#Learning Ecosystem for Companies
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upgradenterprise · 2 months ago
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Reimagine Workforce Learning with Scalable L&D Solutions from upGrad Enterprise
Empower your teams with a future-ready learning ecosystem designed to meet evolving business needs. upGrad Enterprise’s platform offers tailored learning and development programs that drive measurable outcomes—from leadership growth to digital and technical upskilling. With expert-led content, role-based pathways, and seamless integration into existing workflows, businesses can unlock the full potential of their workforce through targeted, high-impact training. Build a smarter, more agile organization with Thriversity by upGrad.
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rebeccathenaturalist · 5 days ago
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I am absolutely fascinated by the ecological recovery of the immediate blast zone around Mt. St. Helens. It was wiped clean of almost all life during the 1980 eruption, and in the aftermath it was decided that this area would be allowed to recover on its own, rather than being deliberately replanted by timber companies with a monoculture of Douglas fir, or by conservationists with a biodiverse array of native plants. This means the area is giving scientists an unprecedented close-up look at how an ecosystem recovers from such a massive natural disturbance.
This isn't to say there haven't been a few nudges by human activity. Rumor has it that local fishing clubs sneaked up to Spirit Lake and illegally stocked it with trout, though I've also heard claims that they arrived from a nearby stream, possibly originating from the higher elevation St. Helens Lake (which may itself have been restocked by humans.)
But the single day--two years after the eruption--that a batch of northern pocket gophers spent on the mountain made a big difference in the recovery of plant communities. (By the way, the picture in the article appears to be a ground squirrel, not a gopher.) Over forty years after their sojourn, the sites they were temporarily introduced to show much better plant growth due to the mixing of the soil microbiome, to include mycorrhizal fungi, bacteria, and other microbes. This microbial jump-start was caused by the gophers' digging, demonstrating why fossorial (burrowing) animals are so important to ecosystems. Without them, soil microbial communities can stagnate, and in the case of areas damaged by massive disasters, a lack of fossorial species can make recovery take much longer.
Speaking of disasters, scientists also found that forests that had been clearcut prior to the eruption had poorer, less diverse microbial communities than areas that had been more mature or old-growth forests, even when both areas were given the gopher treatment. This is yet more evidence that clearcutting forests is terrible for local ecology, because it not only removes entire ecosystems above ground, but below ground as well. And it shows that mature and old-growth forests are better equipped to weather disasters, with their higher biodiversity overall.
If we've learned anything ecologically from the 1980 eruption, it's that nature is incredibly resilient if we just give it the space to recover. The problem is that we keep poking at the wounds we create, not allowing them to heal over properly. By using more sustainable forestry practices, using resources more wisely, and preserving mature and old-growth forests, we increase the likelihood that the deeply intertwined life-support systems the planet provides (and which we, and all life, rely on) will remain functional in spite of our efforts to tear them apart in the name of resource extraction.
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sparrows4bats · 2 months ago
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I believe in Disney Princess Damian supremacy. I believe in a boy who loves nature so much it loves him back just as fiercely.
Odyspenelope on ao3 wrote a one shot and it has occupied my every waking thought since. The Al ghul are eco terrorists, the boy loves the world and I need that influence and core belief to filter into more of his actions.
Give me a Damian that when he came to Gotham, was horrified at the state of local animals and ecosystems and since his father will not allow him to punish every abuser or ceo who destroys the environment like they deserve, He will work to fix their mistakes. Fulfil both his parents' legacies at once by making this city better for all living creatures, not just people.
Give me a damian who, after causing so much pain, learnt unconditional love and forgiveness from Goliath, the bats in the cave, and Titus. Let him learn how to spread it to other animals and eventually people.
Give me a Damian who feeds every stray he comes across no matter the species to the point Alfred sows him extra pockets in his robin uniform and civilian coats for the food. Some are big enough to hold cats and injured birds safely during fights.
Damian brings home and fosters any animal he can hide from Bruce. The largest so far has been a horse he liberated from a neglectful carriage driver in Gotham Park. (Father caught Goliath within three days so it doesn't count.)
After batcow arrives, it becomes easier because when she is not in the cave, Bruce doesn't look in her Barn. The Barn becomes his base of animal and plant rescue operations. With the help of Alfred and a very amused Oracle (she found out after watching Damian on traffic cams with dozens of cats following him around like adoring fans), it grows larger and more extreme.
He creates relationships with every no kill shelter in the city and most decent veterinarians. The network becomes helpful in finding good homes for the animals he rescues and blacklisting bad owners.
Anyone found abusing an animal lives in fear of katanas. They hear soft words to puppies and cats after they have been brutally incapacitated.
He investigates companies with harmful environmental practices and passes any information he has onto Oracle to deal with. (For particularly bad offenders, he let's poison Ivy deal with them)
He carries around wild flower seed balls and puts money into local parks and nature reserves. The harbour is his next big project. ( There's so much he could do with an oyster and seaweed farm for biological filtration and detoxification of the water.)
He just never expects Gothams animals to protect him aswell.
He rescues an army of pigeons who attack a mugger after they gets a lucky shot in and get Damian in the throat. The birds descend in a fury. The mugger is so terrified he gives up before Damian can get him back for the throat punch.
The cats are next. Clawing and Biting human traffickers. Bruce assumes Silena did it, but Damian (who has twisted his ankle in the fight) knows.
It's only after a raccoon starts handing him back batarangs that he's thrown that he decides to try cultivating this behaviour on purpose.
Jon, who he goes to for animal husbandry advice and later training tips, thinks this is the funniest thing to happen ever. (Once he knows the amount of work Damian does for so many animals, he starts to fall a little in love with the boy who has birds happily making a home in his hair and only truly smiles at his strays.)
It's not long until every criminal begins to fear the sound of wings in alleys and claws on cement. You never know which stray is one of Robins.
