#but ai scraping is a real threat

[vampirecatboy]

here ya go!

Barracuda chapter 2/9

~3k words, fic is rated Explicit, but this chapter is closer to Mature

read on ao3 here, or click the read more

Althea managed to get Aja and the rest of the crew to the station in time to board their red eye train. She had been worried about a crowd of fans or paparazzi, but those worries turned out to be unfounded. The station only boasted a few tired employees, a cop falling asleep where he stood, and half a dozen catatonic people waiting to board like them.

They didn't have to wait long for the train. It pulled into the station, and Aja and his entourage boarded with varying levels of energy and enthusiasm.

"I want to bunk with Kory," Aja said upon arriving in the corridor of the sleeper car.

Kory could feel a headache coming on.

"Why," he said flatly.

"Because you're my guppy!" Aja said in a very babyish tone of voice, slinging an arm around him.

Kory felt the vein popping out of his forehead.

"Althea, you can't let this happen—"

"I'll need my coffee first thing in the morning," Aja jumped in, "and Kory is the only one of you who knows my exact order."

Althea looked between them, all steel gray cords of hair, and dark, flawless skin, eyes telling nothing of what she was thinking.

"Sorry, honey," she said to Kory, "he pays me. If he wants you there to get his coffee, I'm not going to argue."

"Okay, Mathok," Kory turned to the goliath head of Aja's security team, "this has to go against some kind of security protocol. I can't—"

"Now you're just hurting my feelings," Aja pouted.

"Mathok, please."

The large man was hunched slightly, head just brushing the ceiling of the car.

"Mathok, I want him with me," Aja said shortly.

Kory wasn't good at pleading eyes, but he tried his hardest to broadcast just how badly he didn't want to bunk with Aja.

No dice.

"My hands are tied, kid," he said, city accent thick and coarse like bad polenta. "He wants you there, he won't shut up if you're not."

Aja beamed, an infuriating sight, and tugged Kory and his bag into their cabin.

When faced with bunk beds, perhaps Kory should've expected some sort of innuendo, but he had let his guard down, or perhaps he was too pissy to keep it up.

"I'm usually on top," Aja said with a wry look, "but I'll give it to you if you're up for a little cowgirl."

Kory's cheeks burned, a truly awful companion to the pain in his temples.

"I'm getting into my pajamas," Kory said, setting his duffle on the bottom bunk and pulling out a t-shirt and flannel pants.

"Great idea!" Kory turned just as Aja pulled his shirt over his head, and turned back as soon as his hands went to his zipper.

Grumbling, face hot, temples throbbing, Kory shut himself into the bathroom, Aja's teasing, "Don't be such a pussy," trailing behind him. He changed into his sleep clothes in silence, making sure to give Aja plenty of time to undress and redress, but of course when he came back out he was met with a very shirtless rock star leaning against the wall, wearing nothing but—

Gray sweatpants.

Joggers, specifically, but the tightness of the pants only made Kory feel more trapped. He looked, of course he looked, gray sweatpants on people with dicks had a certain reputation, and maybe he was still a little horny after he so vividly imagined sucking this man's dick.

Kory saw the line of it, not fully, but the vague shape was there. He willfully dragged his eyes from Aja's groin to his stupid, smug face.

"See something you like?"

"Why."

Aja sauntered over to the bottom bunk, tossed Kory's duffle on the floor, and lounged seductively on the bed.

"I run hot," he said, finger tracing the lines on his chest, like cracks in a sea of hardening lava. The motion also drew attention to the golden barbells in his nipples. Everything about him was expensive and ostentatious.

"You're wearing sweatpants."

"These are for your sake," he said, like it should've been obvious. "Would you rather I wore my shorts?"

As much as Kory hated to admit it, that would be so much worse.

"No," he groaned.

"Thought so," he smirked. "Now that this sleepover is officially underway, how about a pillow fight? Maybe a little spin the bottle?"

"I want to sleep," Kory said tersely, climbing up to the top bunk and crawling under the covers.

"How about truth or dare?" He sounded so excited. Gods, couldn't he take the hint? "Tell me about your first kiss."

"Turn off the light," Kory said. "And that's not how the game works. I have to pick truth or dare before you start grilling me."

Aja sighed and got the light. Kory heard him settle back in bed a moment later.

"Truth or dare?" Aja asked.

Kory feared what might come up if he participated, but he knew Aja wouldn't let it go until he did.

"Truth," he said.

"How old were you when you had your first kiss?"

"Pass."

"Okay… how about your first time?"

"That's worse. Pass."

"Why do you hate me?"

"If I listed all the reasons, you'd be asleep before I finished."

Aja sighed dramatically.

"Fine," Kory snapped half-heartedly. "I was fourteen when I had my first kiss."

"Boy? Girl? Other?"

"Girl, and that's all you're getting out of me," he said.

Aja hummed, pleased, and said, "Your turn."

Kory didn't like that he was trapped in this now, but he had an idea.

"Truth or dare," he said.

"Dare." How unsurprising.

"I dare you to go to sleep."

There was a long stretch of silence.

"You're not taking this seriously," Aja said, sounding disappointed. "I'll change my choice to truth. Ask me anything."

"Fine," Kory sighed. What was he supposed to ask? He didn't want to hear about Aja's first kiss, or first time, or anything remotely romantic or sexual for that matter. He wasn't interested in learning those things about Aja, the thought alone had his stomach twisting itself into knots. "Do you have any siblings?"

Aja was silent again.

"I have an older sister," he said, tone suddenly more serious.

This came as news to Kory. Aja never talked about a sister, or anyone in his family for that matter.

"That's surprising," Kory said carefully, sensitive to Aja's sudden change in demeanor. "You've always given off only child vibes."

Aja laughed weakly, "Yeah, I'm actually a younger sibling."

"That fits too, I guess." Kory paused. "I've never heard you talk about her."

"I haven't seen her for months, certainly not since you started working for me," he said. "We've texted, but I haven't heard her voice for a while. I've been too busy, I haven't had the chance to call, or stop home."

Kory didn't say anything. Aja was sharing something personal, and this wasn't the time for any snark.

"I honestly could use it," Aja continued, "she always calls me on my bullshit, smacks me upside the head if I get too full of myself."

"Sounds like I'd like her."

"You would," Aja chuckled. "I think she'd like you too."

Kory chewed his lip.

"What's her name?"

"Preeti."

"Pretty."

Aja laughed, more genuinely this time. "You sound like every white guy who's tried to hit on her."

"Is she… like you?"

"Like me how?"

"Genasi."

"No," he said. "She's as human as human gets. I really stand out in our family photos. Black hair, brown skin, black eyes, then there's me, red-tinted and on fire."

"Did that ever bother you?" Kory asked.

"A little, I guess," Aja answered. "I didn't pay much attention to it, if I'm being honest. I was getting a lot of attention, and I really like that."

"So you've always liked being the center of attention?" Kory said, half-joking.

"Yeah," Aja laughed.

"Do you miss her?" Kory asked.

Aja was silent.

"Yeah," he said quietly.

Kory had definitely brought the mood back down. He hadn't even meant to. To his own surprise, he was enjoying this conversation, learning about the real Aja. He didn't like how quiet he was being, it was clearly a sign of distress. He had to try to get him back to his usual cocky self.

He sighed. He had an idea, but he didn't like it.

"Do you want to hear about my first time?" he asked hesitantly.

"If you're up to share," Aja said.

"Well, I was seventeen, he was a year ahead of me in school," Kory said. "We were kind of together, I guess. He was getting ready to graduate and didn't want to go to college as a virgin, so he convinced me to have sex with him. It wasn't like, coercion or anything, I wanted to, too, I just needed an extra push.

"So one night, I think it was after prom, we went back to his place, and gods this is going to get embarrassing." He sighed. "It was over really, really fast, like embarrassingly fast. He cried—"

Aja stifled a laugh.

"I had to finish myself off," Kory said. "He was too embarrassed and distraught. It was three in the morning but I went home. We didn't last to the end of the school year."

Aja chuckled.

"My first time was actually great," he said.

Kory rolled his eyes. So much for the nicer version of Aja.

"I lasted a full three minutes," he proudly declared.

That startled a laugh out of Kory, loud, short, and he slapped a hand over his mouth to keep from cracking up.

Aja laughed too, amused with himself.

"You really thought I was bragging," he joked. "No one's first time ever meets their expectations. It's always so lame and disappointing."

"Shut up," Kory said, with very little bite.

There was another moment of silence, mood markedly lighter this time.

"Can I ask you something?" Aja asked.

Kory's heart leapt into his throat.

"Sure," he said hesitantly.

"Why do you hate me?"

What an awful question. What an awful time to bring that up. There were countless reasons, and listing any of them would surely bring the mood down again. Furthermore, only one reason came to mind in that moment.

Because you're never like this. You're never this down-to-earth.

He couldn't say that. It was too vulnerable, too telling.

Kory sighed, and said, "Go to sleep, Aja."

He expected Aja to argue, but after a stretch of silence, all he said was, "Good night, Kory."

Kory mumbled a "good night" back, and slowly, he drifted off to sleep.

.

.

.

There was a warm presence at his back, an insistent hardness pressing against him, teeth and lips nibbling at the delicate webbing of his ear. Lips trailed down his neck, gentle kisses to his sensitive gills. There were hands rubbing his chest, sliding down his sides, gripping his waist. One of them rubbed at his cock, sending hot, tingling throbs through his entire body. A weight pressed against his back, bending him forward. He felt the cock enter him, stretching him. His breath came out in short gasps, small noises left him, they sounded far away, muffled. A familiar voice, clear as day, whispered in his ear—

"That's my guppy."

.

.

.

Kory woke with a start, his cock still throbbing in his pants. He could hear Aja's slow, even breathing below him. Of course he had a sex dream while sharing a room with Aja. It was already fading, but he knew the gist. It had been vague and swimming, but it had been clear who the subject was.

Early morning light was peeking through the tinted window of their cabin. When Kory climbed down and checked the time, it was nearly seven in the morning. They had about an hour before they would arrive in Landsholm. He didn't want to wake Aja, still splayed out on his stomach, drooling on his pillow, but he would have to soon. Might as well do it with his typical morning drink.

He dressed, not bothering to do it in the bathroom. It was small and cramped, and Aja was fast asleep. That was all the privacy he needed.

Once he was dressed, pajamas packed away in his duffle, he turned back to Aja. He looked so peaceful, but he had deprived Kory of sleep before, so he didn't feel much guilt when he grabbed Aja's shoulder and shook him awake.

"Psst, Aja," he whispered.

Aja groaned, and pushed his hand away, eyes still closed.

"We're almost in Landsholm, you need to get up and get dressed," he said a bit louder.

Aja's eyes opened just a crack, their flickering yellow glow bright in the low light of the rising sun.

"Do you want some coffee?" Kory asked.

"Chai latte," Aja mumbled, slowly lifting his head and propping himself up on his elbows.

"Get dressed while I'm gone," he said, moving toward the door. "I'll be back soon. There can't be many people in the dining car at this hour."

"What time is it?" Aja yawned, sitting up.

"About five of seven," he said.

Aja wrinkled his nose.

