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#IT’S LITERALLY STEALING ART FROM AROUND THE INTERNET
toughtink · 2 years
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i hate ai art i hate ai art I HATE AI ART
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hbbisenieks · 8 months
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ok, i've gotta branch off the current ai disc horse a little bit because i saw this trash-fire of a comment in the reblogs of that one post that's going around
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[reblog by user makiruz (i don't feel bad for putting this asshole on blast) that reads "So here's the thing: every Diane Duane book that I have is stolen, I downloaded it illegally from the Internet; and I am not sorry, I am a thief of books and I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, ideas are not property, they should be free to be used by anyone as they were before the invention of capitalism; for that reason I don't believe it's wrong to use books to train AI models"]
this is asshole behavior. if you do this and if you believe this, you are a Bad Person full stop.
"Capitalism" as an idea is more recent than commerce, and i am So Goddamn Tired of chuds using the language of leftism to justify their shitty behavior. and that's what this is.
like, we live in a society tm
if you like books but you don't have the means to pay for them, the library exists! libraries support authors! you know what doesn't support authors? stealing their books! because if those books don't sell, then you won't get more books from that author and/or the existing books will go out of print! because we live under capitalism.
and like, even leaving aside the capitalism thing, how much of a fucking piece of literal shit do you have to be to believe that you deserve art, that you deserve someone else's labor, but that they don't deserve to be able to live? to feed and clothe themselves? sure, ok, ideas aren't property, and you can't copyright an idea, but you absolutely can copyright the Specific Execution of an idea.
so makiruz, if you're reading this, or if you think like this user does, i hope you shit yourself during a job interview. like explosively. i hope you step on a lego when you get up to pee in the middle of the night. i hope you never get to read another book in your whole miserable goddamn life until you disabuse yourself of the idea that artists are "idea landlords" or whatever the fuck other cancerous ideas you've convinced yourself are true to justify your abhorrent behavior.
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atalienart · 3 months
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Most importantly regarding AI, even if we ignored the entire discussion around "what is art? who can make it? what makes it valid?", the fact of the matter is that generative AI programs are inherently based on theft
Someone, some human(s), made the conscious decision to scrape the entire internet for literal billions of artworks, photos, videos, stories, blogs, social media posts, articles, copyrighted works, personal works, private works, private medical images. They took all of this data, crammed it all into a dataset for their generative programs to reference, and sold the idea of "look what a computer can 'create' from 'nothing' "
These programs do nothing on their own. They do not create spontaneously. They do not experiment or discover or express themselves. This is why they need data, a LOT of data, because they can only operate with designated user input, they can only regurgitate what has come before, they can only reference and repurpose what has come before. They steal from all of humanity, without due, without credit, without compensation or any sense of ethics, and the people vehemently selling the idea of AI are doing precisely that: selling it. They're exploiting the hard work, the identities, the privacy of billions of people for the sole purpose of making a quick, easy buck
In any sane world, the argument would end then and there, but unfortunately, we live in a world where are many of our laws are from the stone age (with people actively seeking to keep them there for fear of losing their power/influence). The creators of these AI programs are well-aware of these legal shortcomings, they have openly stated as such on numerous occasions, and are explicitly proud to be operating in this "legal grey area" because they know it means there are ill-gotten profits to be made
Regardless of whether or not a computer can genuinely make "art" or whether some person mashing words into a search bar is genuine "art", the fact of the matter is that it is objectively unethical in its current form. But, even that's an uphill battle to preach because too many people couldn't give a rats ass about ethics unless it personally affects them, and that's why we're in this position to begin with
I completely agree. It's entirely build on theft and it shouldn't exist. But as long as those who steal think they won't face any consequences and it brings them profit they won't stop. It's terrifying how so many people don't care about anything these days. It's just so frustrating to listen to all the excuses.
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All the books I reviewed in 2023 (Graphic Novels)
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Next Tuesday (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."
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It's that time of year again, when I round up all the books I reviewed for my newsletter in the previous year. I posted 21 reviews last year, covering 31 books (there are two series in there!). I also published three books of my own last year (two novels and one nonfiction). A busy year in books!
Every year, these roundups remind me that I did actually manager to get a lot of reading done, even if the list of extremely good books that I didn't read is much longer than the list of books I did read. I read many of these books while doing physiotherapy for my chronic pain, specifically as audiobooks I listened to on my underwater MP3 player while doing my daily laps at the public pool across the street from my house.
After many years of using generic Chinese waterproof MP3s players – whose quality steadily declined over a decade – I gave up and bought a brand-name player, a Shokz Openswim. So far, I have no complaints. Thanks to reader Abbas Halai for recommending this!
https://shokz.com/products/openswim
I load up this gadget with audiobook MP3s bought from Libro.fm, a fantastic, DRM-free alternative to Audible, which is both a monopolist and a prolific wage-thief with a documented history of stealing from writers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
All right, enough with the process notes, on to the reviews!
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GRAPHIC NOVELS
I. Shubiek Lubiek by Deena Mohamed
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An intricate alternate history in which wishes are real, and must be refined from a kind of raw wish-stuff that has to be dug out of the earth. Naturally, this has been an important element of geopolitics and colonization, especially since the wish-stuff is concentrated in the global south, particularly Egypt, the setting for our tale. The framing device for the trilogy is the tale of three "first class" wishes: these are the most powerful wishes that civilians are allowed to use, the kind of thing you might use to cure cancer or reverse a crop-failure.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/11/your-wish/#is-my-command
II. Ducks by Kate Beaton
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In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them. Beaton's memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation. The story that follows is – naturally – wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with – and empathy for – the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/14/hark-an-oilpatch/#kate-beaton
III. Justice Warriors by Matt Bors
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Justice Warriors is what you'd get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola. It's a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz
IV. Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
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The story of three young Canadian women meeting up for a getaway to New York City. Zoe and Dani are high-school best friends who haven't seen each other since they graduated and decamped for universities in different cities. Fiona is Dani's art-school classmate, a glamorous and cantankerous artist with an affected air of sophistication. It's a dizzying, beautifully wrought three-body problem as the three protagonists struggle with resentments and love, sex and insecurity. The relationships between Zoe, Dani and Fiona careen wildly from scene to scene and even panel to panel, propelled by sly graphic cues and fantastically understated dialog.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/11/as-canadian-as/#possible-under-the-circumstances
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Like I said, this has been a good year in books for me, and it included three books of my own:
I. Red Team Blues (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)
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Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough. Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues
II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (nonfiction, Verso)
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We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con
III. The Lost Cause (novel, Tor Books US, Head of Zeus UK)
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For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.
But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause
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I wrote nine books during lockdown, and there's plenty more to come. The next one is The Bezzle, a followup to Red Team Blues, which comes out in February:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
While you're waiting for that one, I hope the reviews above will help you connect with some excellent books. If you want more of my reviews, here's my annual roundup from 2022:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review
Here's my book reviews from 2021:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography
And here's my book reviews from 2020:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading
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It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review
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leebrontide · 3 months
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This is not gonna win me a lot of friends on here but seriously a lot of y'all are irritating me lately with your gleeful piracy posts.
