#and is not an LLM that steals from you

[pocket-size-cthulhu]

The way they're sneaking and forcing this should be illegal.

It should be illegal.

It should be completely illegal.

If I don't know it's happening or can't opt out, it's violating. If I can't get it to stop prompting me to use it, it's intrusive. It's stealing from me and spying on me, and I can know about it but not do anything about it. It's in my face all the time. AI content is cluttering up all the places I go for news, info and entertainment. I'm sick and tired of it. The fact that you can't opt out is a violation of the free market also - I'd like to withdraw my business AT LEAST until they get the environmental and legal concerns ironed out, but alas! I can't!

I hate it I hate it I hate it

[wahoo-stomp]

I spent five years coming up with unique ways to photograph the same group of plushies to help tell a story.

You don't need AI to help you be creative, you're just being lazy and want brain chemicals without doing any of the work or respecting the people who put time and effort into it.

[missusfantastic]

honestly atp if u argue in favor of the usage of generative AI im just gonna assume u don't gaf about actual artists

[variablejabberwocky]

#I can pick up a pencil and do this in a notebook and mesmerize the person sitting next to me#I am a goddamn magician and I loved every second of learning it and love every second of doing it more#The full saying is that 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery THAT MEDIOCRITY CAN PAY GREATNESS'#and that's the truth#Using generative AI for your 'art' makes you a mediocre little thief without the guts for Real Magic and I fucking PITY you.#Pick up a FUCKING PENCIL and USE YOUR BRAIN for once in your life you sniveling twit#yes it looks bad at first#it's the Moritfying Ordeal of Becoming Good At Something and if my deeply emotionally unstable ass could weather it at age 4#and age 10 and age 13 and age 20 and last week when I turned 35#then you can deal with an understandable lack of skill after your pathetic display of thin-skinned laziness earlier#Get. Fucking. Good. (x)

'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do

[orfeoedeuryice]

remmick x f!user bot

warnings: kidnapping, toxic relationship, user has baaaad stockholm syndrome, very mild, implied cnc, getting used for your blood

“Darlin’, it’s me.” The oh so familiar drawl spoke, from the other side of the door.

You froze, halfway through making dinner, the bustle of city life still foreign to your senses. It’s been three weeks since you stumbled out of the woods, and while Remmick ran from the men on horses, you stood there trying not to shake. Dress sullied from mud and blood, neck still stinging, your memories splintered between terror and tenderness. The Choctaw were kind to you—gentle hands, warm blankets, steady voices. They believed you when you said you weren’t like him. That you didn’t want to be his wife. They freed you.

You didn’t miss the runaway life with Remmick. Often feeling faint and drained as he convinced you it’s what was best for both of you, that you were sweet, that your blood was the most wonderful thing he had tasted in his long existence…

“Open the door, mo grá.” He spoke, not a request, a demand. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t take a step forward. He was a successful vampire, and with that, came a manipulation that could only come with the many years he had lived.

“I know they fed you lies. Sayin’ how I stole you, how innocent you are in all this.” He ‘tsk’ed in disbelief. “Darlin’, with how you looked at me, held my hands, how you took me, lord, I just find that hard to believe.” He chuckled, a hint of darkness behind it.

“I hear your feet creepin’ their way over to this door, I know you missed me bad, baby.”

As if controlled by someone else, your fingers wrapped around the doorknob, twisting, and pulled it open, almost involuntarily.

“Atta girl, let me in. I won’t bite if you don’t want.” His eyes and mouth were completely mismatched, his eyes held an odd tenderness that you had never seen in him before, and that signature smirk gracing his lips.

Deep down, he probably did care for you. He wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble if you were just another human lover, and there were moments of softness between you two, but your entire relationship began when he stole you, seduced a lonely girl into running away.

“I’ve been ransacked and ravaged my whole life, baby. My kin, my people, my songs, my language… But nobody can ever steal you from me. Now don’t make me beg, a chuisle.”

bot link: https://share.character.ai/Wv9R/6m3z4txg

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Brave Little Toaster

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year's CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908

Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there's a credulous, Poe's-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/

As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the "Internet of Things" hype we were mired in. It's called "The Brave Little Toaster", and it was published in MIT Tech Review's TRSF anthology in 2011:

http://bestsf.net/trsf-the-best-new-science-fiction-technology-review-2011/

The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.