"Get dressed," Kory said more insistently, and left the cabin.

He moved through the corridors toward the dining car, only the gentle chugging of the train moving over the tracks as background noise. The dining car was farther than he expected, but he didn't mind a little early morning walk.

No one else was up, he didn't pass anyone, but even so, when he got to the dining car, there was a line of tired individuals waiting to order their caffeine fixes. Kory shuffled into line, pulling out payment and his phone. It was blinking with a notification for a new message.

From Aja, with a photo attached. This couldn't be good. He was probably fine, unless he had managed to get tangled in one of his strappy leather harnesses. Why he would wear that outside of a performance—

No. He would. Ever the attention whore.

Kory opened the message, "Thoughts on this top?"

He grit his teeth, and let out a breath.

It was Aja, shirtless, holding a billowy black shirt, straight out of a gothic romance, or perhaps a pirate tale.

If it had been anyone else, Kory would've responded with something cute like, "He looks pretty good as is," but this was Aja, and that was flirting, and Kory wouldn't do that with him.

He sent back a thumbs-up emoji and nothing else, stared at the photo a moment longer, then stowed his phone in his pocket.

The barista blinked tiredly at him and sleepily slurred, "What can I get you?"

"I'll take a can of that cold brew," he said, "and do you do chai lattes?"

The poor barista looked like her soul had just left her body.

"What size?" she sighed.

"Uh, medium please." Aja typically requested a large when he remembered to specify, but he never finished larges. The medium looked like enough.

The barista, whose name tag read "Quinn," pulled a can of cold brew from the fridge behind her, and plunked it down on the counter, then moved to make Aja's latte. She moved slow. The poor thing had probably been up for hours already. Kory pulled a ten dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it in the tip jar. She caught him as he was doing it, and her shoulders relaxed just slightly.

"Here you are," she said, placing the latte next to his cold brew. "That'll be sixteen forty-nine."

Kory tapped his card on the reader and smiled at her, "Have a good rest of your day," he said.

She smiled tiredly back, "You too."

Drinks in hand, Kory started making his way back. The sun had fully emerged from behind the horizon, and bathed the cars in soft yellow light. He ran into one or two freshly awake passengers, but the corridor was wide enough to accommodate both them and Kory.

When he finally reached his and Aja's cabin, he heard voices from inside. Althea and Mathok no doubt. It would be quite the squeeze with all of them in there. Oh well, Kory was small, he could fit.

"—with fans when we get there," Althea was saying as Kory entered.

Aja made grabby hands at Kory once he saw him. Kory held his tongue and handed him his latte.

"Kory, I was just telling Aja, we have a glamour for him when we arrive," Althea said. "We don't want to be swarmed with fans."

"Got it," he replied.

"They're going to make me look like an elf," Aja smiled, holding his latte to his mouth with both hands.

Something that hadn't been conveyed in the picture he sent Kory, was the sheer amount of plunge in his plunging neckline. The shirt was loose and flowy, tucked into his tight black pants, and the plunge went down almost to the waistband of those pants. Kory felt wildly underdressed in his t-shirt and jeans.

"How long will the glamour last?" Kory asked.

"As long as he wears this pendant," Althea said, holding up a wire-wrapped clear crystal on a velvet cord.

"That's new."

"A girl on the security team has a gift for spellcraft," Mathok said. "Tested it myself first, of course, and it'll work for Aja as well."

"What time is it?" Aja asked. "Do we know how much longer until we arrive?"

"It's—"

"Next stop, Landsholm, ETA eight minutes," came the answer over the train's PA system.

"That's awfully specific," Aja remarked.

"Get your bags everyone," Althea said, already shifting into manager mode. "I'll collect the rest of the team and we'll meet in the corridor, got it?"

Kory hadn't even opened his cold brew yet, he might end up having to save it for later, maybe when they got to the hotel. It would be room temperature by then but he didn't really care about that.

He looked at Aja, still sipping his latte, then nodded at Althea, "Got it."

[verus-veritas]

The 4400: Being Tom Baldwin

(AI Generated - Inspired by the sci-fi TV-series “The 4400”. I remember I grew up watching the series, and developing a deep crush on the handsome actor Joel Gretsch, imagining some super powered criminal using their ability to steal his identity. This is my attempt at fulfilling that dream! Anyone else watch this TV-series back in the day? /Verus)

The year was 1998 when my life ended, or so it felt. One moment, I was a nobody, a lanky, aimless 33-year-old drifting through Seattle’s gray streets, scraping by on odd jobs, nursing a secret I barely admitted to myself: a hunger to be someone else, someone bold, someone whole. The next, I was gone, snatched by a blinding light, one of the 4400 stolen from time. When they spat us back into 2004, Seattle was a stranger, and so was I. 

We were branded “returnees,” each gifted or cursed with an ability from our unseen abductors. Some got flashy powers: telekinesis, healing, visions of the future. Mine was subtler, slipperier, a thief’s dream: body-switching. A touch, a pulse of intent, and I could slide into another’s skin, feel their pulse, and wear their flesh like a tailored suit. It was intimate, invasive, and it fed a craving I’d carried since I was a kid, staring at stronger boys in the locker room, yearning to shed my own frail shell for theirs.

The 4400 were chaos incarnate, a puzzle the government scrambled to solve. The National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) herded us into quarantine, probing our powers, our motives. I hated it: the sterile rooms, the suspicious stares, the way they made me feel like an abomination of humanity. 

Pale, scrawny, with stringy hair and a voice that wavered, I was nothing. My life before had been a string of one-night stands with men who never called back, a closet I’d cracked open but never stepped through. I wanted permanence, an identity to claim, a life that mattered. Then I saw him: Tom Baldwin and his partner Diana, NTAC agent, striding through the quarantine’s chaos like a king commanding his court.

Tom was everything I wasn’t. Tall, lean, pushing 50 but carved from years of fieldwork, he moved with an older man’s confidence, every step deliberate. His blond hair, short and sun-kissed, caught the light, framing a square jaw dusted with stubble. His piercing blue eyes sliced through the room, missing nothing, and his suit, stretched tight over a muscled chest, hinted at the body beneath: fit, strong, a man’s man.

His gravelly voice barked orders, calming the crowd, and I was hooked. Not just desire, though that burned hot. I didn’t want to fuck him. I wanted to be him: his badge, his purpose, his life.

My obsession grew slowly, a fire stoked by stolen glimpses. I’d linger outside NTAC’s Seattle office, a ghost in the crowd, watching Tom debrief returnees with that commanding tone. On weekends, I’d trail him to the waterfront, his jogs a ritual I memorized. His sweat-soaked shirt clung to his broad shoulders, smooth chest peeking through the open collar, his lean legs pumping with effortless power. I’d camp outside his apartment, hidden in shadows, peering through blinds as he moved inside: shaving that rugged jaw, sipping whiskey in boxers, sprawling on his couch with a masculinity I could only dream of. 

Tom had it all: a badge that opened doors, a son and ex who adored him despite the divorce, a nephew, Kyle, who idolized him. Me? I was a shadow, a 4400 freak with a power that let me taste other lives but never keep them. Tom was my opposite: unshakable, authoritative, the embodiment of control. I spent months worshipping his blond, fit, older body, and I burned for it: his identity, his everything.

The first real swap was a test, a perverse rehearsal. I planned it meticulously, my heart pounding as I stood outside NTAC one gray afternoon. I’d popped a sedative earlier, not enough to knock me out, just enough to dull my senses, to make my body a trap for Tom’s mind. The pill left me woozy, my steps unsteady, but I pushed through the crowd, spotting Tom in his tailored suit, badge clipped to his belt. His blond hair glinted under the fluorescent lights, his lean frame cutting through the chaos with purpose. 

I bumped into him, feigning a stumble, my hand grazing his wrist, power surging like a live wire. The world tilted, and I was in: Tom’s body, tall and solid, a rush of heat and strength flooding me.

I blinked, settling into him. His hands, big and rough with blond hair dusting the knuckles, flexed on instinct. His suit hugged me, the fabric crisp against his lean frame, and I inhaled his scent: clean deodorant, musky armpit, pure Tom. 

I glanced back, seeing my own body, pale, scrawny, eyes glazed from the sedative, stumble. Tom, trapped in it, opened his mouth to shout, but the drug hit hard. 

“What… the hell…” he slurred, voice thin and panicked, before his knees buckled.

He crumpled to the floor, out cold, and I acted fast. Using Tom’s strength, I scooped my old body up, muttering to onlookers, “He’s one of the 4400, needs help.” No one questioned the badge, the suit, the man they saw as Tom Baldwin.

I carried him to a janitor’s closet, locking the door. My old body slumped against the wall, Tom’s mind locked in a drugged haze, and I had time, time to explore. 

I strode to a bathroom, Tom’s boots clicking, and locked myself in a stall. My hands tore at his suit, buttons popping, revealing that powerful chest I’d dreamed of. Blond dusting of hair spread across his pecs, thin and soft, trailing down to tight abs. I ran my fingers through them, slow and greedy, feeling the muscle beneath, the warmth of his skin. His armpit scent hit me, fresh yet primal, and I buried my face there, inhaling deep, dizzy with lust.

“Fuck, Tom,” I groaned, his gravelly voice echoing off the tiles.

I stepped to the sink, facing the mirror. Tom’s face stared back: blond hair mussed from my touch, blue eyes wild with my hunger, stubble glinting under the harsh light. I leaned closer, tracing his jaw, feeling the grit of his beard, my lips curling into his smirk. My hands dropped lower, unzipping his trousers, freeing his cock: heavy, thick, framed by blond curls. I gripped it, stroking slow, savoring its weight, its heat, as it swelled in my hand, my eyes locked on his reflection.

As I pumped faster, a jolt hit me, not just pleasure but something deeper. Flashes of Tom’s life erupted in my mind, vivid and unbidden. I froze, shocked, realizing the truth: the more intense the sensation in a borrowed body, like an orgasm, the more I could unlock its memories, its essence, making it easier to impersonate my host. 

My hand sped up, and the visions poured in: Tom’s NTAC training, hand-to-hand combat in a gym, his body slick with sweat; interrogating 4400 suspects, his voice sharp and commanding; his failed marriage, bitter fights with his ex, Linda, her tears as he walked away; lonely nights in his apartment, jerking off in bed, his grip tight and practiced.

I adjusted my hold on his cock, fingers shifting instinctively, mimicking that memory, and gasped. I was jerking Tom’s cock exactly as he liked it, muscle memory guiding me, the pleasure so raw, so perfect, it overwhelmed me. His life was mine to steal, piece by piece.

The intensity built, my hand a blur, visions of Tom’s solitary nights merging with my own. I saw him sprawled on his sheets, blond hair damp, his hairy chest heaving as he worked himself, and I matched it, stroking harder, my other hand clawing his thighs, pinching his nipples.

“Tom, you’re wasting your life” I moaned, his voice breaking, the pleasure too much, the memories too vivid. “but I could make you so much better!” I couldn’t hold it, my thoughts and his powerful body, a furnace of desire, and I came, a shattering climax.

