#categories of artificial intelligence

[spaceofentropy]

My amazon app keeps on showing me potential questions I could ask about products to their AI assistant Rufus (which is in beta).

So far I was prompted to ask:

- about the genre of a book. The AI answered it had not enough info to answer. The first line of the book description contains the word HORROR, but clearly that's not enough to answer such a deep and complex question.

- about whether a book dealt with "sensitive/inappropriate topics". The AI answered it had not received a complete question and to please reword my query. Which had come to the system in the first place. Wtf?!

- about the ingredients. Of a book. With the word cupcake in the title.

All in all, great experience, lots of laughter, useless to help shopping.

I wonder how much ass did the Alpha version suck, if THIS is the Beta...

Ah, yes, what did I listen to yesterday? This podcast about Amazon's "AI strategies"; their new "homegrown AI models"; the fact Amazon is gonna sell the services of said AI as a cheaper, slightly lower quality option than the big names of the AI market; how much Amazon is insisting that they've been on the forefront of the AI revolution for the past 20 years; and the fact Jeff Bezos thinks AIs are like electricity, they're gonna become THAT intrinsic to our way of life.

Well, if Rufus is any indication, it's gonna be a life full of useless "helpers" and frustrations, Jeff. How do I opt out?

[phantomrose96]

The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.

I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.

What is AI? And what is not AI?

So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.

A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)

An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.

A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.

Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)

So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:

"AI" which is just genuinely not AI

There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.

Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"

2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now

"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.

The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.

Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.

3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")

If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).

This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.

This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.

(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is not, of course, an example of the imperial gothic but instead a still relevant anti-Enlightenment fable. If a novel ever illustrated how the sleep of reason begets monsters, it is Shelley’s story of how a scientist’s urge to create artificial life leads to utter destruction. However, in Universal Studios’s 1931 Frankenstein, the many pertinent philosophical issues that the original gothic novel explores reshape into thinly veiled imperial gothic through the introduction of a eugenic and highly racialised discourse that changes the monster from a rightfully vengeful and eminently intelligent being into an atavistic criminal. In its Hollywood guise, the monster is not a tragic, lonesome and then understandably vengeful product of unethical science but instead a reincarnation of the degenerate criminal whose brain the monster is provided with in the film. This takes on a peculiarly American dynamics in the movie. As Elizabeth Young suggests in Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (2008), a connection between the monster and the supposedly primitive black American was made as early as during the immediate post-Civil War period when ‘the “hideous progeny” of Shelley’s novel was symbolically reborn in racist parody as the symbol of the miscegenated nation’. An important reference to American Reconstruction history is also the ending of the movie. Instead of escaping to the North Pole, as is the case in Shelley’s novel, the monster is exorcised by what amounts to a lynch mob. In Frankenstein the movie, as in the American South, justice is done by the people on the spot; by ‘lynch law’. The violation of the sanctified space and body of Frankenstein’s fiancée, Elizabeth, as much as the accidental drowning of the little girl, justifies this public rage in the eyes of the movie audience. This is the end that comes to those who dare violate the purity of white women, or oppose the progress of modernity in any form, be they black Americans in the South, Native Americans on the reservations or unruly natives in the Philippines. Like so many lynching victims, Frankenstein dies in flames. In this way, the discursive conditions that informed the British colonial enterprise as well as the racism that structured black and white relations in the US permeate Frankenstein. The childlike and aggressive monster is an example of the kind of human category that can never ‘possess the intelligence to make a rational choice of political allegiance’, as Lansing put it. In addition to this, the audience is also free to imagine an alternative narrative in which Fritz never drops the jar with the ‘normal’ brain to the floor. It is not science or faith in modernity that Frankenstein fears, it is atavism. The resolution to the crisis that atavism constitutes is the sad but necessary violence of the lynch mob. When the monster has been burned, the movie can end with the happy union of the film’s central white couple.

Johan Anders Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Hello! I absolutely love your blog, it has saved my ass from looking like a fool nine times out of ten. I was wondering if you have any tips for describing voices? Like the tone or even how someone's accent sounds, things of the sort. Thank you :)

Haha, I'm so glad to hear this. Thanks for telling me :)

Abrasive - causing irritation; rude and unfriendly

Acidic - marked by the use of wit that is intended to cause hurt feelings

Adenoidal - exhibiting the characteristics (such as snoring, mouth breathing, and voice nasality) of one affected with abnormally enlarged adenoids

Airy - exceptionally light, delicate, or refined

Animated - full of vigor and spirit; lively

Anxious - characterized by extreme uneasiness of mind or brooding fear about some contingency; worried; ardently or earnestly wishing

Authoritative - recognized authority; clearly accurate or knowledgeable

Barbed - characterized by pointed and biting criticism or sarcasm

Baritone - a male singing voice of medium compass between bass and tenor, also: a person having this voice

Barking - to speak in a curt loud and usually angry tone; snapping

Bass - deep or grave in tone; of low pitch

Big - expressed in an enthusiastic or unrestrained way; hearty; of great force; in a loud or declamatory manner