"Poor people deserve stories, to!" You're right. 100% Go on gumroad. There are a ton of authors, myself included, who are giving away free books there. Many of them are from the very marginalized backgrounds y'all claim to want to champion. Look for newsletter giveaways. there are literally so damn many ways to get books that come from creators who have consented to give them away. Oh, but you think anyone should be entitled to the exact book they want without paying for it? the popular book from the big publisher? That's a different thing. That's a different thing that continues to uphold ideas that the mega-corporations are the only source for good stories, that only stories vetted by the companies you claim to be rallying against have value.
"Piracy is archiving!" Archiving is archiving. I can't speak to how it works with indie videogames or what have you, but with books, this is absurd. Ok, say you illegally download a book. If it's from a huge publisher, this is nonsense cause a ton of those were printed. It is not in danger if vanishing. Say it's from a small publisher- you have now decreased that publishers chances of of continuing to print and distribute the book. You are making the book harder to locate in the future. You want to make sure a book doesn't vanish? Pay for it. If it vanishes utterly off the internet when the author dies or whatever, then yay, you have a copy and can maybe help get it back in circulation. Not paying for the book didn't help with that. You can help save an out of circulation book later just as well if you paid for it.
"Piracy is counter corporations!" See point 1. Also, a lot of the sites where you all are pirating fiction do just as much scraping of indie, self-pub, and small press books. Robin Hood wasn't stealing from the poor to give to the poor. I personally know an author whose publisher dropped them mid series because the book wasn't selling, who later found a piracy site with WAY more downloads of her book than there were legal sales. She gave up publishing after that.
This isn't sour grapes, folks. To my knowledge, my own books have never been pirated, and to be honest, over the years I've sold as many copies as a regular mid-list author with a pig publisher.
But I have watched so many authors- not wealthy people- have their work stolen from them. Many of them are disabled and really struggle with other kinds of jobs. They can do this work, but they can't make money, and this is honest to god a big part of why. I feel like people don't believe this. If you don't hang around authors maybe it's tempting to buy in to the hollywood idea of an author.
If you don't think you're entitled to demand free labor from a plumber, then why do you think you're entitled to demand free labor from an author or artist? Is it because you don't have to look them in the eye? Is it because you feel like you can get away with it? Is it because you've fallen for the fantasy that authors are wealthy people living glamorous lives, and their labor doesn't count because they're so lucky to be making a living with their art?
I don't know. And please don't defend this to me.
Just go read free books, if you can't afford to buy them and don't have library access. Or at least stop rubbing what you're doing in the faces of all the creators on this website who put a lot of hard work into the things they make.
Reblogs are nice, but reblogs accompanied by cheerful endorsements of stealing things which aren't freely given do not make for an ideal community.
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Thanks for your response. I was the anon who ended the ask with 'the fandom can suck it'. When I saw that anon who you and twinanimatronics had assumed to be the one that keeps you know starting shit with you, I really hated that they labeled us as shipbrain or whatever they said. I am aroace who finds comfort in shipping characters and that doesn't make me any less aroace. Can't people like them just let us have this, let us share it and stop taping our mouths? God. We are not even hurting anyone. I posted a solarxmoon and solarxearth mini comic thing yesterday and behold, I believe that same anon found it and is looking adamantly through the solarxmoon and even solarxearth because I didn't use the tsams tag for my comic. I took the comic down fast and turned off anon messages so quick because God that anon was quick to leave nasty messages, six in total and that was panic attack inducing. I'm sorry for rambling about this. I don't know anyone else who got that same anon on their back. It looks like they are persistent for lack of better term and it annoys me+scares me. Can't even share things I like about here anymore. Hoping solarxmoon becomes canon so that anon can shut up already
If Solar Moon became canon, they don't even need to change anything.
The actors don't even need to pretend to kiss or be romanically involved at all.
It's literally as simple as "Oh yeah, we were dating for months, anyway..."
OH AND... FUCK THAT ANON. I know the user you are talking about, I think there's around two or three of them... and it seems like they're dead set on hunting down people who use that Solarmoon or Solar x Moon tag.
Going into popular users in the tsams fandom that I personally don't know... and spreading bad lies and rumors about me.
Like, they typically try to keep it as vague as possible, like "oh I am not talking about dana-chan-the-control-brain specifically....." but they often steal the exact wording and turn of phrase I use.
Cause I have an overly wordy way of talking on the internet.
I've always been this way since I was 15, so I feel my style of speaking is pretty overly wordy, rambly and long compared to most people just because I don't have a lot to share with my opinions with in real life. And I also misspell things a lot cus spellcheck has gotten worse since it became AI trained and it doesn't help my dyslexia.
But how sad is that? That someone is searching out the tag for a ship that they don't like, claim that "it's everywhere" and I'm "poisoning the fanbase" when I'm just.... here... playing with my own dolls, doing my own thing.... and not bothering anyone... Not even putting the ship in the tags publicly because I have Such respect and love for the silly little youtube show, who also plays with fnaf characters like they're dolls.
(just saying.. "bio-organic" and interdimensional travel did NOT come from fnaf I can tell you that much. )
And yeah, if they're really stumbling across Solarmoon or these ships on accident.......Blacklist the tags and move on? Don't come to my messages... Don't harass my friends...
And don't harass other people I DON'T EVEN KNOW because someone just said "hehe but what if they kissed" on the internet?
Like blocklist the tag, and move on.
I know the blocklisting tagging system sucks sometimes, so maybe it's picking up "Solar" like in that case? Just scroll super fast and don't look at it?
And yeah. You don't deserve those nasty messages sent your way at all!
Oh, and if you feel brave enough to reupload your art to tumblr and DM me, I will gladly reblog it here. <3
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ilikepjo24 · 5 months
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People I don't like and the reasons why.
- Minors on adult spaces that make themselves unsafe by willingly entering adult spaces and then blaming adults for discussing adult subjects in those spaces.
- Parents of minors that don't monitor the internet experience if their child properly and get mad at the internet and at other adults for creating adult spaces instead of being mad at themselves for not protecting the children they are responsible for properly.
- Radfems. I believe in equality and real feminism. Not in inequality, reverse sexism, transphobia, shaming people that are comfortable with their femininity because "it's bowing to patriarchy", porn haters, slut shaming other women, child haters, man haters and all the things Radical Feminism stands for.
- People that turn everything into a talk about Palestinians. Shaming people for still having a life when you "feel guilty for just having water" isn't helping anyone. I still help the news spread, I still boycott the brands that support Israel, I still give amounts of money I can afford to give to organizations and people that are trying to raise money for Gaza. Just because I don't post about it all the time and victimize myself online doesn't mean I have forgotten or that I don't care. I can still have a life and support Palestine, it doesn't have to be my whole personality.
- Flat earthers. You're just too stupid to understand physics.
- Vegans that force their naturally carnivore pets to also be vegan because "it feels so wrong to love one animal and eat the other". If you don't like your pet to eat meat or meat based products, get an animal that is a leaf-eater like you, don't torture the poor dog.
- Vegans that walk up to you while you eat a burger and try to talk harass you out of it.
- "Seperate the art from the artist" people. You can't! If your favourite artist is a bad person *cough cough* like Kanye West *cough cough*, you can't listen to their music without supporting them, giving them money, and allowed all the bad things they've done to go answered. You either have to stop listening to their music, or admit to yourself that you're selfish enough to help a bad person continue being a bad person for a couple of songs. You can only "seperate the art from the artist" if the artist is dead, because only then you can enjoy the art without giving money to a bad person.