Cum erupted, hot and thick, splattering the stall, and I’d moan his name, my stolen voice low and rough. I scooped it up, licking it off my fingers, tasting him: salty, sharp, mine.

I cleaned up, rebuttoned his suit, and swapped back just as my old body stirred in the closet. Tom woke confused, rubbing his head, muttering about losing time. I played the concerned returnee, and he never suspected.

That taste wasn’t enough. I needed permanence. For months, I stalked him deeper, my obsession a living thing. I’d tail him to dive bars, watching him sip beer off-duty, tie loose, shirt unbuttoned to tease that smooth chest. I’d study his routines: NTAC briefings, jogs, late nights at his apartment, planning my move. 

My own life frayed; I barely ate, barely slept, consumed by visions of Tom’s body, his badge, his life. I jerked off nightly to stolen memories of his skin, his scent, his power, but it only sharpened my hunger. I needed him forever...

—

One rainy night, I struck. Tom was at a dive bar, nursing a beer, his dress shirt open enough to show that perfect chest. I approached, playing the desperate 4400. “Agent Baldwin? Please help me! My ability’s out of control.”

His blue eyes narrowed, but he grunted, ever the hero, and offered to drive me to NTAC. In his car, I suddenly grabbed his wrist, power flaring, and instantly swapped us. My mind slammed into his body, a wave of heat and strength, while his jolted into mine, dazed and disoriented.

I blinked, adjusting to him: taller, leaner, solid. His hands gripped the wheel, big and calloused, blond hair dusting the knuckles. I flexed them, grinning at the power in every twitch.

“What the hell?” he rasped from my old body, voice weak and panicked. I glanced over, seeing my former self: pale, scrawny, forgettable, staring with Tom’s confusion. 

“Relax,” I said, his deep voice smooth, “it’s temporary.” 

A lie.

I drove to his apartment, adjusting myself constantly as an excuse to feel his muscles shift under his clothes, the shirt brushing his nipples.

Inside, I locked the door. He stumbled, demanding answers, still reeling in my old shell. I ignored him, peeling off his jacket, then his shirt, exposing the body I’d coveted for months. Broad shoulders, a powerful chest with a light dusting of blond hair, abs firm from years of work. I ran my hands over it, slow and possessive, savoring the coarse curls, the heat of his skin, the musky armpit scent rising sharp and clean.

“Stop that!” he barked, lunging at me in his stolen body. I shoved him back, his strength mine now, and pinned him to the wall, relishing the reversal.

“You don’t get it,” I growled, his voice rumbling in my throat. “Your body and life belong to me now.”

He fought, but he was weak in my old frame. I grabbed his throat, my throat now, and squeezed, Tom’s biceps flexing as his air cut off. His eyes widened, blue but trapped in my pale face, and he clawed at me, gasping, “Please…” 

He went limp, unconscious, and I tied him up with his own belt and a curtain cord, gagging him for good measure. My old body slumped, Tom’s mind locked inside, and I turned to the mirror, shedding the rest of his clothes.

Pants hit the floor, revealing Tom: naked, magnificent. Thick, hairy thighs, a heavy cock swinging between them, blond curls framing it. I gripped it, stroking slow, feeling it thicken in my hand: his hand. His scent, clean deodorant laced with musky sweat, filled my lungs, intoxicating. 

“Fuuck, Tom,” I moaned, his timbre echoing off the walls, “your body feels so good!”

I jerked harder, other hand roaming: tugging at the powerful pecs, pinching nipples, clawing at the meat of his ass. He stirred behind me, muffled groans through the gag, and I smirked, his smirk, watching him watch me defile his body. 

Cum erupted, thick spurts across his stomach, matting the blond hair. I scooped it up, licking it slow, tasting him: bitter, salty, mine.

I couldn’t keep him here. He’d ruin everything. So I acted. I dressed myself in Tom’s clothes, perfectly tailored to my body, and dragged him to his car, Tom’s strength making it easy. I drove through the night, rain lashing the windshield, crossing state lines to a corrupt rundown asylum in Idaho I’d researched. Tom woke halfway, thrashing against the bonds, screaming through the gag, but no one heard. At dawn, I pulled up, flashing Tom’s badge, my badge now. 

“Agent Tom Baldwin, NTAC,” I said, his voice calm and authoritative. “This man’s a maniac and a danger to society. He’s completely unstable and claims he’s me. I suggest you diagnose him with Dissociative Identity Disorder and lock him up for good!”

They bought it. Tom, in my old body, was dragged inside, still shouting, “I’m the real Tom Baldwin!”

The staff nodded, sedatives ready, dismissing him as delusional. I signed the papers with Tom’s signature, practiced for weeks, and left, never looking back. He’d rot there, drugged and forgotten, while I claimed his life. I drove back to Seattle, the sun rising over the Cascades, Tom’s blue eyes reflecting a world now mine.

—

Back in his apartment, my apartment, I shed his clothes, the shirt stiff with dried sweat, the suit crumpled from the long drive. I cranked the shower, steam filling the small bathroom, and stepped under the spray, hot water cascading over Tom’s body. His blond hair darkened, slick against his scalp, and I ran my hands through it, feeling the coarse strands. I lathered his smooth chest, fingers brushing the nipples, the soap suds trailing down his tight abs, his strong thighs.

I explored every inch: his broad shoulders, knotted from tension; his lean biceps, flexing as I scrubbed; his heavy cock, thickening under my touch. I lingered there, stroking slow, testing its weight, its heat, moaning softly in Tom’s gravelly voice. The shower was a baptism, washing away the last traces of my old self, sealing me in his skin.

I toweled off, droplets clinging to his powerful chest, and stood before the mirror, Tom’s reflection a vision of power: blond hair tousled, blue eyes fierce, stubble sharp against his jaw. I flexed his arms, watching the muscle shift, then lifted an arm, burying his nose in his pit, the musky scent grounding me.

Naked, I sprawled across his bed, the sheets cool against his warm skin, and surrendered to the hunger. I gripped his cock, stroking it firm, my other hand roaming: rubbing his hairy calves, squeezing his thick quads, then slipping lower. I moaned, Tom’s voice deep and raw, “Fuuuck, you’re so tight, Tom,” as I slid two fingers into his ass, the tight warmth clenching around them, a new spark of pleasure igniting.

I worked myself furiously, fingers pumping, cock throbbing under my palm, the intensity unlocking more memories, vivid as dreams. I saw Tom briefing NTAC, his voice steady as he outlined a 4400 case, agents hanging on his words; bantering with Diana in the office, her laugh warm as he teased her about her coffee; hugging Kyle tight, his nephew’s arms around his waist, a rare moment of family. 

The sensations deepened, my fingers curling inside, and another memory hit, sharp and intimate: Tom that morning, showering in this same apartment, steam thick, his hands lathering his body, then dressing in his perfect suit, adjusting the tie, inspecting himself in the mirror with a nod of approval. I saw his reflection as he did, his blond hair perfect, his blue eyes confident, his body a weapon of authority. That image, so vivid, so him, broke me.

“Oh Tom, your body is fucking perfect!” I gasped, his voice cracking, and came fiercely, a tidal wave of cum, hot and thick, splattering my chest, matting his blond hair, soaking the sheets.

I lay there, a shuddering mess, sweat drenching Tom’s body, my body now. His post-orgasm haze wrapped me in him, his musky scent heavy in the air, his memories settling into my mind like keys to a kingdom. I licked the cum from my fingers, tasting him, and knew I was ready. I’d claimed Tom Baldwin in every way, his life mine to live, his perfect body mine to wield. I drifted, sprawled on his bed, the sheets damp, feeling invincible, prepared to step into his world tomorrow.

—

The months that followed were a perverse paradise. I lived as Tom Baldwin, my new life a seamless performance. I wore his suits, his badge, his authority, striding into NTAC with his blond hair neat, his blue eyes sharp. Diana clapped my shoulder, Kyle called me “Uncle Tom,” and I owned it, his grin my mask. But the nights were where I truly reveled, exploring the power of Tom’s body and badge in ways I’d only dreamed.

One evening, I leaned into it, testing the limits of my stolen identity. NTAC’s after-hours were quiet, but a few agents lingered, drawn to Tom’s charisma like moths to a flame. I’d noticed their glances: Agent Torres, a broad-shouldered man with a sly smile, and Agent Larson, a sharp-eyed woman whose gaze lingered on Tom’s chest. I invited them for drinks at a bar near NTAC, playing the charming Tom Baldwin, my badge glinting on my belt. Torres clapped my back, his hand lingering, and Larson smirked, her fingers brushing my arm. 

“You’re different, Baldwin, but better,” she teased, and I grinned, Tom’s grin, leaning into the role.

We ended up at my apartment, Tom’s apartment, whiskey flowing, the air thick with tension. I stood, loosening my tie, unbuttoning my shirt to reveal that powerful chest, blond curls catching the dim light. Larson’s eyes widened, Torres bit his lip, and I felt Tom’s power surge through me. 

“You ever wonder what it’s like with an NTAC agent?” I asked, his gravelly voice low, teasing. 

They didn’t hesitate. Larson’s slim hands found my pecs, fingers fondling my pecs, while Torres pressed against me, his beard grazing my stubble. I guided them to the bedroom, Tom’s strength effortless as I shed my suit, badge clinking on the nightstand.

Naked, I was a god. Tom’s lean body gleamed: hairy thighs, heavy cock swinging, blond curls framing it. Torres knelt, his mouth hot and eager, taking me deep as I groaned, Tom’s voice rumbling. Larson straddled me, her nails raking my chest, and I thrust into her, relishing the heat, the control. I switched between them, fucking Torres against the headboard, his moans muffled, then Larson on her back, her gasps sharp as I pounded, Tom’s cock thick and relentless. My hands roamed: tugging my own muscular pecs, inhaling my musky armpit scent, savoring every sensation. 

Cum erupted twice that night, first in Larson’s mouth, then across Torres’s stomach, matting my blond hair as I collapsed, spent, their bodies tangled with mine. Torres left at dawn while Larson stayed for some post-sex cuddles, no questions, just satisfied smiles, and I lay in Tom’s bed, his sweat and musk all over me, knowing I’d claimed his life in every way.

—

Then came the cure. A few months later, the NTAC cracked the 4400 secret: a serum to strip our powers, restore order. Returnees lined up, eager for normalcy, but I panicked. I realized my power was my weakness; one slip, one swap, and I’d lose Tom, his body, his life. I couldn’t risk it.

Late one night, I broke into NTAC’s lab, heart pounding in Tom’s lean chest. The serum glowed blue in its vial, a faint promise of freedom or ruin. I swiped it, drove home, and drew a bath, syringe in hand. Across the room, his reflection stared back in the bathroom mirror: rugged, blond, stubble sharp, blue eyes fierce.

I jabbed the needle into his arm, plunger down, a cold rush spreading through his veins. It hit fast: a tingling wave, then a hollow ache, like a cord snapping inside. My power vanished. I reached for it, that familiar spark, but found nothing. I was locked in Tom’s flesh, no way out.

His hands flexed, permanent now, his musky scent baked into my pores. I grinned, his grin, my grin. 

“No more playing pretend,” I muttered, voice low and final. “You’re mine forever, Tom.”