The batfamily only realise what's going on when Damian is kidnapped and is rescued by a pack of stray dogs somehow. Each has a robin themed collar. Dick thinks it's the cutest thing in the universe, and Bruce gives him funds directly to increase the size of his operation. (After he freaks out about Damian being so much like Talia and how could he be this blind to what's going on in his house. He rescued hundreds of animals??? How??)
Robins Strays now includes exotic birds, a tiger, a couple of goats, a deer, and hundreds of rats and mice, each trained to gather information and retrieve lost and missing items during investigations.
Ivy, Harley, and Silena have dubbed him a Siren and give him any animals or environment related cases they can't personally handle. (Damian adores them, especially after meeting Harleys hyenas)
Gotham adores Robin and knows never to hurt an animal with an R on it or any animal, really. They make plushies of Goliath when he is introduced to the public after an arkham asylum breakout. (Bruce gave up on trying to get the animals to stop fighting crime. It's as useless as trying to stop his children.)
Jon eventually asks Damian out while they are bottle feeding newborn kittens in the barn under the watchful eyes of two dragons and a zoos' worth of pets.
He gets shovel talked by Silena and Ivy first. It's terrifying.
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lackadaisycats · 1 year ago
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Hey Tracy! Have you heard about the new Ai called Sora? Apparently it can now create 2D and 3D animations as well as hyper realistic videos. I’ve been getting into animation and trying to improve my art for years since I was 7, but now seeing that anyone can create animation/works in just a mare seconds by typing in a couple words, it’s such a huge slap in the face to people who actually put the time and effort into their works and it’s so discouraging! And it has me worried about what’s going to happen next for artists and many others, as-well. There’s already generated voices, generated works stolen from actual artists, generated music, and now this! It’s just so scary that it’s coming this far. 
Yeah, I've seen it. And yeah, it feels like the universe has taken on a 'fuck you in particular' attitude toward artists the past few years. A lot of damage has already been done, and there are plenty of reasons for concern, but bear in mind that we don't know how this will play out yet. Be astute, be justifiably angry, but don't let despair take over. --------
One would expect that the promo clips that have been dropping lately represent some of the best of the best-looking stuff they've been able to produce. And it's only good-looking on an extremely superficial level. It's still riddled with problems if you spend even a moment observing. And I rather suspect, prior to a whole lot of frustrated iteration, most prompts are still going to get you camera-sickness inducing, wibbly-wobbly nonsense with a side of body horror.
Will the tech ultimately get 'smarter' than that and address the array of typical AI giveaways? Maybe. Probably, even. Does that mean it'll be viable in quite the way it's being marketed, more or less as a human-replacer? Well…
A lot of this is hype, and hype is meant to drive up the perceived value of the tech. Executives will rush to be early adopters without a lot of due diligence or forethought because grabbing it first like a dazzled chimp and holding up like a prize ape-rock makes them look like bleeding-edge tech geniuses in their particular ecosystem. They do this because, in turn, that perceived value may make their company profile and valuations go up too, which makes shareholders short-term happy (the only kind of happy they know). The problem is how much actual functional value will it have? And how long does it last? Much of it is the same routine we were seeing with blockchain a few years ago: number go up. Number go up always! Unrealistic, unsustainable forever-growth must be guaranteed in this economic clime. If you can lay off all of your people and replace them with AI, number goes up big and never stops, right?
I have some doubts. ----------------------
The chips also haven't landed yet with regards to the legality of all of this. Will these adopters ultimately be able to copyright any of this output trained on datasets comprised of stolen work? Can computer-made art even be copyrighted at all? How much of a human touch will be required to make something copyright-able? I don't know yet. Neither do the hype team or the early adopters.
Does that mean the tech will be used but will have to be retrained on the adopter's proprietary data? Yeah, maybe. That'd be a somewhat better outcome, at least. It still means human artists make specific things for the machine to learn from. (Watch out for businesses that use 'ethical' as a buzzword to gloss over how many people they've let go from their jobs, though.)
Will it become industry standard practice to do things this way? Maybe. Will it still require an artist's sensbilities and oversignt to plan and curate and fix the results so that it doesn't come across like pure AI trash? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.
If it becomes standard practice, will it become samey, and self-referential and ultimately an emblem of doing things the cookie-cutter way instead of enlisting real, human artists? Quite possibly.
If it becomes standard industry practice, will there still be an audience or a demand or a desire for art made by human artists? Yes, almost certainly. With every leap of technology, that has remained the case. ------------------ TL;DR Version:
I'm not saying with any certainty that this AI blitz is a passing fad. I think we're likely to experience a torrential amount of generative art, video, voice, music, programming, and text in the coming years, in fact, and it will probably irrevocably change the layout of the career terrain. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was being overhyped as a business strategy right now. And I don't think the immensity of its volume will ever overcome its inherent emptiness.
What I am certain of is that it will not eliminate the innate human impulse to create. Nor the desire to experience art made by a fellow soul. Keep doing your thing, Anon. It's precious. It's authentic. It will be all the more special because it will have come from you, a human.
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reasonsforhope · 10 months ago
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"A young entrepreneur is using 3D printers to create cheap school campuses in rural Madagascar.
It takes just $40,000 and 18 hours to build a “Thinking Hut,” as they’re called, and founder of the project Maggie Grout is aiming to get the cost even lower before handing the reins over to local professionals.
GNN previously reported on Maggie Grout’s idea in 2021 during the pandemic. It was then that she and a San Francisco architect came up with the idea of making them honeycomb-shaped so that additional modules could be added seamlessly.
And indeed, the first completed campus is called the “Honeycomb.”
Madagascar is one of the most challenging places in Africa to develop, but also the most opportune owing to a lack of any armed conflicts and a government welcoming of foreign workers.
But extreme poverty, lack of infrastructure, terrible roads, and a delicate, priceless natural ecosystem all pose challenges to anyone seeking to implement large-scale development projects.
Instead, Grout brought her 3D printers over in a single shipping container and has now printed a school in the town of Fianarantsoa, a city in south-central Madagascar with 200,000 people.
