploiting its knowledge assets.

2. Document digitization

Physical to digital conversion: Image to Text Converter Online is used to convert paper-based documents to digital, thus making their handling and storage easier.

Easy access: Makes historic records, contracts, and legal papers easily traceable; hence, access to information will be faster.

Storage needs: It reduces the use of physical storage space contributes to less clutter and saves on the cost of storage.

3. Recover information from forms

Automatic processing of forms: Assists in gathering information fast and accurately through form processing using registration documents, application forms, and survey forms.

Environmental impact: It applies in reducing paper usage toward achieving sustainability since it reduces the carbon footprint of any organization.

Saving time: This accelerates the data entry processes that enable the applications and forms to be processed fast.

Applications in industry: It is useful for the intake forms of patients in hospitals, loan applications in banks, and all application procedures in government offices.

Error Reduction: It greatly diminishes the likelihood of data entry errors. More accurate records are ensured.

4. Making documents searchable

Text scanning: Scanned images and documents are made into searchable text for ease of retrieval.

Improved retrieval: The process improves the location of specific information in big text repositories, saving time and effort.

Documentation management: Organizing files and retrieval in virtual archives enhances efficiency in a firm's operational activities.

OCR Translation technology has enormous potential in all industries. We discussed how OCR enhances data management. Automated digitized documents and invoice processing extract data to enhance document searchability and different forms of image content. 

Organizations can perform data entry from printed papers or data records using OCR as input, including passports, portfolios, financial records, sales receipts, and business cards. 

[dragonpyre]

don't watch movies with me if you don't want the ending spoiled. I've never seen it, I've just taken enough literature and storytelling classes to guess how it ends

[eggy-tea]

I’m so glad AI is here to save us.

(On the second attempt, it instead opened LibraryThing. Easy mistake to make; even to native English speakers it can be hard to distinguish between the sounds of “audible,” “library thing,” and “heart.”)

[the-fallen-blue]

I've been seeing a lot of discourse about the Murderbot casting, to the tune of "Wells says she imagined it as brown"/"the narrator of the audiobook is a man"/"the writing just sounds female, the types of things it notices and cares to mention and the way it puts its sentences together is how a woman would"/"it's canonically agender wtf"/"agender people can look masculine you asshole"/"it's supposed to look big and average that means white male"/"that's your own cultural bias in play and evidence says the average in its universe is brown"/"that's your bias in play there's no ironclad indication what the average is in the Corporation Rim"/"here's every single canon description of Murderbot it has no canon physical attributes other than Tall it could be played by literally anyone Checkmate Atheists" etc etc etc and it all just... misses the point?

No one is annoyed with Skarsgård!MB because "white dude" isn't canon.

They're annoyed because written Murderbot presents a level of identification and recognition for them that "white dude" does not.

Or, in other words: it is difficult to imagine a level of abuse more profound than not having the freedom of your own literal thoughts, consigned to a cripplingly limited and cruel social role from which any deviation is met with brutal pain. And it is all too easy to imagine a demographic who are presumed violent, hostile, and inferior, good only for labor and violence, who must be controlled and denied and unpersoned for the good of the rest. The lines aren't hard to draw, here; Murderbot is deeply relatable to many people who are not (visibly masculine) white men, specifically because they are not (visibly masculine) white men. Because they share with it the experience of oppression, marginalization, and being known on sight as wrong, being punished for the slightest deviance. Because it is not just another in the long boring line of ten thousand thousand grizzled white space marine heroman types; it is the thematic opposite of that.

And yeah duh obviously you can look like a boilerplate white dude and still suffer plenty of oppression, but film is a visual medium. Character design is a crucial part of its language, especially when a specific character is the only example of its type available to the audience. It is a shorthand that the audience will understand as a reflection on the wider setting. Which means that casting Skarsgård is, whether they meant it or not, a subtle statement that the ultimate bigotry in Murderbot's universe is against and about conventional white dudes.

Or in other other words, you cannot refute complaints about Skarsgård!MB with ~canon~ because canon has nothing to do with it. It's a thematic inconsistency, a failure to understand the not the story's text, but its subtext and its place in the wider cultural conversation of sci-fi (or at least to accurately translate those meta considerations to the satisfaction of a decent segment of the audience).

Like you can still yell about how bullshit you think that is if you want. Casting's not that deep or it's an important queer metaphor to pass and still struggle or people have no inherent 'right' to representation or whatever else. I'm not telling anyone what to say or believe. But just understand that that's what you're actually arguing with (or for, for that matter), is all I'm saying.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[askablindperson]

In what way does alt text serve as an accessibility tool for blind people? Do you use text to speech? I'm having trouble imagining that. I suppose I'm in general not understanding how a blind person might use Tumblr, but I'm particularly interested in the function of alt text.