I ran my hands over his smooth chest, feeling the muscle, the reality of him, and laughed: a deep, triumphant rumble. I’d given up everything, my body, my life, my powers, to become him. No longer a 4400, I was NTAC agent Tom Baldwin, hunting and investigating others like me, my days filled with purpose, my nights with the perverse joy of his skin. Tom was gone, silenced in that asylum, and I lived his life, wore his body, reveled in his everything, forever.

[ninjaduelist]

you draw my hero academia and helluva boss fan art which is just as much infringing on intellectual property and content slop generation as AI image generation

Ah yes, the false equivalency. Okay, let's break this down.

Fan art is derivative work, yes! While personal, non-commercial use and sharing can generally be considered legal, selling it is where it becomes an issue. But there's something to keep in mind here, and that's the environment in which these things exist. Companies and artists are well within their rights to tell people not to produce/sell fan art. And some do! Disney is a prime example. I'm going to focus on anime though, as that's my particular wheelhouse.

Creating and selling fan art is a known and understood part of the fandom experience. Companies could very easily tell every single person in the artist alley to hit the bricks and hit them with a cease and desist, because it is against the law. And sometimes they do! Because they are all present at conventions, walking the aisles and looking out for problems. Looking for anyone who has over stepped a boundary. There's an understanding of what's going on and as long as you don't go too far, they're not going to bother. For example, if I remember correctly, Funimation would put a stop to it if you included the anime's logo in the artwork. Otherwise, you're fine. The main difference here is that with AI, people's art and art styles are being stolen without their knowledge or permission, and just about everybody wasn't cool with that. If you gave these AI people permission to scrape your work? By all means. But there's no understanding between artists and the AI people the way there is between companies and fans of their work like there is at conventions. So yes, infringement is happening but it's known and generally accepted (and often appreciated!) AI scraping is not.

Now that we've covered that, let's go over why drawing fan art and generating "art" with AI are different.

AI scrapes images directly from an artist and essentially just mashes what it finds together. I draw my art with my own two hands, and it doesn't look anything like the original. I create an entirely new image with my interpretation of the subject material with the skills I honed for years.

I am not a threat to anyone's livelihood. Companies and people are already turning to AI instead of hiring or commissioning real artists. Me drawing fan art for fun isn't going to replace anyone, and companies are in no way threatened by the existence of my art. I am not their competition.

Drawing fan art has little to no effect on the environment, whereas the energy needed to generate even a single image for AI is detrimental.

AI has no soul. What is the point of creating an image without having put in the effort to make it? What sense does it make to take the human out of the humanities? It's soulless and bleak.

At the end of the day, generative AI is disrespectful to art and artists. Taking the time to draw something because you love and appreciate it will never be "slop" the way generative AI is.

[mariacallous]

When tech companies first rolled out generative-AI products, some critics immediately feared a media collapse. Every bit of writing, imagery, and video became suspect. But for news publishers and journalists, another calamity was on the horizon.

Chatbots have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations. They do so by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers. Suddenly, fewer people are traveling outside the generative-AI sites—a development that poses an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.

According to one comprehensive study, Google’s AI Overviews—a feature that summarizes web pages above the site’s usual search results—has already reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent. The CEO of DotDash Meredith, which publishes People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Food & Wine, recently said the company is preparing for a possible “Google Zero” scenario. Some have speculated that traffic drops resulting from chatbots were part of the reason outlets such as Business Insider and the Daily Dot have recently had layoffs. “Business Insider was built for an internet that doesn’t exist anymore,” one former staffer recently told the media reporter Oliver Darcy.

Not all publishers are at equal risk: Those that primarily rely on general-interest readers who come in from search engines and social media may be in worse shape than specialized publishers with dedicated subscribers. Yet no one is totally safe. Released in May 2024, AI Overviews joins ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, and other AI-powered products that, combined, have replaced search for more than 25 percent of Americans, according to one study. Companies train chatbots on huge amounts of stolen books and articles, as my previous reporting has shown, and scrape news articles to generate responses with up-to-date information. Large language models also train on copious materials in the public domain—but much of what is most useful to these models, particularly as users seek real-time information from chatbots, is news that exists behind a paywall. Publishers are creating the value, but AI companies are intercepting their audiences, subscription fees, and ad revenue.

I asked Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI about this problem. Anthropic and xAI did not respond. Perplexity did not directly comment on the issue. Google argued that it was sending “higher-quality” traffic to publisher websites, meaning that users purportedly spend more time on the sites once they click over, but declined to offer any data in support of this claim. OpenAI referred me to an article showing that ChatGPT is sending more traffic to websites overall than it did previously, but the raw numbers are fairly modest. The BBC, for example, reportedly received 118,000 visits from ChatGPT in April, but that’s practically nothing relative to the hundreds of millions of visitors it receives each month. The article also shows that traffic from ChatGPT has in fact declined for some publishers.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with several news publishers, all of whom see AI as a near-term existential threat to their business. Rich Caccappolo, the vice chair of media at the company that publishes the Daily Mail—the U.K.’s largest newspaper by circulation—told me that all publishers “can see that Overviews are going to unravel the traffic that they get from search, undermining a key foundational pillar of the digital-revenue model.” AI companies have claimed that chatbots will continue to send readers to news publishers, but have not cited evidence to support this claim. I asked Caccappolo if he thought AI-generated answers could put his company out of business. “That is absolutely the fear,” he told me. “And my concern is it’s not going to happen in three or five years—I joke it’s going to happen next Tuesday.”

Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents. Publishers have tried to fight back, but my conversations revealed how much the deck is stacked against them. The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.

Publishers have been responding in two ways. First: legal action. At least 12 lawsuits involving more than 20 publishers have been filed against AI companies. Their outcomes are far from certain, and the cases might be decided only after irreparable damage has been done.

The second response is to make deals with AI companies, allowing their products to summarize articles or train on editorial content. Some publishers, such as The Atlantic, are pursuing both strategies (the company has a corporate partnership with OpenAI and is suing Cohere). At least 72 licensing deals have been made between publishers and AI companies in the past two years. But figuring out how to approach these deals is no easy task. Caccappolo told me he has “felt a tremendous imbalance at the negotiating table”—a sentiment shared by others I spoke with. One problem is that there is no standard price for training an LLM on a book or an article. The AI companies know what kinds of content they want, and having already demonstrated an ability and a willingness to take it without paying, they have extraordinary leverage when it comes to negotiating. I’ve learned that books have sometimes been licensed for only a couple hundred dollars each, and that a publisher that asks too much may be turned down, only for tech companies to take their material anyway.

Another issue is that different content appears to have different value for different LLMs. The digital-media company Ziff Davis has studied web-based AI training data sets and observed that content from “high-authority” sources, such as major newspapers and magazines, appears more desirable to AI companies than blog and social-media posts. (Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI for training on its articles without paying a licensing fee.) Researchers at Microsoft have also written publicly about “the importance of high-quality data” and have suggested that textbook-style content may be particularly desirable.

But beyond a few specific studies like these, there is little insight into what kind of content most improves an LLM, leaving a lot of unanswered questions. Are biographies more or less important than histories? Does high-quality fiction matter? Are old books worth anything? Amy Brand, the director and publisher of the MIT Press, told me that “a solution that promises to help determine the fair value of specific human-authored content within the active marketplace for LLM training data would be hugely beneficial.”

A publisher’s negotiating power is also limited by the degree to which it can stop an AI company from using its work without consent. There’s no surefire way to keep AI companies from scraping news websites; even the Robots Exclusion Protocol, the standard opt-out method available to news publishers, is easily circumvented. Because AI companies generally keep their training data a secret, and because there is no easy way for publishers to check which chatbots are summarizing their articles, publishers have difficulty figuring out which AI companies they might sue or try to strike a deal with. Some experts, such as Tim O’Reilly, have suggested that laws should require the disclosure of copyrighted training data, but no existing legislation requires companies to reveal specific authors or publishers that have been used for AI training material.

Of course, all of this raises a question. AI companies seem to have taken publishers’ content already. Why would they pay for it now, especially because some of these companies have argued in court that training LLMs on copyrighted books and articles is fair use?

Perhaps the deals are simply hedges against an unfavorable ruling in court. If AI companies are prevented from training on copyrighted work for free, then organizations that have existing deals with publishers might be ahead of their competition. Publisher deals are also a means of settling without litigation—which may be a more desirable path for publishers who are risk-averse or otherwise uncertain. But the legal scholar James Grimmelmann told me that AI companies could also respond to complaints like Ziff Davis’s by arguing that the deals involve more than training on a publisher’s content: They may also include access to cleaner versions of articles, ongoing access to a daily or real-time feed, or a release from liability for their chatbot’s plagiarism. Tech companies could argue that the money exchanged in these deals is exclusively for the nonlicensing elements, so they aren’t paying for training material. It’s worth noting that tech companies almost always refer to these deals as partnerships, not licensing deals, likely for this reason.

Regardless, the modest income from these arrangements is not going to save publishers: Even a good deal, one publisher told me, won’t come anywhere near recouping the revenue lost from decreased readership. Publishers that can figure out how to survive the generative-AI assault may need to invent different business models and find new streams of revenue. There may be viable strategies, but none of the publishers I spoke with has a clear idea of what they are.

Publishers have become accustomed to technological threats over the past two decades, perhaps most notably the loss of ad revenue to Facebook and Google, a company that was recently found to have an illegal monopoly in online advertising (though the company has said it will appeal the ruling). But the rise of generative AI may spell doom for the Fourth Estate: With AI, the tech industry even deprives publishers of an audience.

In the event of publisher mass extinction, some journalists will be able to endure. The so-called creator economy shows that it’s possible to provide high-quality news and information through Substack, YouTube, and even TikTok. But not all reporters can simply move to these platforms. Investigative journalism that exposes corruption and malfeasance by powerful people and companies comes with a serious risk of legal repercussions, and requires resources—such as time and money—that tend to be in short supply for freelancers.

If news publishers start going out of business, won’t AI companies suffer too? Their chatbots need access to journalism to answer questions about the world. Doesn’t the tech industry have an interest in the survival of newspapers and magazines?

In fact, there are signs that AI companies believe publishers are no longer needed. In December, at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked how writers should feel about their work being used for AI training. “I think we do need a new deal, standard, protocol, whatever you want to call it, for how creators are going to get rewarded.” He described an “opt-in” regime where an author could receive “micropayments” when their name, likeness, and style were used. But this could not be further from OpenAI’s current practice, in which products are already being used to imitate the styles of artists and writers, without compensation or even an effective opt-out.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also asked about writer compensation at the DealBook Summit. He suggested that a market solution would emerge, possibly one that wouldn’t involve publishers in the long run. This is typical. As in other industries they’ve “disrupted,” Silicon Valley moguls seem to perceive old, established institutions as middlemen to be removed for greater efficiency. Uber enticed drivers to work for it, crushed the traditional taxi industry, and now controls salaries, benefits, and workloads algorithmically. This has meant greater convenience for consumers, just as AI arguably does—but it has also proved ruinous for many people who were once able to earn a living wage from professional driving. Pichai seemed to envision a future that may have a similar consequence for journalists. “There’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think—there’ll be creators who will create for AI,” he said. “People will figure it out.”