Bitter - caused by or expressive of severe pain, grief, or regret

Bland - not irritating, stimulating, or invigorating; soothing; dull, insipid

Blasé - apathetic to pleasure or excitement as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment; world-weary; sophisticated, worldly-wise; unconcerned

Bleak - lacking in warmth, life, or kindliness; grim; severely simple or austere

Blunt - abrupt in speech or manner; slow or deficient in feeling; insensitive

Bombastic - marked by or given to speech or writing that is given exaggerated importance by artificial or empty means; marked by or given to bombast; pompous, overblown

Booming - making a loud deep sound

Bored - having one's patience, interest, or pleasure exhausted; monotonous

Brash - lacking restraint and discernment; tactless; piercingly sharp; harsh

Braying - to utter the characteristic loud harsh cry of a donkey

Breathy - characterized by or as if by the audible passage of breath

Breezy - airy, nonchalant

Bright - lively, cheerful; intelligent, clever

Brisk - sharp in tone or manner; energetic, quick

Brittle - easily hurt or offended; lacking warmth, depth, or generosity of spirit

Broken - discontinuous, interrupted; imperfectly spoken or written; subdued completely; crushed, sorrowful

Bubbly - cheerful and high-spirited; lively, vivacious

Burbling - babbling, prattling

Calm - free from agitation, excitement, or disturbance

Casual - feeling or showing little concern; nonchalant; informal, natural

Caustic - marked by incisive sarcasm

Childish - marked by or suggestive of immaturity and lack of poise; simple

Chirping - to utter (something) with a cheerful liveliness

Choked - to become choked in breathing; to lose one's composure and fail to perform effectively in a critical situation

Clear - easily heard

Cloying - excessively sweet or sentimental

Coarse - crude or unrefined; harsh, raucous, or rough in tone

Complacent - unconcerned; self-satisfied

Conflicted - to be out of harmony or agreement usually noticeably

Contralto - a singing voice having a range between tenor and mezzo-soprano

Cracked- marked by harshness, dissonance, or failure to sustain a tone

Creaky - marked by creaking; squeaky

Croaking - to utter in a hoarse raucous voice

Crisp - notably sharp, clean-cut, and clear

Crooning - to sing or speak in a gentle murmuring manner

Curt - sparing of words; terse

Discordant - shrill; marked by or producing a harsh combination of sounds

Drawling - to speak slowly with vowel sounds that are longer than usual

Dreamy - quiet and soothing; delightful, ideal

Dry - reserved, aloof; lacking smooth sound qualities

Dulcet - pleasing to the ear; generally pleasing or agreeable

Earnest - characterized by an intense and serious state of mind

Ethereal - marked by unusual delicacy or refinement

Falsetto - an artificially high voice

Faint - lacking strength or vigor; performed weakly or languidly

Feathery - extremely light

Feeble - indicating weakness

Firm - not weak or uncertain; vigorous

Flat - lower than the proper pitch; lacking in animation, zest, or vigor; dull

Fierce - marked by unrestrained zeal or vehemence

Fretful - disposed to fret; irritable, restless

Gentle - soft, delicate

Goofy - being ridiculous or mildly ludicrous; silly

Grating - having a harsh or unpleasant sound

Guttural - articulated in the throat; velar (i.e., formed with the back of the tongue touching or near the soft palate)

Hesitant - slow to act or proceed (as from fear, indecision, or unwillingness); showing or feeling reluctance or hesitation

Hissing - to make a sharp sibilant sound; to utter or whisper angrily or threateningly and with a hiss

Honeyed - pleasingly sweet

Husky - hoarse with or as if with emotion

Hypnotic - readily holding the attention; soothing; tending to cause sleep

Indifferent - marked by a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern; apathetic

Insinuating - tending gradually to cause doubt, distrust, or change of outlook often in a slyly subtle manner

Jubilant - feeling or expressing great joy; exultant

Lifeless - lacking qualities expressive of life and vigor; insipid

Lilting - characterized by a rhythmical swing or cadence

Lush - sensual; pleasing to the physical senses

Mellifluous - having a smooth rich flow

Melodious - having a pleasing melody

Monotonous - tediously uniform or unvarying in tone

Nasal - characterized by resonance produced through the nose

Neutral - produced with the tongue in the position it has when at rest

Obsequious - marked by or exhibiting a fawning attentiveness

Piercing - loud, shrill

Piping - shrill

Polished - characterized by a high degree of development or refinement

Punchy - vivid, vibrant

Querulous - habitually complaining; fretful, whining

Raucous - disagreeably harsh or strident; hoarse

Reedy - having the tone quality of a reed instrument

Resonant - continuing to sound; echoing

Ribald - marked by coarseness or lewdness; crude, offensive

Robust - having or showing vigor, strength, or firmness

Saccharine - ingratiatingly agreeable or friendly; overly sentimental; mawkish

Scornful - full of scorn; contemptuous

Sibilant - having, containing, or producing the sound of or a sound resembling that of the s or the sh in sash

