#Getting Started with AI Tools

[jerusalemlocksmith]

*Description:* "Embark on your AI journey with this comprehensive beginner's guide designed to make Artificial Intelligence easy to understand and accessible. Whether you're curious about machine learning, neural networks, or AI applications, this tutorial guide breaks down complex concepts into simple, step-by-step lessons. Learn the basics, explore practical examples, and discover tools and resources to help you build your first AI project. Perfect for absolute beginners with no prior experience!" --- *What You'll Learn:* 1. *What is AI?*

A simple explanation of Artificial Intelligence and its real-world applications.

Examples of AI in everyday life (e.g., virtual assistants, recommendation systems).

2. *Key AI Concepts for Beginners:*

Machine Learning (ML) vs. Deep Learning vs. AI.

Supervised, Unsupervised, and Reinforcement Learning.

Neural Networks and how they work.

3. *Getting Started with AI Tools:*

Introduction to beginner-friendly platforms like Google Colab, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

How to use pre-built AI models and libraries.

4. *Step-by-Step Tutorials:*

How to build your first AI model (e.g., image recognition or text classification).

Hands-on coding exercises with Python (no prior coding experience required).

5. *Resources for Continued Learning:*

Free online courses, books, and YouTube channels for beginners.

AI communities and forums to ask questions and share progress.

--- *Why This Guide?*

*Beginner-Friendly:* No technical background required.

*Hands-On Learning:* Practical tutorials to build confidence.

*Free Resources:* Accessible tools and materials to get started without cost.

--- *Getting Started:* 1. *Set Up Your Environment:*

Install Python and necessary libraries (e.g., NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn).

Explore Google Colab for cloud-based AI development.

2. *Follow Along with Tutorials:*

Start with simple projects like predicting house prices or classifying images.

Gradually move to more advanced topics like natural language processing (NLP).

3. *Join the AI Community:*

Participate in forums like Reddit’s r/learnmachinelearning or Kaggle competitions.

[isat-script-project]

Your amazing work here has inspired me to want to try doing a script project for DQB2 and I was wondering if you had any advice for me?

I'm gonna assume that's some sorta dragon quest game?

Well, ISAT really is a blessing in this regard, because the game is not encrypted at all. Accessing files and all text via rpgmaker MV and VSC is incredibly easy.

okay this got really long i'm putting it under the cut.

But before you get started, there really are some things you need to ask yourself first:

How am I going to get the text from this game?

If your answer is "write it down by hand as I play" then already know that there HAS to be a better way. If you're choosing that method, get yourself emulation, save states, or endless patience, because hooh boy, I've done a little bit of that for a different project (no, I will not elaborate) but save scumming on original hardware to get different dialogue options is agony.

Is there a text dump for your game? Is there a file dump or decomp for your game? Do you have the technical know how to access it? If not, are you confident in your knowledge of the game to accurately identify where all dialogue may occur? If not, are you satisfied missing out on nothing lines and just focusing on the non-optional? Is your game linear enough to not need a closer look at the code to figure out what happens when, as isat does?

2. What's my scope?

Again, do you truly want every line from this game, or just what's "important"? I personally cannot rest until I've exhausted the fucking Menus (which is why there's a script page for those, too) because I'm a completionist with delusions of grandeur, but some people are satisfied transcribing the cutscenes and nothing else (MUCH TO MY ANNOYANCE WHEN I NEED THE OTHER STUFF.... nobody cares about the optional collectible npc dialogue BUT I CARE!!! I CARE!!!!!)

Anyways, what exactly your scope is is gonna significantly influence what your next step looks like.

3. How am I going to present this?

Making the isat script project an individual website mainly came down to how finicky the dialogue in isat is. There's conditionals stacked on conditionals and I wanted a space where I had total control over how to present these factors without influence.

For more linear games, like, say, that time I made all the fewiki scripts for Fire Emblem 6 from chapter 12 onward, it was easy enough to present the scripts on a wiki page just because the game is much more linear, there's less dialogue to begin with, and all conditional text could be nicely divided up into similar groups, like boss dialogue where the condition is just "fight boss with x character".

isat script project would not exist without my fire emblem fixation, fun fact. other fun facts include that as a child i attempted to novelize Mario Party DS by transcribing all story mode text into a booklet by hand, and I did not finish this for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

This is, as you may figure, way easier to do. There is significantly less burden on you to actually understand how a website works - I cannot stress enough that the current state of the script project is only possible thanks to Gold, and without them, we'd still be at all dialogue being formatted as <p><b>Siffrin:</b> Says some text.</p>

For a lot of older games, you can also find whole game scripts being put up into a single document. Tis common on gamefaqs, I've used those plenty. There I believe you're just working with plain ol txt.