[xenosagaepisodeone]

As much as copyright law sucks, its unfortunately one of the only legal venues with any sort of real power for artists working in creative industries to protect their livelihoods and colleagues. Unionization alone isn't going to stop companies from scraping people's work, especially not people who are non-union or freelancers, and unions like SAG-AFTRA keep throwing people who aren't making top-dollar under the bus for "ethical" AI startups they partner with anyway, even when said members call them out for siding with corporate over their own due-paying members. When corporations who normally try to shut down creators with DMCA takedowns are now violating the IP of countless creators themselves, why shouldn't we at least hold them accountable to the same laws they already use against us?

because it will not work. I truly cannot stress this enough, whatever meager personal gains that some industry artists are able to acquire in isolated cases against startups and other boutique tech ventures will set the precedent for which the corporations that actually control your country (who have infinite resources to expend on legal ventures) will use to push the law further in their favor. disney already does so much to prevent their IPs from entering the public domain! if you give them an avenue to exploit, they will do it! and it won't matter who was actually right because they have they have so much more money. artists and indie animation studios that could pose any threat to corporate monopolies on art will get C&D'd out of existence for superficial similarities. karla ortiz' lawsuit was so vaguely worded that you could hypothetically pursue someone legally if they had artwork of yours saved in a pinterest inspo board since CLIP models were framed as "trade dress databases". this entire movement is more concerned with potentially obstructed opportunities to rent-seek than it actually is about workers rights- or even simply art that was not created with the intent of being 'content'. and the same industry artists who spearheaded this frenzy will side the the corporations when it comes to it because they've already got theirs.

copyright is never made with the interests of individuals in mind. like, i can't even begin to explain how historically, the little guy is the one getting fucked over by copyright law! how so much of what shapes our culture exists in spite of copyright law as opposed to because of it. what drives me insane is how ai is the thing that artists end up rallying around in unity; not anything to actually improve the quality of life working within the arts, but instead a fad technology. i've seen people describe working in animation as being like a form of debasement and act like nothing can be done while i'm witnessing an entire movement unfold to protect that because a lot of artists seem to think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed small business owners over workers.

[the-jellicle-duelist]

i woke up feeling Nihilistic about Technology so now you must all suffer with me most people are probably not keeping up with what the tech companies are actually making, doing, demoing, with AI in the way i am. and that's okay you will not like what you hear most likely. i am also not any kind of technology professional. i just like technology. i just read about technology. there's sort of two things that are happening in tandem which is:

there is a race between some of the biggest ones (google, meta, openai, microsoft, etc. along with some not yet household name ones like perplexity and deepseek) to essentially Decide, make the tech, and Win at this technology. think of how Google has been the defacto ruler of the internet between the Search Engine that delivers web pages, and the Ad Engine that makes money for advertisers and google. they have all of the information and make the majority of the money. AI is the first technology in 20 years that has everyone scrambling to become the new Google of That.

ChatGPT, the thing we have access to right now, it is stupid sometimes. but the reason every single company is pushing this shit is because they want to be First to make a product that Works, and they also are rebuilding how we will interact with the internet from the ground up. the thing basically everyone wants is to control 'the window' as it were between You typing things into the computer, and the larger internet. in a real way, Google owns 'the window' in many meaningful (monetary) ways. the future that basically every company is working towards right now is a version of the the websites on the internet become more of a database; a collection of data that can be accessed by the AI model. every computer you use becomes the Search box on Google.com, but when you type things into it, it just finds information and spits it out in front of you. there is a future where 'the internet' is just an AI chat bot.

holding those two ideas at once (everyone wants to be the Google of AI, and also every single tech company wants us to look at the internet in a way they choose and have control over) THIS SUCKS. THIS SUCKS ASS.

THE THING THAT IS BEAUTIFUL ABOUT THE INTERNET IS THAT IT IS OPEN. you can, in almost every place in the world, build a stupid website and connect it to the internet and anyone can look at it. ANYONE. we have absolutely NOTHING ELSE as universal, as open, as this. every single tech company is trying to change this in a meaningful way. in the Worst version of this, the internet just looks like the ChatGPT page, because it scrapes data and regurgitates it back to you. instead of seeing the place where this data was written, formatted, presented, on its own website like god intended

the worst part is: despite the posts you see from almost everyone in our respective bubbles about how AI sucks, we won't use it, it's bad for the environment, etc. NORMAL PEOPLE are using this shit all of the time. they are fine that it occasionally is wrong. and also the models of the various Chatbot AIs is getting better everyday at not being wrong. for like the first time in like 20 years since google launched, there is a real threat that the place people go to search for things online is rapidly shifting somewhere else. because people are using this stuff. the loudest people against AI are currently a minority of loud voices. not only is this not going away, but it is happening. this is actually web 3.0. and it's going to be so shit

this is not to say you will not be able to go to tumblr.com. but it will take effort. browser applications are basically not profitable, just ask Mozilla. google has chrome, which makes money because it has you use Google and it tracks your data to sell you ads. safari doesn't make money, but apple Takes google's money to pay for maintaining it. most other browsers are just forked chromium.

in my opinion there will be one sad browser application for you to access real websites, it will eventually become unmaintained as people just go to the winner's AI chatbot app to access information online. 'websties' will become subculture; a group of hobbyists will maintain the thing that might let you access these things. normal people will move on from the idea of going to websites.

the future of the internet will be a sad, lonely place, where the sterile, commercially viable and advertiser friendly chatbot will tell you about whatever you type or say into the computer. it will encourage people to not make connections online, or even in their lives, because there will be a voice assistant they can talk with. one of the latest google demos, there is a person fixing their bicycle, having Gemini look thru the manual, tell them how to fix a certain part of the bike. Gemini calls a repair shop, and talks to the person on the other side. a lot of people covering this are like 'that future is extremely cool and interesting to me' and when i heard That that is when i know we have like. lost it.

for whatever reason, people want this kind of technology. and it makes me so sad.

[kivaember]

there's a startling lack of allmind/iguazu fics out there... anyway this is the start of an allmind/iguazu oneshot im writing, so... enjoy!

It started with an innocuous mission request.

"Rb19 Iguazu: as per your standing search query, one job meets your parametres. Location, Grid 086. Client, Junker Coyotes. Target, RaD. Payment: 100'000 COAM. Do you wish to accept this job as an independent contractor?"

It didn't stand out as anything unusual. Iguazu abused the 'independent contractor services' that ALLMIND offered to all mercenaries on Rubicon - be they corporate or independent - trying his best to build up some personal scratch that wasn't directly tied to the Redgun's operational budget.

Every single sortie he did under the Balam banner he basically did for free. After deducting ammunition, repairs, fuel and a bunch of other bullshit auxiliary costs, Iguazu was left with barely two coins to rub together. The Reguns existed in perpetual poverty, indentured servants despite most of them being in denial over it, and Iguazu refused to let himself be content with that.

So he accepted ALLMIND's offered missions on the sly, pocketing a considerable chunk of the pay after she deducted a 5% 'facilitation cost'. ALLMIND even paid for the ammunition and repairs! It was suspiciously generous, but no matter how much Iguazu wracked his brains, he didn't know what ALLMIND was getting out of this. She was an AI, she didn't really have ambitions. It was likely she was just programmed by a complete dumbass.

Well, her deficiencies were his gain. After a few more months, Iguazu might actually have enough money to negotiate for an early release from his Redgun contract, and finally leave this whole life behind him. So, when that innocuous mission request rolled round, no different to any other job he'd taken before through ALLMIND, he'd accepted it without question and departed.

It ended up being the biggest mistake of his life.

-

"DAMN IT!"

Iguazu slammed his fists against the arms of his cockpit seat, his vision half-dazzled by the blinking red emergency lights. There was a faint stench of burning, but he didn't move to evacuate his wreck of an AC, stewing quietly as EN ANAMOLY flashed across his mostly inert console.

Fucker had somehow hit his generator after they got jumped by those random mechs... and just left him here?! Through HEAD BRINGER's thick chassis he could hear the sounds of combat, muffled staccato fire and the telltale 'pff-THWMP' of a piledriver engaging and driving its spike into solid, military grade steel. It galled him to know that Raven didn't need back up at all, that Iguazu had been viewed as an annoyance to be swept aside quickly to focus on the real threat.

How dare he... how dare he...?!

"Rb19 Iguazu."

He froze at the familiar voice, ALLMIND's detachedly polite voice crackly through his fucked console. The emergency power only really focused on powering the important things: life support and comms.

"I see that HEAD BRINGER has suffered from a catastrophic failure. Do you require extraction and repairs?"

Iguazu didn't immediately answer. His chest felt tight and his stomach churned, as he abruptly realised the predicament he was in. Iguazu never told the other Redguns about him taking sly jobs through ALLMIND, because he'd always finished them with only a few dents and scratches on HEAD BRINGER's paintjob, and ALLMIND usually buffed those out. He'd never full on wrecked before. Michigan might get pissed...

...which was whatever! Guy was always riding Iguazu's ass! This would just be one another thing he'd nag him about, and Nile will complain about the fact that this was done off company time so Iguazu would-

Oh.

Oh shit.

He'd have to... pay for repairs out of pocket.

His savings... all that COAM he'd managed to scrape together and save by taking these jobs, that'll be consumed and thensome to fix up HEAD BRINGER. Generators weren't cheap! Not at all! He would've preferred Raven shooting off a leg at this rate! Oh fucking shit cunt asshole fuck-

"Rb19 Iguazu."

"Will you fuck off!?" he half-shrieked. "I'm busy- fucking- argh, I'm so screwed! Why did you give me this job?! Why didn't you tell me the fucking freelancer was here?! I got caught totally off guard because of you!"

"I was unaware that Rb23 Raven was contracted by RaD at this time. His handler had submitted a stay in mission requests for the next two days."

What? Wait, Iguazu didn't give a shit about that.

"Well he's here! Kicking ass and being a fucking cunt as usual!" Iguazu seethed, and flung himself back in his cockpit chair, grunting when it jarred his Cerebral Control Spite. Irritably, he reached up, easing out the cerebral spike with an experienced and gentle care, closing his eyes against the brief moment of vertigo the disconnect brought him.

ALLMIND obliviously kept talking.

"I've initiated emergency extraction protocols. Please hold your position for the next ten minutes. You will be brought to an ALLMIND sponsored foundry for repair and recuperation. Do you wish to send a message to Rb09 Michigan-"

"NO!" Iguazu snapped. "No, don't tell that old man anything. He can't know I was out here!"

"I understand. Then I assume you wish for your bill of repairs to be discretionary?"

Bill of...? "You're gonna bill me?!"

"Yes. If you recall, part of the policy for the Independent Contractors System is that upon mission success, all repair and ammunition costs are absorbed by ALLMIND. Upon failure, the pilot takes full responsibility-"

Iguazu did not recall reading that at all, but... well, he just skimmed all the legal jargon and fine print when ALLMIND had first introduced this system to him, so it was likey he'd missed it. Crap. Well, there was the fish hook he had been marvelling the absence of.