“From that first project, I really learned how to streamline the logistics,” Grout told Fast Company. “I learned how to put together the supply chain when there’s not a lot of locally available materials. And then I learned how to work in harmony with the local people.”
Local people are the key—lack of institutional presence in rural areas means that almost any economic activity has a foundation built on years of trust between community individuals. When foreigners come in, building trust is often the biggest challenge to getting a project off the ground in Madagascar.
However, from the onset, Grout said she wanted to rely on the locals as much as possible. During the first project, she learned how to best manage a team of cross-cultural partners. She used local people to install traditional windows and doors, and worked with the Madagascar Ministry of Education to bring in teachers.
“We do think through the holistic collateral impacts of what we’re doing,” Grout says. “We’re really just aiming to be a stepping stone for [the community] to be successful on their own… We don’t want them to be dependent on us.”
Her long-term goal is to establish Thinking Huts in many different countries."
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-via Good News Network, June 9, 2023. Video via 60 Second Docs, July 18, 2022
Note: A bit older but still good - and still ongoing! This year they started a formal partnership with the Madagascar Ministry of Education and are working on a new campus, The Honeycomb Project.
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Don’t Imagine with Jade Leech…
Warning: None! As far as I’m aware. Some weird mushroom? It does “bleed” but not much detail
author’s note: this is my first ficpost!! planning on a floyd ver for suresies >:) (god no one is gonna see this this is so self indulgent)
1.3k words, fluff, pre-relationship
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DON’T Imagine…that for once you didn’t have to worry about overblots or whatever latest shenanigans your friends had gotten up to. Everyone was in their own little bubbles, even Grim who had pounced on the chance to attend a Heartslabyul tea party. For once, there was only peace and you couldn’t be more relieved. You decide to take a leisurely stroll through the halls of NRC. Why not? You could stand to learn more about the place that you call home now. (You wonder if it will be that way indefinitely.)
Don’t think about peering into the science classroom while being sucked into the vortex that was your own thoughts and finding Jade shouldering on hiking gear. The equipment was bulky yet swung across his back effortlessly as he took stock of his stuff. You spot a lantern peeking from the side of his overcoat and a compass on a backpack strap. You blink and realize this must be the “Mountain Lovers” Club that Jade himself had told you about in passing. You recall that conversation with a weird fondness. Jade Leech was most certainly a man to be wary of—that was a fact without question. But, in the moment you showed interest in his little club: you saw his eyes shine with a wholesome joy. That is not a passion a person could fake, you were sure of it.
“Prefect? Can I help you?”
Oh, certainly do not think about how you were caught staring. Jade’s eyebrow crooks upward with the beginnings of a crooked smirk creeping up his face. You clear your throat and ask where he was going. Try not to think about how you feel like you walked in on something intimate. Don’t, because your face is warm. You don’t miss the way his face brightens ever so slightly under the usual mask of cunning.
“Ah. I am heading to the mountains. It is a little ways from the school gate, and yet I have yet to scale it. I wish to correct that today.” You hum in response. It wasn’t like you had much else to do today, and Jade wasn’t bad company—to you at least. It was hard to tell with him; like any day now could be the day the other shoe drops. You know that. And yet, you ask to join him.
“You…Want to?” He says, the shock written all over his face. It shifts back just as quickly as it came into the Jade’s usual polite expression. “Fuhuhu…I would not want to turn you away after you asked so nicely after all. “
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In a few hours, you and Jade were well on your way up the mountain. The journey was mostly quiet as the two of you walk side by side absorbing the peacefulness into your very bones. Sunlight streams through leaves above you and warm your skin, the chittering of woodland birds becomes the soundtrack, and the crunching of sticks accent your footfalls. Interspersed among beats of comfortable silence was Jade’s stops to examine mushroom specimens for his terrariums.
He halts you with a hand on your wrist for one of these stops(don’t think about how it stops your heart singlehandedly) and crouches to a mushroom though it looks to you much more like an open pomegranate. “A ‘Bleeding Tooth’,” Jade says with a hushed awe in his voice, “It secretes a thick red liquid—hence the name. Despite that, it is completely nonpoisonous. What a most fascinating specimen.” The name was indeed scary sounding. You crouch down next to Jade for a better look, and you can’t help but agree with wonder.
There is a pause. As you look at this most strange looking growth, Jade peers at you. “Creepy. Is it not?” He says nonchalantly. You blink up at him. He looks back with a glint in his eye that you feel as familiar. You just can’t quite recall from where. But it makes you feel wrong inside. “Mushrooms are a particularly extraordinary part of land ecosystems,” He continues, “They do not hunt or hide. But they will be the ones to dispose of all life eventually and make it anew. And if something, or someone, were to stop them…well there’s been enough proof of its power.”
Ah. You remember now. His yellow eye draws you in like an angler fish draws in prey. You cannot help but liken this scene to when you first met Jade in the Coral Sea—when he was swimming circles around you and merely toying with his food.
“It is a little scary, is it not?” Jade Leech says again. You stare. And Jade stares back. Something in the back of your mind supplies the nature of Jade’s unique magic to you. It does nothing to stifle the tension in the air that threatens to suffocate you. You wonder, if there was any part of Jade that wanted to make you bleed like the mushroom he so admired.
“Not really.” You reply as you turn back to the fungi. Jade makes a tilt of his head. “Really, now?” You nod. “I mean, that’s how they survive, right? They grow in bright colors and weird shapes to make sure they can live. It’s not like we can fault them for that,” You point to the oozing mass in front of you both, “Isn’t that what every living thing wants? And it’s pretty important that they decompose stuff, since it recycles nutrients. If anything, doesn’t it make them pretty essential?”
You look over at Jade again: “They don’t tend to hurt the living unless somebody decides to mess with it. And some don’t have any effects at all. It’d be weird to lump them all together like that.”