The rule is always though look at examples and if they do something cool figure out whether you can copy it. i did not create the website layout myself, i used a base and fiddled with it for a whole weekend until it stopped exploding.

Again, like, using an existing structure like a wiki or gamefaqs or just google docs or a spreadsheet is a significantly eased burden. One of my favorite things ever is actually a text dump on github, of all places. For this one, the person putting it up chose to leave all text in as close to original state as possible, doing no trimming of things like character emotes and leaving in all original string titles of every line. This is also incredibly useful, even if it is more difficult to use for your average schmoe! (This has fucking saved me doing wiki stuff for engage. engage text dump i ADORE you)

Do you want to be as accurate to the code as possible, or as accurate to the game? Do you have the time, energy, and skills to make the visual presentation nice? Or do you want to keep it rudimentary to streamline your process?

If you ARE doing something like making your own website, it is crucial that you figure out your visuals early, lest you be like us, and be stuck in Reformatting Hell for several months, because someone figured out how to make a thing prettier and nicer to read, and now you need to update the 100+ pages you've already created.

Reformatting code like that takes just as long as making a page in the first place, by the by, because you're just not getting around copy-pasting everything line by agonizing line.

This stuff takes HOURS. If I went at it alone, I doubt I'd have finished by now, or within the next like, two years. This is a really time consuming hobby, and I love doing it a lot, it scratches my exact fixation itch, but if your game is huge, consider seeing if people would be interested in joining you? I will also say being autistic about your game of choice is also a bonus in the sustainability department.

Many a times there were just no updates (as they are now) cuz I am just. Distracted by something else. Like yes on one hand I'm going to uni now and have less time but it's not really less time if I can still put 17hrs into a new video game in three days.

Stuff like this is ALWAYS a long-term project and you WILL need to take time off from it or else you'll start seeing html in your dreams and get burnout.

STREAMLINE YOUR PROCESS!!! FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS WITH AS LITTLE EFFORT AS POSSIBLE!!!! Gold introduced me to Espanso, which is a program that lets you set up keyboard shortcuts to insert phrases, which was a MAAAAAASSIVE time saver in the html department, as it allowed me to just rapid fire paste in all the many html classes we stacked for the presentation of the site. even if you are doing a script on a wiki where everything does look like ['''Siffrin:''' says a thing] you will still be doing yourself a favor if you can shorten that '''Siffrin:''' to just typing :s .

As a side note, I also wanna say like. The popularity of isat script project is a complete outlier. Other game scripts may be used by a maniac like me to overanalyze the plot structure of Sonic 06, but you're very likely not going to see that recognition. I love doing this, because I want these resources to exist for myself. I don't do this for the good of the fandom, but because it is useful to me. I started this because I was writing isat fanfic, and got tired of looking up dialogue on youtube or booting up my own game.

Do I know if anyone found my FE6 scripts useful? No. Do I know if anyone is going through Veyle/Quotes and appreciating that I transcribed all the fucking battle voice clips? No. Do I know if someone appreciates me accurately labelling all voice lines from the ring polishing minigame in engage? Hell no. I don't know, I'm never going to get feedback on that. Those are wiki pages, anyone can edit them, they don't have viewcounts or comments I can look at, and the fandom just isn't as prone to taking screenshots and posting about them line by line as isat.

Isat blew the fuck up on tumblr. I'm not saying you'll get no recognition at all, but if you are relying on external motivators, you are probably going to peter out. There are pages I've worked on for other script things that I've genuienly not touched in two years because I just didn't feel like it, and that's also okay.

TLDR:

Figure out how to get the text you need with the least effort possible (and figure out whether doing that is even possible at all!), figure out what scope you're actually willing to put up with, and present it with the least effort possible, because everything else just isn't sustainable. Streamline streamline streamline. Be prepared to spend hours on this and maybe like find a new favorite podcast to just copy paste text to, because honestly, doing this is also pretty zen.

