#Quantum Entanglment

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

New Chapter for Lotura Fic - Quantum Entanglement

Story Summary: Princess Allura of Altea didn’t die in VLD s8. Instead, in saving the multiverse, she became lost in it, crash-landing on an Earth different from the one she knows. She is found by a human Lotor, who mourns for a dead Allura. But death is not so mysterious when one knows alchemy. And the realm of the dead, where both the human Allura and the alien Emperor Lotor reside, is not as far as it might seem.

VLD canon/AU crossover (Still Lotura with some Zonerva included.)

Rated: M (please see tags on AO3)

You can read the new chapter here on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21694762/chapters/109814772 

[starcurtain]

Hear me out. I know it's unlikely that Ratio would ever have been foolish enough to directly get taken in by a scam, but considering that we know:

One of the groups specifically tricked by Kakavasha before he joined the IPC was the Intelligentsia Guild

What he tricked them about was Tayzzyronth's Swarm remnants, the exact same thing we see Ratio investigating in his very first appearance in the game, and

The researchers were described as "extremely cautious"

I am surprised that "Ratio was at least somehow connected to the Intelligentsia Guild team fooled by Kakavasha before he was ever even a Stoneheart" isn't more popular with the Ratio and Aventurine fandom.

Like imagine being Dr. Ratio. You tell your colleagues, "This seems like a scam. Are you sure you should trust this 'local guide' you've made contact with? Tell me about him. A picture? Does this even look like an Egyhazan native to you? I won't save you fools from making idiotic decisions." (You end up having to clean up the aftermath of their idiotic decisions anyway. There is sand in places on your body you didn't even know existed before this. How mortifying for the Guild. For you, by association.)

Then, next thing you know, you get a mission briefing slid across your desk from your IPC connections. They want you to work with their new Stoneheart. You open the packet to see... that little bastard with the enthralling eyes who had your moronic colleagues scrambling in the dirt on a backwater planet for months. Apparently he's made a career out of fooling you your supposedly competent guildmates.

You run off to confront him. You never met him personally back then, but you deserve compensation for the idiocy you were subjected to nonetheless. He deserves to know how much of a pain in the ass he's been in your life already without ever having met your eyes--

He proceeds to shove a gun into your hands and tries to make you an accomplice to a suicide. Apparently, this is normal behavior for the man now called Aventurine. Somehow, it's supposed to prove to you that he is a sane and reliable individual.

Absolutely nothing in your life has been normal since Egyhazo.

You would like to have mundane problems, sometimes.

How do you keep ending up in this beautiful manic clever conman's orbit, and why, like binary stars, can you not escape the gravitational pull?

[genericpuff]

On this week's episode of "Webtoon Controversies That Could Have Been Avoided If Only They Had Some Damn Quality Control"-

Oh boy, prepare yourselves, there's some TEA on this one.

Quantum Entanglement, a new Webtoon Originals series from creator Arts Angel (aka Sarah Ellerton) is uh... a teeny weeny painfully obvious that it was made with AI.

AI is getting better, but when it comes to comics, there are still a lot of "tells" you can pick up on once you know where to look. Hands are certainly one of them.

Not knowing how to draw hands efficiently and consistently is definitely an Artist Problem(tm) but it becomes a lot more obvious it was made by AI when you get weird little off-putting mistakes like a fingernail being just a little too long or missing joints (hot dog fingers, eyo) or the distinction between fingers not being clear.

But there's also hair and other detailed parts that are often lost in the translation process between prompt to final piece. Jewelry, text on a screen, phones, that sort of thing. The insinuation of a 'thing' is there, but it's like looking at it through a fishbowl.

And ultimately, a lot of AI art tends to just be a little too 'perfect'. Everything is just a little too smooth for it to look like it was naturally made by a person. Faces end up veering into the uncanny valley territory and there are inconsistencies between the eyes and the rest of the body. Backgrounds become lost in what I like to call "AI goop", becoming nothing more than weird blurred/filtered out insinuations of what's supposed to be behind the character.

Basically, at this point, it's undeniably clear that AI is being used to create this comic. While there are also plenty of signs in the handiwork that show a human was involved in some parts, there are other places that are undeniably filled in with the use of AI. So it's not necessarily a 100% made-by-AI comic, but it's absolutely AI assisted.

But what's REALLY absurd about this whole situation? The creator denies it. To the point of including a disclaimer in the first episode trying to "get ahead" of people who are assuming it's AI by saying, "No, it's not made with AI, here's the proof! Don't look at the blood on my hands or the body in the trunk of my car!"