Jade stares. And you stare back. Something imperceivable happens within his mind and you find yourself wishing you could peer inside. He smiles. “I knew bringing you along would be most fruitful.” And he stoops down to take the Bleeding Tooth with him.
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You’ve been walking for a few hours at this point. The two of you chat more freely now after that little pitstop. You find yourself slowing as you hike higher and higher up the mountain: apparently you severely misjudged the fitness and experience required for such a journey. Your hiking partner’s mirth in his eyes cannot be overstated and you shoot him a look. He plays it off masterfully with a faux offended look that you would even say such a thing. You nudge his side. He laughs. Despite his ribbing, he lends you his hand to pass the rougher terrain. Do not think about how your fingers lace perfectly against each other. Do not think about how when you make it across the felled tree in the way; Jade takes a few seconds longer than necessary to pull away.
At last, the you two make it to the top and the view was worth your pain and more. It was gorgeous: the sun casting hues of orange, yellow, and pink as it sets across the vastness of the mountain below you. Every tree and bush looked like strokes of a paintbrush on the ethereal work of art. You turn excitedly to Jade at your side to point out the way the clouds frame the scene—and are met with his expression examining your own. You dared not put a name to it, but it made your heart race in a way you didn’t know it could. Do not even think about classifying Jade’s expression as “fond” or god forbid “admiring.”
Because then, it would mean your heart would be as good as his.
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evolutionsvoid · 7 months ago
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A common joke that comes with freshwater lakes is that they are superior to the saltwater because they are "shark-free." While indeed many ponds and rivers can rest easy knowing they don't have razor-toothed flesh eating fish within them, that comfort cannot be given to all freshwater bodies. One must remember that every ecosystem has its predators, with issues only arising when they get too big or aggressive. Yes, the lakes don't have sharks, but they have other fish that some would consider even worse...
The native Americans knew quite well where log gars could be found. It was in waters where their canoes were chewed into splinters. This is because log gars possess a nasty set of serrated teeth and an incredible aggression towards wooden objects. Log gars are carnivorous fish, using their long toothy jaws to shred prey. While they will happily eat whatever they come across, it should be noted that their primary prey are beavers. This is where their saw-like teeth come into play, as these weapons help rip through beaver dens and dams so that they can get at the morsels behind the wooden walls. A lifestyle of devouring beavers has led to the species developing a link between food and wood, where chewing through wooden objects inevitably leads to meat. While this does lead to them attacking fallen branches, their beliefs were validated when man and his wooden boats came to their waters.
The natives of these regions learned this lesson, and so would others who came. Canoes of wood and birch bark were seen as targets, and the log gar's teeth sawed through them with ease. Torn open by these eager fish, the boats would sink and leave the floating men inside at the mercy of these gar. To no surprise, quite a few folk were devoured by the log gar. Even loggers who floated their products down the river fell to these nasty fish, who detected the presence of meat atop it all. Many attempts were made to be rid of these terrors, but the log gar is no easy foe. Their bodies are covered with hard scales coated in dentine, which can repel spear and hook. Attempts to stab them often fail, and their razor teeth mean hook and line is easily severed. Nets are torn to ribbons and any more extreme efforts would jeopardize the rest of the aquatic life within. Even if someone were to master a way to catch them, their populations are high enough that it would be impossible to deplete them by hand.
Even as nasty as they are, natives did occasionally succeed in catching these fish or finding dead ones. Those that they could harvest would have their scales used as arrowheads and shielding, while their jaws made fine makeshift saws. Log gar meat is seen as disgusting, due to its composition and their propensity to swallow a whole lot of sawdust during their feeding frenzies. Their hard scales also make them a pain to fillet, though they may help make your knife sharper!
Log gars proved to be a menace in many lakes, causing quite a few to be marked off limits for water sports and other recreational activities. When man started to switch from wood to fiberglass, the attacks on these vessels lessened. The few log gar that made the mistake of attacking these ships often perished after swallowing chunks of fiberglass, leading to a painful demise. While this does make water travel safer against these fish, it still isn't recommended in some areas due to the possibility of someone falling in. Even if your boat doesn't sink, an accidental tumble into the water can end in a bloody demise.
Though hated and feared by many, often considered pests and menaces, the log gar does get its rare times to shine. Their scales make for neat jewelry, and one renowned power tool company has one as their mascot. They are also highly valued as fishing trophies, due to the extreme difficulty to catch one and the fact that many older larger specimens remain around today. And who could forget the charming children's safety scissors made to look just like them?
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"Log Gar"
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thefugitivesaint · 1 year ago
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''The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power'' by Shoshana Zuboff, 2018 "I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later. It was Google that first learned how to capture surplus behavioral data, more than what they needed for services, and used it to compute prediction products that they could sell to their business customers, in this case advertisers. But I argue that surveillance capitalism is no more restricted to that initial context than, for example, mass production was restricted to the fabrication of Model T’s. Right from the start at Google it was understood that users were unlikely to agree to this unilateral claiming of their experience and its translation into behavioral data. It was understood that these methods had to be undetectable. So from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take — and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening. We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” By now it’s very difficult to participate effectively in society without interfacing with these same channels that are supply chains for surveillance capitalism’s data flows." from an interview with Shoshana Zuboff in the Harvard Gazette in March of 2019. It's an interesting interview that I suggest you peruse.
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lizardsfromspace · 12 days ago
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Years ago I read an article by someone who encountered the head of a company that sold writing advice books, and they advised them that was where the real money was. I can't find it right now - it was on Slate or Salon or some similar site - but what it amounted to was that there are many people out there who want to write a book, but who don't care to read any, so they'll buy books telling them how to write but not, you know, books. An entire ecosystem of books designed to help people who don't read books learn how to write a book no one will read. This was a type of guy: someone who would write something boilerplate with no love of literature to say they wrote it, or even better, pay someone to write a book for them & then tell everyone they wrote it. Anyway that was still more respectable than plugging prompts into a computer and saying that's it. That's my book. I did that
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babybluebanshee · 3 months ago
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“Everyone is telling me to go watch The Day the Earth Blew Up, but no one wanted to support Wish when it came out and shit on it constantly”. My sibling in Christ, I cannot begin to tell you that a lovingly-made 2D animated film that was going to get utterly shafted by Warner brothers and shelved indefinitely for no reason other than a tax break until a small distribution company paid for it out of pocket to go to theaters, and Disney’s latest by-the-numbers cash-grab to sell toys and theme park tickets to people, which had money, advertising, and merchandise thrown at it like baking soda on a grease fire are not EVEN REMOTELY the same thing.
