#ai discourse

[local-dragon-haunt]

hey! i’m an artist and i was wondering what about the httyd crossover art made it obviously AI. i’m trying to get better at recognizing AI versus real art and i totally would have just not clocked that.

Hey! This is TOTALLY okay to not have recognized it, because I DIDN'T AT FIRST, EITHER. Unfortunately there’s no real foolproof way to distinguish real art from the fake stuff. However I have noticed a general rule of thumb while browsing these last few months.

So this is the AI generated image I used as inspiration. I will not be tagging the account that posted it because I do not condone bullying of any type, but it’s important to mention that this was part of a set of images:

This is important because one of the BIGGEST things you can use to your advantage is context clues. This is the thing that clued me in: right off the bat we can see that there is NO consistency between these three images. The art style and outfits change with every generated image. They're vaguely related (I.E. characters that resemble the Big Four are on some sort of adventure?) and that's about it. Going to the account in question proved that all they posted were AI generated images. All of which have many red flags, but for clarity's sake we'll stick with the one that I used.

The first thing that caught my eye was this???? Amorphous Blob in the background. Which is obviously supposed to be knights or a dragon or something.

Again, context clues come into play here. Artists will draw everything With A Purpose. And if what they're drawing is fanart, you are going to recognize most of what you see in the image. Even if there are mistakes.

In the context of this image, it looks like the Four are supposed to be running from these people. The thing that drew my attention to it was the fact that I Didn't Recognize The Villains, and this is because there is nothing to recognize. These shapes aren't Drago, or Grimmel, or Pitch, or any other villain we usually associate with ROTBTD. They're just Amorphous Blobs that are vaguely villain shaped.

Which brings me to my second point:

Do you see the way they're standing? There is no purpose to this. It throws the entire image off. Your eye is drawn to the Amorphous Villain Blobs in the background, and these characters are not reacting to them one bit.

Now I'm not saying that all images have to have a story behind them, but if this were created by a person, it clearly would have had one. Our group here is not telling a story, they are posing.

This is because the AI does not see the image as a whole, but as two separate components: the setting, and the description of the characters that the prompter dictates. I.E. "Merida from Brave, Jack Frost from ROTG, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Hiccup from HTTYD standing next to each other"

Now obviously the most pressing part of this prompt are the characters themselves. So the AI prioritizes that and tries to spit out something that WE recognize as "Merida from Brave, Jack Frost from ROTG, Rapunzel from Tangled, and Hiccup from HTTYD standing next to each other".

This, more times than not, is going to end up with this stagnant posing. Because AI cannot create, it can only emulate. And even then, it still can't do it right. Case in point:

This is not Hiccup. The AI totally thinks this is Eugene Fitzherbert. Look at the pose. The facial structure. The goatee. The smirk. The outfits. He's always next to Raps. Why does he have a quiver? Where's Toothless? His braids? His scar??

HE HAS BOTH OF HIS LEGS.

The AI. Cannot even get the most important part of it's prompt correct.

And that's just the beginning. Here:

More amorphous shapes.

So these are obviously supposed to be utility belts, but I mean. Look at them. The perspective is all off. There are useless straps. I don't even know what that cluster behind Jack's left arm is supposed to be.

This is a prime example of AI emulating without understanding structure.

You can see this particularly in Jack, between his hands, the "tassels" of his tunic, and the odd wrinkles of his boots. There's just not any structure here whatsoever.

Lastly, AI CANNOT CREATE PATTERNS.

Here are the side-by-sides of the shit I had to deal with when redesigning their outfits. Please someone acknowledge this. This killed me inside. THIS is most recognizable to me, and usually what I look for first if I'm wary about an art piece. These clusterfuck bunches of color. I hate them. I hate them so. much.

Anyways here's some other miscellaneous things I've noticed:

Danny Phantom Eyes

???? Thumb? (and random sword sheath)

Collarbone Necklace (corset from hell)

No Staff :( No Bow :(

What is that.

So yeah. Truly the best thing to do is to just. study it. A lot of times you aren't gonna notice anything just looking at the big picture, you need to zoom in and focus on the little details. Obviously I'm not like an expert in AI or anything, but I do have a degree in animation practices and I'm. You know. A human being. So.