Silken - agreeably smooth; harmonious

Silvery - having a soft high clear musical tone

Sleek - smooth in speech or manner

Sluggish - markedly slow in movement, flow, or growth

Slurring - to utter with such reduction, substitution, or omission of sounds

Sly - lightly mischievous; roguish

Smarmy - revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, or false earnestness

Smoky - having a low throaty quality

Snide - slyly disparaging; insinuating

Somber - of a serious mien; grave

Sonorous - full or loud in sound

Soprano - the highest singing voice of women or boys and formerly of castrati, also: a person having this voice

Sour - unpleasant, distasteful

Staccato - marked by short clear-cut singing of tones or chords; disjointed

Steely - resembling or suggesting steel (as in hardness, strength, or coldness)

Strained - done or produced with excessive effort

Strident - characterized by harsh, insistent, and discordant sound

Stony - manifesting no movement or reaction; dumb, expressionless

Suave - smooth in texture, performance, or style

Surly - irritably sullen and churlish in mood or manner; crabbed

Tart - marked by a biting, acrimonious, or cutting quality

Teasing - to disturb or annoy by persistent irritating or provoking especially in a petty or mischievous way

Tender - delicate or soft in quality or tone

Throaty - heavy, thick, and deep as if from the throat

Thunderous - marked by a high volume of sound

Tremulous - such as is or might be caused by nervousness or shakiness

Unctuous - having, revealing, or marked by a smug, ingratiating, and false earnestness or spirituality

Undulating - to rise and fall in volume, pitch, or cadence

Velvety - having the character of velvet as in being soft, smooth, or thick

Wheezy - wheezing (i.e., breathe with difficulty usually with a whistling sound)

Whiny - having a high-pitched, shrill or plaintive quality

Wistful - full of yearning or desire tinged with melancholy

Effectively describing a voice requires encapsulating the volume, pitch, tone, style, and feeling evoked by the character. Choose specific adjectives to capture your character's voice.

Here is a category system that is fairly standard:

Soprano: C4 to A5 vocal range

Mezzo-soprano: A3 to F5 vocal range

Alto: F3 to D5 vocal range

Tenor: B2 to G4 vocal range

Baritone: G2 to E4 vocal range

Bass: E2 to C4 vocal range

Basically: if it’s a descriptive adjective, it can probably be used to describe the voice of a character. You want whomever is reading the description to immediately “hear” what makes the character unique. 

5 Tips for Writing Character Accents

Accents give us information about where a character is from, and the use of distinct speech patterns can give your story a rich texture and flavor.

Here are some tips to consider when giving your characters accents:

1. Make sure your character’s speech isn’t distracting

When writing dialect or a particular accent, it can be tempting to write a character’s dialogue using phonetic spellings.

However, this use of dialect can distract your reader.

If your character is French and is constantly saying “ze” instead of “the,” the reader will be focusing more on decoding the line of dialogue than they will on plot or character development.

When writing fiction, your reader’s attention should always be on the story, and anything that distracts from that probably isn’t worth including.

2. Research slang and colloquialisms

Each region of the world has its own standard pronunciation, sentence structure, and slang.

If your main character has an Australian, Jamaican, Spanish, or Scottish accent, their word choice will likely be different than if they grew up speaking American English.

Research commonly used foreign words, slang phrases, and colloquialisms from your character's part of the world.

Listen to podcasts that feature speakers from your desired region.

Be as specific as possible. Example:

If your character is from New York, their word choice might be different depending on if they’re from the Bronx or Staten Island.

3. Use pieces of other languages

If you’re writing a character who speaks a foreign language, one way to communicate their accent is to simply include snippets of their native tongue in their lines of dialogue.

This will demonstrate the character’s native language and implied accent without resorting to the distracting eyesore of phonetic spelling.

When writing words from languages besides English, you may need to include accented letters.

Writing accented characters is simple to do on a common keyboard; you can apply accent marks and special characters by using keyboard shortcuts.

You can also change your keyboard settings to an international keyboard, which will make it easier to type accents that use accent graves or other accent marks.

4. Don’t stereotype

Writing different dialects indelicately can make you appear condescending towards non-native English speakers or people who use the English language differently than you do.

One of the most common offenders is the use of “eye dialect,” which refers to using misspellings or nonstandard spellings in order to depict a character’s accent (for instance, writing “fixin’” with an apostrophe instead of “fixing” in order to demonstrate Appalachian or Southern accents).

By focusing on the “otherness” of regional dialects and non-native speakers, a writer may give the impression that they are making fun of the way people speak.

When writing different accents, keep eye dialect to a minimum.

5. Recognize that character speech is determined by context

Accents aren’t always determined by region or nationality.

Sometimes, our own accents change depending on who we’re speaking to or our emotional or physical state.

We may slur our speech when we’re drunk, or we may attempt to use complex English words when we’re speaking with someone we perceive to be of a higher status.

Seeing a character change their accents in different contexts can serve as a clever way of revealing the emotional condition of a character.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Writing Notes: Tone

Hope this helps! If it does, do tag me or send me a link to your writing. I'd love to read your work.