TDTEBU cost $15 million to make. Wish? The LOW estimation for their budget was $175 MILLION. Disney isn't some independent studio that's at risk of getting buried. THEY ARE THE ONES DOING THE BURYING. Hell, the reason TDTEBU is being pulled from so many theaters is because they want to make room for that godawful Snow White remake. Disney is a multi-billion dollar corporation that has decided to stop trying because they've learned they can coast by on their name and the groundbreaking work they've done in the past. Unless they really clean up their act, I don't care about their films anymore. I don't care if everything they do for the next hundred years flops. What I care about is a healthy animation ecosystem that's not choked out by one company shitting out subpar work.
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tieflingkisser · 6 months ago
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Parents of OpenAI Whistleblower Don't Believe He Died By Suicide, Order Second Autopsy
[Suchir] Balaji had only recently become a whistleblower about OpenAI and its use of copyrighted material to train its ChatGPT AI model, speaking to the New York Times in an interview published in October. In addition to the legal issues around consuming copyrighted material, Balaji told the Times it was also "not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole." On November 26, two days before Thanksgiving, Balaji was found dead in his apartment on Buchanan Street. The medical examiner deemed it a death by suicide, and the SFPD has said there is "no evidence of foul play." Balaji's mother, Poornima Ramarao, who lives in the Bay Area, tells Bay Area News Group this week that she and her husband are "demanding a thorough investigation" into their son's death. They do not believe he would have taken his own life, and they say there had been zero indication in his mental state that this could be a possibility. "No one believes that he could do that," Ramarao tells the news group. The mother says that she and her husband had last spoken to their son on November 22, in a 10-minute phone call in which he had not indicated anything was wrong. He said he was heading out to get dinner. Ramarao said that when she had asked Balaji, who had quit his job at OpenAI over the summer, how he would make a living, he assured he wasn't concerned, and said "money is not important to me — I want to offer a service to humanity." Balaji was reportedly working to establish a nonprofit that was centered on machine learning. Balaji also reportedly reassurred his parents about his decision to go public with his concerns about OpenAI, and they say they were proud of him and that he was untroubed by his decision. Days before his death, Balaji was named in a legal filing by the New York Times as a person with significant documents to support their case. The Times is among multiple companies suing OpenAI over the use of copyrighted materials. "He was very happy," Ramarao tells Bay Area News Group, adding that he had just turned 26 less than a week earlier, and he had spent his birthday backpacking with high school friends in the Catalina Islands. "He had a blast. He had one of the best times of his life," the mother says. The parents have hired an attorney, Phil Kearney, and they have commissioned a second, independent autopsy.
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gremlinmodetweeker · 11 months ago
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König's Favourite Place (Aside From Your Side)
König grew up in a small, rural Austrian village. It intersected with a large, rolling forest that spread for miles. As a little boy, he'd spend his time walking along trails, following his Mama and Papa and his three older siblings through the woods. Later, when he was a teen and he couldn't stand the world, he went hiking on his own.
He found solace in the pines. The great oaks were family to him. Moss and ferns became his pillows when he rested. He would find delicate wildflowers and take pictures with his Papa's old camera and develop them at a local shop, then proudly show his siblings. His favourite spots were the places where the forest gave way to a clearing, and he could look up and see the clouds gently wafting by in the sky. Nature is what keeps him human.
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In the forest, you can expect what threats you'll come across. He'll never forget the day he encountered a mother bear and her cub. He won't lie to you, he pissed himself a little bit, but he thanks the heavens he's alive today. But, if you keep your distance and watch, nature is welcoming. It's beautiful, and it won't hurt you the way humans do. It will test you, it will change you and it will tear you apart, but it will put you back together again afterwards. Nature is a beautiful beast to be respected. König will always firmly believe that animals are better than humans.
With his older brother Friedriech, they'd go hunting with their uncle and Opa. They taught him to hunt carefully, treat the woods with respect. Every animal you catch is a gift from nature to be revered. They were careful to try to not kill mothers or babies, as they were the future of the forest. When they did get a good catch, he learned to use every part of the animals he caught.
Being so in tune with nature, König became a natural survivalist. He's made his own shelters out of nothing but scraps before. He can build a nice hut with sticks, grass and leaves. He can survive out there easily, even in the cold. It's harder in the cold, yes, but he can endure it. His affinity for nature and survivalist training is part of what made König a natural Jagkommando. Others in the program learned to get close to him, and it's through this that König made his very first friends. If you treat nature well, it will reward you handsomely.
Nature is home for König in a way that no human settlement can replicate. There is no greater comfort than the songs of chaffinches and wood pigeons. He'll tell you that wood pigeons sound like they're always complaining. My toe hurts, Betty. My toe hurts, Betty! That's what he'll tell you they sound like if you ever ask him what bird is calling. Heck, he can list off all the most common birds around his little village. He'll tell you how he would raise abandoned nestlings with his Mama in shoe boxes before letting them go back to the wild.
If you let him, he'll turn over stones (only briefly) to show you the world underneath the forest floor. Under the leaves and brushes, there is an entire ecosystem in the soil. Just take a look! There's an alpine salamander. Don't touch it, just leave it be. The oils on your hand will clog the airways on his skin. And do you see the little isopods? Look at how silly they are as they scurry away! Best put this rock back and let these under dwellers return to the dark.