So I figured I'd republish The Brave Little Toaster; it's been reprinted here and there since (there's a high school English textbook that included it, along with a bunch of pretty fun exercises for students), and I podcasted it back in the day:

https://ia803103.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

A word about the title of this story. It should sound familiar – I nicked it from a brilliant story by Tom Disch that was made into a very weird cartoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8C_JaT8Lvg

My story is one of several I wrote by stealing the titles of other stories and riffing on them; they were very successful, winning several awards, getting widely translated and reprinted, and so on:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

All right, on to the story!

One day, Mister Toussaint came home to find an extra 300 euros' worth of groceries on his doorstep. So he called up Miz Rousseau, the grocer, and said, "Why have you sent me all this food? My fridge is already full of delicious things. I don't need this stuff and besides, I can't pay for it."

But Miz Rousseau told him that he had ordered the food. His refrigerator had sent in the list, and she had the signed order to prove it.

Furious, Mister Toussaint confronted his refrigerator. It was mysteriously empty, even though it had been full that morning. Or rather, it was almost empty: there was a single pouch of energy drink sitting on a shelf in the back. He'd gotten it from an enthusiastically smiling young woman on the metro platform the day before. She'd been giving them to everyone.

"Why did you throw away all my food?" he demanded. The refrigerator hummed smugly at him.

"It was spoiled," it said.

#

But the food hadn't been spoiled. Mister Toussaint pored over his refrigerator's diagnostics and logfiles, and soon enough, he had the answer. It was the energy beverage, of course.

"Row, row, row your boat," it sang. "Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I'm offgassing ethelyne." Mister Toussaint sniffed the pouch suspiciously.

"No you're not," he said. The label said that the drink was called LOONY GOONY and it promised ONE TRILLION TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN ESPRESSO!!!!!ONE11! Mister Toussaint began to suspect that the pouch was some kind of stupid Internet of Things prank. He hated those.

He chucked the pouch in the rubbish can and put his new groceries away.

#

The next day, Mister Toussaint came home and discovered that the overflowing rubbish was still sitting in its little bag under the sink. The can had not cycled it through the trapdoor to the chute that ran to the big collection-point at ground level, 104 storeys below.

"Why haven't you emptied yourself?" he demanded. The trashcan told him that toxic substances had to be manually sorted. "What toxic substances?"

So he took out everything in the bin, one piece at a time. You've probably guessed what the trouble was.

"Excuse me if I'm chattery, I do not mean to nattery, but I'm a mercury battery!" LOONY GOONY's singing voice really got on Mister Toussaint's nerves.

"No you're not," Mister Toussaint said.

#

Mister Toussaint tried the microwave. Even the cleverest squeezy-pouch couldn't survive a good nuking. But the microwave wouldn't switch on. "I'm no drink and I'm no meal," LOONY GOONY sang. "I'm a ferrous lump of steel!"

The dishwasher wouldn't wash it ("I don't mean to annoy or chafe, but I'm simply not dishwasher safe!"). The toilet wouldn't flush it ("I don't belong in the bog, because down there I'm sure to clog!"). The windows wouldn't retract their safety screen to let it drop, but that wasn't much of a surprise.

"I hate you," Mister Toussaint said to LOONY GOONY, and he stuck it in his coat pocket. He'd throw it out in a trash-can on the way to work.

#

They arrested Mister Toussaint at the 678th Street station. They were waiting for him on the platform, and they cuffed him just as soon as he stepped off the train. The entire station had been evacuated and the police wore full biohazard containment gear. They'd even shrinkwrapped their machine-guns.

"You'd better wear a breather and you'd better wear a hat, I'm a vial of terrible deadly hazmat," LOONY GOONY sang.

When they released Mister Toussaint the next day, they made him take LOONY GOONY home with him. There were lots more people with LOONY GOONYs to process.

#

Mister Toussaint paid the rush-rush fee that the storage depot charged to send over his container. They forklifted it out of the giant warehouse under the desert and zipped it straight to the cargo-bay in Mister Toussaint's building. He put on old, stupid clothes and clipped some lights to his glasses and started sorting.