In conclusion:

(Y'all should totally reblog my redesign of this btw)

[txttletale]

genuinely curious but I don't know how to phrase this in a way that sounds less accusatory so please know I'm asking in good faith and am just bad at words

what are your thoughts on the environmental impact of generative ai? do you think the cost for all the cooling system is worth the tasks generative ai performs? I've been wrangling this because while I feel like I can justify it as smaller scales, that would mean it isn't a publicly available tool which I also feel uncomfortable with

the environmental impacts of genAI are almost always one of three things, both by their detractors and their boosters:

vastly overstated

stated correctly, but with a deceptive lack of context (ie, giving numbers in watt-hours, or amount of water 'used' for cooling, without necessary context like what comparable services use or what actually happens to that water)

assumed to be on track to grow constantly as genAI sees universal adoption across every industry

like, when water is used to cool a datacenter, that datacenter isn't just "a big building running chatgpt" -- datacenters are the backbone of the modern internet. now, i mean, all that said, the basic question here: no, i don't think it's a good tradeoff to be burning fossil fuels to power the magic 8ball. but asking that question in a vacuum (imo) elides a lot of the realities of power consumption in the global north by exceptionalizing genAI as opposed to, for example, video streaming, or online games. or, for that matter, for any number of other things.

so to me a lot of this stuff seems like very selective outrage in most cases, people working backwards from all the twitter artists on their dashboard hating midjourney to find an ethical reason why it is irredeemably evil.

& in the best, good-faith cases, it's taking at face value the claims of genAI companies and datacenter owners that the power usage will continue spiralling as the technology is integrated into every aspect of our lives. but to be blunt, i think it's a little naive to take these estimates seriously: these companies rely on their stock prices remaining high and attractive to investors, so they have enormous financial incentives not only to lie but to make financial decisions as if the universal adoption boom is just around the corner at all times. but there's no actual business plan! these companies are burning gigantic piles of money every day, because this is a bubble

so tldr: i don't think most things fossil fuels are burned for are 'worth it', but the response to that is a comprehensive climate politics and not an individualistic 'carbon footprint' approach, certainly not one that chooses chatgpt as its battleground. genAI uses a lot of power but at a rate currently comparable to other massively popular digital leisure products like fortnite or netflix -- forecasts of it massively increasing by several orders of magnitude are in my opinion unfounded and can mostly be traced back to people who have a direct financial stake in this being the case because their business model is an obvious boondoggle otherwise.

[spaghettioverdose]

Notoriously Litigious Company who holds like half the IP in the known universe: hello AI company we are suing the fuck out of you because we decided your program is plagiarising our IP. This will expand IP law if it succeeds.

People who made part of their identity and livelihood to "plagiarise" IP from from Notoriously Litigious Company:

[ternwithatmblr]

gonna be real on main for a sec

I fucking HATE AI. Viscerally.

Seriously it used to not be that bad but the last year or two? Infuriating. I GET ACCUSED OF BEING AI ALL THE TIME.

My papers for university get flagged as AI generated and automatically graded as a zero. My online posts on other websites get comments saying stuff like “this is ai generated” or “you forgot an em dash”. Like IM SORRY I CAN WRITE AT MY AGE LEVEL WHEN I CHOOSE TO. SORRY I KNOW HOW TO USE AN EM DASH. MY BAD. LEMME JUST HAVE EVERY SENTENCE BE A RUN ON. LEMME NOT CAPITALIZE ANYTHING.

I had to go to my criminal law professor and show him my printed, highlighted, annotated references for my paper. I had to turn track changes on in Word just to prove I wrote my own papers. Online I get accused of being AI for no other reason than commenting on a post with proper grammar and spelling. I WILL THROW MYSELF OFF A CLIFF ISTG.

My Instagram account that I regularly post and comment on has been flagged as a bot and temp banned. TWICE.

WHY DON’T I PASS THE TURING TEST???!!!!

[geekysteven]

[rosegardendeprofundis]

If you ever think AI knows the answer to everything, try Googling a question about a niche topic you are very informed on and seeing what the AI summary says. You will see VERY quickly that it is just making stuff up.

I saw an article a few days ago about an author who says he uses ChatGPT to do his research for him. CHATGPT CANNOT DO RESEARCH. Like, I hope you have the best editor in the world, sir, or your books must be riddled with errors. I will never read a book by an author who admits to writing with AI.