When he goes travelling with his company, he'll grab local guide books for birds and animals. He'll tell you he needs to know how to survive if he gets stranded out here, but really, he just likes learning about all the wildlife.
His favourite vacation destination is to just go camping. He already has all the gear, so you might as well tag along. Two heads are better than one, after all. You'll come with him, won't you? It won't be easy, but you'll see a new side to him.
He'll teach you, of course. However, he won't teach you like you're a new recruit or some battle-hardened soldier, he'll teach you like he was taught, back when he was a boy. He'll praise you with laughter and shower you with adoration when you succeed in starting a fire, he'll gently encourage you when you fail to gather enough sticks for a shelter. König will be there for you every step of the way, guiding you with love and affection laced in every word and action he makes. But, on the off-chance you're better than him, he'll love you for it.
If you need a break, he'll happily take over. Please don't feel upset when he can do things better than you can ever hope to, he was raised this way. He won't ever look down on you. Instead, he'll take the time to encourage you. If he needs a break too, he'll happily join you, but not before taking a shower in his rudimentary shower system. Being clean is extremely important in survival situations, actually, little known fact.
You might find you like camping with him. If you don't, he'll be sad, but he won't force you to join him. But please, you have to understand that he needs this to be himself. He needs to be out in nature. He'll go alone if he has to, but please don't take this away from him. He needs this to be there for you. He needs this to work. Without nature, König is a broken man.
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urautismdiagnosis-wistie · 3 months ago
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Headcanons about Shellington or Inkling? Maybe about their lives before being octonauts?
I'm going to make a larger post about the professor soon, but for now I'll share some more about shellington!
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Here's a lil doodle of him and his sister pearl! Sorry if it looks kinda messy <:3
As mentioned in another post shellington has POTS in my misty memories au, and I'm making a post that explains a bit more about it along with a requested artwork but if I get something wrong here pls let me know! This starts out a lil bit rough but It gets better
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Shellie grew up in a sea otter community where half of the town was floating homes and the other half was social areas and family areas in/on the water... falling asleep beneath the stars and all that yk? <3
Having POTS definitely would've made leaving his swimming sea otter community like.. really hard... esp if he wanted to get a higher education.
He always kinda felt bad about his disability growing up (not ashamed!) cuz his sister pearl would often try to stay behind with him or change her own plans for his sake, even tho she had older friends and interests that just weren't POTS friendly... not to mention alot of the sea otter communities games like wrestling and diving courses and races just... weren't really something he could DO....
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pearl never minded or saw it as a pain because they were honestly both raised pretty well enough to communicate their needs and feelings. Eventually shellington did make a few close friends of his own tho,but even then he and pearl were always close and enjoyed eachothers company ^v^
his parents tried to support him physically and mentally-and shellington knew he was loved, but that mixed with autism really just gave him this sense of othering at times. They did talk to him about that and they worked on it through communication and helping him find his own "niche" so to speak. And he always made sure to support his family too, he's a very good listener after all.
He got to have good experiences and got to make mistakes, learn from them, and grow up accepted and cherished even if he just had to do things a little differently sometimes.
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His dad was actually a jeweler that worked on a nearby shop on land and his mom did tutoring and was pretty active in their community.
Shellington was always in their local library researching creatures he couldn't find locally (creatures that traveled told him about so many interesting stories! His own parents used to travel alot before pearl and he were born and his old man would tell him tons of stories about their traveling adventures! And little creatures they met too) and drawing them.
Shellington loved to draw wherever he could and whenever he could and even won a few art competitions for youth through the years.
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Eventually he got older and his passion for sea creatures grew even stronger and stronger, making him dive into a world full of aspiration of understanding them all on a deep biological cellular level.
(Especially since he was very aware of all the "amazing natural cures" that were just a bunch of bs, he'd rather do research to find real helpful uses that might ACTUALLY help people someday)
The word was just FULL of mysteries of so many creatures abilities- and he just wanted to solve them and understand them and SEE EVERYTHING! He even got to work in a lab thanks to his academic success.
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It was that same passion that allowed him to excel and that same passion that lead him to being one of the first members (other than the captain tweak and inkling) to join the octonauts! He had a wide range of understanding and an even wider range of skills. Shellie understood creatures, the complicated webs and nature of ecosystems, and was deeply passionate.
So he did basically got his dream job!
And thats a bit of backstop for my shellie! Thoughts (and corrections/ suggestions for any inaccuracies ) are welcome !
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mariacallous · 2 months ago
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What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted as much during more than ten hours of testimony, over three days last week, in the opening phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
The F.T.C. is arguing that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in the “personal social networking services” industry, in part by buying up Facebook’s competitors, such as Instagram, which the company acquired in 2012, and the messaging platform WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014. But the F.T.C.’s definition of the social-media industry is hazy, and the antitrust case was already dismissed once, in 2021, partly because the “personal social networking services” market was too loosely defined. Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it. In one of its slides at trial, Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage, though the F.T.C. doesn’t define any of those three as such. The company also used smartphone screenshots from the various apps to demonstrate how they’ve gravitated toward common formats: short video clips look similar on both Instagram and TikTok; messages look essentially the same in Instagram DMs as on Apple’s iMessage. Even as such similarities serve as helpful evidence for Meta’s defense, they also demonstrate how stultifying the entire online ecosystem has become. While in 2012 Facebook may have seemed singular and inescapable, now it looks like part of a crowded marketplace of apps competing to serve the same purpose.
The F.T.C.’s case, which originated during Donald Trump’s first term, entails reëvaluating business deals that it approved more than a decade ago, when the industry looked dramatically different. This makes the commission’s case less than airtight. Benedict Evans, an influential technology analyst, called the F.T.C.’s market definition of social networks “gerrymandering.” He told me, “By the F.T.C.’s definition, TikTok doesn’t compete with Facebook at all. Does that mean it would be O.K. for Facebook to buy TikTok?” Antitrust lawyers must prove that allegedly monopolistic practices cause consumer harm. In another antitrust case currently unfolding against Google, a court found that the company maintained a monopoly over parts of the online-advertising market by integrating its various automated advertising technologies, illegally privileging itself and harming its publishing customers by “reducing their revenue.” In the case of Meta, though, there is no price differential to point to—Meta’s platforms all allow users to access them for free—so the question of harm is less clear-cut.