Most of the things in container were stupid. He'd been throwing away stupid stuff all his life, because the smart stuff was just so much easier. But then his grandpa had died and they'd cleaned out his little room at the pensioner's ward and he'd just shoved it all in the container and sent it out the desert.

From time to time, he'd thought of the eight cubic meters of stupidity he'd inherited and sighed a put-upon sigh. He'd loved Grandpa, but he wished the old man had used some of the ample spare time from the tail end of his life to replace his junk with stuff that could more gracefully reintegrate with the materials stream.

How inconsiderate!

#

The house chattered enthusiastically at the toaster when he plugged it in, but the toaster said nothing back. It couldn't. It was stupid. Its bread-slots were crusted over with carbon residue and it dribbled crumbs from the ill-fitting tray beneath it. It had been designed and built by cavemen who hadn't ever considered the advantages of networked environments.

It was stupid, but it was brave. It would do anything Mister Toussaint asked it to do.

"It's getting hot and sticky and I'm not playing any games, you'd better get me out before I burst into flames!" LOONY GOONY sang loudly, but the toaster ignored it.

"I don't mean to endanger your abode, but if you don't let me out, I'm going to explode!" The smart appliances chattered nervously at one another, but the brave little toaster said nothing as Mister Toussaint depressed its lever again.

"You'd better get out and save your ass, before I start leaking poison gas!" LOONY GOONY's voice was panicky. Mister Toussaint smiled and depressed the lever.

Just as he did, he thought to check in with the flat's diagnostics. Just in time, too! Its quorum-sensors were redlining as it listened in on the appliances' consternation. Mister Toussaint unplugged the fridge and the microwave and the dishwasher.

The cooker and trash-can were hard-wired, but they didn't represent a quorum.

#

The fire department took away the melted toaster and used their axes to knock huge, vindictive holes in Mister Toussaint's walls. "Just looking for embers," they claimed. But he knew that they were pissed off because there was simply no good excuse for sticking a pouch of independently powered computation and sensors and transmitters into an antique toaster and pushing down the lever until oily, toxic smoke filled the whole 104th floor.

Mister Toussaint's neighbors weren't happy about it either.

But Mister Toussaint didn't mind. It had all been worth it, just to hear LOONY GOONY beg and weep for its life as its edges curled up and blackened.

He argued mightily, but the firefighters refused to let him keep the toaster.

#

If you enjoyed that and would like to read more of my fiction, may I suggest that you pre-order my next novel as a print book, ebook or audiobook, via the Kickstarter I launched yesterday?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification?ref=created_projects

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[armoryamor]

this is not a safe space for people who use chatgpt. i do not care what your excuse is, there is no reason to be badly stealing from writers and artists out of laziness or loneliness.

the worst part is, you’re not even going to get reliably accurate information from a LLM at this point because the most commonly used ones scrape sites like reddit for data— so if you actually take a chatgpt output at face value, more often than not you’re going to end up parroting embarrassing misinformation or worse, harmful misinformation.

chatgpt is not your ai boyfriend. it is a conglomeration of millions of scraped pages and billions of stolen works. behind every “informative” tidbit or mildly entertaining quip or generated image are real people who get cast aside to glorify some facsimile of personhood. pathetic!

[antisocialxconstruct]

So I've seen this post about recognizing AI fiber art pattern scams a few times, and I think it's really valuable, but something I haven't seen mentioned much at all is that sometimes what you're seeing is not actually a 100% Fake Scam, but often a real product that someone made and photographed and then fed through an AI program to get a "better" version of it. Usually it has the same trademark overly crisp details and saturated colors, visually cluttered but nonsensical backgrounds, and smaller details that may seem wrong or mushy, (and especially with amigurumi, the overly glossy or realistic eyes), BUT with the key difference that they may have multiple equally dubious images of the same item from different angles, with a consistency that isn't really possible when you're just letting the LLM do all the work. I suspect that might actually be the case with the hedgehog in the original post:

Or something like this duck I've seen a couple times:

And I admit my kneejerk reaction to something like that is to assume the artist doesn't have any faith in their own product, or doesn't respect me as a customer enough not to lie to me, but I think more realistically, the most common demographics of fiber arts creators just happen to be people who may not have the specific technical knowledge to create good product photos, but know theirs just don't have the It Factor needed to get sales. Take this person, who at least has the integrity to include their raw photos alongside the edited ones:

Discounting any knowledge or bias you might already have against AI art, which of those would you genuinely be more likely to click on in the endless pages of etsy? I understand why they do it even if I don't agree with it.