And most importantly, sparkle on, don't forget to have fun! Even if it seems big and intimidating, you can still make it just a fun side project, and slowly chip away at it over time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and with all the advantages going for isat script project (additional manpower, unencrypted files, easy tools for game examination) it still took over a year to complete.

(loop voice) Don't make the same mistakes I did, okay?

oh, yeah, one last thing, if you're not putting it on a wiki and ARE making your own website, ABSOLUTELY PUT IT ON GITHUB!!!! setting up so any changes to the main branch on github get reflected onto neocities is pretty easy and you only need to do it once, and what this allows is to just have random strangers show up and fix your problems for you. sometimes someone will just show up and fix five bajillion typos and then leave. or they'll stick around and help with more stuff and wowie you have a semblance of a team now.

if you're doing it on a wiki, find like, the wiki discord, if someone is interested in chipping in. if you're doing your own website, put it on github. do it. do it do it do it.

[carlyraejepsans]

HELPP i found out about character AIs and im losing it over calling deltarune sans "a more manipulative personality" 😭😭 like whatt we've only seen this man like 2 times

sorry im being a hater hgfjdks but you're the sans understander

lmaoo character.ai, look where the fall of ai dungeon got us, smh. thank you for the compliment though!

[forsty]

feels like we need to be way more vocal about bullying people who do AI generated stuff

no fucking tolerance for that soulless piece of crap

[toxooz]

I know the answer might be no but still!

Are you ever going to make or add your characters into character ai?

I think it'll be really cool to be able to talk to Ollie, or just talk to the whole gang!!

Also lots of love to your art and comic, I found this comic when I was at my lowest and it really helped me out when I was really sad in depressed! Thank you for making this comic and for doing all of this amazing work that you have put in to your characters and storyline!!!

look 🙏 i do see the possible appeal in that i aint gunna lie one bit and as the creator of these characters the idea of being able to seemingly talk to them sounds pretty cool! BUT i simply cant jump on the AI train to Any extent it just wouldn't sit right with me. I feel like it would unnerve me after a while plus the idea of my OCs being 'off' or having out of character dialogue that's out of my control kinda gives me the willies. It seems like one of those things that are simply too good to be true in a practical sense so any possibility of it happening just goes into uncanny valley like do i wish i could take my ocs out of my brain and talk to them HELL yes ( if i dont get killed first) but that should be an impossible thing to do unless im dreaming or hallucinating or some shit. It's like the AI images ie. i Could just type in a bunch of prompts and shit out like 30000 images of my ocs so that i could look at them but where would the yearning be after that??? The loving sculpting of them in my brain while im trying to capture their essence with my hands into a drawing??? One of the main reasons for my ocs to exist is so that its something for my brain to toy around with and wallow in like a cat in catnip, so the idea of being able to just 'lay everything out' so easily just ruins the whole ' i have mysterious little dudes in my head that i mold around everyday to try and figure them out' aspect if that makes any sense??? PLUS im pretty sure the chat ai basically takes paragraphs from writers so for me to be so abhorrently against ai images yet being on board with chat ai when its ~surprise~ stealing from real writers feels like the most hypocritical ass shit i could do sO long old head 'robots evil' rant short: its a no from me dawg

BUT THAT ASIDE im glad to hear u like wheel bitten!! That means so much to hear and may your life continue to improve and thrive!✨🌟

[racke7]

Generative AI, or LLM

So, I've been wanting to summarize the many and varied problems that LLMs have.

What is an LLM?

Copyright

Ideological / Propaganda

Security

Environmental impact

Economical

What is an LLM?

Do you remember that fun challenge of writing a single word and then just pressing auto-complete five dozen times? Producing a tangled and mostly incomprehensible mess?

LLMs are basically that auto-complete on steroids.

The biggest difference (beyond the sheer volume of processing-power and data) is that an LLM takes into account your prompt. So if you prompt it to do a certain thing, it'll go looking for "words and sentences" that are somehow associated with that thing.

If you ask an LLM a question like "what is X" it'll go looking for various sentences and words that claim to have an answer to that, and then perform a statistical guess as to which of these answers are the most likely.

It doesn't know anything, it's basically just looking up a bunch of "X is"-sentences and then using an auto-complete feature on its results. So if there's a wide-spread misconception, the odds are pretty good that it'll push this misconception (more people talk about it as if it's true than not, even if reputable sources might actively disagree).