The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice. But that, too, is difficult to prove in the case of Meta’s WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions, because both sales occurred early in those companies’ life spans. In 2014, when WhatsApp was acquired, it had around half a billion users; now it has more than two billion. As Evans put it, the F.T.C. is arguing that “if Meta hadn’t bought WhatsApp, it would have become this voracious competitor.” He continued, “What we all actually know from following the history is that the founders of WhatsApp didn’t want to do any of the things that Meta did to fuel its runaway expansion. One of WhatsApp’s founders once compared the service’s goals to those of Craigslist, Zuckerberg recalled during his testimony. Meta, by contrast, aggressively pursued growth, loading WhatsApp with features such as social groups and video calls. The F.T.C. notes that market competition can result in “improved features, functionalities, integrity measures, and user experiences”; it’s hard to mount a persuasive argument that an independent WhatsApp would necessarily have provided more of those things than a Zuckerberg-owned one. (Many social networks fail; Path and Google+ were two other threats that Zuckerberg perceived, but neither grew into a viable competitor. He did at one point attempt to buy Snapchat, and though that company survived, it failed to become a major rival.)
One of the most surprising moments in Zuckerberg’s testimony came when the F.T.C. presented him with a memo that he sent to company executives, in 2018, suggesting that it might be better to spin Instagram into its own entity by choice. Zuckerberg wrote that Instagram was potentially undermining Facebook’s success, and that businesses that are independent often perform better than they would within a parent conglomerate. “Over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin off our other apps anyway,” he noted, with some prescience. Seven years ago, before the advent of TikTok and the diversification of content across digital platforms, that kind of split might have resulted in more varied products for users, more quickly—or it might not have. Either way, the social-media landscape today is arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. TikTok may ultimately be banned; generative A.I. may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet. On April 15th, the Verge broke the news that OpenAI is developing a social network of its own, to compete with the likes of Instagram and X. The F.T.C. may be chasing an old problem just as newer, bigger ones appear on the horizon.
This week, the European Union fined Apple and Meta for anticompetitive practices, but the penalties—five hundred million euros and two hundred million euros, respectively—are relatively modest. If the U.S. case prevails, the F.T.C. will have to decide whether to force a wholesale breakup of Meta or seek less dramatic “remedies.” One factor in this calculus might be the wishes of President Trump. In recent months, Zuckerberg has visited the White House repeatedly, and he’s ingratiated himself to the Administration with moves, at Meta, against D.E.I. and fact-checking. So far, despite a growing closeness with Silicon Valley, Trump has nevertheless continued to back the suit against Meta. As in the Administration’s ongoing trade war, Trump appreciates a pronounced threat as a tool to force a deal. Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has all but capitulated to a mandated sale of a majority of the company. With regard to Trump, at least, Zuckerberg might be expected to capitulate one way or another.
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womenaremypriority · 6 months ago
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Sharing the words of Beka Saw Munduruku, a 21 year old indigenous climate activist who’s super cool.
I have come to the United States to ask the Cargill-MacMillan family to stop the destruction of our land. My people are called the Munduruku, which means “the red ants.” We are 13,000 strong, divided into 160 communities. Life is simple here. We plant, we harvest, we create. We learn by watching our elders. This is how we learn the riches of our culture: our stories, our forests, our animals.
We have lived here in the heart of the Amazon for over 4,000 years. But now our world hangs by a thread.
Modern science tells us that our forests stabilize the climate and shape the weather. My people have always known this. Science tells us the Amazon is nearing a tipping point, a point of no return where the forest will no longer sustain itself. My people already see and suffer from these changes.
But this is not our biggest problem.
There is illegal mining, there is illegal logging. There is the theft of our land and our trees and the damming of rivers. There is the murder of those who defend the land and the brutal intimidation of our leaders. And all of these problems grow because companies like Cargill covet our land and subject it to so-called development.
We have been fighting against Cargill for a long time. It has been devastating.
Your executives tell us that Cargill is a good company, that they have pledged to end the destruction of nature. But this is not our experience.
In every region where Cargill operates, you are destroying the environment and driving out or threatening the communities who live there.
Despite your many commitments to end deforestation, the destruction has increased.
Last year alone an area of tropical forest twice the size of Massachusetts was destroyed.
And while your company publicly promises to end these practices, you only expand further into our lands.
The worst example of Cargill’s unceasing expansion is the Ferrogrão. The Ferrogrão is a 1,000-kilometer railway that Cargill wishes to cut through our lands to transport soy. Soy produced from the destruction of the Cerrado – a critical ecosystem south of the Amazon.
Last year the forests and savannas of the Cerrado were destroyed at a rate of 8,000 acres a day. This is an area of destruction the size of your hometown of Minneapolis every five days.
Our relatives in the Cerrado are the target of constant threats from ranchers and land-grabbers. In addition to this, they are suffering from pesticides from the crops and the contamination of their rivers and streams.
The Ferrogrão will impact 16 Indigenous territories including those of the Munduruku, Panará, Kayapó, and our relatives of the Xingu Indigenous Land. This railway will destroy 2,000 square kilometers of the Amazon forests we live in, including Munduruku lands that are currently federally protected Indigenous Territory[1] It will open our lands to more land grabbers and illegal miners and loggers who already invade and burn our lands and murder our people.
The Brazilian Supreme Court has ruled that the Ferrogrão is illegal, but economic interests like Cargill want to change the laws to allow for construction. Cargill has said that anyone who opposes the Ferrogrão is “irresponsible.”
We are fighting for our lives. For our land. For our cultures. For our children and grandchildren.