I saw someone recently say that they use chatGPT to get information about language rules (grammar, sentence structure, translations, etc) for languages that are very rare and have pretty much no information available online.

And that really stuck out to me because generative AI like chatGPT does not think. It doesn't magically have information about every single language in the world in its database. Generative AI works by deciding what words are most likely to be next to each other in a sentence, based on information it pulls from either its internal database or from whatever online resources it is given access to.

So if you're looking for information about, for example, Ojibwemowin grammar and you can't find ANY information about it online no matter how long you search, but chatGPT somehow has the exact information you're looking for? Then whatever chatGPT is telling you was made up. It took a bunch of different resources about a bunch of different languages, probably using pages that mentioned Ojibwe once or twice, and smashed it all together into something that looked somewhat coherent to someone who doesn't actually know the facts. Whether it's accurate or not doesn't matter because that isn't actually the purpose of generative AI.

[malcolmschmitz]

So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.

There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.

A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.

They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.

When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.

If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Look, I'm not gonna pretend that I don't get it, when it comes to AI. But it's like this:

In most parts of the US, a residential electrician works only on houses and apartments. They use romex wire, that yellow cable stuff. You run it from the panel to wherever it's going, staple it to the studs, then make up both ends. You need to know basic electrical code but mostly it's pretty simple. A fast learner could be a decent residential electrician inside a month.

I, on the other hand, am a union industrial electrician. I work primarily in hospitals, factories, and research labs. Most of our wire is run in steel conduit that has to be hand bent on the job, which is an art form in and of itself. We work with much higher voltages, much heavier wire, much more complicated equipment, and we need to know much more of the code. Our apprenticeship is 4-5 years and that's only enough to scratch the surface of everything an industrial electrician might do.

And yes - I absolutely get a little defensive when unknowing people compare me to a residential electrician. There's absolutely a knee-jerk impulse to declare that they're not *real* electricians, that they're merely a pale imitation of what I do. But I fight that impulse because it's a *bad impulse*. Resi still takes skill and work, it's just different than mine. We're both electricians. And it's better for us to work together to improve working conditions for all workers than to get into pissing contests about whose job is more "real". And both our jobs are in increasing danger due to the proliferation of low voltage systems that the average homeowner can install and repair without hiring a professional.

So yeah, I do get it. But it has been very, VERY insulting over the last year to hear people repeatedly say "AI was supposed to replace blue collar jobs, not *my* job! My job is ~special~ because it has ~humanity~!"

Your job is not special. It's not more important than my job and it's not more fulfilling to you than my job is to me. And I don't get to insist that everyone start building homes with steel conduit just so less skilled people can't be electricians, and I don't get to yell at people for hiring a handyman to replace an outlet for $50 when my time would be worth $200.

I absolutely understand the instinct that AI art can't be real art because people who use it didn't "earn" it, or that automating art is uniquely damaging in a way automating other jobs isn't because it's "supposed" to be about human expression. But please actually think about what you're implying and who you're throwing under the bus when you say shit like that, and whether it actually holds up to your other values or if it's just a knee-jerk reaction you need to examine.

[reachartwork]

[notesonlearning]

Ok I want to say a thing, and probably it will not be popular, so let me just say:

1. I believe that generative AI is scary as hell and has the potential to hurt a lot of people in a lot of ways. I want to protect people from this danger.

2. I believe that there is a context in which struggling is valuable, especially when developing skills, ESPECIALLY in young people learning how to do things

3. The conversation about what gives creativity/ art value is complicated and we're not going to nail it down in a tumblr post. That said, I do believe that art made by a person is more valuable then one generated by ai.

4. I don't think the people making these posts are intentionally trying to be hurtful to anyone using any non-ai accessibility aids

But.

I've been noticing a pattern with anti-AI discourse that's a bit disturbing. It's a general pattern that has been frusterating me for decades, and it's essentially "You have to suffer to be good".

Not just "good" meaning "skilled at x thing." But with the implication of you MUST suffer to be morally good.

My main issue with this talking point is in the context of disability. I have several disabilities. Due to one of them, I had to use a rolling bag in highschool because I couldn't physically pick up a backpack. My peers repeatedly called me lazy. People would kick my bag as I walked by. Rumours spread that I was faking in order to get special permission to use the elevator (which, having gone to school in a two-story building, would have been a WILD thing to do). I was young and tired of literally being kicked around, so I stopped using the rolling bag against doctors orders. I hurt myself more.