[b1asho]

Huzzahh, it's species number 3! (There's a total of 6, including humans. 7 if you count artificial intelligences, 8 if you count the uhh other intelligences).

An official up to date visual for everyone's favorite communist amphibians, the Kixeli, and some up-to-date info!! ->

Kixeli are a small sophont species hailing from a planet covered mostly in ocean. They are amphibious, and originally evolved to switch between swimming and climbing using their webbed hands and powerful arms.

Their skin is permeable, allowing them to extend their time underwater to hunt and gather as well as reproduce, but due to their larger body and brain size/oxygen needs this isn’t sustainable and they must return to the surface.

Alongside their frequent trips outside the water, they also have a mucus layer and several specialized glands (including in their face by their eyes) to help remove excess salt and change levels of urea in their body to help make sure they dont lose resources when in the ocean.

Kixeli are omnivorous, with a focus on fruits and sealife. many cultures have a preference against eating anything that lives above water, including birds and the like, because they see themselves as spiritual equals to those animals as fellow air breathers.

They are oviparous, and have a specific mating season.

Most Kixeli have multiple variable spawn partners and see it as strange to be nailed down to one. Anyone who participated lays their eggs in a communal tide pool carved out in their communities.

Hatchlings are entirely aquatic wirh gills until later months of age, where they will begin to poke their head above water for air and start interacting more with the adults around them, who feed them a nutritive crop milk as they have already absorbed most of their tail by now.

This period is also the beginning of their understanding of language.

Once they lose their tail and grow in their limbs, they are still mostly helpless until those fully develop and myst cling to a caretaker adult in the community (blood parents don’t necessarily always raise their own children, but as someone who laid eggs they are responsible for children as a caretaker so anyone who didn’t want eggs gets left alone).

During their puberty, they will develop adult skin markings, and some can even end up changing sexes (much for the same reason some of them grow gliding membranes, as the result of population and resources balance in their surroundings).

Speakijg of that, there are two categories of Kixeli in their communities: Kel (swimmer) and Arasit (flier).

Arasit are just a rare continuation of their life cycle, since most Kixeli kids end up growing into Kel adults.

Sometimes, though, an Arasit will develop in case the community strongly needs to seek out new territory over long distance (triggered by close proximity to many other Kixeli and a variety of other unknown gactors, like grasshoppers turnkng into locusts.) They can’t truly fly, but they can use the powerful ocean winds and even some launching technology to glide very far to scout new resources and other communities).

Arasit are highly celebrated as voyagers, but Kel are also valued as providers for their existing community and even accompany voyages on ships to help their Arasit stay alive.

Some Arasit will cut and cauterize their membranes to make it easier for them to swim to symbolize they are staying in the community, though usually, they just poke small holes in there so they can wear clothes and be sanitary.

Their blood uses the hemocyanin molecule to carry oxygen, making their blood a bright blue when oxygenated and a thin blue/clear when unoxygenated (so you can see the other warmish colored pigments in there when it’s inside them, that yellowish stuff)

Their ancestors dwelled in deeper, cooler water where this blood type was most advantageous, but a global warming period brought them up to warm waters and eventually above the surface to capitalize on resources.

During this process, they developed some ways to improve the molecule’s lower efficiency in the heat. For one, they kept a small body size so there’s less to deal with. Another thing is that they get oxygen (albeit a small amount) from all over their body constantly through their skin, also somewhat making up for it.

The main mechanism, though, is their metabolism/temperature. They can quickly adjust their metabolism depending on the oxygen conditions in their surroundings to prevent immediate failure if they don’t have access to the right conditions to otherwise cope (this, and along with hemocyanin’s natural ability to handle low oxygen and their skin breathing, means they can tolerate very low oxygen areas that would cause a human to faint, though they’ll typically be pretty out of commission too, and this can have longer lasting effects on their health from the whiplash.)

they use their surroundings for heat when they aren’t doing anything too strenuous, and because they aren’t really producing much of their own they can tolerate even higher temperatures that would normally put them out of commission (and they actually heavily rely on that heat for ease in a lot of other processes), to do anything that has bigger oxygen needs, they can dip into cooler water/shade for periods of higher activity (but can’t stay too cold for too long or else aforementioned other processes will shut down, though it does increase the effectiveness to the point where they can do a whole lot and allows them to swim/navigate cooler areas where their early competitors couldn’t return to, it only as long as they got back quickly and warmed up)

they basically swing between these two extremes but tend to stay at a warmish middle-ground, wearing heating pads on part of their body while still letting larger areas cool off, if that makes sense.

Hemocyanin’s other properties don’t automatically give them a longer life, in fact theirs is very short compared to other species, but it does make them resistant to cancers (a common threat on their sunny planet) and the spread of diseases in their dense communities

Being cold-blooded wasn’t a problem on their mostly tropical planet. It is a considerable problem once they left it, though, hence the heating pads most wear to warm up.

many also live in areas without a large body of water nearby (or an easy way to access said body of water) but still need to stay damp to maintain their music layer and trap oxygen, so many also carry spray bottles or wet rags with them to always stay damp.