- People that say "it's freedom of speech" when it's not and then proceed to throw slurs around.
- People that are haters of artists and when you ask them why they say "because I don't like their music" + [incert 584370 incorrect facts the media and other haters pulled out if their asses and can easily be debunked if you put the slightest bit of effort]. Like, no. There's literally nothing wrong with that person and "I don't like their music" is a valid reason to not be a fan, but you don't have to be a hater instead, you can just be indifferent if you don't like their music.
- People that wear shoes inside a house they don't clean.
- People that steal your good without asking when they aren't your siblings. My sister gets a free pass, but you don't. If you want a fry, you'll ask for it and I'll just say yes, because it's just a fry, you don't have to be annoying and steal it.
- People that say "ADHD is not real" or "Aren't we all a bit ADHD?". No, we're not. ADHD is perfectly real and it causes issues with productivity and concentration that you could never imagine, don't use it as an excuse for your laziness and then say "don't we all have done ADHD?". There's medication for it, because it is 100% real, so don't disregard it or say it's not real, it's just getting annoying.
- People that make jokes about autism, mental health problems, SA, sexism, ect and all it "dark humor" but get upset when you crack some dark humor jokes about men or the church.
- Neurotypical people that give the most basic, overhead "advice" ever to neurodivergent people and then think they know better when someone neurodivergent says "I actually have already tried this, and it's not really working for me".
- People that don't believe in the seperation of religion and state. The laws are for everyone not just you, and "everyone" includes people with different religious beliefs and therefore the laws should not be based around your religion.
- People that are Anti-choice. If you don't want to have an abortion, don't. That's good for you. Congratulations. I hope your baby is born healthy and grown up to live a long life and be the smartest, healthiest, happiest, prettiest person ever and I hope they achieve all their dreams. But just because you didn't want to have an abortion doesn't mean you get to tell others what to do. You go and focus on raising your wonderful child and leave me the fuck alone.
- Homophobic and Transphobic people. Because I have normal human decency.
- Racist people. Because I have normal human decency.
- Sexist people. Because I have normal human decency.
- People that chew with their mouth open.
- People that are "Lesbian Truthers" when it comes to a female character that isn't canonically a lesbian and has shown attraction to men in the past and headcannon them as lesbian and then call homophobic whoever disagrees. I'm looking at you Lesbian Azula Truthers.
- People that are "Lesbian Truthers" when it comes to AN ACTUAL HUMAL PERSON that has shown attraction to men MULTIPLE TIMES, FOR YEARS AND YEARS and have the fucking nerve to "headcannon" them as lesbians AS IF THEY AREN'T ACTUAL HUMSN BEINGS AND NOT CHARACTERS, and then call you homophobic when you say "hey hadn't this person dated multiple men openly? And I actually remember them saying they don't like you be all up their business and guessing their sexuality." I am looking at you Gaylors (aka Taylor Swift Lesbian Truthers). K!ll yourself Gaylors. Please.
- People that blame the child for being abused.
- People that get big dogs and stuff them into little apartments and don't exercise them properly on a daily basis.
- People that get bird and stuff them into tiny cages all day long for all their lives.
- People that are prejudiced again certain dog breeds when it's proven that there's no bad breed, just but owners.
- People that are haters just to troll.
- People that say "I'm not done talking yet". Honey, if you wanted to give a speech you should have told me so that I wouldn't show up. This is a conversation.
- Teachers that don't like kids. Why tf would you get this job then? And why do you have to torture the kids now?
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miraphoenix · 4 months
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Right off the bean, this is not a callout post. I'd talk to the person this is about 1-on-1, but a) he's had me blocked for 4 years, and b) it's mutual. This is me venting on my personal blog, something that he decided to vague about me doing back when I had my first blog.
With that out of the way. I'm really fucking tired of people stealing from Valenth/Revecroir, and from its creator.
Years and years ago, when they were a literal child, my bff/queer life partner--for the purpose of this post, their name is Leupai--made lizard-critters with hands on their tongues and called them leupaks. Eventually, they ended up splitting off from Subeta where they worked at the time, making an affiliated petsite called Valenth where the leupaks featured quite prominently as creatures in a fantasy-meets-steampunk world.
Unfortunately, their boss was a piece of work, and following a rather large kerfluffle involving another petsite lifting other elements of my partner's work (namely, a dragon concept and a companion concept), my partner was fired by the Subeta head boss. The leupaks were renamed into leupai, and Valenth expanded into Revecroir. This was in 2014, give or take a few months.
Through about half of the Valenth era and into the Revecroir era, Leupai was dating someone else, who went by Sixar at the time, later Kismeti, and the two had a long-distance open relationship. Kismeti also did a fair amount of site art for Valenth, and described himself as Leupai's biggest fan; when he'd met Leupai originally, his username referenced leupaks, he had a bunch of leupak characters, and a leupak sona. I met both of them in 2013-2014, right around the close of Valenth, and started chatting with them both. Leupai was more responsive, Kismeti was more reserved, but I did the best I could.
Over the years, I kept trying to reach out to Kismeti, but found that Leupai was honestly more willing to talk with me, so I did become better friends with them. Note that I was friends with Leupai, and trying to be friends with Kismeti. We chatted, we sent memes, we played World of Warcraft, I bought folks pizza across the Pacific Ocean, you know the drill.
Through this, I became really familiar with Leupai's world, at that point named Revecroir. I got to know their lore, their worldbuilding, their current projects, and the leupai creatures themselves.
The leupai were--and are!--still fat lizards with paws on their tongues, who can open portals between worlds with acid in their claws, who transfer their consciousnesses to other bodies if one is destroyed, and whose strength comes from the realm of dreams and creativity. In the early days, in lore that wasn't publicized, leupai were roaming around to find a world to live on after Valenth. This was a project that was supposed to be worked on with Kismeti, but nothing really ever came of it. Eventually, Leupai kind of moved on from that storyline to write more about Revecroir itself.
At the same time, I tried asking Kismeti about his worldbuilding, because he had characters and allegedly a world of his own, but didn't really get a lot in the way of answers. I saw a lot of Sonic fanart, I saw a lot of homestuck, I saw a lot of MLP:FiM, I saw a lot of Captain Planet. Eventually, I kind of... Gave up asking? And that's on me, but frankly, if you ask someone to share their stuff and they don't share their stuff, I figure that's the signal to stop asking.
As time went on, though, I was seeing some cracks forming in the 10-year relationship between the two, and I was helping Leupai through a lot. I watched as he yelled at my best friend for not responding to messages fast enough. I watched as he made plans with Leupai and then fucked off to do other things for hours, leaving Leupai in the lurch and worried about his physical safety. I watched as he gaslit Leupai about their ability to use a computer. On one memorable instance, when Leupai's internet was unstable while we were all playing WoW together, Leupai left the voice call to go reset the router, and Kismeti decided that it was a great time to shit-talk Leupai's intelligence to me. For a half hour straight. Until Leupai rejoined the call.
Eventually, I visited Leupai in person and watched as they were broken down to tears by Kismeti failing to respect their boundaries for literal hours, until Leupai caved to Kismeti's preferences. That was a rough night, and I remember wondering why the fuck my best friend's partner was treating them so badly.
About a month and a half after I visited Leupai, they decided to break up with Kismeti, because they'd had enough of him verbally berating them for not responding fast enough to memes sent over instant message, among so many other things. He, to put it mildly, lost his shit.