This is not irresponsible.
What is irresponsible is for your company to make promises to end deforestation while continuing to expand into our territories and giving license to others to do the same.
You have the power to stop this.
You must cease the destruction of our forests. You must stop expanding into our territory. You must stop selling commodities from lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. You must stop the murder of the defenders of these lands.
Listen to the guardians of the Amazon and cease your destruction. We defend our lands not just for our people but for all of humanity. Your company is harming our collective future.
We wish to leave our children and grandchildren the life our ancestors gave to us.
I am Munduruku, and I will never give up this fight.
Beka Saw Munduruku
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deepdreamnights · 9 months ago
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Hey there, saw your post re: harassment around artists using gen ai and thought it was great esp with the debunking of data usage myths. Would you share your thoughts regarding concerns that models are being trained to copy specific art styles and thus pose a direct threat to the artists whose art styles are being used?
Well, there's several levels to that.
The main one is that on copyright grounds, styles are explicitly non-copyrightable. Moreover:
No one's style is unique
No one's style is unimitatable by analogue means.
The second point is important, because anyone can go on Fiverr right now and and find someone to replicate any given art style, and every competent draftsperson has to be able to do it to some degree or another. No major animation house, art studio, or comic company has ever hired someone because they couldn't find someone else that could imitate the surface-level aspects of their style.
The first point is just a matter of basic reality. Ex-nihlo creativity either doesn't exist or is so rare as to be a once-in-an-epoch thing. Everyone builds on the influences that they learn from, and if you think someone has a unique style what they really have is a different media diet than you.
For example, Don Bluth. Born 1937, aged 15 in 1952.
Same year Time released this this picture of Burlesque Performer Dale Strong.
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Someone made an impression.
Marilyn Monroe was also a national sex symbol when Bluth was a teen, putting some context to most of his other ladies, but especially Goldie Pheasant (or maybe she's more Jayne Mansfield, hard to tell through the bird-ness). His art style has obvious roots with Tex Avery and I would guess he read Mad Magazine a lot as a kid.
And Not to hang the guy out to dry alone, I was a teenager in the 1990s, and most of my sexy fictional ladies are 9/10 some combination of Dana Scully, Peg Bundy, and Rhonda Shear.
The point being that style isn't something you create intentionally so much as an accumulation of influences, drawn from the commons. Attempting to claim ownership of such a thing is by itself an act of theft in my view, and allowing them to be protected under the law would mean a judge being shown exactly how many pieces of prior art the Walt Disney Corporation owns that your work superficially resembles. Why, they'll even run it through a style recognizing AI to make sure they catch them all.
But let's talk about style matching.
It just takes one image now, and doesn't require training.
Which I'm sure sounds frightening, but this has been the situation since February for Midjourney, and it was available in the Stable Diffusion ecosystem long before that. If the threat were as pronounced as feared, we'd have seen the impact by now. And we haven't, and we're unlikely to, for several reasons, several of them listed above.
The largest is that style isn't even close to the be all/end all of what an artist brings to a given project. And the kinds of execs who are making a 'replace 'em with a robot' kinda decision aren't the kinds of people who care about art style beyond how much it looks like the most recent successful thing. And nobody's ever needed a robot to ride coattails.
But the next largest part is that AI style imitations aren't really accurate because the robot doesn't see style in the same way we do. It's all just math to the robot, and it prioritizes what it notices, not what we do.
I'll demonstrate.
Jack Kirby will be my example, for several reasons.
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He has a bold and identifiable style, he's arguably the most famous artist in western comics history, and he has many analogue imitators and homagers.
Using Midjourney and prompting "an illustration of dana scully by jack kirby, 1968, in the style of 1960s marvel comics --ar 3:4 --s 15"
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Using the base model, on the first roll we get three complete style mismatches and one that's kinda close, though I'd say that's way more Sal Buscema or John Byrne.
Kirby's women had a certain, difficult to describe oddness about their faces that the robot doesn't seem to grok, and it doesn't touch on the kinds of wild patterns and bold black/white swatches that make Jack's work feel 'jack'.
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Tom Scioli's take on Kirby is a sort of lovingly flanderized parody, but it captures the spirit of Jack's art much more directly even if a lot of individual details aren't period-accurate. He draws Kirby the way you remember Kirby from your childhood, but I don't question whether the page above is trying to be a Jack Kirby homage or one to Sal Buscema.
But Midjourney has style reference, so we can inject the Kirby right in. Using the picture of Sersei dancing from above with the same prompt, we get:
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Well, the work is more convincingly period, but again, we're not terribly close to being on-point. In fact, they're not very consistent between each other. Top left is any 80s marvel fill-in artist. Top right is maybe Kirby-esq. Bottom Left is flat out Jim Lee, bottom right is very Byrne-y.
Using three reference images to give the best shot, I'm also moving to using images of a similar color style, and all with a woman as the central focus. I have included the infamous Crystal pin-up shot because as I said, Kirby women have a certain oddness to them (fondly).
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Results (MJ 6.1 on the left, Niji 6 on the right):
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It all says 60s-70s Marvel, but I don't think Kirby would be the first guess for any of them. Maaaaaaybe the lower-left Dana in image #2 if you squint.
And that's Jack Kirby. Massively popular and prolific with a career spanning decades. If anyone in the comics space should be impersonatable by this thing, its him.
I'm sure you could train a LORA to get closer, and sure, the tech is only going to get better from here, but by the nature of how the system works no generation pulls just from what is referenced. Every generation is both blended with other concepts and emphasizes only what the machine catalogs as relevant, not what we might.
There's not much to stop someone from imitating your style with a machine, but there was nothing stopping them from doing the same with an underpaid freelancer. The results are likely to miss the mark regardless.
If the client wants you, they'll try and get you. If they just want something kinda like you, they've always had an avenue to that.
Fortunately, you're more than your style, and whatever anyone can do with the machine, you can do better because you've got access to both.
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