I have spent my whole life being told that I'm not trying hard enough, that I'm lazy, that I shouldn't have to use my accessibility aids or whatever because "everyone else gets by without them fine" and "doing it the hard way will teach you how to do it right" and "all good artists/scientists/successful people must suffer through this", to name a few. This whole attitude has been majorly damaging for me, personally.

Which isn't to say that I think no one should struggle ever. Obviously I don't think that. Some struggle is good, as has been pointed out above! But as someone who had to abandon my garden halfway through the season because I was in so much pain that I was crying, it felt shitty to read the words "you have to find a way to enjoy the discomfort, or the best thing for you is to just give up." Like. I know it wasn't a personal attack on me. But it still hurt.

Can we please. PLEASE. find ways to talk about the issues with generative ai, without being ableist?

And i know some people are going to read this and think "boo hoo, this joe blow can't read one (1) tumblr post without complaining that it's not perfectly tailored to them uwu", but the words we use matter. The way we express value for things matter. I almost died because I thought that reaching for a tool to make it easier was somehow morally wrong. When people around me speak of the tools I use, it is almost always negatively, as if I were lazy and bad for needing them. And that has left a mark on my beliefs. Has continued to affect me, despite the therapy to try and get past it.

I believe that people are going to read these anti-ai posts and, rather than hearing "ai is dangerous and we need to be wary", which I'm sure is the intended message, will instead walk away with the belief "suffering is good actually and anything that makes life easier is evil."

Maybe I shouldn't attach this take to a reblog. Maybe i should vague-blog into the abyss. But if i cant speak my mind on tumblr dot com, where i feel safely anonymous and people can literally block me if they dont like it, then where exactly am i supposed to do it?

One thing I’ve noticed about AI users is that they are completely repulsed by the notion of feeling bad or frustrated for even the slightest moment

[lovemewednesdays]

The AI issue is what happens when you raise generation after generation of people to not respect the arts. This is what happens when a person who wants to major in theatre, or English lit, or any other creative major gets the response, "And what are you going to do with that?" or "Good luck getting a job!"

You get tech bros who think it's easy. They don't know the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a creative endeavor because they were taught to completely disregard that kind of labor. They think they can just code it away.

That's (one of the reasons) why we're in this mess.

[madagasc-art]

Anti-AI Zine

So generative AI is fucking bullshit, and I initially thought it was just going to fade away like its NFT brethren but clearly not, SO I've been busy

I spent about a year working on this zine about all the ways that current AI tech is undermining the arts, contributing to climate collapse, stealing our data, and just being all around shit.

I wrote a lot about my personal opinions on the subject and included quotes from writers, academic studies, and other creatives, as well as artworks from artists I admire, who I contacted for their permission beforehand. Because it TURNS OUT asking people for PERMISSION is the respectful thing to do????????? Who'd have known... 💀

The rest of the images were either made by me or were from the public domain (not fucken "publicly available" like OpenAI like to say 🤪).

If you'd like to read it I have the full PDF available for free on my website here and physical copies are on my etsy here. 💙

It's been really fun connecting with people about this subject and seeing people speak out more and more about how fucked AI is. Because as much as tech bros like to say that AI is an "inevitable" tech advancement that we can't take back, that doesn't change the fact that we still can and should be regulating the HELL out of it.

Stay safe out there folks, especially Sam Altman cause otherwise he's gonna catch these hands 👊👊

[butchfriend]

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

[theothin]

midjourney is so small they can get away with not having customer service

people hear about the size of data centers and assume midjourney requires that level of power rather than a tiny fraction of it

you dont need to be an expert to know that this isnt how this fucking works. Disney does not go up to a judge and say "id like to expand copyright law please!"

The outcomes of lawsuits set legal precedent, which is then applied to future cases. Like this is such a basic fact of the legal system in the US! And this post is whining about "misinformation" like are you fucking kidding me.

[owlygem]

The ai stuff thats been happening has been getting to me quite a lot, to the point im barely drawing, any words of encouragement would be greatly appreciated 😥

[fixing-bad-posts]

I don't care. I don't care. AI entertainment without anything in it. could it hurt? yes. By using AI the investors make money on theft.