(For the record, I know what went down, because Leupai had me read the messages sent back and forth, to make sure they were grounded, and were reading things right. I've seen logs going back 10 years. His original vague accused me of not knowing what I was talking about, but boy howdy I was either there, or have read the raw logs.)
Anyway, he begged for Leupai back. Leupai gave him a chance that he fucked up within a day. Leupai said goodbye and blocked him. He then started messaging me about this on discord, clearly trying to use me as a go-between to get to Leupai.
At the time, I was going through some Complex Feelings about my own abuse by various people in my life, triggered by his behavior, so was reblogging a lot of support stuff on my original blog. I guess he decided this was vaguing about him, because he made a vaguepost accusing me of not knowing all the details (unbeknownst to him, I'd read everything) and finally blocked me.
I figured this chapter in my life was done at this point, and moved the fuck on. Made a new blog because I didn't feel like getting all his shit off my old one, moved across the country, got a new job, the whole shebang. Leupai and I entered our odd QPP/partners/bffs/???? phase, and I genuinely didn't think much about him, unless I was helping listen to Leupai talk about stuff they'd gone through with him.
Until this year. When I saw some comment of his break containment and end up on my dash, under the name "riftclaw". I had a bit of an inkling, so I broke my "don't look" rule and looked at the linked toyhouse to confirm it was really him.
Turns out, riftclaws are... Lizard creatures. Who open portals between worlds with acid in their claws. Who are looking for a new world to call their own. And who have some divine properties, that may involve body switching.
And all of Kismeti/riftclaw's old leupai characters are now riftclaws.
Oh, and he was planning to make them into a closed species. To make money off them.
Now, leupai were decently popular back in the day. I still have leupai characters, and make some periodically from time to time. There's a tag on tumblr and everything; if you're reading this, there's a decent chance you remember Vee yourself, as a fair number of my followers were there too. People still talk about Valenth from time to time. Leupai still has a folder of old fanart from back in the day with some 800 pieces of art in it. They were, by all accounts, successful until they weren't.
But the height of popularity was back when Vee was still around, in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The only new stuff in the tags is from an archive blog of old Vee assets.
Despite that, though. And I know this from messages between the pair, I know that Kismeti tore into Leupai repeatedly for "being more popular" and "having more eyes on their work". Even though "those eyes" didn't keep Leupai fed or housed, or really give them any income. Even though "those eyes" meant getting 50 notes on a tumblr post as opposed to 20. Even though "those eyes" just increased thievery and the constant pressure to be a Content Creator(tm), and were a major part of what drove Leupai off the internet entirely starting in 2018.
So imagine. Imagine for a moment. Being so hungry for clout and attention. That you steal your ex-partner's species concept that they've had since they were literally 8 years old, barely file off the serial numbers, and then make that your entire online persona four full years after your partner broke up with your ass twice for being an abusive piece of shit over a 10-year timeframe.
To borrow my own tags from this post, which got me thinking about all of this again?
#This is all to say; if you're jealous of someone else's success? Fine. Go have your emotion. But don't lift their shit.#Your emotions are valid; your actions aren't.
(Oh, and this is the smallest thing in the world, the least important piece of this? Riftclaws are already a thing from a game released in 2016 called Grim Dawn.)
#phoenix sounds#leupai#leupak#Valenth#Revecroir#I have a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions and a lot of frustration#Leupai's had their shit stolen three times now#Once when they were a kid; once by another petsite#And now once by their ex#Which is just... Honestly? I guess they've got an original idea because everyone else seems to be cribbing it#This is why the Revecroir setting's forever private now though#Leupai got run off the internet by this kind of thing (and much worse) and they're staying gone now#And this whole hbomberguy vid thing about plagiarism is just making me think about... How many people this impacts#How many artists have had their shit lifted and stolen by someone and how crushing that is#How many people that disenfranchises and removes from communities#I can attest that Revecroir is flourishing but it will *never* be seen again by outside eyes because of the repeated thefts#How many more things are like that I wonder? How many people stop making all together because of this sort of thing?#Ties into the sssniperwolf shit from a few months ago where she was freebooting stuff from much smaller creators and claiming it was hers#In her case we do know that there were small creators who stopped making after she stole their shit for millions of views on youtube#So it's not like this is some victimless crime#Anyway I think the constant searching for clout/visibility/reach/whatever the term de jour is?#Has made everything unfathomably worse in terms of theft and plagiarism#And to confront the latter we have to remove the former
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secretgamergirl · 1 month
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The latest disinformation campaign from the con artists pushing "AI" - Expanding the definition.
As a growing percentage of the population is waking up to the fact that the whole "AI" thing is some combination of outright lies, the same autocomplete function your phone has had forever, and obfuscation of the outright theft of an unfathomable amount of art, writing, contents of theoretically secure databases, etc. the newly emerging strategy to keep the world from pulling the plug on the whole thing and putting the people stealing basically every file accessible on the internet is a pivot to a defense of "well SOME uses of AI are outright criminal acts sure, but there's a lot of useful things about it to!" However, since that's... you know, not actually true, what they're actually doing is just going around pointing at literally anything cool involving computers and going "see, that's AI!"
Some of the examples I've been seeing have really just been flooring me, too. These hucksters looking for useful software to use as a shield for their scams are pointing at stuff like the basic fundamental concept of a database, AI in the sense of the routines that dictate enemy behavior in games, and even things like freaking shaders. You know, the code that gets applied to 3D models to determine whether they react to lighting realistically or look cartoon-y or whatever. There's a post going around this site right now trying to claim we wouldn't have Miles' jawline in Spiderverse if we shut down the people stealing every digital artist's portfolio to repackage and pretend a computer did it. Yeah no, putting a hand drawn looking line on the edge of a 3D character's jaw is something we've been doing for at least 30 damn years now.
Everything about these scams infuriates me, but this latest set of lies is particularly setting me off, because we're already apparently dealing with a serious problem in society where a huge number of people under the age of 25 or something are just shockingly lacking in basic computer literacy, and now we've got a bunch of con artists trying to convince them that basic math and data structures are beyond all human comprehension and possible only because of whatever goes on inside of the unknowable black box that has an honest to goodness thinking machine, which not only can't be understood, but will stop functioning if you try to stop people from committing blatant theft.
I'm honestly mostly just venting here, but for real, any time you see this sort of crap, please do your civic duty and call out how none of this stuff is "AI" and useful software has nothing to do with any of these creeps scraping every file they can off the internet.
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neveragainfools · 2 months
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Let’s talk about art since apparently I’m a dumbdumb idiot who knows nothing about it or the internet.
Am I salty? Yes. Let’s get into it. So, you might have seen the Keith Haring AI Unfinished Painting going around with my commentary of disdain, and then a bunch of people reblogging it with commentary on how it’s an obvious troll/bait post and how stupid I and those who chimed in in the same fashion are. Apparently the post made it to trending (though I never saw it there, because I mostly just pay attention to my dashboard.)
Of course it doesn’t feel good to get “got.” I think if someone hadn’t sincerely pulled a similar stunt with the Mona Lisa recently, I would’ve seen it as a troll post. I did actually take a moment to consider that it might be a troll before I reblogged with commentary. But that damn expanded Mona Lisa came to mind, and I thought, “no, there are people out there who absolutely think this is okay” and went on my little rant. Jingle my bells for I’m now the court jester. I took the bait.