In short, yes. We use text to speech (among other access technology like braille displays) very frequently to navigate online spaces. Text to speech software specifically designed for blind people are called screen readers, and when use on computers, they enable us to navigate the entire interface using the keyboard instead of the mouse And hear everything on screen, as long as those things are accessible. The same applies for touchscreens on smart phones and tablets, just instead of using keyboard commands, it alters the way touch affect the screen so we hear what we touch before anything actually gets activated. That part is hard to explain via text, but you should be able to find many videos online of blind people demonstrating how they use their phones.

As you may be able to guess, images are not exactly going to be accessible for text to speech software. Blindness screen readers are getting better and better at incorporating OCR (optical character recognition) software to help pick up text in images, and rudimentary AI driven Image descriptions, but they are still nowhere near enough for us to get an accurate understanding of what is in an image the majority of the time without a human made description.

Now I’m not exactly a programmer so the terminology I use might get kind of wonky here, but when you use the alt text feature, the text you write as an image description effectively gets sort of embedded onto the image itself. That way, when a screen reader lands on that image, Instead of having to employ artificial intelligences to make mediocre guesses, it will read out exactly the text you wrote in the alt text section.

Not only that, but the majority of blind people are not completely blind, and usually still have at least some amount of residual vision. So there are many blind people who may not have access to a screen reader, but who may struggle to visually interpret what is in an image without being able to click the alt text button and read a description. Plus, it benefits folks with visual processing disorders as well, where their visual acuity might be fine, but their brain’s ability to interpret what they are seeing is not. Being able to click the alt text icon in the corner of an image and read a text description Can help that person better interpret what they are seeing in the image, too.

Granted, in most cases, typing out an image description in the body of the post instead of in the alt text section often works just as well, so that is also an option. But there are many other posts in my image descriptions tag that go over the pros and cons of that, so I won’t digress into it here.

Utilizing alt text or any kind of image description on all of your social media posts that contain images is single-handedly one of the simplest and most effective things you can do to directly help blind people, even if you don’t know any blind people, and even if you think no blind people would be following you. There are more of us than you might think, and we have just as many varied interests and hobbies and beliefs as everyone else, so where there are people, there will also be blind people. We don’t only hang out in spaces to talk exclusively about blindness, we also hang out in fashion Facebook groups and tech subreddits and political Twitter hashtags and gaming related discord servers and on and on and on. Even if you don’t think a blind person would follow you, You can’t know that for sure, and adding image descriptions is one of the most effective ways to accommodate us even if you don’t know we’re there.

I hope this helps give you a clearer understanding of just how important alt text and image descriptions as a whole are for blind accessibility, and how we make use of those tools when they are available.

[contlis12]

Male Feedee and Genderless Feeder dark feederism short story

Cole groggily came to feelings his feeder lifting his legs with the straps they had installed in the bedroom after Cole had passed the 550 pound mark and changing and cleaning was becoming more of an issue. Pushing the massive parachute sized white underwear half way up his thighs ready to squeeze them past his sagging hips when they finally got him standing. As his feeder was slipping on his bariatric soft socks over his plump feet Cole asked almost nervously “why are you dressing me already? I haven’t even had my first feeding yet” his feeder just chuckled sweetly. “Oh we are going to do your breakfast out on the couch today, you are going to need the energy you’ll be busy today” they said rubbing lotion into the crevasses of Coles fat struggling to keep him from getting any bed rash or chub rub spending so long in bed and being so unhealthy and massively fat. Coles walk or more accurately waddle to the living room couch was eventful to say the least at one point Cole had broken down in tears begging to go to back to bed and that he couldn’t make it to the couch and had to be taken in his bariatric wheel chair the rest of the way to the couch. “There piggy I know this was hard and you are really cranky from being hungry so I’m going to make sure your belly is aching after this feast and you feel all better baby” and they weren’t exaggerating. Giant bowls heaped to the top with gravy and biscuits, greasy hashbrowns swimming in ketchup, even glazed doughnuts with slices of American cheese melted on the top of them. Coles feeder loved listening to him retch in pain so full his stomach is screaming to expel the food to make room and then greedily scarfing down the next bite making guttural gulping and snorts as he loses control plunging his mouth into the greasy low quality slop he’s been conditioned to love. After what seemed like hours Coles feeder had considered it satisfactory and let the pig stop eating and left in a messy ketchup and gravy covered mess. Grinning they came over and softly rubbed the sagging slab of fat that Coles gut had grown into a huge stretch mark covered waterfall of fat going nearly to his knees. “That’s such a good job piggy, I’m glad you ate plenty so you have the energy to entertain your friends tonight”. 