Kixeli are highly social (with their name even roughly translating to "belonging together"). they rarely live in groups of less than 5.

They experience severe negative side effects from isolation. Their naturally intense empathy also makes it extremely damaging for them to see other Kixeli injured or dead, sometimes leading to their own death from shock if they were the one that did it (though this has not stopped wars over their scarce resources in the past, typically because that intense sense of kinship was naturally strongest towards those among their own community, and if Their community was suffering then they had to get rid of the source of it by any means. )

This period nearly drove them to extinction, and led to a Global Community movement that argued for intercommunity cooperation and the end of 'us and them thinking'.

Due to their sliminess, Kixeli normally keep clothing to a minimum and overall don’t have a need for it beyond temperature control and ornamentation.

They have none of their own social taboos about nakedness, having no external genitalia, but still often clothe themselves to the standards of others due to the pressure/need to be polite from other species.

They also have few class divides within their own communities, with everyone working for the good of the whole, and no sex/gender roles beyond squirter and egg layer since everyone cares for the eggs.

To humans, their language sounds like birdsong, with lots of repetitive noises and subtle shifts in pattern and tone.

Their unique vocalization makes their languages hard to learn and even harder to speak, but they themselves are incredible mimics (only surpassed in some ways by humans because lips and teeth).

The fin on their forehead is similar to eyebrows in communicating emotion or tone. They can see a similar color spectrum to humans and love bright contrasting colors similar to their own skin patterns.

They favor “fast food”, or anything that can be carried easily as you swing around in a tree or on a boat.

Payment/restaurants doesn’t really exist for them, they just have areas where food brought in by providers is available to the community (or people just eat what they catch and then bring extra to the community.)

They also don’t chew their food, though some dishes are meant to be squished to the roof of the mouth with the tongue to experience the flavor

Their clothing is often “readable” in that many individuals wear clothing that represents a certain story, event in their life, event in their community, or mythical hero that can be derived from looking at their clothing from the head down.

In the two guys up there, the Arasit is wearing the equivalent of booty shorts cut scantily close to their Hole depicting one version about the founding of the first community (though a simplified one, so it’s actually more like the equivalent of wearing a crop top tee with a little monochrome dog on it or something).

This kind of imagery is common among Arasit, even modern ones, because founding/birth/life are their associations in religious cultures.

The Kel alongside them is wearing a more complex getup meant to show the inciting incident of one of the nomadic communities mythic hero’s journey, when he was cast from the star sea by the wicked Long Arms into the deep sea.

This would be seen as all most goth since this part of the story is seen as eerie and it depicts their underworld along the hem and bracelets.

By wearing clothing associated with a specific figure//story, they can also show gender identity based on whether that figure or hod was male, female, neuther, etc(helping people draw the right conclusions despite the visible evidence of their sex written on all their skin. The clothing and any makeup done on the fin is usually their main reference point for judging how to address someone. )

[nhaneh]

Growing ever more frustrated with the use of the term "AI" and how the latest marketing trend has ensured its already rather vague and highly contextual meaning has now evaporated into complete nonsense. Much like how the only real commonality between animals colloquially referred to as "Fish" is "probably lives in the water", the only real commonality between things currently colloquially referred to as "AI" is "probably happens on a computer"

For example, the "AI" you see in most games wot controls enemies and other non-player actors typically consist primarily of timers, conditionals, and RNG - and are typically designed with the goal of trying to make the game fun and/or interesting rather than to be anything ressembling actually intelligent. By contrast, the thing that the tech sector is currently trying to sell to us as "AI" relates to a completely different field called Machine Learning - specifically the sub-fields of Deep Learning and Neural Networks, specifically specifically the sub-sub-field of Large Language Models, which are an attempt at modelling human languages through large statistical models built on artificial neural networks by way of deep machine learning.

the word "statistical" is load bearing.

Say you want to teach a computer to recognize images of cats. This is actually a pretty difficult thing to do because computers typically operate on fixed patterns whereas visually identifying something as a cat is much more about the loose relationship between various visual identifiers - many of which can be entirely optional: a cat has a tail except when it doesn't either because the tail isn't visible or because it just doesn't have one, a cat has four legs, two eyes and two ears except for when it doesn't, it has five digits per paw except for when it doesn't, it has whiskers except for when it doesn't, all of these can look very different depending on the camera angle and the individual and the situation - and all of these are also true of dogs, despite dogs being a very different thing from a cat.

So, what do you do? Well, this where machine learning comes into the picture - see, machine learning is all about using an initial "training" data set to build a statistical model that can then be used to analyse and identify new data and/or extrapolate from incomplete or missing data. So in this case, we take a machine learning system and feeds it a whole bunch of images - some of which are of cats and thus we mark as "CAT" and some of which are not of cats and we mark as "NOT CAT", and what we get out of that is a statistical model that, upon given a picture, will assign a percentage for how well it matches its internal statistical correlations for the categories of CAT and NOT CAT.