Do I still stand by it? Yes, for the most part. One could argue that the troll is a form of art, and I played a part in the performance. Much like Fountain by Duchamp (a piece in which he literally signed a urinal and displayed it as fine art and it nearly burned down the art world), this piece inspires rage, and the rage is the most important part of the conversation. I’ll make no bones about my position on AI art. When the “art” is simply an image generated by an AI tool, that is not art to me. It is a commercial image. The use of an AI tool to “complete” or “expand” an image with the intention to create a vast reaction, and post it in such a manor can be argued as performance art, the same way Fountain is. Machine learning can also be used as a tool in the process to create a piece of art, but a generated image alone is not art.
So then why do I stand by it? A big problem with art types like this is that it’s callous, cold and doesn’t respect the work that it’s “building on” or “elevates.” Whether it’s Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s rehashing of comic panels, Duchamp’s Fountain or this AI piece, in all cases, it uses the originator without concern for the content of the art itself. Someone at the toilet company had to design that urinal. Someone at Campbell’s had to design the soup can label. Lichtenstein took panels from real living comic artists and re-rendered them with less skill and care. Those works are never co-credited with the people who did the initial designs. The twitter person who made this mess used a heartbreaking piece about a man’s grief and frustration about his own untimely death due to AIDs, and a lot of people weren’t familiar with it before this viral moment. Sure, it starts a conversation into the nature of art, as do all of these “subversive” pieces. But especially with Haring, who was concerned about computers and their eventual intelligence and would likely hate it, especially because we DO know the original artist, and those who are meant to be angered are familiar with the original piece (mainly lgbtq people), it feels especially rude and poor taste.
Other works wouldn’t cause such a visceral reaction. The personal nature of Unfinished Painting why “finishing it” is so controversial. No one says art has to be respectful. No one says art can’t steal, remix or transform works that came before it to create a new meaning. I’m still allowed to hate it. I’m still allowed to think it spits on Keith’s grave. The choice to do something so disrespectful is integral to the point of the piece, all in the name of showing how reactionary people are to AI generated images. It’s still a shitty thing to do. Perhaps something so visceral that causes such bad reaction is necessary for us to find the boundaries of where AI is or isn’t okay to be used in art. I hope for this twitter person’s sake it is.
There are so many things we could take from this debacle: reactionary nature of the internet, the question of consent and collaboration vs. remix in art, whether artists and their art should always be questioned, the list goes on. I’m happy to continue that conversation.
tldr: Sure, I got "got" by the Keith Haring Unfinished Painting AI "finishing". You could classify the act as art. It stimulated conversation into the relationship between AI images and art. But I think it's still a shitty thing to do.
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livingthedragonlife · 7 months
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ugh i have such mixed feelings about the AI copyright stuff, because like. on the one hand i don't want copyright law to get stronger, that would be bad for literally everyone but the giant corporations. but on the other, i don't trust the current capitalist hellscape of the internet with the total abolishment of copyright. the only reason so many artists were able to prevent people from stealing their stuff to make NFTs and AI art mimics of their work, including my girlfriend, is to wave around copyright. "this art is mine, you don't have permission to sell it." it's why huge corporations have to trick young artists into entering "contests" where they sign away their copyright and produce free labor. imagine a world without copyright where they can just steal anything they see without having to pull some legal loophole bullshit.
personally i would be really scared of thay future - a person or company being able to steal my writing and sell it somewhere else with no repercussions because copyright doesn't exist. like, that's my work that i made, and what i'm trying to make a living doing. i know they can do that anyway, and there will always be people who steal shit for a quick buck, but at least with copyright and DMCA there's at least one (extremely flawed, but effective) resource to safeguard against that if it does happen
i think that while abolishing copyright in the long-run is good (see: everything streaming services and Disney do), i feel like it would only help smaller artists in a world where their art isn't tied to their ability to eat food and pay rent. i just feel like it would matter less in a world that also had a UBI. if that makes sense
idk can someone make a case for me? because i am struggling with the dissonance. it feels like a really "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, where no matter what, the megacorps benefit.
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katimanki · 7 months
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you sound bitter bc the “art stealer” is getting more notes on posts than you. I know them irl. they also don’t claim the art as theirs, they’re just sharing it on this platform. the artwork they are posting is all over the internet, mainly Pinterest, without any indication who the artist is. they give credit when they know who the artist is. they literally changed the post to include credit as soon as you gave them the original artist’s instagram handle, despite you claiming that they did nothing.
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I am aware that I sound very bitter. I am allowed to. You're saying that I am not allowed to feel bad or bitter when I see someone steal, and get interactions on their stolen posts? And yes, in this case they have reached higher notes than most of mine. But when I called this out the first time, they didn't, the elmax art had just around 100 and this el one had 14 notes.
I have seen stolen art on the Byler tag before that got zero notes. ZERO. And that also made me want to call that person out. I didn't, but I still think about digging up that post and doing it. So I don't know what to tell you, art theft makes me mad every time, but yes, in this instance the amount of notes has a part in my actions. Because now it's not just about the op deleting the post, because that doesn't delete it from this platform completely. It will stay here as long as there are reblogs of it.
You're really trying to justify art theft? Art theft is never justified. Just because the art has been stolen several times already and is all over pinterest as you say, DOES NOT make it okay for more people to be spreading it around. I highly doubt any artist posts their art on pinterest, (my art has been posted there and it was terrible) so it is safe to assume that if you find art on pinterest it is already stolen.
And just like op you're trying to justify art theft by saying, they don't claim it as their own. They only wanted to share it to this platform, you say? And that isn't stealing? When it's still posted without the artist knowing or conseting? Interesting. Well, that's not cool. It's not right. It is not justified, and it's still stealing, no matter what you say.
And you also say there's no indication to who the artist is. (You're also using the exact wording as the op did in DMs. I'm not gonna say it but I'm thinking it) The elmax art had the artist handle right in the middle of it. You call that "no indication"?
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Also it took me about two minutes to figure out the original artists and to find the original posts. So it really is not that hard to find them. And if you can't, then don't post it. And even if you do, still don't repost other people's art because they aren't consenting to it. This is what the elmax art had in the description. Doesn't seem like your friend even checked out the artist after I told them who it is.
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And fine, I admit saying they did nothing is not completely true. I was going to bed and trying not to ramble in the tags of that post. I'm sorry that I spread misinformation like that. They did do something, they added the artist credit to the description. But as we already established, that artist doesn't allow reposts. And also, if you don't know how tumblr works editing the original post after there are reblogs, only edits the original post, not the reblogs. So now there are reblogs of that art with no credit floating around tumblr.
Honestly I know that reasoning with people who have stolen art never works. My art has been stolen on Instagram and for two years I have asked for it to be taken down(yes the repost has more likes then mine, I am allowed to feel bad about that). I just really wish it never happened in the first place but the world can't be that perfect now can it?
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psycho-chair · 1 year
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gimme your hcs about cross or killer (or both), i wanna see somethin >> - Paper'd What
oh boy oh boy, here comes a long one, you've just unleashed the flood.
Cross
Cross has a strong tolerance for strong temperatures, but once he gets too warm or too cold, he stays that way for a while
He sticks to a routine, keeps a calendar, and has an annoyingly loud alarm clock. He never takes more than 20 minutes in the shower.