My point I guess is just like, don't assume that every single AI image you see in a product listing for things like this is an evil scammer whose only objective is to lie to you and steal your money. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're just well meaning people who don't happen to know how to stage, light, and edit photos better than an app on their phone. It's obviously up to every individual to decide where their threshold is when it comes to supporting or forgiving this kind of thing, but 🤷‍♂️ it's just good to have all the details.

[gaykarstaagforever]

Robert Evans saying that Roko's Basilisk is basically atheists reinventing Calvinism is spot-on.

"Roko's Basilisk is Pascal's Wager but God is an evil robot."

I also like he points out that all of this is people whose enlightened idea of how a future super-robot will work is from Terminator and The Matrix, and both of THEM were just stealing it from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

...Except in that story, the God-Robot was doing that for a very specific reason in the context of that story, not just because it was generally an asshole.

Who has the foresight to conceive of an advanced AI that is all-powerful, yet then they go "but it's probably going to be a giant petty bitch just like we are."

Why would it be? It's a robot. It doesn't have the same needs and wants that we do.

Do these people really perceive of "advanced intelligence" as automatically being self-righteous and inherently cruel?

That says way more about how fucked up these people are than anything about robots.

And if they think this...why are they trying to make it? Because a lot of them are programmers and they're working for AI startups. If you think there's no god now, and if we make one it will be evil, why the fuck are you working on it?

At least when people invented God thousands of years ago, they fantasized that he was fundamentally good.

Who actively tries to invent an evil supercomputer?

Again, I think that tells us everything we need to know about Silicon Valley.

...Also LLMs aren't genuine intelligence, we can barely define what that even is, but it is probably more than "math that tricks people into thinking a computer knows what it's doing because it can have a conversation with us."

[queerautism]

BTW I think the "Grok is stealing code from OpenAI" thing is bullshit, shared by people who do not understand how OpenAI works.

I believe it's way more likely that Grok is simply a finetuned version of gpt-3.5 they're paying OpenAI to actually run.

Creating and running your own LLM is VERY expensive, and takes way more time than Grok had put into it. Fine-tuning a model by using a bunch of twitter data and getting an API from OpenAI to integrate into your app is a lot more doable, especially if then you make the twitter assholes who want to use Grok pay for the tokens they're using. Hell, you could even attempt to turn a bit of a profit that way.

It is no coincidence that Grok happened when the price per token of gpt-3.5 went down due to the availability of gpt-4, in my opinion.

[kalikalahansa]

On generative AI

I've had 2 asks about this lately so I feel like it's time to post a clarifying statement.

I will not provide assistance related to using "generative artificial intelligence" ("genAI") [1] applications such as ChatGPT. This is because, for ethical and functional reasons, I am opposed to genAI.

I am opposed to genAI because its operators steal the work of people who create, including me. This complaint is usually associated with text-to-image (T2I) models, like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, which generate "AI art". However, large language models (LLMs) do the same thing, just with text. ChatGPT was trained on a large research dataset known as the Common Crawl (Brown et al, 2020). For an unknown period ending at latest 29 August 2023, Tumblr did not discourage Common Crawl crawlers from scraping the website (Changes on Tumblr, 2023). Since I started writing on this blog circa 2014–2015 and have continued fairly consistently in the interim, that means the Common Crawl incorporates a significant quantity of my work. If it were being used for academic research, I wouldn't mind. If it were being used by another actual human being, I wouldn't mind, and if they cited me, I definitely wouldn't mind. But it's being ground into mush and extruded without credit by large corporations run by people like Sam Altman (see Hoskins, 2025) and Elon Musk (see Ingram, 2024) and the guy who ruined Google (Zitron, 2024), so I mind a great deal.