Now, first off, the absolute absurdity of making yourself look guiltier by trying to prove your innocence before people have even started to suspect you... I'd like to think that this was edited into the first episode after the initial accusations started rolling in but considering it's an Originals series, it's hard to know if it was, as creators typically don't get as much control over just editing their episodes on the fly like Canvas creators do. Typically it's their editors who do that sort of thing for them. And even if it was edited in afterwards, it's still there for people who have no idea going into the comic blind and might not automatically assume it was made with AI, so it just looks like you're bringing up the potential of AI being used completely unprovoked. By planting the idea in your audience's brain that AI is even a question, you're making them suspect everything.

It's kind of like when Dream was suspected of cheating in a way-too-lucky-to-be-real speedrun of Minecraft a couple years back, so he went to all these painstaking efforts of hiring a quantum physicist to "prove" his innocence with a straight up THESIS documenting all of the reasons he couldn't have cheated through math and figures and jargon. Ironically, this just made Dream look guiltier, and sure enough, he eventually admitted he had cheated.

That said, did you notice something in that "art process" pic?

That finished panel isn't even what showed up in the final comic.

So the absurdity of this all, again, just makes Arts Angel look a lot more guilty of actually using AI, especially when it's basically undeniable in so many of those panels above. People don't paint like that.

But that brings us to talking about Sarah Ellerton, aka "Arts Angel", the creator. Many long-time readers of her work are defending this, claiming that she has, in fact, "always drawn like this".

What's insane? She actually is who she says she is. This isn't like some kid who came out of the woodwork with AI and claiming that they had 20 years of experience, Sarah Ellerton's main site, The Seraph-Inn, has been live and crawled by Wayback Machine as far back as 2005.

And you can see the art evolution over the years, starting with Inverloch-

-into Phoenix-

-and all the way to Immaterial-

But here's the thing about that last comic. The main protagonist is, apparently, the same girl from Quantum Entanglement, the newest installment in this series where it becomes abundantly clear the creator has started using AI.

You can see the effects of this being parsed through AI, because she's gone from being a unique character with two-toned hair and darker skin, to being turned into a generic Instagram anime girl. And lemme tell you, AI used in comics has NOT gotten better at depicting darker-skinned characters (I actually tested an AI-coloring tool WT was planning on putting out a year or two ago, it was uh... not great.)

But the most damning thing about Sarah?

She works in IT.

That on its own wouldn't be so telling if it weren't for the 20 years she clearly spent actually honing her craft, only to suddenly switch to using AI as a crutch.

Quantum Entanglement was picked up for Originals in July 2023. It launched two days ago, with four free to read episodes and 6 more under the FastPass paywall. Three months after it got picked up. That turnaround speed is insane for an Originals series. Now, I'm more inclined to believe that maybe she's using the exact same pages she used in the Canvas version (there's unfortunately no way of checking through Wayback, it never crawled the Canvas version, so unless someone has backups of the Canvas pages they're willing to share, we'll never know) but that short turnaround time is insane for a comic that's this insanely detailed. It likely means they didn't need much pre-production time to get a strong buffer going, and that it doesn't take them as long to produce these episodes on a weekly basis so they could be under way less crunch than creators who do this by hand.

By comparison, the winners of the Call to Action contest from last year are STILL working on their pre-production. Many other greenlit Canvas series are known for getting picked up and stuck in pre-production for several months and even a year or more simply due to how the company operates with when it chooses to launch these series and how much pre-production is necessary. Some creators have literally said that their pre-production was done, but WT still kept them waiting to launch. So three months for a freshly greenlit Canvas series to launch is NOT the norm.

All that said, I feel for the people who are trying to defend her. But it's so undeniably AI with the creator herself providing fake proof that it makes it really sad to think that this person was honing their craft for 20 years just to wind up utilizing AI. Being a good artist does not make you immune to the temptation of using cheap methods or developing bad habits. Going through "the struggle" does not make you immune to taking shortcuts that wind up cheapening your work or taking advantage of the work of others.

Now, maybe Sarah trained AI around her art. If this didn't play out the way it did, I'd be willing to give her benefit of the doubt and assume that. Training AI off your own work, while still up for debate as to how ethical that is, at least doesn't hurt other artists, because it's your own work the AI is "stealing". There are definitely ways AI could be used to make life easier for artists without replacing the art process entirely, the same way artists have learned to use 3D assets and digital art filters to make their process more efficient and boost the quality of their art up to the next level.