He handwashes his clothes.
Despite how his mannerisms imply otherwise, Cross is actually pretty Sans-like. His room is a mess, he sleeps for 20+ hours if allowed to, and he's perpetually tired.
Cross has some of the Sansy typical depression, but it's not as prominent as Dust's or Classic's. He keeps it all at bay and suppressed by constantly doing something.
He likes to draw but keeps it a secret from the gang out of worry that they'll get mad. [Cross thinks that being an artist is a bad thing, and that the guys will hate him for it because Ink is also an artist. Being an artist is literally Ink's gimmick, so by association, being an artist is bad.]
He likes working with his hands, and has considered asking Horror to help with the garden. Cross keeps a couple mini plants in little pots on his desk and does his best to take care of them. It's hard, since Nightmare's realm doesn't have an actual sun, but the magic UV lamp thing he bought seems to help.
Cross doesn't like empty-seeming things. Like the dark, or an empty field, things that remind him of the empty void of his old AU. He has several nightlights and some starry stuff on his bedroom ceiling. His favorite nightlight is the one that projects stars and constellations.
Cross really likes the idea of animating and digital art, but his allowance never seems enough, despite the fact that he hardly ever uses it. He's thought about stealing the equipment, but he doesn't have many places to put it all.
Cross keeps a journal, he barely writes in it, but he keeps one. He doesn't trust the others not to snoop around and find it, so it's always in his inventory. He also carries around a sketchbook and some supplies in his phone's dimensional boxes.
He has another journal that he uses for missions, mainly scouting missions, raids, and recon
Cross is kinda the weakest on the team, but because he's had actual training, his skill level is still pretty high. Strength-wise, he's like a -15, but his training brings a 100 to the table, making him more like an 85 instead of a -15. It's a huge buff.
Cross has thinner bones than the others, minus Killer, so he's very lanky and slim when he doesn't have his puffy outfit on. He has the magical equivalent of high metabolism. It pisses Horror off because Cross eats nowhere near enough to counter it.
Cross trains every single day he can; two hours in the morning, and one in the afternoon. It doesn't help considering how quickly his body burns through his energy and how little he eats.
Cross is the only person in the house who actually keeps up with the internet and stuff. He has several game consoles, a shit ton of games, a big tv, and some rather shittily installed speakers that essentially make a dollar store surround-sound system.
Epic visits a lot, and Cross visits Epic a lot. They always hang out in Cross's room, since Epic is kinda awkward around the rest of the gang.
Cross is a master at blocking XChara out. He can ignore him very easily, and has full control of mostly everything. He still struggles with his magic, though, since the magic still belongs to XChara and doesn't bend to his will so easily. Cross knows how to summon his own knife and has learned to mimic all of XChara's abilities except for one. He can't make XChara's hack knife.
Cross is a bit of a glitch himself, and is able to open and read, though compared to Error, his skill is basic as hell. He uses it mainly to open portals. It also makes some of his missions way easier, because he can just sit in his room and watch the code to gather intel. He's getting good at reading it, but it's slowly messing up his vision. [It's how he learned why Error's vision is so bad.]
Cross is the only person on the team who can open portals without Nightmare's help, but he refuses to do it without Nightmare's permission.
Cross is allergic to seafood.
He can cook a little, but it's mediocre at best. It takes him a while to earn recipes, but he likes helping Horror with cooking. Cross can make a really good taco, though. He also has the recipe for pumpkin pie memorized. [He calls it pimplom pie, though, for some reason.]
Cros loves chocolate. Any kind, except for Spicy Chocolate.
Cross has a massive sweet tooth. He'll eat twice his weight in cinnabunnies if allowed to.
He can speak two languages fluently, Spanish and English. He can also speak Japanese, but he's still learning, okay? It's just really slow when you're learning it from watching anime.
Cross is a fanatic. In his room at Epic's house, there is so much anime stuff that it looks like a gift shop. He has several body pillows of his favorite anime characters.
Cross glitches sometimes, usually when he's healing, but there are moments when he just has a fit and he has no idea what the trigger is or if it's randomized.
He tried drinking alcohol, but it never works on him. Killer and Dust both say he just has a strong tolerance, but he doesn't care to find out what his limit is, and just smokes weed and eats edibles to get a buzz.
Cross has random nosebleeds, headaches, and occasionally, his right eyesocket will bleed, which is XChara's doing.
When he gets really mad, Cross's eyelights both turn red and HATE will start to come out of his eyes, which is also because of XChara.
Cross gets sick from taking someone else's shortcuts, it makes him dizzy and gives him a shitload of vertigo. His own teleports don't do anything, but with the others, it's awful.
Cross's favorite flowers are orchids and spider lilies.
Cross is unironically a gamer. He's a quick learner, and once he gets the hang of something, he immediately beings grinding and speedrunning. He has completed Skryim %100.
He has an intense hatred for the Minecraft OST, but he literally couldn't explain it, he just hates it.
Cross doesn't like using the big knife, and prefers the twin daggers instead. He's also trying to shape his magic so that he can summon whatever kind of weapon he wants. So far, he's learned to make a katana, an ax, a farmer's scythe, and a reaper's scythe. He's focusing on a whip currently. [Idk which of my aus this is, but it's canon to it now.]
Cross plays DND with Epic, Sci, Lust, Geno, and Error. He has many characters, but his favorite one is a reiteration of his very first character, and it's this woman who has no thumbs and no eyes.
Cross can sing, but it's impossible to catch him doing it.
Cross is actually kind afraid of Error, but it's getting better.
He is a violent sleeper, he will kick and turn and twist around. He has to make his bed every day because everything always ends up on the floor. He's considered making a space in the ground for his bed to be in, so that all of his things don't fall off and stay in the same area, but he gave up once he figured out that he'd be cutting into Dust's bedroom ceiling.
Cross spends a lot of time with Killer when he's not hanging out with Epic.
Cross likes to read sometimes, and was using one side of his closet to store books that he likes. Nightmare found out though and immediately made a section in his library for Cross because Cross is the only other person in the gang who's shown an interest.
Cross and Nightmare give each other recommendations sometimes, but Cross has an interest in books made for younger folks, so he reads stuff like Foxcraft or Warriors, or Bearhaven, while Nightmare is waving around the complete collection of The Lord of the Rings and Stephan King books. Still, they humor each other.
Because of Cross, Nightmare learned that graphic novels, comic books, and some other types of books weren't so childish after all. However, he refuses to read manga.
Cross is terrified of heights and deep water.
Cross's teeth are sensitive to cold, despite his tolerance to it, so he hates drinking cold things.
Hot chocolate.
Killer
Killer is a smartass. He has a response for everything, and it's always something witty. He uses language as a weapon, an instrument, and a toy. He's good at it.
He always has a minimum of 20 knives on him. He is not a heavy guy, but the amount of knives on him makes him heavy.
Killer has two looks: Classic Sans or Lust Sans
Classic Sans style is pretty much just the Classic Sans outfit, with some slight variations. His jacket is on properly, though the sleeves are often pulled up, either a black t-shirt or a puffy sweater underneath, fingerless gloves, some shorts [black on white], some sneakers, and some droopy socks. He usually has some of the white tape stuff wrapped around his forearms. [the kind of tape boxers wrap around their hands.]
He switched style permanently after he went to a particularly influencing LustVerse AU. The style resonated with him and just stuck forever.