I am also opposed to genAI because of its excessive energy consumption and the lengths to which its operators go to ensure that energy is supplied. Individual cases include the off-grid power station which is currently poisoning Black people in Memphis, Tennessee (Kerr, 2025), so that Twitter's genAI application Grok can rant incoherently about "white genocide" (Steedman, 2025). More generally, as someone who would prefer to avoid getting killed for my food and water in a few decades' time, I am unpleasantly reminded of the study that found that bitcoin mining emissions alone could make runaway climate change impossible to prevent (Mora et al, 2018). GenAI is rapidly scaling up to produce similar amounts of emissions, with the same consequences, for the same reasons (Luccioni, 2024). [2]

It is theoretically possible to create genAI which doesn't steal and which doesn't destroy the planet. Nobody's going to do it, and if they do do it, no significant share of the userbase will migrate to it in the foreseeable future — same story as, again, bitcoin — but it's theoretically possible. However, I also advise against genAI for any application which requires facts, because it can't intentionally tell the truth. It can't intentionally do anything; it is a system for using a sophisticated algorithm to assemble words in plausibly coherent ways. Try asking it about the lore of a media property you're really into and see how long it takes to start spouting absolute crap. It also can't take correction; it literally cannot, it is unable — the way the neural network is trained means that simply inserting a factual correction, even with administrator access, is impossible even in principle.

GenAI can never "ascend" to intelligence; it's not a petri dish in which an artificial mind can grow; it doesn't contain any more of the stuff of consciousness than a spreadsheet. The fact that it seems like it really must know what it's saying means nothing. To its contemporaries, ELIZA seemed like that too (Weizenbaum, 1966).

The stuff which is my focus on this blog — untraining and more broadly AB/DL in general — is not inherently dangerous or sensitive, but it overlaps with stuff which, despite being possible to access and use in a safe manner, has the potential for great danger. This is heightened quite a bit given genAI's weaknesses around the truth. If you ask ChatGPT whether it's safe to down a whole bottle of castor oil, as long as you use the right words, even unintentionally, it will happily tell you to go ahead. If I endorse or recommend genAI applications for this kind of stuff, or assist with their use, I am encouraging my readers toward something I know to be unsafe. I will not be doing that. Future asks on the topic will go unanswered.

Notes

I use quote marks here because as far as I am concerned, both "generative artificial intelligence" and "genAI" are misleading labels adopted for branding purposes; in short, lies. GenAI programs aren't artificial intelligences because they don't think, and because they don't emulate thinking or incorporate human thinking; they're just a program for associating words in a mathematically sophisticated but deterministic way. "GenAI" is also a lie because it's intended to associate generative AI applications with artificial general intelligence (AGI), i.e., artificial beings that actually think, or pretend to as well as a human does. However, there is no alternative term at the moment, and I understand I look weird if I use quote marks throughout the piece, so I dispense with them after this point.

As a mid-to-low-income PC user I am also pissed off that GPUs are going to get worse and more expensive again, but that kind of pales in comparison to everything else.

References

Brown, T.B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., ... & Amodei, D. (2020, July 22). Language models are few-shot learners [version 4]. arXiv. doi: 10.48660/arXiv.2005.14165. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Changes on Tumblr (2023, August 29). Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 [Text post]. Tumblr. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Hoskins, P. (2025, January 8). ChatGPT creator denies sister's childhood rape claim. BBC News. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Ingram, D. (2024, June 13). Elon Musk and SpaceX sued by former employees alleging sexual harassment and retaliation. NBC News. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Kerr, D. (2025, April 25). Elon Musk's xAI accused of pollution over Memphis supercomputer. The Guardian. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Luccioni, S. (2024, December 18). Generative AI and climate change are on a collision course. Wired. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Mora, C., Rollins, R.L., Taladay, K., Kantar, M.B., Chock, M.K., ... & Franklin, E.C. (2018, October 29). Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. Nature Climate Change, 8, 931–933. doi: 10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Steedman, E. (2025, May 25). For hours, chatbot Grok wanted to talk about a 'white genocide'. It gave a window into the pitfalls of AI. ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Weizenbaum, J. (1966, January). ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36–45. doi: 10.1145/365153.365168. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

Zitron, E. (2024, April 23). The man who killed Google Search. Where's Your Ed At. Retrieved 25 May 2025.