Coles already thudding heart started racing even faster as his food fogged brain started to realize what his feeder had just said. “Whu-what do you mean?” Cole stammered looking down at his feeder now with their head resting on his stomach looking  sweetly up at him. “Oh I invited your friends out to finally visit with you again, they all missed you so much so I kept up with them for you and set up a surprise visit honey” Coles mouth dropped open as he seen the glint in his feeders eyes as they drank in the absolute shock on his face. “I’m tired of you not giving me my due recognition Cole, you lay in my house pigging out all day eating up my money and you’ve never once told anybody how proud you were to be my piggy and grow for me. You try and hide that body I’ve grown and I’m due some respect and you to be a little more grateful” Cole began to let the words tumble out of his still open mouth “I-I-uh” his feeder puts a finger up to his lips. “Don’t speak because I don’t care, you need to learn how to give in this relationship and you are going to start by letting all your friends see what I’ve grown you into and how happy you are that I was kind enough to pick you for all this affection and time”. Cole hoped this was another role play scenario his feeder, there’s no way that this could be real. “They are going to be here in about 15 minutes or less. They texted me they were close to town towards the end of your breakfast. I was hoping to have you better dressed but there’s no way we could even get you into the bathroom that fast much less cleaned up and I need to welcome everyone in since you can’t open the door or really do anything but sit there and eat ofcourse” Coles eyes widened as he looked down and seen his massive exposed food stained body. His underwear were almost completely swallowed by his cascading waterfall of fat his body had turned into, if you didn’t look close you’d assume him nude. “Please you can’t do this to me! I can’t face people I used to know in this state!” Cole wailed eyes streaming tears that mixed with the ketchup staining his bloated fat puffy cheeks. “Oh I can’t? Okay Cole go walk to the bedroom and get yourself dressed” his feeder said coldly armed crossed smiling. “I can’t! You know I can’t!” His feeder walked over looming over him sitting on the couch “exactly so stop telling me what we are going to do piggy! You are going to learn your place, you are out of control princess!” They said grinning ear to ear at this point. “Now beg me, ask me like a pathetic hog since you’ve ate your manners away with your self control”. “Please I’m sorry can I get cleaned up and clothes” he said angry and totally mentally drained at this point knowing this wasn’t going to stop. “No” his feeder immediately replied “you are going to learn to respect me piggy, but I’ll let you have a shirt”.

Coles three closets friends all pilled out of the van they’d rode in from the airport in. “I can’t believe Coles partner paid for all our tickets here and everything! I mean seriously that guy is lucky to have a partner with those kind of expenses.” Mike said to Kayla “Yeah nice house too, must have been an old couples or something before. There aren’t even steps just a wheel chair ramp”. “I’m just glad to see the guy again, it’s been over two years since he moved out here with them and he barely kept touch. Honestly kind of annoying” Danny said following them up the ramp. “Oh stop Danny, you know how life can be. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it, at least the old gang is back for a few days!” Kayla said as she rung the door bell on the large oversized double door that seemed way too big for a suburban single level home. Coles feeder answered the door “Hey guys! Hope the flight wasn’t too bad” as they helped them bring everyones bags in. “No not at all, so where’s Cole? I can’t wait to see him!” Kayla said looking at the kitchen that’s as near the entrance to the home. Where those funnels on the wall? Surprising that they are still doing beer bongs at this point but who is Kayla to judge, they all used to party with Cole alot. Coles feeder smiles “oh he’s in the living room watching tv” as she points to the next room. Kayla is the first to walk into the living room and Danny walls face first into her back as she completely stops in her tracks “what the hell Kayla?” He starts to say as he hears Kayla say “Cole? Cole?” And I raspy breathy voice responds “yea hi Kayla” Danny peers around her shoulders to see Cole and nearly drops his jaw on the floor as he accidentally lets a “oh my god” without even realizing he had said it out loud. Looking at what he is told is his old friend he can’t believe it. He wasn’t even sure if the thing melting into that couch was male. Coles huge stretch mark stomach hung obscenely out of the too small shirt his feeder had pulled over his torso that barley even covered his belly button. “Yeah I kind of gained a lot of weight” Cole said staring down at the floor to embarrassed to even meet his friends eyes “uhh yeah you’ve gained some weight” Mike said finally after standing silently behind the other two “are you doing okay buddy?” He said walking towards the pile of fat that spilled off the sagging couch. “Yeah I just have a- I have an eating disorder I think” he said nervously. His feeder stepped into the room behind them “Cole has had some issues in the past we are trying to work on and even spoke about this morning but let’s not worry about that now. You guys are old friends! Sit down please you guys need to catch up!” Coles feeder said putting a hand on Mikes shoulder “he always talked about you guys so much”. The three friends looked at each other concerned before Mike spoke up “ofcourse no need to dwell on this negative stuff I’m just happy we are all together. It’s always good to see old friends”.