He has a sleeveless turtleneck crop-top. It's black, and makes him hot. His jacket is ever-changing, sometimes he wears it properly, sometimes it hangs at his elbows, and sometimes it's gone altogether. He also has some tight black pants and some ankle boots. He also learned how to wear earrings. He had to hit up a Swaptale Papyrus for tips since those types are always holding a cigarette with nothing. His arm wraps turned into black sleeves that covered his entire forearm and a bit of his hand.
He rocks both looks too well.
With less clothing than before, it's even more baffling to know that he still carries a shit ton of knives on him, and no one knows where. All of his clothes are skin-tight, so you'd think it'd be obvious, but no, it's a mystery.
Killer, like Cross, has high metabolism, but his bones are just a little thicker. They're somewhat more fragile, but he's pretty strong.
He's agile as hell, very fast and flexible. He does the best with stealth missions and assassinations, but he gets the most fun out of chaos.
Killer often messes up missions on purpose just to have the excuse to go on a killing spree.
Killer only ever uses the public bathhouse because he likes watching others bathe. Horror and, somewhat rarely, Nightmare are the only other two who use it too.
Killer is always smiling. When he stops, someone is going to get badly hurt, and it's likely that it'll be him.
He doesn't drink often, but it's mostly because Nightmare banned him from doing it a bunch. Killer gets a little too into it, and usually ends up damaging a lot of things. Including himself.
Killer takes obsessively good care of his knives, and often uses his own bones to test the sharpness.
He likes the taste and smell of blood.
Killer is half blind, but it's impossible to tell. The only way anyone would find out is if Killer outright says it.
Killer gets horrible migraines periodically, and usually, those precede an episode.
He can't teleport anymore, since he lost that ability once he meshed his soul with his Chara's. He's lost touch with his magic, and can't access it as well as before. Now it mostly just acts as a secondary energy source and acts like an energy field to help him 'see' better.
Killer can't eat a lot of sweets, since it makes him sick, but he likes sugary stuff still. He likes to add sugar to a lot of his drinks.
He doesn't like coffee.
Killer's soul spins depending on his emotions. The faster it is, the more he's feeling, or the stronger of an emotion he's feeling. If it's slowing down, he's stunned or shocked. Slow spinning means he's either tired, sleepy, content, or calm. Complete stillness means he's about to go apeshit.
Killer never sleeps in his room, he hardly ever goes in there, there's no bed or anything really. Just dents and slashes on the walls and broken knives on the floor and in the wall. There's black stains everywhere, a lot of them looking a little like hand prints. There are also other stains, but those are hard to make out.
Killer doesn't enjoy being alone for a long time, which is why he's always following someone around and why he never sleeps in his room. He sleeps in everyone elses' beds, mostly Horror because the big guy is cozy and nice to him.
Killer doesn't move in his sleep, once he's asleep, he's like a rock, he stops moving. The only sign of life is his soul, which spins and flashes in little bursts.
Killer loves fluffy things, he has a fluffy blanket that he carries around. No one knows where he got it from, but he's rather attached to it for some reason. There's cat fur all over it, which makes Dust sneeze whenever Killer is bunking with him.
Killer has a soft spot for cats, and visits the Ccino's cat cafe whenever he can. He always buys something for the gang when he's there, and gives a hefty sum of money to Ccino to pay for the cat's food and care.
Killer has a set of cat ears and a cat tail hidden in his phone's dimensional boxes. He's put them on once while drunk and it was actually really funny. The video is really popular.
Killer lives on impulses. He doesn't think things through often, and when he wants to do something, he immediately does it or eggs someone into helping him do it. [Usually, that someone is Cross, because Cross is the only one who can make portals aside from Nightmare.]
Killer is the only one who can get Cross to do things that he normally would never do.
Killer and Cross spar a lot, they just really like fighting. They bicker a lot too, and compete a bunch, but that's just how their relationship works. It drives Nightmare insane, but he doesn't complain since Cross is now an outlet for Killer to let out energy on, instead of wrecking the castle or going into an episode from the buildup.
Killer is not only physically flexible, but also flexible in every other way. He's Nightmare's right hand for a reason. Killer can fill any role he needs to.
Killer is ambidextrous and can fight with any weapon you hand him. He's not been trained with any, but he has a habit of using weapons in weird ways and it gives him an edge in a fight.
Killer enjoys woodcarving, a lot. Horror helps him get wood for it often, which is all kept in a closet in Killer's activity room. [Nightmare calls it that.]
Killer has an activity room, btw.
In the activity room, there are: Carving tools, a sanding belt machine, a hanging punching bag, a sparring mat, a set of bo staffs, a whetstone grinder, a closet full of chopped wood, several shelves full of his creations, a lathe [which he uses for woodturning], a cool tunnel slide that goes directly to the bathhouse, a set of Bluetooth speakers, some stolen arcade games, some knife displays with Killer's favorite knives, and a section of the room that dips into a small pillow area with an overhead tv and one or two gaming consoles.
Killer and Cross often take naps in the activity room. They spar in there sometimes.
Killer can't cook for shit, people will die if he cooks. He is the only person to ever make Nightmare sick, and he did it with a bowl of spaghetti.
Killer chews on things. His knives have a ton of dents on them from his teeth.
He can speak two languages: Arabic and English. He's learning a bit of Spanish from Cross, though. He doesn't speak Arabic often, and the years of disuse have made him a bit rusty, but Cross's Spanish has brought it out of him since some of the sounds and pronunciations are similar enough to draw out his other language. He's cursed at Cross in Arabic like seven times now.
Killer is dogshit at singing. His voice is scratchy and low, a little hoarse sounding, and he has horrid control over his vocal range. He'd be really good at grunge though.
Killer has a pond/tub/lake thing in the castle's courtyard that he's filled with eels. There's Eelissa, Taquieela, Bathtub, Steely Dan, Nieel, Shaquieel, Meelani, Mentally Eel, and Crunchwrap Supreme.
Killer loves his eels. They bite his fingers a lot when he's feeding them, but he literally doesn't care.
Killer is like Cross, he's very online. He may not be as intune with the Internet, but he's still pretty up to date.
Killer and Cross both do live sreams, sometimes solo and sometimes together.
Killer's streams are either him just talking, him doing his carving/woodturning stuff, or him doing some gaming.
Cross's streams are mostly gaming, but sometimes he does a very scuffed art stream, or he just talks. [The chat always blows up when he's there because they like his voice.]
Whenever they stream together, it's either them talking with each other while doing their own thing [hich is usually Cross drawing and Killer carving], practicing with the bo staffs, wrestling, or they carry some smaller camera and live stream the eels.
i just made that part about streaming up, that one is an idea dump, please ignore rip rip
Killer sometimes gets Cross to paint his finished carvings, which Cross happily does so.
Btw Cross isn't slick at all about his love of art, literally everyone knows.
Killer like to go skinny-dipping in the lake that's somewhere in the woods behind the training building.
Killer gets cold easily, but is tolerant of heat.
He collects rocks.
Killer is currently trying to convince Nightmare to let him use the activity room's balcony to make a forge so he can make knives, but Nightmare is very very hesitant to let Killer be around fire. Cross is also interested in forging, though, so Nightmare is considering it.
Killer has the best equipment for weapon upkeep, so Horror and Cross both frequent the activity room a lot.