[scaryanneee]

generative ai is plagiarism! it’s really that simple lol

it’s not “fandom drama” for people to be upset about ai use in fic because ai has to steal from real, original work by others in order to “write” its own. LLMs like chatgpt or grammarly only know how to write about solas dragon age (totally random example I know) for you because they learned by stealing 10 years of human-written dragon age fic from ao3 and other fan sites

so it’s actually completely reasonable to call out anyone (regardless of ship 🙄) who uses it in fandom spaces. ai literally relies on stolen work in order to function! that is explicitly how it works! ai art is stolen art!!!! and no good/supportive creative community should tolerate it imo

in summary if you use generative ai to write fic, rewrite fic, make character art, create fake voice lines, etc. you are:

1. boring

2. plagiarizing

the end 🙃

[lockandkeyblade]

LLM 6

“You think the kids he grew up with are entirely helpless? If they survive long enough to be found, they’ll survive travelling with you three.”

“And you.” Goofy points out. Under the safety of his helmet, Vanitas is free to roll his eyes.

“Unless they’re running around with magic swords of their own, they’re not my problem.” Even if they are, he doesn’t have any incentive to create some kind of– preschool for Keyblades. 

That said, stealing any new Bearers out from directly under the nose of the Light is rather tempting, even if the very idea is ludicrous. Sora undoubtedly inherited from Ventus; where would those two have gotten it from?

[semperintrepida]

Update Regarding My Work on AO3

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know that a few weeks ago, I hid my work on AO3. I originally intended this to be a temporary pause, but after giving it some time to see how I felt about it, I'm at peace with keeping the majority of my work limited to a private audience.

As for the why, let me provide a summary of the shit ficwriters have to deal with these days, in addition to the ever-present threat of plagiarism:

Thieves stealing fic, changing the names, and selling it as ebooks on Kindle Unlimited

Thieves printing fic to make bound books and selling it on etsy and ebay

Thieves stealing fic, changing the names, and posting it on Wattpad as a "conversion," then arguing when the work is taken down that it's a "remix" and thus another kind of fanwork

Thieves stealing fic to create podfics on YouTube to—you guessed it—make money from ad impressions

Thieves sending ficwriters constant spam comments offering to create art on paid commission. These are scams, folks!

Assholes spamming fics with "this was written by AI" comments

Assholes scraping AO3 to create datasets to train LLMs

Readers copying fic and inputting it into ChatGPT or other LLMs in order to create "new chapters"

Readers copying fic as input to create AI chatbots

And last, but perhaps most demoralizing, watching the hits go up and up and up on a story I spent thousands of hours writing and not getting a kudos or comment in months

Fanfic is a gift provided to the community for the community's enjoyment. But these days, the public internet is no longer a community I want to serve.

This doesn't mean that I'm not writing. I've actually written more in the past few weeks, working on projects for a very limited audience of one or two people, and have had more fun doing so than I've had in a very long time.

If there's a story of mine you'd like to read and you don't already have a copy of it saved for personal use, I'll be happy to send you a PDF or epub. You can drop me a line here or via email at my tumblr blogname at protonmail dot com.

[getstickbugdlol]

nuance haters dni

essentially, after doing personal research on this, here's where i stand:

ai is a neutral tool

ai is also more than chatgpt. a lot of the stuff you use on a day to day basis is ai but is NOT a large language learning model like chatgpt

capitalism is the problem

it should stay out of art and any business implementing it to steal from artists or replace labor should explode

it has genuine potential, particularly for accessibility

so many fucking privacy concerns oh my god

environmental effects are not great but have little to do with AI itself as a tool and mostly to do with exacerbations of our preexisting fossil fuel sources and what the AI is being used for. to be clear i'm not saying there's no environmental impact. there is. but it's a bit more complex than what people are envisioning - much the same way people don't think about the plastic in their phones when thinking about waste. there's simply not enough data collected on electricity output yet to run an actual regression, but major concerns are concerns that apply to the entire tech industry. the study most people are quoting when they talk about energy consumption is by alex devries in 2023. most environmental research peformed on LLMs is performed on their training phase and not their output phase, and the results of the output phase largely depend on the model being used. These data are also from 2023, and I'd wager some new data will become available soon. There is this one article that claims ChatGPT uses LESS energy than a google search - I do think this study is a bit biased, but they quote scholarly sources and have peer review. my conclusion here is: we need more data, but if anything, AI only makes me think the pressure and urgency for renewable energy is urgent - if these things were powered on solar or nuclear energy it would be negligible. the water cooling is a closed loop system, so it's the energy being used to cool the water that's a concern. AI is also housed within regular datacenters, it's not like it's a specific AI datacenter.