The evening had gone well until the pizza Coles feeder had ordered had arrived. His feeder had came in the room with a tv tray and a few boxes of pizza as they started laying slice after slice of pizza in a large dinner bowl. “I got you the extreme pepperoni lovers with extra extra cheese you like honey, I know you are starving. Let me get your ranch” coming in the room with a huge bottle of ranch Coles friends stare in amazement as Coles feeder starts squirting messy cup fulls of ranch all over the pizza that was messily thrown into the bowl

“Now eat fast because you have a lot more to finish babe” they say as they give Coles belly a hard open palmed smack after filling the bowl to the max. “Do you really think he should be eating that?” Mike says as Coles feeder starts walking back to the kitchen. “Excuse me?” Coles feeder says still holding the massive bottle of ranch. “I said do you think he should eat all of that?” Mike said pointing at Cole. “I mean seriously what was that? Look at that pile of cheese and ranch! You are killing him!” Mike says raising his voice.  Kayla puts a hand on his arm “Mike” as he pulls away. “No Kayla it isn’t right! They are killing him and enabling him with this weird fucking fetish! Look at him!”. Danny stands up beside Mike “He’s right Kayla, it’s obvious this is some weird feeder kink thing and they are enabling Cole. This is just as bad as somebody handing an alcoholic beer Kayla.” Coles feeder puts their hands on their hips and surveys them all. “Do you think he doesn’t want this? Coles happier than he has ever been being my feedee” they walk over squirting an even more obscene amounts of ranch on his pizza as they grin at Coles friends “Do you want more piggy?” Coles feeder coos pinching Coles double chin “or maybe your friends are right maybe we should put you on a diet” Cole weakly clutches at his feeders shirt “please feed me I’m so hungry piggy wants more” Coles feeder picks up a messy handful of the ranch covered pizza and holds it up to his nose. In a moment Cole is digging his face into the messy pizza slop making obscene oinking and gasps “feed me please I’m a good piggy grow my belly!” Feeling his feeders fingers push the pizza over his tongue.

Mike huffs in disgust “fine, I’m not being a part of this weird fetish bullshit. Have fun eating yourself to death Cole. I really hope you get some help but I think you are too far gone” as he walks into the entryway grabbing his bag and walking to the street “I’m calling an Uber”. Danny stands without saying anything besides “Bye Cole” and following Mike out to the porch. Kayla walks over absolutely disgusted about what is happening before her “Cole please, we can get you help. You aren’t going to live like this. You aren’t happy, you can’t be” Coles feeder pulls the slop away from his face “what do you think honey ready to leave me and get help?”. Coles eyes roll as he looks at Kayla’s distraught and disgusted face “Piggy needs feeding tube, so hungry” is all Cole moans in response. Coles feeder grins at Kayla “want to help”. Kayla looks at Cole one last time “Fuck you” she says to Coles feeder before looking down at Cole “bye Cole, good luck” before walking out of the front double door to join her friends waiting for their Uber as she wonders if Cole will even be able to fit out of them by the next year.

[crow-caller]

Hi Crow,

Apologies if this has been asked before but I’m trying to get to the bottom of what people describe as ‘biblically accurate angels’ and I’m getting conflicting results and I thought why not ask someone who definitely knows more on the topic than me. Is the incomprehensible multi-eye wheel creature thing true?

"True" is the problem, because... it is, and it isn't, and it depends, and it's complicated!

I looooove angels, you're right, and I was working on doing a vid on this exact topic because the term 'biblically accurate angel' is a pet peeve of mine. However, no matter the power of my autistic angelic obsession, I wouldn't say I'm a perfect source. I got intimidated outta making that video because I got too anxious of messing it up and losing my angel cred. BUT! I do know some stuff.

What's wrong with "Biblically Accurate Angels?

Three things!

1. "Biblically"

Most people I see, when confronted with the word 'Biblically', think of Christianity. The Bible technically refers to a collection of texts shared by a number of Abrahamic religions, but I've a lot of people entirely unaware of that fact. There's often a general lack of recognition around 'biblically accurate angel' posting that angels aren't exclusively or originally Christian concepts. Tumblr is an outlier of a place, remember; I read youtube comments.

2. "Accurate"

This makes me lose it, just a little bit, because the idea 'real angels in the bible actually looked like scary monsters' is both incorrect and kind of a rude thing to say about a holy entity a number of religions believe in.

There are a lot of ideas of angel classification and hierarchy, but you'll usually only see one--- the Christian one. This has nine orders in three spheres, going usually angel, archangel, principality (3rd sphere, most humanoid), powers, virtues, dominions (2nd, basically no lore), thrones/ophainim, cherubim, seraphim (1st, weirdo patrol). The lowest spheres are closest to humanity, the highest are closer to the divine.

(it's worth noting there's a big difference between 'what is exactly in the canon holy text' versus 'writings/visions/ideas from scholars later'. There's differing opinions everywhere and also different sects.) Little is universal.

Speaking of, religions! Heard of them? Angel hierarchy as it's commonly see is very specifically a Christian angle! There's a number of different Jewish angelic hierarchies which include different types or interpretations of angels. There's usually 10 ranks instead of 9 too.

I know the least about angels in Islam, but they don't have a strict angel hierarchy either, though some angels are more important than others.

As for angel physical descriptions, it varies. They can take human form, but they're spirits doing that for our convenience. Some of them are doing weird stuff, but most of the time an angel is some essence of light and fire taking a lesser defined shape for our convenience.

Some of the main ideas of a 'biblically accurate angel' come from one of my fav bits of the bible, the chariot in Ezekiel.

If you've not read the fun weird bits of the bible before, let me introduce you!!