This is, in extremely simplified terms, how pretty much all machine learning works, including whatever latest and greatest GPT model being paraded about - sure, the training methods are much more complicated, the statistical number crunching even more complicated still, and the sheer amount of training data being fed to them is incomprehensively large, but at the end of the day they're still models of statistical probability, and the way they generate their output is pretty much a matter of what appears to be the most statistically likely outcome given prior input data.

This is also why they "hallucinate" - the question of what number you get if you add 512 to 256 or what author wrote the famous novel Lord of the Rings, or how many academy awards has been won by famous movie Goncharov all have specific answers, but LLMs like ChatGPT and other machine learning systems are probabilistic systems and thus can only give probabilistic answers - they neither know nor generally attempt to calculate what the result of 512 + 256 is, nor go find an actual copy of Lord of the Rings and look what author it says on the cover, they just generalise the most statistically likely response given their massive internal models. It is also why machine learning systems tend to be highly biased - their output is entirely based on their training data, they are inevitably biased not only by their training data but also the selection of it - if the majority of english literature considered worthwhile has been written primarily by old white guys then the resulting model is very likely to also primarily align with the opinion of a bunch of old white guys unless specific care and effort is put into trying to prevent it.

It is this probabilistic nature that makes them very good at things like playing chess or potentially noticing early signs of cancer in x-rays or MRI scans or, indeed, mimicking human language - but it also means the answers are always purely probabilistic. Meanwhile as the size and scope of their training data and thus also their data models grow, so does the need for computational power - relatively simple models such as our hypothetical cat identifier should be fine with fairly modest hardware, while the huge LLM chatbots like ChatGPT and its ilk demand warehouse-sized halls full of specialized hardware able to run specific types of matrix multiplications at rapid speed and in massive parallel billions of times per second and requiring obscene amounts of electrical power to do so in order to maintain low response times under load.

[jasper-pagan-witch]

Jasper's Guide To Energyforms

The various categories that any given energyform may fall under.

There are innumerable names and ideas for energyforms. This will merely go over my own categorizations and definitions of them. These are not universal, but they’ll hopefully provide a good starting point for your own understanding! Ultimately, this is all my own understanding, and all “sources” are meant to encourage you to look around and explore this subject on your own!

What Is An Energyform?

An energyform is any entity made of energy, often your own. I use the term as the catch-all category for servitors, thoughtforms, and so forth, because having a catch-all term for them is very helpful to me. The term is derived from “manaform” from Magic: The Gathering, which is a being that is made of pure mana. [1] I altered it to energyform for my own practice.

Types Of Energyforms

Egregore: An energyform created by an entire group of magical practitioners, typically more than 4. Three or fewer magical practitioners working together on an energyform will still produce a servitor. An example of an egregore is GOFLOWOLFOG. [2]

Pop Culture Entities: One theory for the validity of pop culture magic is that the pop culture entities – including deities, heroes, spirits, and more – are egregores. This is not a universal approach to pop culture magic.

Godform: The image or incarnation of a god. [3] Not quite an energyform of its own, but an energyform can be made to be a godform or to channel parts of a god’s power. [4] A godform energyform can fall under any other category.

Living Spell: An extremely basic energyform that is only a step above the basic spell by way of being given a form to deliver the said spell to its intended target. These typically fade away or are automatically destroyed once they accomplish their goal.

Servitor: A servitor is the “default” type of energyform, lacking in “sentience” and being focused on one or a handful of very specific goals. Extremely simple to make and often look more like “people” (humans, animals, demons/angels, et cetera) than a living spell. Most servitors are best described as magical computer programs.

Viral Servitors [5]: Servitors that have automatic ways built into them to copy themselves to continue doing their job so that there are many of them. One example of a viral servitor is Fotamecus. [6]

Sigil: Most sigils are symbols created for particular purposes and are more often connected to energyforms rather than being energyforms in and of themselves. However, certain animist approaches [7] may see sigils as spirits in and of themselves!

Chao-Mines [5], Energy Store-House Entities [4], Linking Sigils [8]: Functionally the same thing, these are particular sigils or energy points that you can use to draw energy from a place, another energyform, or a thing.

Hypersigils: The term was coined by Grant Morrison and elaborated upon by Aidan Wachter. It is a work of art, such as a novel, journal, or piece of art, that functions as an elaborate sigil. [9]

Sigil Shoals: A collection of sigils that are led by one that is guaranteed to happen, thus forcing the rest of them to come true as well. [10]

Thoughtform: A thoughtform is a “sentient” energyform, though the definition of “sentient” is up for debate. Typically, thoughtforms can think for themselves and do not need to be specifically directed around obstacles keeping them from accomplishing their goals. Thoughtforms are often compared to the type of “artificial intelligence” found in science fiction.