"...how much will it cost," he asked stonily.

"If you don't wish to pay using COAM, an alternative means of payment can be arranged," ALLMIND said, and though she was an AI and thus lacking in emotion or human ambition, there was something... unnervingly sly in her tone. Smug, almost.

That fish hook now had a hundred cruel barbs on it. Iguazu swallowed, viscerally remembering the last time he heard those words - if you can't pay with money, then there's an alternative means of payment... - and how it ended up with him here: augmented against his will and fighting on a backwater planet for a company he despised from the very bottom of his soul.

"Depends on what those 'alternative means' are," Iguazu said warily.

"In pursuit of offering better services to the mercenaries I serve, and gaining better understanding of their wants and needs, it would be beneficial to have several mercenary subjects on hand to gather vital data from."

What? "You want me to be some guinea pig?"

"There will be nothing invasive. Not to the extent of your augmentation surgery. All data shall be harvested via simulations or logs you willingly submit from live combat. You will not be harmed or physically discomforted in any way."

This sounded way too lenient.

"That's it...?" Iguazu probed. "You just want... some fucking data from me? You can get that whenever you want as is! You definitely want something else."

"Of course. The data I automatically obtain is superficial at most. What I require is your biometrics."

"What, like my... fingerprints?"

"The biological performance of your body in combat, both real and simulated, its responses to actions taken by your AC whilst you are under high-levels of stress and synchronisation, its default state post-combat. Gathering this data will allow me to develop AC hardware that encourages perfect synergy between pilot and machine, the likes which Arquebus and Balam have not yet achieved."

Okay... okay, this was... Iguazu could not put his finger on it, but having grown up in the slums of Earth, where he'd met almost every single degenerate under the sun, an instinctive part of him was screaming this is a fetish thing the AI is making you participate in a fetish thing THIS IS TOTALLY A FETISH THING.

"..."

But even if it was a fetish thing, it was still a good deal. Iguazu's used to being horrifically violated, and this was the most gentle way of having it done. He could record this data and send it, and exist in blissful denial over whatever ALLMIND would do with it. She's an AI, she didn't have a physical body to masturbate with. She'd do... whatever it was AI did to get off. Have a power surge? Bluescreen? Whatever. Not his problem. Not thinking about it. Biometric data for possibly fetishtic purposes in exchange for HEAD BRINGER getting repaired and Michigan not knowing about his illegal moonlighting? Brilliant deal if you had no pride, and boy, Iguazu was used to tossing his aside when it was convenient.

"Fine. It's a deal," Iguazu gritted out. "I'll send you all the data you want after you repair HEAD BRINGER."

"Understood. Thank you for your cooperation, Rb19 Iguazu. This will serve to benefit ALLMIND, and in turn, benefit all mercenaries."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever..."

-

Actually, accepting that mission hadn't been the biggest mistake of his life.

Agreeing to ALLMIND's deal had been.

[nowis-scales]

Rating: Mature Audiences

General Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Fandoms: Fire Emblem Fates

Relationships: Shiro & Ryoma, Shiro & Felicia, Felicia/Ryoma

Additional Tags: Deeprealms, Family Drama, Family Bonding, Bad Parenting, Fix-It of Sorts, Childhood Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff & Angst, Happy Endings, Revelation Route, Character Study, Fates’ characters’ bad parenting but from a humanized and resolution-focused perspective

Story Chapter Count: 2/?

Story Summary: Shiro Santori, or Prince Shinonome Masahide?

Shiro's parents lied about his identity to protect him. They lied with noble intentions. It doesn't change the fact that, for Shiro, his whole life is gone, and in its place is a new set of responsibilities as the future Crown Prince of Hoshido. Navigating his new life will already be hard enough, but with the relationship between him and his parents dashed to pieces, he has no idea where to turn. Through battles, explorations of the past, and time spent together as a real family, Shiro may discover that while there is no excuse for such harsh lies, that doesn't mean there is no explanation for their choices... and the ugly feelings on both sides still have strong roots in love for one another.

Shiro may not know who he is, but as it turns out, both his parents are still working on figuring that out for themselves, too.

[Read it on AO3.]

(Note: Due to potential threat of AI-scraping from Tumblr, I have opted to publish the actual text content of this fic only on AO3. Thank you for your understanding.)

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #682

Top Ten AI Characters

AI is one of those things that’s really cool in fiction but – certainly in the way we experience it today – sucks in real life. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are genuine positive benefits of AI; I’ve seen its application in medicine and scientific research, and how it can speed up research and diagnoses, and that’s great. But it’s the use of AI in creative spheres, and the politics of the people behind those AI companies, that’s causing concern. Because generative AI art – whether ChatGPT or image and video generation – is not only ugly, it’s also damaging livelihoods of creatives across the globe, and it, like, burns through half a rainforest to generate one email. I feel like we need to decouple the genuine scientific uses of “AI” (because, really, none if it is actual artificial intelligence) from the grift-mill data-scraping of the mega-corps. Otherwise in order to defend against the latter, we risk eliminating the former.

Anyway, fictional AI. They’re cool, even when they’re evil!

That’s basically all this list is. My favourite fictional AIs. Now, me being me, I’ve gotten very granular about what is an “AI”. My biggest thing is that these cannot be robots. If there’s a character and they’re “artificial” – if they’re walking around in a physical body that can interact with other characters and the environment – then that’s not the “AI” I’m on about, even if they are intelligent and – to some degree – artificial. If you start googling “AI characters” for research (like what I done) you get a lot of people suggesting, say, Data or Gort; I don’t count them here. Those fall under robot/mechanoid/synthazoid/whatever. This has created a bit of a dilemma for me with regard to someone like Ultron; he definitely exists as a formless AI, capable of inhabiting multiple bodies. But, really, it’s his existence in those bodies that’s so important. He’s a big, real, physical threat. Same with Brainiac. You can argue about them being sentient programs or whatever – and certainly the scene in Age of Ultron where he tries to kill JARVIS is an excellent representation of artificial intelligences – but, really, Ultron is a big stompy robot who chops off Smeagol’s arm.

And that’s why C-3PO isn’t in this list.

Now, there are a couple of other “borderline” cases that I came up against, and you’ll see me debate them in the list itself. But for the most part, these are entirely artificial characters; they’re just faces on a screen, or weird holograms, or even blinking red lights. They can’t kick Captain America out of a truck.

HAL-9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968): the big grandaddy of all cinematic AIs is a monotone voice (a superb Douglas Rain) and a red light, and yet not only steals the entire film out from under the flesh-and-blood actors but in doing so becomes an eternal icon. HAL has his orders, and will follow them through even to the point of killing the crew, turning the film into a horror movie for a brief section, this omnipotent force directing every object against our human heroes. It’s the cold, emotionless calculus of it that’s terrifying, prefiguring notions of humanity sacrificing its decision making to algorithms, something we see in small scale in the real world already, and which would become a genre staple. However, HAL is such a complex character – he’s not bad, he’s just programmed that way! – that when Dave (Keir Dullea) slowly disables his memory, with HAL pleading for his life and slowly losing his faculties, it’s actually a horrific scene of torture and death that makes us empathise with the evil supercomputer.

Holly (Red Dwarf, 1988): from the sublime to the ridiculous, both performances – Norman Lovett and Hattie Hayridge – deliver a masterclass in deadpan comic timing and stupidity. The flipside to HAL’s faceless logic, Holly – the name designed to evoke 2001, just as Dave Lister evokes Dave Bowman – is a floating head rather than a red light bulb, and is all the dimmer for it. Aside from the comedy of Holly being allegedly a super-genius but sounding like a genial middle-aged Brummie, we then have his decline – played of course for maximum comic effect – after spending three million years alone in space. There are so many moments of high comedy – from his pranking of Lister and Rimmer to, in the Hayridge years, banging her head on the screen when trying to count – all delivered perfectly. An ongoing foil for our hapless heroes. In a way, just as much of a menace as HAL.

Cortana (Halo: Combat Evolved, 2001): Cortana’s the first one that gave me a bit of pause, because whilst she’s definitely an AI, she does often appear as a tiny little hologram lady. However, she still counts, because most of the time she’s just a voice in Master Chief’s head (brilliantly played by Jen Taylor), telling him where to go and turning on big alien lifts and stuff. It’s the growing relationship between her and Chief that impresses, the two utterly trusting each other and gradually falling in love, the whole arc overshadowed by the fact that an AI such as her has a severely limited lifespan. As such, first of all she “dies” before then appearing to come back as an evil version of herself. All the while, the relationship with Chief endures, the two sharing a bond that transcends her death, madness, rebirth, and sacrifice. But those early days, a perky voice in the ear, a constant companion – that’s the best stuff.

FRIDAY (Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2015): the most famous of Tony Stark’s AIs in the MCU is probably JARVIS – he was first, after all, and was “the voice in his head” throughout the entire Iron Man trilogy and the first blockbuster Avengers movie. But for me it’s Stark’s second AI – chosen in Age of Ultron after JARVIS sort of becomes Vision – that takes the cake. FRIDAY is chattier, sarkier, and, well, just a lot more Irish. It’s delightful to hear Kerry Condon’s dulcet tones in billion-dollar movie; and her lines are incredibly Irish. The fact she keeps calling Tony “boss”, for instance: “yer man’s in the church, boss”; “yer armour’s knackered, boss”. It’s fantastic, and for me the biggest tragedy of Tony Stark’s untimely demise is that it means we probably won’t see FRIDAY again. My suggestion: have FRIDAY become Jocasta the way JARVIS became Vision!

GLaDOS (Portal, 2007): back to the world of games for an AI that is equal parts evil malevolence and camp comedy. GLaDOS runs the testing facility you’re trying to escape from, and her soft mechanical lilt (provided by Ellen McLain) guides you through the increasingly macabre and sinister rooms. Her deadpan monotone – designed to sound artificially generated – adds an increasingly sinister edge to the supposedly pleasant dialogue, until she starts to become more and more deranged. And she’s funny! Really funny! I assume (what do you want, research?) that she was designed to be something of a parody of System Shock’s evil AI, SHODAN; I didn’t really played System Shock that much, which is why she’s not on the list. But GLaDOS also deserves props for her wonderful singing voice.

Max (Flight of the Navigator, 1986): a sort-of weird eyeball thingie on a big mechanical stalk, he flits about in the cockpit of the funky silver time-travel ship, helping “the Navigator” David. In this child-centred tale, he starts the film as a mysterious but knowledgeable “adult in the room”; although friendly-sounding, he’s the voice of authority. Then halfway through he undergoes a personality change and suddenly becomes all cool and wacky. This is expertly sold by Pee-wee himself, Paul Reubens, as the voice of Max; he manages to be both otherworldly and funny all at the same time. In a universe of static, faceless computer people, Max at least is animated.

Auto (WALL-E, 2009): there’s a subset of fictional AIs that are functionally bad guys but are only following their programming; Auto here is cut from the same cloth as good old HAL. They’re designed to look after the crew of the Axiom, a generational ship carrying the last of humanity through the stars. But they also have to preserve the lie, to prevent the humans from returning to Earth. As such, Auto – brilliantly styled as a futuristic ship’s wheel with a HAL-esque eye, and voiced by Apple’s text-to-speech program MacInTalk – is the antagonist, and the Pixar masters do a tremendous job imbuing them with tons of personality.