These are the Living Creatures which are considered Cherubim in Christianity. The wheels are the Ophanim, who are also Thrones. The whole thing sounds like a very intricate chariot rather than a bunch of angels, but hey, it says right there they're 'living beings'

3. "Angels"

What is an angel anyway?

Well, there's an answer, but as I think I've highlighted there's a number of different, varying ideas of them which are all equally valid! This can include, of course, the artistic choice of making them monsters ( I love doing this ), but it's incorrect to assert such a design is 'more or truly accurate'.

Angels are messengers. The word for angel originally was Messenger, and the role of angels is generally to serve as a conduit and messenger of divine will. They can be teachers or healers. They often are more extensions of the holy rather than truly independent spirits, good because they are divine rather than the choice of free will. (but like everything I'm saying it depends bc religions and opinions are not unified monoliths).

Not all angels are messengers. Even without a strict hierarchy, there's a common idea of specific angels for specific jobs. The idea of Archangels is also common, though which are and how many differs wildly, as does their function.

Angels are divine beings. Humans don't become them. There also are some sects that believe this, like the Latter Day Saints, but generally the divide between human and angel is very clear. Humans are generally above angels, because we're beloved new ocs.

angels are cool. I really like them

---

anyway, this is a very approximate ramble for you on the subject. I think I could have gone on in much more detail and I decided not to. Especially as I note I don't have that kind of 'learn and memorize everything about your special interest' kind of autism, just 'a lot more than normal over many years'. Angels are a really complicated subject because religion is, and it all differs. But I do dislike Biblically Accurate Angel because I think it's really misled people who come across it casually. Yes, there's weird angel stuff, but it's pretty rare (especially in common canon), and it isn't 'the secret creepypasta truth'.

[smellslikebot]

"how do I keep my art from being scraped for AI from now on?"

if you post images online, there's no 100% guaranteed way to prevent this, and you can probably assume that there's no need to remove/edit existing content. you might contest this as a matter of data privacy and workers' rights, but you might also be looking for smaller, more immediate actions to take.

...so I made this list! I can't vouch for the effectiveness of all of these, but I wanted to compile as many options as possible so you can decide what's best for you.

Discouraging data scraping and "opting out"

robots.txt - This is a file placed in a website's home directory to "ask" web crawlers not to access certain parts of a site. If you have your own website, you can edit this yourself, or you can check which crawlers a site disallows by adding /robots.txt at the end of the URL. This article has instructions for blocking some bots that scrape data for AI.

HTML metadata - DeviantArt (i know) has proposed the "noai" and "noimageai" meta tags for opting images out of machine learning datasets, while Mojeek proposed "noml". To use all three, you'd put the following in your webpages' headers:

<meta name="robots" content="noai, noimageai, noml">

Have I Been Trained? - A tool by Spawning to search for images in the LAION-5B and LAION-400M datasets and opt your images and web domain out of future model training. Spawning claims that Stability AI and Hugging Face have agreed to respect these opt-outs. Try searching for usernames!

Kudurru - A tool by Spawning (currently a Wordpress plugin) in closed beta that purportedly blocks/redirects AI scrapers from your website. I don't know much about how this one works.

ai.txt - Similar to robots.txt. A new type of permissions file for AI training proposed by Spawning.

ArtShield Watermarker - Web-based tool to add Stable Diffusion's "invisible watermark" to images, which may cause an image to be recognized as AI-generated and excluded from data scraping and/or model training. Source available on GitHub. Doesn't seem to have updated/posted on social media since last year.

Image processing... things

these are popular now, but there seems to be some confusion regarding the goal of these tools; these aren't meant to "kill" AI art, and they won't affect existing models. they won't magically guarantee full protection, so you probably shouldn't loudly announce that you're using them to try to bait AI users into responding

Glaze - UChicago's tool to add "adversarial noise" to art to disrupt style mimicry. Devs recommend glazing pictures last. Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

WebGlaze - Free browser-based Glaze service for those who can't run Glaze locally. Request an invite by following their instructions.

Mist - Another adversarial noise tool, by Psyker Group. Runs on Windows and Linux (Nvidia GPU required) or on web with a Google Colab Notebook.

Nightshade - UChicago's tool to distort AI's recognition of features and "poison" datasets, with the goal of making it inconvenient to use images scraped without consent. The guide recommends that you do not disclose whether your art is nightshaded. Nightshade chooses a tag that's relevant to your image. You should use this word in the image's caption/alt text when you post the image online. This means the alt text will accurately describe what's in the image-- there is no reason to ever write false/mismatched alt text!!! Runs on Windows and Mac (Nvidia GPU required)

Sanative AI - Web-based "anti-AI watermark"-- maybe comparable to Glaze and Mist. I can't find much about this one except that they won a "Responsible AI Challenge" hosted by Mozilla last year.