But the fact that she's being so cagey over it, claiming she's not using AI period when she very clearly is, providing "proof" that actually proves she definitely used AI, while operating under a penname that's strangely similar to a name Grimes - former tech wife of Elon Musk and staunch supporter of AI - used for one of her studio albums-

- that's what makes it a lot more clear she's using it maliciously.

The AI is very likely trained off another artist's work. Maybe someone whose art style is similar enough to hers that she could integrate it into her own and pass it off as legitimate. Someone whose art style is cartoonish but still modern, like if Disney made anime. Someone who's so prolific and consistent in their stylization that training an AI off it would seem like a no brainer to those who want to replicate that style quickly and easily.

Damn. What a disappointment. Do better, Sarah.

And for god's sakes, Webtoons, pay more fucking attention. I've been steadily picking away at moving the entirety of my comics over to other platforms on a weekly schedule, but at this point I kinda just wanna dump the last 30 or so chapters onto ComicFury all at once so I can ditch this platform for good, especially if it turns out AI comics getting greenlit is a feature, not a bug. The ratings for Quantum Entanglement have dropped significantly overnight, now sitting around 5.09 and still dropping, but is Webtoons going to do anything about it? That remains to be seen.

[awaitingrain]

A vampire and a werewolf? Get a grip.

Happy Halloween! 🎃🧡

Day 31: Spookycorp

[thecornerofegg]

QUANTUM ENTANGLED MEME COMPETITION ENTRY :D @qe-podfic

(Frankly, I haven't read the fic. I have listened to all of the podfic so far and read a few snippets, one of which being a dunk party scene. That's the scene the meme is referring to by the way👍)

[qe-podfic]

Calling Good Omens Fan Artists!

Our podfic needs YOU. We would like art to go in the background/thumbnails of the Quantum Entangled podfic reading.

(on YT and in the AO3 post)

Your reblogs help make the QE podific a reality! Even if you're not an artist, engaging with this post can help push it towards the artists on your dash. What have we got so far? Chapter 1:

Art by: @lexarturo

Chapter 2:

Art by: @commentdismal

Chapter 3:

Art by: @yetrop

Chapter 4:

No Art Yet. (This spot could be YOURS!)

Chapter 5:

No Art Yet. (This spot could be YOURS!)

Chapter 6:

No Art Yet. (Spot taken by @lvndrlondonfog)

Chapter 7:

Art by @pb-and-jammothy

Chapter 8:

No Art Yet. (This spot could be YOURS!)

Chapter 9:

No Art Yet. (This spot could be YOURS!)

Ideally, we'd have one illustration per scene, but one per episode is what we're aiming for (in the interest of realistic expectations). There will be one "main" illustration per chapter. Read through whichever chapter you want to illustrate and pick a scene to draw. We want you to have full artistic control. So long as it's relevant to the fic, go ahead!

Curious? Read the fic here:

Want to help out? The best place to find us is on discord:

[beej-machinations]

Red Dwarf Text Posts 10/??

[sciderman]

How dare you permanently change how I hear Peter’s voice in the best way possible that tardigrade guy is so fitting my god

HEE'SS SOOO... yeah. yeah. i can't not think of his voice for pete.

[typhlonectes]

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real.

“Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; 

“Local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. 

Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) 

Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know it. “It is fantastic news. It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-deserved...”

Read more:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it

[freerangewhales]

@qe-podfic has me foaming at the mouth send help

(Excuse the shading, my phone camera is awful)

[tibli]

There's something romantic about quantum entanglement as a concept. Two particles impacting each other no matter how far apart they are. Centimeters, miles, lightyears- it doesn't matter. A change in one will be reflected as a change in the other.

[thishumanexperience]

Alright strap yourselves in. Quantum mechanics is here is blow your mind and it will not be denied. Now you might think you’re not interested in quantum mechanics, but this isn’t really about quantum mechanics it’s about what to do with our flicker of consciousness and stuff. So an object is considered to be “real” if it exists with definite properties independent of observation. It is “local” according to the principle that objects can only be influenced by their surroundings. One property many particles have is spin, which is measured as “up” or “down”. If you know the spin of a particle and break it into two particles, you know their spins will always complement each other because their sum is known — the particles are entangled. SO GET THIS: You entangle a pair of particles. You separate them. When you measure them, one particle’s spin will ALWAYS be up and the other down, 100% of the time, even when they’re lightyears apart !! You might think that’s just because they inherited these properties when they separated, but their quantum states are random not consistent: you do not know the particle’s spin until you measure it. in fact they do not HAVE a definite state until measured, and are considered to exist in multiple states because of quantum superposition. So as soon as you measure an entangled particle, the other one INSTANTANEOUSLY collapses into the opposite spin. as if telepathically, like it KNOWS. And we know no information could have travelled between the particles because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It’s wÈïṞḏ™️