The Entity (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, 2023): the Entity is utterly faceless – they’re almost a ghost, almost the Devil itself, hunting down our heroes in an anonymous quest for – what? Domination? Annihilation? It’s both the Entity’s all-encompassing power, and its unknowable, inhuman thought process that makes it one of the most terrifying AIs on this list. They’re a spectre looming over the whole film, turning it into something approaching a horror, giving it the air of grim inevitability. All without really being a screen presence; the Entity is the 21st Century Sauron!

Miss Minutes (Loki, 2021): another one that made me stop and think for a bit, because Miss Minutes does get about. She’s basically the AI that runs the TVA, popping up with her cutesy Fleischer-esque design and delightful Southern accent (hat tip Tara Strong); but right from the off, there’s something off, right? And so she’s gradually revealed to be a rug-puller, tipping the scales in favour of He Who Remains. But nuance is added to her character, what with her double-and-triple crossing people, and her apparently genuine love for HWR at the end of time. All the same, despite being a cool character, is she too mobile? Should she count? Well, despite it all, I think she is an AI rather than anything else, and even if she pops up as a hologram all over the shop, it’s not too dissimilar to when the Red Dwarf guys usedto drag a massive CRT telly around so Holly could join in their adventures.

Skynet (The Terminator, 1984): I think in all of cinema, Skynet probably takes the crowd for the most iconic faceless AI. The story of The Terminator is so simple it’s now cliché: evil AI takes over and nukes the world. They’re a cautionary tale, showing the excess of human hubris, of putting our faith in soulless algorithms. There’s nothing to really hate in Skynet, and to a certain extent nothing to fight. They’re a program in the ether, and they’re operating entirely on logic and reason; they really cannot be bargained with, they don’t feel pity or remorse or fear. Whilst they may lack the character or screen presence of most of these pissy programs, they make up for it as a force of fear. Hasta la vista.

Oh, by the way, tiny point of interest that I’m mentioning just for myself really. I sometimes get a bit bogged down with dates for this thing; or in trying to articulate, say, if I’m on about the MCU version of a character or the Marvel Comics version, or whether it’s the book The Lord of the Rings or the film The Lord of the Rings, that kind of thing. So I think – in what should always have been obvious and easy – that I’m just going to list first appearances. I mean, that’s what I was always supposed to be doing, but like I say, I got bogged down in unnecessary specifics (which really is what I could have called this whole blog). So if I mention FRIDAY appearing first in 2015’s Age of Ultron, you understand I’m talking about the film character rather than the character that debuted in Iron Man #53 in 2002. Yeah? Yeah.

[foggieststars]

LOVED the ai discourse from you. It was like a rock in my shoe mentally at work all day yesterday and you had the discussion I wanted to have to 🙏 Ty.

Got me when you said that anyone who uses ai to write fic should not interact with your works in any way, because that's exactly how I feel.

Maybe it's selfish, but if I spend tens or hundreds of hours on a work, I want it to be read by people who appreciate that work. I don't want someone who views art that way reading it and viewing it through such a careless lens. I don't want my work copied by real people, and even more, I don't want it copied by generative ai.

I realise that ff is full of tropes, but the creation of an art piece just based on the amalgamation and simplification of existing works is, to me, repulsive.

Art should be about diversifying viewpoints and ideas, not blending them together.

If that's what the fandom becomes, I won't be there.

Writing is really hard. Plotting is hard, and writing is hard. I think some people look at something like Frechheit and don't see how difficult and exhausting it is, not seeing that I spent probably 5 or 6 hours per day working on it for 6 months; even if that work was often mental. Exploring concepts, plotting, re-plotting, understanding my characters and trying to follow the right plot for their motivations, and the mood and ideas I was trying to foster. Then writing and editing.

It's really hard.

Sometimes it feels like scraping my brain with a cheese grater, trying to get something worthwhile out of it.

And I don't have a beta, I just fight through it on my own. And the work is imperfect and it takes a lot of time and energy. But it's worth it to create something that I'm proud of and that is enjoyed in good faith by a community.

And I think that's what art is?

And if ai fics become commonplace, and people are flooding the space with cheap works, actual authors will get lost and disillusioned, and leave. It's the same as the whole discourse about selling fic. It's not just annoying. It a) goes against the whole spirit of fandom, and b) is an existential threat to the creation and distribution of the real thing.

Sorry, that was long af. Much love x

i absolutely agree with EVERYTHING you've said!!

Maybe it's selfish, but if I spend tens or hundreds of hours on a work, I want it to be read by people who appreciate that work. I don't want someone who views art that way reading it and viewing it through such a careless lens. I don't want my work copied by real people, and even more, I don't want it copied by generative ai. -> could NOT agree more and idc if it's selfish. like you said, if you can't appreciate the effort writing fics (esoecially a behemoth masterpiece like frechheit) takes then why would i want you to read it!!!

i also think you make such a good point about flooding the tags with shite... like if that was the case i would get SO discouraged!! to be honest i already tend to avoid browsing by new fics in f1 and rely on recommendations i see on tumblr/mutual's fics/authors i'm subscribed to because after the wattpad implosion there was an outpouring of like badly tagged x reader fics which is absolutely a slay for some but is not my jam. and if this AI stuff gets worse i simply will never be going back!!!

all this to say you put this all so beautifully (as you always do) and reminder that i love and appreciate your fics and all the work that goes into them!!!!! mwah

[sophieinwonderland]

When it comes to you, people are always very quick to latch onto anything to make you the villain, even if it's not about tulpamancy or plurality. And this is coming from someone who deeply despises stable diffusion with how it's used (along with how costly it can be).

For example, i 100% disagree with the thing you said about how "AI" image generators learn to "draw" similarly to how artists do it. To train a neural network to create images from a prompt, the basic idea is to add degrees/levels of noise to an image of say a bike, provide both the altered and unaltered image of the bike to the neural network and ask it, based on the degrees of noise, to remove that noise so that the noisy bike image can become an image of a bike with no noise. Of course there's also splitting the prompt into tokens that the neural network can understand, so that it can actually generate something that looks like a bike when you ask it to generate a bike, and then when you're done with the basic training you can move on to refining the model to generate specific images (this is the part where you feed it most of those scraped images) but all in all i don't know how you'd compare this to artists looking at a drawing and getting inspired or deciding to emulate things like the line weight, the silhouette, the coloring style etc. the neural network is trained to emulate a style based on parameters the people who made the network don't even know, while an artist will be able to tell you why each pen stroke was made in that way. Why the colors look the way that they do, why the composition is set up like that etc

And I'm not much better that that since I'm getting mad over a vague group of people on anon but there we go i guess

It does always seem to be something, doesn't it?

Anyway, you're totally right on the different processes by AI and humans. The AI doesn't really understand what it's doing or know the craft.

My comments were more about where the line is drawn on what is or isn't "copying". Can an image that draws inspiration from another image be considered a copy? Even when it isn't similar enough to infringe directly on intellectual property in a way that would constitute plagiarism?

Even though AI doesn't know the craft, it's similar to human thinking in the specific way that both absorb information and produce outputs based on the works of others. That's what humans do, and that's what the AI does.

By the way, I actually believe there should be laws to prevent AI companies from using copyrighted works as training data without permission.

But I also suspect that even with such laws in place... there's not a good way to prevent the real issue people are most concerned with, which is the impact on human jobs. It would be, at best, a speed bump.

AI companies could still use any public domain works. Social media sites with TOS that state they have the right to use any images posted there could claim this includes the right to sell your works to AI partners as training data unless this was specifically banned by the law. Some, like Tumblr, may allow users to opt out of this where not opting out is taken as consent.

And AI will still be a threat to the jobs of artists.

There's no real solution to that problem other than banning AI images completely. And a straight ban on AI technology like that feels counter to our ideals of freedom and progress.

Which leaves us with... I don't know... 🤷‍♀️

It's complicated. I don't want artists to lose work. But I don't want to hamper technological progress with authoritarian measures. I don't think there's a real solution to this problem that's fair to everyone and doesn't compromise morals somewhere.

[navigatorsghost]

I've seen a few reblogs now of people writing posts in simlish or similar nonsense as a response to the AI scraping thing and I totally get the reasoning behind that, but they've got me thinking - honestly, do we even need to try to poison any sane dataset? We already have the bots and gimmick blogs who do really specific weird things to any post they encounter, and the unreality blogs whose whole thing is starting a post sounding plausible and ending it in some Night Vale netherworld while still somehow making a weird kind of intuitive sense the entire way down. We have our hyperbolic threat culture and tendency to bite each other in posts that makes people not familiar with it wildly uncomfortable. We use hashtags in a completely different way to any other platform out there and have, like, sixty percent of our conversations in them. And our "yes, and" game is unrivalled anywhere.

Like, for real, you're going to be able to spot a tumblr-trained AI just by telling it you like its shoelaces or asking it if Delaware is a state. Pretty much the only thing you could make with tumblr data would be an artificial tumblr user, and we're all so used to stepping over those already that I'm not sure what would be the point.

[mezmer]

Ok sorry AI artwork argument again

I'll never get this lol. This is the argument you're going with? This is how art works anyway. you look at art "eat it" and produce more art inspired by every art piece..people are viewing art for free all the time... If your images were available for free online then why is it such a problem they were used in a dataset. Data sets contain billions of information packets, your little picture is like a crumb. And AI art looks terrible lol. Maybe if it was a threat to artists, which it may very well be in coming years, then it should make for some different concerns not regarding the ethics of data scraping

The real issue I think is that artists need to form organizations unions whatever to secure their livelihoods that way if they're so important. Don't get on Twitter or tumblr and post angery shit cuz it's not getting you anywhere lol. Most important thing is to build a solid ground for future generations who will struggle finding work as an artist due to AI when it's already difficult as it is for many artists. But also if your art is worth a shit AI probably isn't going to stand a chance. I have a feeling once AI starts creating more incredible artwork that it won't be free to use anymore. They want people creating image prompts to train the model and they're getting that done for free. With cornballs like me who get to go through and tell the model it's doing a great job

[commiemartyrshighschool]

This right here is my key philosophical objection to a lot of AI generated stuff.

(The fact that many of these systems are consistently and dangerously wrong about objective facts is the single most important argument against their use in many cases, but that could theoretically be solved at which point my day job as a journalist will face an existential threat finally born from technology instead of just capitalism.)

The scraping and remixing aspect to me really doesn't separate AI generated content in a substantive way from derivative works in general or something like a collage. Although the fact attribution and acknowledgement of influence become much harder makes it a thornier ethical dilemma, it really comes down to a case-by-case matter just like other spaces where there are lines between the stolen and the transformed to argue about.

AI could have potential as a labor saving system, and I think there's interesting applications out there where somebody uses it as raw material they edit or carve away from to provide something with a human touch. But when the AI's work itself is presented as the finished product it's not a matter of it lacking a human essence, it's a matter of it lacking human effort and labor.