Just Add A Regular Watermark - It doesn't take a lot of processing power to add a watermark, so why not? Try adding complexities like warping, changes in color/opacity, and blurring to make it more annoying for an AI (or human) to remove. You could even try testing your watermark against an AI watermark remover. (the privacy policy claims that they don't keep or otherwise use your images, but use your own judgment)

given that energy consumption was the focus of some AI art criticism, I'm not sure if the benefits of these GPU-intensive tools outweigh the cost, and I'd like to know more about that. in any case, I thought that people writing alt text/image descriptions more often would've been a neat side effect of Nightshade being used, so I hope to see more of that in the future, at least!

[morlock-holmes]

What objections would you actually accept to AI?

Roughly in order of urgency, at least in my opinion:

Problem 1: Curation

The large tech monopolies have essentially abandoned curation and are raking in the dough by monetizing the process of showing you crap you don't want.

The YouTube content farm; the Steam asset flip; SEO spam; drop-shipped crap on Etsy and Amazon.

AI makes these pernicious, user hostile practices even easier.

Problem 2: Economic disruption

This has a bunch of aspects, but key to me is that *all* automation threatens people who have built a living on doing work. If previously difficult, high skill work suddenly becomes low skill, this is economically threatening to the high skill workers. Key to me is that this is true of *all* work, independent of whether the work is drudgery or deeply fulfilling. Go automate an Amazon fulfillment center and the employees will not be thanking you.

There's also just the general threat of existing relationships not accounting for AI, in terms of, like, residuals or whatever.

Problem 3: Opacity

Basically all these AI products are extremely opaque. The companies building them are not at all transparent about the source of their data, how it is used, or how their tools work. Because they view the tools as things they own whose outputs reflect on their company, they mess with the outputs in order to attempt to ensure that the outputs don't reflect badly on their company.

These processes are opaque and not communicated clearly or accurately to end users; in fact, because AI text tools hallucinate, they will happily give you *fake* error messages if you ask why they returned an error.

There's been allegations that Mid journey and Open AI don't comply with European data protection laws, as well.

There is something that does bother me, too, about the use of big data as a profit center. I don't think it's a copyright or theft issue, but it is a fact that these companies are using public data to make a lot of money while being extremely closed off about how exactly they do that. I'm not a huge fan of the closed source model for this stuff when it is so heavily dependent on public data.

Problem 4: Environmental maybe? Related to problem 3, it's just not too clear what kind of impact all this AI stuff is having in terms of power costs. Honestly it all kind of does something, so I'm not hugely concerned, but I do kind of privately think that in the not too distant future a lot of these companies will stop spending money on enormous server farms just so that internet randos can try to get Chat-GPT to write porn.

Problem 5: They kind of don't work

Text programs frequently make stuff up. Actually, a friend pointed out to me that, in pulp scifi, robots will often say something like, "There is an 80% chance the guards will spot you!"

If you point one of those AI assistants at something, and ask them what it is, a lot of times they just confidently say the wrong thing. This same friend pointed out that, under the hood, the image recognition software is working with probabilities. But I saw lots of videos of the Rabbit AI assistant thing confidently being completely wrong about what it was looking at.

Chat-GPT hallucinates. Image generators are unable to consistently produce the same character and it's actually pretty difficult and unintuitive to produce a specific image, rather than a generic one.

This may be fixed in the near future or it might not, I have no idea.

Problem 6: Kinetic sameness.

One of the subtle changes of the last century is that more and more of what we do in life is look at a screen, while either sitting or standing, and making a series of small hand gestures. The process of writing, of producing an image, of getting from place to place are converging on a single physical act. As Marshall Macluhan pointed out, driving a car is very similar to watching TV, and making a movie is now very similar, as a set of physical movements, to watching one.

There is something vaguely unsatisfying about this.

Related, perhaps only in the sense of being extremely vague, is a sense that we may soon be mediating all, or at least many, of our conversations through AI tools. Have it punch up that email when you're too tired to write clearly. There is something I find disturbing about the idea of communication being constantly edited and punched up by a series of unrelated middlemen, *especially* in the current climate, where said middlemen are large impersonal monopolies who are dedicated to opaque, user hostile practices.

Given all of the above, it is baffling and sometimes infuriating to me that the two most popular arguments against AI boil down to "Transformative works are theft and we need to restrict fair use even more!" and "It's bad to use technology to make art, technology is only for boring things!"

[pandemic-info]

Text from https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/910-24/transcript-mayor-adams-holds-in-person-media-availability

Dear Mayor Adams,

No.

The entire point of masks — especially fitted respirators, i.e. N95s, which do not leave gaps around the face — is to protect the wearer from harmful airborne pathogens.

Let's break that down:

If : someone who is

A. visibly sick and carelessly spreading it everywhere (as many do), or

B. is unknowingly, asymptomatically shedding viral particles (also, as many do, because most people erroneously think it's over and generally take no precautions) was in that vehicle,

Then: there's a high likelihood they've left viral particles in the air.

It's really fucking simple:

AIRBORNE viral particles can LINGER IN THE AIR for hours.

That means the masked person getting into a vehicle — who doesn't want to / can't afford to get sick(er), even despite regular harassment and threats that Mayor Adams doesn't give a shit about — will not be safe to remove it inside.