And this observer effect isn’t just some anomalous glitch exclusive to this experiment. When you pass photons one by one through a plate containing two slits onto an observed screen, an interference pattern is created on the screen due to the wave nature of light — the light wave passes through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself. BUT, if you monitor the photons passing through the slits, they are always found to be passing through either one or the other, and the interference pattern disappears. because it’s only absorbed at the screen at those two discrete points, exhibiting particle, not wave, behaviour. it changes its behaviour based on whether there is detection! So a particle can be described as either a wave or particle before measurement. Wave-particle duality! Where the particles are detected is probabilistic; you can never predict their behaviour for certain. again, quantum superposition.

So anyway by measuring an entangled particle you can somehow influence the quantum state of the other entangled particle, both by collapsing its state and doing so instantaneously. This is bewilderingly uncomfortable right, because it throws everything we know about classical physics out the window. Well it was also uncomfortable to Einstein, who couldn’t accept that quantum mechanics was the full story of reality, and proposed there must be hidden variables that we haven’t yet discovered. But no one could test this theory, UNTIL decades later when John Bell devised an experiment to test for hidden variables. In the years since, this eponymous Bell test — the separated entangled particles experiment with extra detector settings — has been conducted many times and increasingly rigorously. ruling out loopholes. enlarging the distance between entangled particles. And every single time, quantum mechanics proved triumphant. even when a cosmic Bell test was done based on stars hundreds of light years apart! This is what won the Nobel in physics. There are no hidden variables. Particles can be connected, entangled, no matter how far apart they are !¡!

THEREFORE. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? two things: Objects are NOT only influenced by their surroundings AND objects do NOT have definite properties/states unless measured. Are you hearing this? OBJECTS ARE NOT LOCALLY REAL.

So deeply contrary to our everyday experiences that we didn’t really probe into this realm until like a hundred years ago. It doesn’t affect our everyday lives; we don’t need to know about quantum entanglement to survive or live happy lives, but we still WANT TO KNOW. We still wonder. How fucking phenomenal is that. In love with this relentless pursuit of truth and desire for knowledge unique to our species. Floored by the dedication of these physicists who kept digging at this despite the pessimism and dismissal of hordes of people, despite the it’s-too-hard-so-just-leave-it pressure. We too are just particles that lumped together and evolved into consciousness, but every day we use that consciousness to search for meaning, even when that quest may reinforce our own fragility and futility.

And I wouldn’t trade that for anything in this unreal world.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

The recent research explores the possibility of closed-timelike curves, or CTCs—a hypothetical pathway back in time. The curve is a worldline—the arc of a particle in spacetime over the course of its existence—that runs backwards. Steven Hawking posited in his 1992 “Chronology protection conjecture” paper that the laws of physics don’t allow for closed timelike curves to exist—thus, that time travel is impossible. “Nevertheless,” the recent study authors wrote, “they can be simulated probabilistically by quantum-teleportation circuits.”

The team’s Gedankenexperiment goes like this: Physicists put photonic probes through a quantum interaction, yielding a certain measurable result. Based on that result, they can determine what input would have yielded an optimal result—hindsight is 20/20, just like when you can look over a graded exam. But because the result was yielded from a quantum operation, instead of being stuck with a less-than-optimal result, the researchers can tweak the values of the quantum probe via entanglement, producing a better result even though the operation already happened. Capiche?

The team demonstrated that one could “probabilistically improve one’s past choice,” explained study co-author Nicole Yunger Halpern, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, in an email to Gizmodo, though she noted that the proposed time travel simulation has not yet taken place. 

[awaitingrain]

"where are we now? 'cause if it's torn, we can stitch it up."

[mindblowingscience]

Bulky and hard to wrangle, molecules have long defied physicists' attempts to lure them into a state of controlled quantum entanglement, whereby the molecules are intimately linked even at a distance. Now, for the first time, two separate teams have succeeded in entangling pairs of ultra-cold molecules using the same method: microscopically precise optical 'tweezer traps'. Quantum entanglement is a bizarre yet fundamental phenomenon of the quantum realm that physicists are trying to tap into to create the first, commercial quantum computers.

Continue Reading.

[qe-podfic]

Hehe. *casually uses a gay fanfic to posit a new theory on gravitational lensing*

This needs a bit of cleanup (for instance, I noticed that I overused the word "unnecessary" in paragraphs 4 and 5 while making this post) but that's a juicy tidbit from chapter 10 for ya. :)

Please know that I have suffered while researching for this.