This is also true for images, obviously.

An image-generating LLM takes a picture filled with static and then "auto-completes" it over and over (based on your prompt) until there's no more static to "guess" about anymore.

Which in turn means that if you get a picture that's almost what you want, you'll need to either manually edit it yourself, or you need to go back and generate an entirely new picture and hope that it's closer to your desired result.

Copyright

Anything created by an LLM is impossible to copyright.

This means that any movies/pictures/books/games/applications you make with an LLM? Someone can upload them to be available for free and you legally can't do anything to stop them, because you don't own them either.

Ideological / Propaganda

It's been said that the ideology behind LLMs is to not have to learn things yourself (creating art/solutions without bothering to spend the time and effort to actually learn how to make/solve it yourself). Whether that's true or not, I don't think I'm qualified to judge.

However, as proven by multiple people asking LLMs to provide them with facts, there are some very blatant risks associated with it.

As mentioned above about wide-spread misconceptions being something of an Achilles' heel for LLMs, this can in fact be actively exploited by people with agendas.

Say that someone wants to make sure that a truth is buried. In a world where people rely on LLMs for facts (instead of on journalists), all someone would need to do is make sure that the truth is buried by having lots and lots of text that claims otherwise. No needing to try and bribe journalists or news-outlets, just pay a bot-farm a couple of bucks to fill the internet with this counter-fact and call it a day.

And that's not accounting for the fact that the LLM is effectively a black-box, and doesn't actually need to look things up, if the one in charge of it instead gives it a hard-coded answer to a question. So somebody could feed an LLM-user deliberately false information. But let's put a pin in that for now.

Security

There are a few different levels of this, though they're mostly relevant for coding.

The first is that an LLM doesn't actually know things like "best practices" when it comes to security-implementation, especially not recent such.

The second is that the prompts you send in go into a black box somewhere. You don't know that those servers are "safe", and you don't know that the black box isn't keeping track of you.

The third is that the LLM often "hallucinates" in specific ways, and that it will often ask for certain things. A situation which can and has been exploited by people creating those "hallucinated" things and turning them into malware to catch the unwary.

Environmental impact

An LLM requires a lot of electricity and processing-power. On a yearly basis it's calculated that ChatGPT (a single LLM) uses as much electricity as the 117 lowest energy-countries combined. And this is likely going to grow.

As many of these servers are reliant on water-cooling, this also pushes up the demand for fresh water. Which could be detrimental to the local environment of those places, depending on water-accessibility.

Economical

Let's not get into the weeds of Microsoft claiming that their "independent study" (of their own workers with their own tool that they themselves are actively selling) is showing "incredibly efficiency gains".

Let's instead look at different economical incentives.

See, none of these LLMs are actually profitable. They're built and maintained with investor-capital, and if those investors decide that they can't make money off of the "hype" (buying low and selling high) but instead need actual returns on investment (profit)? The situation as it is will change very quickly.

Currently, there's a subscription-model for most of these LLMs, but as mentioned those aren't profitable, which means that something will need to change.

They can raise prices

They can lower costs (somehow)

They can find different investors

They can start selling customer-data

Raising prices would mean that a lot of people would suddenly no longer consider it cost-beneficial to continue relying on LLMs, which means that it's not necessarily a good way to increase revenue.

Lowering costs would be fantastic for these companies, but a lot of this is already as streamlined as they can imagine, so assuming that this is plausible is... perhaps rather optimistic.

With "new investors" the point is to not target profit-interested individuals, but instead aim for people who'd be willing to pay for more non-monetary results. Such as paying the LLM-companies directly to spread slanted information.

Selling customer-data is very common in the current landscape, and having access to "context code" that's fed into the LLM for good prompt-results would likely be incredibly valuable for anything from further LLM-development to corporate espionage.

Conclusions

There are many different reasons someone might wish to avoid LLMs. Some of these are ideological, some are economical, and some are a combination of both.

How far this current "AI-bubble" carries us is up for debate (until it isn't), but I don't think that LLMs will ever entirely disappear now that they exist. Because there is power in information-control, and in many ways that's exactly what LLMs are.