The child's macaroni art has more intrinsic meaning than the sculpture from Homegoods. The handwritten note has greater emotional weight than the Hallmark card from the pharmacy. And that is because a large aspect of art is communication, expressing an idea or an emotion or a fact in a way that can pass from one consciousness to another.

AI can imitate that in a fully convincing way, but why wouldn't you value messages from a human more highly? Being sent through a phone tree or speaking with an AI for customer service is always a miserable experience, we're all demanding to speak to a real human not only means a human who is probably better able to handle the lateral thinking necessary to handle most of our problems is there, but the fact you're holding their attention, and perhaps able to make an emotional appeal, is so important.

The interesting parts of an essay or a piece of fiction, or a photo or a painting will usually be in some way the result of how we can relate to the person responsible for it. Maybe at some point prompting will become so sophisticated an art that we can gain some of that information, but right now it tends to be at enough of a remove that we can't begin to detect it from the piece itself.

[clayoai]

Why Do You Keep Getting So Many Scam Calls in 2025 (And How to Actually Reduce Them)

It’s 7:45 AM. You’re sipping your first coffee, prepping for a call with your team. Your phone rings.

Unknown number.

You ignore it.

Thirty minutes later, another one. Then another in the afternoon.

Eventually, you pick up.

A robotic voice says: “Your bank account has been compromised. Press 1 to speak to a fraud agent.”

You hang up instantly—but the question lingers: Why am I getting so many scam calls in 2025?

Let’s unpack what’s actually happening behind the scenes—and what you can do to stop it

 Scam Calls in 2025: Not Just Annoying, But Smart

Back in the early 2000s, scam calls were easy to spot—terrible audio, obviously fake stories, and calls from numbers with strange area codes.

But in 2025? Things are different.

Scammers are using AI, voice cloning, massive databases, and psychological tactics to make scam calls smarter, more frequent, and harder to detect.

Let’s answer the big question first: Why so many scam calls in 2025?

There are three big reasons:

AI tools are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

VoIP technology allows mass-calling for pennies—one scammer can launch tens of thousands of calls per hour.

Leaked personal data is everywhere. Your phone number, city, employer, and even family connections are already online.

 The Data Behind the Surge

The numbers are staggering.

According to Hiya’s 2024 Voice Threat Report, over 25% of unknown calls globally are fraudulent.

Truecaller’s 2024 Global Report noted that Indian users receive 17–20 scam calls per month on average, with many receiving significantly more.

The FCC in the U.S. has reported billions of scam calls annually, with increasing reports of AI voice scams.

If it feels like scam calls are getting worse, you’re absolutely right.

 How Scammers Use AI (And Why It’s Working

In 2025, AI scam calls are more believable than ever.

Here’s how they do it:

Voice cloning: A few seconds of your voice (from a podcast, YouTube video, or even a phone greeting) can be used to clone your voice.

Data scraping: Scammers match your number with leaked or public information to make the call feel real.

AI-generated responses: They’re no longer limited to pre-recorded messages. Many scammers now use tools like ElevenLabs or Resemble AI to create real-time, interactive voice bots.

The result? Scam calls that sound like:

Your bank confirming a charge.

A delivery person needing payment for a package.

A government agency requesting urgent action.

A loved one in distress asking for help.

You’re not just getting calls. You’re getting weaponized manipulation at scale.

 Common Types of Scam Calls in 2025

Knowing the enemy helps. Here are the top categories of scam calls circulating today:

Bank fraud alerts: “Your account has been compromised. Confirm your card number.”

Fake courier scams: “Your parcel is pending. Pay ₹50 now.”

Electricity/utility threats: “Pay your bill immediately or face disconnection.”

Deepfake family calls: Emotional voices asking for urgent financial help.

Loan approvals and tax refunds: Designed to collect sensitive details.

These scams are increasing in frequency, and unfortunately, they work—especially on busy professionals and elderly users.

 Why Your Phone Keeps Getting Targeted

You might be wondering, “Why me?”

Here’s why you’re getting so many spam and scam calls:

Your number was leaked in a data breach or sold by a sketchy app.

You answered a scam call once, which flagged you as a “live user.”

You filled out a form online—maybe for a lead magnet, a giveaway, or a service quote.

Your profession is public-facing (e.g., founder, coach, creator), making you more searchable and targetable.

Once you’re on a list, your number gets passed around and recycled. And since scam call automation is cheap, they just keep trying.

 How to Reduce Scam Calls in 2025 (What Actually Works)

Now to the good part: how to reduce scam calls in a world where they’re increasing.

Here’s what works—tested and recommended by founders and professionals:

 Step 1: Don’t engage with unknown numbers

Let them go to voicemail. Answering confirms your number is active and useful to scammers.

 Step 2: Use call screening technology

Use tools that automatically analyze and filter calls. The best ones include:

Clayo.ai – An AI-powered call screener that understands intent, blocks spam, summarizes legit calls, and forwards only what matters. Built specifically for busy professionals.

Truecaller – Good for identifying numbers, but limited in intent detection.

Google Call Screen – Great for Pixel users, but lacks depth for business use.

Clayo.ai stands out because it doesn’t just block—it thinks. It asks questions, screens calls in real-time, and ensures you’re only interrupted when it’s worth it.

 Step 3: Enable built-in spam filters

Both iOS and Android offer basic tools. Turn them on.

 Step 4: Report and block

Every time you get a scam call, report it through your local authority or apps like Truecaller and Clayo.

 Step 5: Don’t share your number casually

Avoid entering your number on untrusted forms, websites, or giveaways.

 Bonus Tip: Don’t Fall for the “Silence Trap”

Scammers now don’t say anything on the first call.

Why? They’re testing to see if you’ll call back. Once you do, they start the scam process with the added advantage that you reached out.

Never call back a number you don’t recognize unless you can confirm who it is.

 Final Word: You Can Take Back Control

We live in a world where our phones should empower us—not distract or deceive us.

But in 2025, scam calls are weaponized distractions—designed to steal your time, focus, and money.

You don’t need to fight them manually anymore. You don’t need to silence your phone all day. You just need a tool that understands the difference between what’s important—and what’s spam.

It filters, screens, and summarizes unknown calls. So I stay informed—but never distracted. It’s like having a personal gatekeeper who protects your time.

[98edits]

Top Web Security Solutions That Safeguard Your Website from Hackers and Data Breaches

In today’s digital age, website security is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. As cyber threats grow more advanced, businesses must invest in comprehensive web security solutions to safeguard their online assets. From protecting sensitive customer data to maintaining brand integrity, a secure website helps build trust and ensures regulatory compliance. Effective web protection includes multiple layers of defense, including firewalls, encryption, real-time monitoring, and access control. Without these tools, your site could fall victim to data breaches, malware attacks, and financial fraud. Implementing robust web security solutions is critical to ensure your digital infrastructure remains secure, reliable, and resilient.

Protect Your Site from Cyberattacks with Robust Firewall Tools

A firewall acts as the first line of defense against cyberattacks by filtering out malicious traffic and unauthorized access attempts. Modern web security solutions integrate advanced firewall tools that monitor both incoming and outgoing data to protect against various threats, including DDoS attacks, phishing attempts, and brute-force intrusions. These firewalls can be hardware-based or cloud-enabled, offering scalable protection for websites of all sizes. By continuously updating threat databases and rules, firewall tools help businesses proactively respond to evolving cyber risks. Investing in robust firewall protection is a fundamental step toward creating a secure, attack-resistant digital environment for your website.

Monitor Threats in Real-Time to Stop Breaches Before They Spread

One of the most powerful components of effective web security solutions is real-time threat monitoring. This feature allows businesses to detect anomalies and suspicious activity as it happens, providing immediate alerts and automated responses. Whether it's unauthorized login attempts, abnormal traffic patterns, or data exfiltration, real-time monitoring tools ensure breaches are contained before they cause significant damage. These tools use AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze behavior patterns and identify potential threats with high accuracy. Early detection through continuous monitoring gives businesses the edge in stopping hackers in their tracks and reducing the impact of security incidents.

Encrypt Sensitive Data to Ensure Secure Online Transactions

Encryption is a cornerstone of trusted web security solutions, especially when handling sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers, or personal information. By converting readable data into an unreadable format, encryption ensures that even if data is intercepted, it cannot be misused. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols are commonly used to encrypt data during transmission. This builds trust with users, protects your reputation, and ensures compliance with data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA. By encrypting your data, you provide a secure environment for online transactions and communications, essential for any business today.

Use Web Security Solutions to Block Malware and Harmful Bots

Malware infections and harmful bots pose serious risks to your site’s functionality, user experience, and SEO rankings. Advanced web security solutions offer malware scanning, bot filtering, and threat elimination tools that detect and neutralize these digital dangers. Malicious bots can scrape content, flood forms, or launch automated attacks. Security software can distinguish between good bots, like search engine crawlers, and bad bots using behavioral analysis and IP blacklists. Meanwhile, anti-malware tools scan your website regularly and quarantine suspicious files or scripts. This proactive approach keeps your web environment clean and ensures visitors can access a safe, high-performing site.

Authenticate Users with Strong Access Control Methods

Restricting access to authorized users only is essential in preventing unauthorized data exposure or sabotage. Strong access control methods are a vital part of web security solutions, ensuring that each user has the correct level of access based on their role or needs. Multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access control (RBAC), and single sign-on (SSO) are all technologies that reinforce security by validating identities. These systems reduce the chances of credential theft and prevent lateral movement within your network. Implementing layered access controls not only deters cybercriminals but also adds a significant layer of accountability and transparency to user actions.

Prevent SQL Injections with Secure Coding Practices

SQL injection is a common and devastating attack where hackers manipulate queries to access or corrupt your database. To mitigate this threat, web security solutions must include secure coding practices from the ground up. Developers should use parameterized queries, input validation, and stored procedures to prevent malicious code execution. Security-focused code reviews and automated vulnerability scanners can catch flaws early in the development cycle. Educating your development team about secure coding standards plays a crucial role in eliminating loopholes. By prioritizing secure code, businesses create a strong foundation that reduces the risk of injection attacks and data breaches.

Regular Updates and Patches Keep Vulnerabilities in Check

Outdated software is a prime target for hackers, as known vulnerabilities can be easily exploited. That’s why ongoing maintenance—such as regular updates and security patches—is a critical aspect of any web security solution. Whether it's your content management system, plugins, or third-party tools, every component must be updated to the latest version. Web security tools can automate this process, ensuring that no patch is missed. Additionally, vulnerability assessments can help identify and fix issues before they become exploitable. Keeping your systems current not only strengthens your defenses but also reduces the overall attack surface for cybercriminals.

Conclusion

Comprehensive web security solutions are essential for maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of your digital infrastructure. From strong firewalls and real-time monitoring to encrypted transactions and secure coding practices, each layer of protection serves a crucial role in fending off cyber threats. As cyberattacks become more frequent and sophisticated, businesses must be proactive rather than reactive in their approach to security. By investing in the right tools, enforcing strong access controls, and keeping systems up to date, you build a solid defense against potential breaches. Ultimately, robust web security solutions provide peace of mind and help your business thrive safely online.