Dust shows up too, but only because he wants to use the slide.
Killer likes cold drinks, and often eats ice for the hell of it.
Killer likes slushies.
Killer hates the color harliquin green. He despises it with a passion, and it makes him want to rip out someone's heart while it's still beating.
Killer once joined Cross's DND game, but he got kicked out for talking in the most obnoxious voice and kept trying to roll for clams. He also got in a fight with Error, but that's not the point.
Killer likes to collect rocks. He has several buckets full of rocks he thought were interesting.
Killer loves the stars.
Andd that is all <333 there's probably definitely more, but these are the just some off the top of my head :]
is this what you wanted :D
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acearohippo · 2 years
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MonkeyLotus + Lewis discover that they have become popular enough to gain a fan base. Lewis loses his shirt (heh) over the fact the he is a meme (in a good way). Ling goes on a rant about how he is an artists worst nightmare (hands? I got six of em’!) and Xuan saves countless videos and animatics. Fanfic is written. Fic is discovered. Chaos ensues. Xuan makes literal essays of thoughtful feedback. Ling subjects Lewis to a dramatic reading of poorly written smut. The internet knows no peace.
You and me, right now? We this 🤞🏼. Cause I've been on that SAME WAVELENGTH FAM. What started as a thought of "What if the review section existed in universe as a way for non-espers to safely and anonymously vent, criticise, praise, and/or make suggestions about the espers around?" And then, because it was a bunch of out-of-touch boomers who decided to make this a thing, they didn't even attempt to but any regulations on it asides from some basic censoring some curse words and body parts. So, imagine the older espers, like gen xers and older millenials, genuinely wanting to hear what people had to say about them MEANWHILE younger millenials and gen Z espers are like "FFUUUUUU- NOOOOOO!"
Cue the first ever espers union live reading of comments, and Li Ling just adamantly refusing to read a single one of his reviews. Tang Xuan is Lost™ and barely focused, Lewis is trying not to bust out laughing in front of the cameras.
"I'm actually illiterate, you ableist piece of shiii-" -Li Ling, straight faced, but flushed maroon and unable to make eye contact.
"I don't even think you'd be allowed to say half this stuff, live" -Lewis, trying to steal a sheet so he can read it out loud to test the censorship crew
"I have bore witness to a string of words I never thought to be grouped together and we, humanity, are forsakened." -Tang Xuan, Traumatised™
Them discovering fandoms and stan content related to them would be equal parts terrifying (for content featuring themselves) and hilarious (for content about their friends).
Eventually, because the trio of them are such chill and go-with-the-flow type of dudes, they'll probably jump in and add to fandom chaos! I'm talking, more fan service, random social media posts quoting lines from pretty well known fanfics, Tang Xuan sharing a crap ton of art, especially ones featuring him and Li Ling with captions like "this could be us but you're playing 🤡", and saving anything nsfw featuring him to a private account "this could be us but you'd rather impale miramon😔". Li Ling actually gets upset when artists forgo his arms, hand-drawing difficulty be damned, "Ableist, all of them! >:(" "bro, wtf is up with you and ableism?? You just learn that word or somefin?" "Besides, you can get rid of your arms at any time, that's not a disability." "Yeah?? And?? Sometimes people in wheelchairs CAN walk, we ain't taking away their wheeling privileges tho" "... I... Mm. I don't like that that is, probably, an... Acceptable comparison. " "Nah, but hard agree, why tf does that make sense?!" "It's called self-advocacy🤌🏽✋🏽👍🏽 😌✌🏽✊🏽🤙🏽"
Lewis commissions artists to draw all sorts of posters and create shirts and what not for the Fire Fists. Tang Xuan makes weekly posts covering his favourite songs and gets super stoked when they're used in AMVs featuring him. Li Ling will not touch social media because of the amount of thirst comments he gets, but he also reads every single social media post he can find on himself and will make references to them.
And the memes. Oh LORD the memes. Once the Boys get a hold of them, it's over for the Union. Or, rather, it's over for the aged Union members and an all out war amongst the younger espers.
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vampiremeerkat · 1 year
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Do you think AI will eventually render artists useless?
There's no thought behind what a computer does. We have alot of funny little AI websites right now -stealing drawings and art techniques from around the internet to assemble the most beautiful images, but ask this AI the meaning of it, the feeling it had while "drawing" it, anything that would make its creation interesting to the emotional, human mind, and there won't come an answer. If there ever were to come a time art AI could be interviewed, its answers will too be stolen strings of words from other people, since computers literally do not have the organs to produce the chemicals with that allows them to "feel". Everything they say is an answer told to them, not a conclusion based on wants and needs. A computer doesn't want or need. I hope people realize that next time they see a scary robot video wherein their creator claims it's intelligent. There's more to being a human, let alone to being alive. There's also no real way to adjust an AI generated piece. You type in a prompt, and you might get something pretty, but is it truly what you had in mind? That's never been the case for me, and I'm convinced it never will be. To get my imagination out into the real world, I'll have to use my hands. Using AI means you'll have to constantly compromise, and I hope the world of art is inhabited by creative minds that can't and won't accept this method of working, not lazy bums only out to get fame or a buck. Laziness is the true threat artists may very well face in the future, if they don't already. It's tempting to call computers "more efficient", but the desire for quick cash is what killed 2D cell animation, not the mere existence of useful software.
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ask-shamebats · 2 months
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About Ai art, I personally believe it could do a lot of good IF they had the consent of the artist the ai trains on because now many AI programs are being trained in a way small artists who already struggle to make a living. I think Ideally the companies could pay the artists whose images they use to train their AI with but I know it will be unlikely, I don’t think AI art is the problem but how it is being used right now in a way that small artist are collateral damage to it’s development and people making AI art and sell it are profiting while the artists whose art is stolen are in a shitty position. I wish they would develope art AI’s in a more ethical way but under capitalism that is unlikely that is all, hope you have a good day!
It's a nice thought but this isn't just rich corporations vs artists, there are in sheer numbers way more researchers and individuals who play around with MLAs locally on their own computers as a hobby and don't make any money off of it.
Something like that would just make it so it becomes inaccessible to most individuals, leaving corporations who already own huge amounts of data to have a monopoly on the tech. Just like copyright laws generally don't work in artists' favor, this wouldn't either.
There's no reason for me to believe that companies like Adobe, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, DevianArt, Pinterest and all other for-profit websites that host data wouldn't just update their terms of service to make it so everything you post (text, images, video, audio) will be legally owned by them. Because if you make data even more profitable, you can bet corporations would take that and run with it.
I feel like ppl used to be more aware of that back in the day, I remember "everything you post to the internet will stay on the internet, anyone can download it" being basic safety advice and I feel like it's only getting more necessary to be aware of this. It's not just art. Every time you post something, even if it's just a text-only shitpost, that can and will be picked up by web crawlers. Not saying it's a good thing but that's the current reality. Not even massive corporations like Disney can do anything about it. Bing doesn't stop me from doing this:
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
(the prompt for this one was literally "AI stealing copyrighted Disney & Pixar characters")
Something like a publicly available opt-in only dataset created as a community-project could become a better alternative in the future. Especially if the anti-AI push does empower corporations to a push for copyright laws that would give them the upper hand. It would take a long time to gather the necessary data that way but it might end up being a way for hobbyists, researchers and artists to continue using AI if it becomes pay-walled.
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