Neither is it a good idea to try to enforce this based on mask type, force medical permits, etc. Others have written about this extensively. Unlike (effective) mandates, these bans are not based on science or data. E.g.:

First, addressing the claim that mask bans are necessary for facial recognition and societal safety, growing data shows that face masks are less effective than sunglasses in masking face identity. Another study claims “Convolutional Neural Networks are highly capable of learning features and accurately identifying the image, even when the only fully visible part of the face is the eyes.”

—

Those statements betray how out of touch this mayor is with the average person who actually walks NYC streets and takes public transit.

"This person" he refers to, as we all know, was not attacking random individuals. "This person" went after one specific man who had millions of dollars worth of blood on his hands:

"For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death."

—

Adams et. al., driving their private cars on sidewalks, don't care if regular, vulnerable people are endangered daily by everyone who chooses entitlement, selfishness, or just plain willful ignorance.

—

New Yorkers, the next mayoral election is in 2025:

Until then, contact NY officials:

Even if they are already for / against an issue, it still makes a difference to tell them (source: they and volunteers for these offices say so themselves).

If you have the spoons, please help. If you're able to call, do that. People who are disabled, chronically ill, etc. have to do so much of this lifting alone while they're already exhausted.

[somerandomdudelmao]

do you ever notice users pacifically, who continue to comment and for some reason you just really notice that person?

Oh yes, I see you, I read your comments and tags and I remember you. Not everyone, of course, there are too many here. But some..?

So far, I have

The person with cool theories

The person with a possible degree in psychology

The person who always assumes the worst and most painful outcome for literally any episode

The person who points out very little details in tags

The person who wrote very long essays with a caps lock in tags (they either left or stopped doing it a while ago :( Press F.)

Another two people who write very long essays in tags. I click on their reblogs and the unfolding text does not fit in the screen of my phone hahah.

The person who sends asks/comments/tags in which they hilariously accurately predicts what will happen next.

The person who does the same thing but never guesses right, but writes lots of nice words of recognition and compliments. They cheers me up a lot.

The person who always reminds me to drink water.

The person who tracks my appearance in trends and then posts a screenshot of it, commenting on everything as if they were running a weather report.

I won't tag anyone because I'm not sure all these people are okay with it.

I especially don't want to tag the person with correct predictions. I've never responded to them, so they don't know (I..I think they don't..at least..)that their assumptions are like...VERY spoilerish hahah

I didn't include people who make art or write fanfics or create any other content. I'm talking specifically about people who come in and just read and comment and reblog. You are cool. I see you and I appreciate you. Thank you:)

[aimzicr]

I always associated the Three Ladies of Castle Dracula in my mind as ‘Brides of Dracula’ because pop-culture osmosis and/or adults around me specifically referencing Hammer Films, even if that isn’t accurate to the text. 

Still, with Dracula being a representation of inversions of the ‘natural order’, we have here a ‘til death do us part’ in which he’s Still Single but he hasn’t let go of his other possessions. He’s a warlord, boyar, master of all, and they’re part of what he owns. He doesn’t just treat employees and guests as property to do with as he wishes, but also the women he apparently once loved. Love and possession are apparently the same thing to him. Messed up.

Given the descriptions of the women, two of them seem to be at least locals, or of the same cultural background as Dracula himself (he did go into great excited detail about his history and his empire before, and the strength of his people, so it wouldn’t be that odd for him to be wife-shopping in the European region he conquered). 

On the other hand, we have a woman described in a more Victorian style of beauty, and Jonathan has a ‘dreamy fear’ that he kind of recognises this third woman, the blonde woman. What if he does recognise her, from posters from music halls or theatres that he would have seen as a child? What if this third bride is a famous Englishwoman? An actress or performer who went missing on some tour decades ago? Hence the odd recognition he can’t place - she was a celebrity, and her pictures were around, but a young Jonathan would have no association with her because she was just before his time.

But Dracula had to get the idea to take over London (and then England) from somewhere. What if his new foreign bride wouldn’t stop talking about The Empire Where The Sun Never Sets, and possessive, obsessive Dracula went ‘I want that, too’?

Also, when the women come across Jonathan sleeping, the agreement of who to kiss him first is very quick. ‘Yours is the right’. What if she gets first dibs not because she’s Dracula’s current favourite or best or strongest wife/consort, but because Jonathan is her fellow Englishman? That she misses home so much, and her homesickness has been tainted by her vampirism that she just needs a little taste of home, no matter what that means? And her ‘sisters’ recognise that, and give her the right to kiss first, before they drain him dry?

[shyalia]

Happy One Year Anniversary

to The Day the World Broke by @saladmix!!! She deserves all of the recognition for writing such an incredible and in-depth story, please go show her some love!!

To celebrate and show my immense appreciation, I spent the last two months working on an animatic for it. It's not perfect, but the vision is there and I'm honestly proud of myself for completing a major project like this. 100+ frames later (not all of them made the cut, unfortunately) it is finally complete just in time for the anniversary!