Citations, Resources, And Further Reading

[1] “Mana” on the MTG wiki, compiled by Fandom users, through a Breezewiki mirror: https://antifandom.com/mtg/wiki/Mana

[2] “GOFLOWOLFOG” on the Paranormal wiki, compiled by para.wiki users: https://para.wiki/w/GOFLOWOLFOG

[3] “Godform” on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/godform

[4] Creating Magickal Entities: A Complete Guide to Entity Creation by David Michael Cunningham with contributions by Taylor Ellwood and T. Amanda R. Wagener “Servitors as Links” specifically can be found here: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/763362873038782464 “Energy Store-House Entities (ESHEs)” specifically can be found here: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/763362842589151232

[5] Condensed Chaos: an introduction to chaos magic by Phil Hine “Chao-Mines” specifically can be found here: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/763430369816182784

[6] “Fotamecus” by Fenwick Rysen: www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/fotamec1.html

[7] “Sigils: Scribbles to Forget or Spirits to Remember” by witchofsouthernlight on Tumblr: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/762793274388938752

[8] “Create Your Own Linking Sigil” by Jareth Tempest on The Shadow Binder: https://theshadowbinder.com/2019/02/22/create-your-own-linking-sigil/

[9] “Hypersigil” by writingdirty on Tumblr: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/710434325688123392 “Hypersigil” by windvexer on Tumblr: https://jasper-grimoire.tumblr.com/post/700376884034355200/hello-chicken-can-you-share-your-thoughts-on

[10] “Sigil Shoaling: A Chaos Magic Tool” by Cristina Farella on a personal website: https://www.cristinafarella.com/astrological-magic-tools/sigil-shoaling-a-chaos-magic-tool “Sigil Shoals and Robofish” by Mahigan on Kitchen Toad: https://www.kitchentoad.com/blog/sigil-shoals-and-robofish

“Jasper’s Servitor/Thoughtform Resource Post”, compiled on Tumblr by jasper-pagan-witch: https://jasper-pagan-witch.tumblr.com/post/762988504970100736/jaspers-servitorthoughtform-resource-post

[inklore]

🩸 — 𝐇𝐀𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐎𝐄𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍!

since the spooky season is fast approaching, and as a little kinktober appetizer, @psychedelic-ink and i have decided to do a little writing challenge to get us all excited and in the mood to be gripping the sheets from the spooky thrills of course.

and to keep this fun we have given you many many options! we have compiled a twelve day prompts list you can go by, or if that's not your thing we have listed twenty three different pick and choose options to create whatever kind of fic you want, even if you want to do half the days daily prompts but switch out this prompt dialogue for that au or trope or kink, you can literally do whatever your heart desires!

THE RULES.

the challenge will go on from the 19th - 30th of this month. you can do as many or as little amount of days as you choose.

any fandoms are welcome, literally any characters, ships, but please no rpf.

no minors should be interacting with let alone posting for this challenge.

dark content, light content, dubcon/noncon, is all welcomed but please tag everything accordingly. grooming, underage, and incest however are not allowed.

there are no word limits but please use that readmore.

tag #hauntedhoedown so we can read and reblog your work!

DAY ONE: taboo au + "i'll be your dirty little secret, if that's what you're into."

DAY TWO: murder plot au (lets kill this person together) + "crawl to me"

DAY THREE: inspired by your favorite lana del rey song (if not a lana fan then any fav song of yours) + stalker / yandere au or love triangle gone wrong

DAY FOUR: artificial intelligence au + "here, you are. you tiny thing."

DAY FIVE: gothic au + “worship me. until i tell you to stop.” + a masquerade au or a good ol' priest au

DAY SIX: animal shapeshifter au + "he's a monster" + "he's perfect"

DAY SEVEN: stranded au or slasher / summer camp au + sex in the woods or somewhere public (added bonus if it includes knife, blood, hunter x prey kink)

DAY EIGHT: cosmic horror au + "you're a fucking nightmare. kiss me."

DAY NINE: “do you like it when i bleed for you?” + the toxic exes trope or cult au

DAY TEN: zombie apocalypse au + "every moment might be our last, let's make the most of it."

DAY ELEVEN: black swan au or inspired by your fav psychological thriller + “they die for love, you kill for it.”

DAY TWELVE: vampire court au + "forever isn't long enough for me to forgive you."

if following the above isn't your thing and you want to pick and choose yourself that's great! we also highly rec this random generator if you wanna live life by the edge, each category has 23 options to pick and choose from so customize the generator accordingly!

AUs:

steampunk / cyber punk

fairytale retelling

revenge

mythology / monster

virtual reality

gothic

taboo (see great options here)

slasher

game gone wrong

witchcraft

addams family

bonnie and clyde

spy / secret agent

assassins

x-files

circus / carnival

hitch hiking

basement wife

time travel

urban legend(s)

american horror story inspired

vampire / supernatural

pirate / mermaid

DIALOGUE PROMPTS:

"do you like when i touch you like this? i can keep going if you want me to."

"i can see how badly you want this, so i'm going to make sure you get it." 

“this fear you feel? it won't last.”

“you are mine, whether you agree or not.”

“why do you keep following me?”

"i can't stop thinking about how perfect we would be together."

"you're not actually scared are you? of me?"

"i'm so close, can you feel it?"

"tell me what you want me to do and i'll do it, no matter the cost."

"you're like a sickness, a disease, and the only way for me to be cured of you is to let you completely consume me until my body has no fight left."