[withacapitalp]

Given the new wave of AI BS that's coming to tumblr I'm not going to be posting full chapters here anymore. I'm still going to be posting snippets and tags when I update for people who've asked, but no more full chapters or oneshots. Unsure of drabbles, but most likely those are going to AO3 as well. There's no way to completely avoid AI scrapping but I'd rather make them fight to take my things rather than handing them over on a silver fucking platter

[the-gay-trashmouth]

One thing watching the 42 hour long Henningverse video has got me thinking about all the animals that played on the Beverly hillbillies. Despite the show's popularity, I can't find any readily available information on any of the animal actors or what happened to them throughout the show/after it ended. I can't even find if the same monkey played skipper throughout the show. Does anyone have any resources on this? Or at least somewhere for me to start?

[cryptidjeepers]

there are literal writing assistant apps and websites that i have been using for years to proof read/check grammar (after i proof read myself) that use ai technology (and some dont) in the sense that it is an artifical intelligence program designed specifically for that and not a random generative ai program. and sometimes, theyre not 100% accurate either. nano and pro ai people constantly conflate specifically programmed ai applications with generative ai and think they have the same ethical use??? me using a word count website to check my grammar and readability is an assistive tool i used throughout my entire school career. i never fucking used it to write my work. Ai as a tool (not generative ai) should not add onto your work outside of missing words and grammar. but those programs have existed for yearssss and thats so clearly not what nanowrimo is referring to. (also you wouldnt need to defend the use because like i said, it's not writing for you) people trying to defend their stance are being obtuse on purpose, i swear.

[ghostie-gengar]

does anybody know if google docs' ai thing is actually going to be taking everyone's stuff to use for prompts without consent? i've heard a lot of rumours about it but i don't wanna go through the trouble of moving all my stuff and deleting it if it's not true

[waffelteufel]

"AI generated quests" "AI generated dialogue" – so these people are admitting that they see story and narratives as filler meant to inflate the size of a game, instead of enriching the world it's meant to portray? If a character only talks about some meaningless bullshit when I interact with them because their story has been automated by an artificial mimicry datascraper tool and that the devs might not even be aware about what it talks about, they can honestly just stay silent. You are wasting people's time! Unethical AI is pure quantity over quality, instead of a single well designed thing you'll just get 50 turds with a randomised shape. We're gonna get flooded with so much unnecessary crap in the next years. There will be so much inflated content and time-wasters, so much noise just to trick you into losing even more time and money. We ought to come up with clever review techniques to sort out the trash efficiently.

[corranforce]

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[hashtagloveloses]

should you delete twitter and get bluesky? (or just get a bluesky in general)? here's what i've found:

yes. my answer was no before bc the former CEO of twitter who also sucked, jack dorsey, was on the board, but he left as of may 2024, and things have gotten a lot better. also a lot of japanese and korean artists have joined

don't delete your twitter. lock your account, use a service to delete all your tweets, delete the app off of your phone, and keep your account/handle so you can't be impersonated.

get a bluesky with the same handle, even if you won't use it, also so you won't be impersonated.

get the sky follower bridge extension for chrome or firefox. you can find everyone you follow on twitter AND everyone you blocked so you don't have to start fresh: https://skyfollowerbridge.com/

learn how to use its moderation tools (labelers, block lists, NSFW settings) so you can immediately cut out the grifters, fascists, t*rfs, AI freaks, have the NSFW content you want to see if you so choose, and moderate for triggers. here's a helpful thread with a lot of tools.

the bluesky phone app is pretty good, but there is also tweetdeck for bluesky, called https://deck.blue/ on desktop, if you miss tweetdeck.

bluesky has explicitly stated they do not use your data to train generative AI, which is nice to hear from an up and coming startup. obviously we can’t trust these companies and please use nightshade and glaze, but it’s good to hear.

[cottoncandywoof]

👉👈 ive been trying my best... i think partly it helped to be poor, since i couldnt really get references done, so i was like "fine... ill do it myself". and seeing improvement has been... insane. ive been sometimes sad about my own art, but... some of the latest things actually working?? wheww

Appreciation post for all the beginner artists who work hard despite the AI ​​looming over us. You are fabulous. You are precious. Keep up the hard work, you are needed.

[arolesbianism]

Oh and to be clear with my beastieball team building I have gone into the game basically completely blind so I am just working off of what I've seen within the game for hypothetical team building