I'm about to ramble, I apologize in advance lol. Feel free to scroll down to the next blue text to see the animatic, please mind the spoiler and trigger warnings!

This fic is so important to me and holds a special place in my heart. I came across the first chapter the day it was posted, so early that it didn't even have any hits or kudos yet. The title and little description intrigued me so I clicked on it, and I'm so glad I gave it a chance because I was hooked from the first paragraph. Little did I know how much it would impact me that evening after raving about it to my best friend, during and after reading it. I'm not kidding when I say it has been on my mind every day for a full trip around the sun. Its AU is so unique that I haven't read anything like it before. The writing is beautiful, the storytelling is captivating, and the characterizations of the boys are so in-depth and relatable and a joy to read, the plot is insane and every chapter blows my mind... I could go on about it forever!!

I've read that first chapter more times than I can count, and the rest of it several times as well because even at 300k+ words, every single word is worth the time and energy. I'm always finding subtle details that are easily missed in earlier chapters that come up again later and I have a "WAIT HOLD UP" moment, like @saladmix is a genius I swear. When going back through chapters to locate details for my artwork to make it as accurate as I can, I always find myself getting lost reading because it just pulls me in, even though I already know what is about to happen... it's just that good.

Honestly, I can't get enough of this story, it means sooo much to me. It has inspired me to become a better artist, to have the courage to write my own stories, my enjoyment of reading has been rekindled, and most importantly, it brought friendship. @saladmix is such a kind person, she is so supportive and funny and a pleasure to talk to, I'm thankful to have her as a friend. Keep on being awesome, girl!!

Okay, I'll stop rambling and let y'all see this animatic that I worked so long on! xD

Please be forewarned that it contains spoilers up to and including chapter 23, so if you have not read that far and want to avoid spoilers, save this to watch at a later date!

TW for brief images of knives and guns, and for light sensitivity as some very bright frames come up. I apologize if you're sensitive to those types of things!

[multibodied]

9 times of 10 I see AI hate it is misaddressed from the actual problem, which isn't the fucking learning algorithms but the capitalistic desire to squeeze as much money with as little effort as possible from everything and anything that promises a prospect of Any financial gain and prioritises it over quality and whether it actually makes someone's life better, because the measure of "value" is entirely linked to financial gain. It doesn't matter if it makes our world a better place, it doesn't matter whether it makes our world a significantly worse place, what matters is whether it sells. And THIS is the problem.

AI voice assistants, chats and other machine learning tools are not the enemy to hate on. The system surrounding their use that prioritises the interests of CEOs over the interests of general public as well as Requires people to do stupid useless things for money to survive is the actual problem. Ironically, the people who could benefit from AI tools the most, those whose life could literally be turned around for the better (people with various disabilities) are the LAST people who are considered in this ai race. Because the system dictates that it'll rather focus on cheap production of shitty pictures to cut costs and eliminate the need for the rich to pay those of us who may actually enjoy their job rather than make accessibility tools actually accessible, despite being able to do so if only it was the priority.

We have chatbots who speak in natural voices, we have face and object recognition features integrated into our phones. But we don't have screen-readers that don't suck, we don't have accessible tools for translating in real time what the camera sees into accurate descriptions to help visually impaired people. We have algorithms to generate pictures, social medias integrate various bots to put them on their platforms for god knows why, but what they don't have is algorithms that could automatically generate text descriptions of pictures and videos posted on them. What they don't have is AI tools for detecting flashing in videos and gifs and a way to filter them. They have algorithms searching for porn and copyrighted materials tho even if it's just a few seconds of music created by a world famous artist who has been dead for decades.

Granted, we have really good automated subtitles and translators, but at the same time there are no automated descriptions of other sounds while the tools for GENERATING various sounds exist. And subtitles themselves do nothing to convey intonation even though just adding some cursive words when a speaker makes an emphasis on them would already greatly improve the experience.

Whenever I think of the current state of AI, I remember that project that through implants gave blind people the ability to see. The one that got shut down and left all the people who used it blind again. Because it wasn't profitable.

[centrally-unplanned]

As someone who dual-uses Chrome & Firefox, and definitely found Chrome's recent updates to hit performance, I have been using Firefox a bit more heavily and man, Chrome is the better browser. It just has such much more ease-of-use features from tab & audio management to settings customization, and its extension library is on average more robust than Firefox's (though both are fine in this regard).

I have the bespoke need of using automated translation & OCR tools for reading multilingual sources - hilariously, Google Image OCR (the best one out there) actually has stripped functionality on Firefox? Awful act of digital terrorism there on Google's part, but I live in the world I am given, I can't fix it. Chrome also has more accurate text recognition for page translation and smoother toggle options. For most other things Firefox vs Chrome is preference, but when I do anime research I literally have to use Chrome, the efficiency impact of Firefox is way too high.

So yeah I respect all the Firefox stans out there - I use both after all - but if they want wider adaptation they need to compete a bit better.