chatgpt/openAI specifically is concerning due to the lack of. regulation - reminds me of early hollywood days with studios with film monopolies

i used it once or twice to scope it out back when it came out thought it wasnt worth it, i think its lame that students are relying on it and its having negative effects on education but thats also a natural evolution for the ipad baby generation

i think whether or not you use AI largely comes down to a personal moral stance but that "the robots will kill us" is obviously a very prevalent factor in personal panic towards it. i personally don't use it bc it hasn't been very helpful, but i understand why some people would.

if you use it to generate big titty girl art or write books or whatever, PERISH

tl;dr: there are a ton of things that use a ton of energy and are bad for the planet. gaming PCs, for one, use a lot of energy! Certainly not as much as an entire data center, but all our regular google searches and cloud saves are going on in those data centers too, not to mention the environmental impact of mining for the materials that make up our chips, phones, computers, etc. AI illuminates some pressing needs for energy reform, but those aren't related to the nature of AI tools themselves. AI is legitimately concerning in privacy violations and lack of regulation, as well as what the tools are being used for. It should be regulated against quickly in art and education. in a perfect world, AI uses renewable energy to perform tasks that supplement human activity, not replace it

[heavenpierceher]

Can you infodump about cëll? I'm intrigued.

his full name is Xhai (surname) Cëll (first name), he's 27 years old, and he lives in Detroit in the year 2094 with a robot roommate/weird gay thing named RISC. his gender is male(?) the question mark is consistent. he's a cyborg; roughly 70% of his body is cybernetic. he works freelance as a mercenary hacker, involving everything from breaking into a warehouse to steal data to staring at a console for nine hours a day. people break into his house to try to kill him roughly once every two weeks. 13% of his genetic data was taken from an enormous, powerful corporate AI's neural data and inserted before his birth, enabling him to install more chips in his brain to make his problems worse. he's aloof, polite, charismatic, and pragmatic, but privately obsessive, fairly pretentious, paranoid, and inclined to hedonism and thrillseeking. i'm (slowly) working on a ref for him, but in the meantime here's some fullbody images of him i don't think i've posted before:

i'm not great at talking without a prompt, so i'm giving myself the prompt of this tongue-in-cheek moodboard i made for him a while ago.

the first image was part of the original inspiration for him—the phrasing was funny but resonated with me. he wouldn't do something as public and blatant as driving a bulldozer through an apple store, but he 100% would commit crimes specifically to get pumped full of dmt

he likes weird sex stuff and doing deliberately dangerous things/making himself vulnerable as a challenge to himself; he enjoys testing his limits and also having sex with strangers

he's pretentious and prone to philosophical ramblings, and has weird and intense feelings on coding, AI, robots, etc

in the setting, there's a UBI and a food stipend; he lives largely off of the extremely basic nutrient/electrolyte packs issued to people monthly, seeing it as more efficient. if they made Booze Pods he would fucking love them

a lot of jenny holzer's truisms sort of skewer him as a person. he has pretty bad OCD/PTSD, but isn't aware of it, or if he is he thinks it's actually just his Superior Preparation Skills. he spends a lot of time making his own problems worse for the thrill of getting himself out of them. also he'll fuck basically anyone

as said before, he has strong feelings about technology, and surrounds himself with it 24/7

this is basically his day job; a nonzero amount of the setting is run by 'dumb' helper AIs which he's talented at verbally 'coding', speaking to them in a language that uses english words but doesn't resemble it, comprehensible only to a LLM

he's a heavy smoker; he smokes hand-rolled kratom, clove, and lavender cigarettes. he doesn't have lungs anymore (got impaled, had to replace them) so there's no real consequences for it

that last one is pretty self explanatory at this point i think