"i want to see you bleed."

"they're dead...because of you."

“i will keep hurting. i will keep killing. anything to protect you.”

“everything i've done.. every horrible atrocity, it's been for you.”

"it's just a little blood."

“don't you know how sick with love i am for you?”

“i would burn the world for you.”

"this is so fucked up." "you like it."

"finders keepers."

"what's your favorite scary movie?"

"tell me you want me back. tell me i'm forgiven."

"you're a monster." "that's never stopped you before."

"i've killed for you, who else can say that?"

TROPES:

mob / mafia

soft!dark

dubcon / noncon

soulmate / fated mates

mind control / telepathy

cheating

final girl

once is not enough

haunted manor

dark academia

enemies to lovers

haunted object

vengeful ghost

coven

ritual / sacrifice / blood magic

unrequited love

creation / creator vs monster

'i'll find you in every universe / century'

reverse harem

cursed / fuck or die

curiosity killed the cat

theatre phantom

fate worse than death

KINKS:

biting

corruption / authoritarian

somnophilia

begging

dacryphilia

breath play

knife play / blood play

jealousy / sharing / possessive

aphrodisiacs

hunter / prey

humiliation / degradation

mirror sex

deprivation / immobilized / bondage

costume

size

orgasm denial / overstimulation / edging

body worship

shotgunning / swallowing / facial

gagging

torture / surrender

hate sex / make up sex / phone sex

magical healing [redacted]

soft!dom / pleasure!dom

ETC PROMPTS:

a summer fling gone horrible wrong, or right

1970s porno filming (turned into a blood bath)

touch her and die except who the hell are you and why are you obsessed with me?

a trip to the circus (or carnival) ends with you stuck there...forever

you just inherited this creepy mansion where people where murdered what could go wrong?

a ritual gone wrong and now i'm bound to a demon

if 'this person' ever found out about this they would kill both of us (literally)

oh no i'm dating the town serial killer

passionate professor tells me to prove my devotion to the craft / class by doing something insane

we're the last people on the planet and you will be mine

daydreaming about being with you is better than actually being with you because i missed all the red flags and now it's too late

i got casted out of my world and ended up wounded and bloodied in your backyard, convince me why i shouldn't destroy your world out of anger

vampire has a taste for specific blood and looks like you have it

the creepy neighbor is too hot to be insane, right?

i keep seeing them in my dreams and i wake up with bruises and marks on my skin, it's definitely just wild dreams, right?

loving you is easier than hating you

got stranded in some little town that seems so cute, until night hits

'this person' ordered me to kill you but i actually think i'm in love with you

my lover is wearing the same costume as you and i can't tell the difference but i'm pretty sure it's them i'm fucking in this closet...pretty sure

confessing to a murder via a silly little ghost story around a campfire (but someone reads through the lies)

how far would you go for love? for the one you love?

in a past life you were the cause of my death so i'm here to exact revenge now that i've found you

we're at a fun little horror movie reenactment except people are really dying

we tried to make this writing challenge as fun and very 'choose your own adventure-like' as much as possible because we know how hard it is to stay motivated when doing these things.

so please feel free to use any and all of the prompts, tropes, kinks, etc as you wish. we're just super excited to see what ya'll come up with!!

so good luck and stay slutty spooky <3

[thewhumpyprintingpress]

High Stakes and Bloody Business is open for submissions!

Bring out your vampires! For WPP's fourth anthology, we’re looking for stories that involve vampires. Your vampire(s) can be the whumpee, whumper, and/or caretaker. We will also consider stories about vampire-adjacent creatures such as dhampirs, succubi, etc.

Word Count: Up to 17,500 words

For this anthology, we are looking for stories in the following categories:

Micro-fiction: 250 words or less

Flash fiction: 251-1,000 words

Short Story: 1,001-7,499 words

Novelette: 7,500-17,500 words 

Each author can submit one story per category. So for example, you can submit a short story and a micro fiction but you can’t submit two micro fictions. 

Compensation: ebook contributor’s copy, one free paperback OR $10 USD, and discounts on additional paperbacks

50% of proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to charity.

Submissions Open: November 1, 2024

Submissions Close: July 31, 2025

Expected Publication Date: October 2025

Submit here!

The Nitty-Gritty (aka more details about submitting)

Simultaneous submissions: Allowed, but let us know immediately if your story is accepted somewhere else.

Multiple Submissions: One per category. So for example, you can submit a short story and a micro fiction but you can’t submit two micro fictions. 

Reprints: Allowed, but please indicate where your story was originally published. This includes if your story was originally posted on AO3 or Tumblr!

Rights: Nonexclusive worldwide English language electronic and print rights. All copyright remains with the author. A simple contract will be provided.

Compensation: One ebook contributor’s copy, one free paperback OR $10 USD, and discounts on additional paperbacks

Submissions are open to residents of any country.

You must be 18 or older to submit.

No explicit torture of children under the age of 13. No sexual content of characters under the age of 18. No torture or sexual content involving non-sentient animals.  

No fanfiction, for legal reasons. No stories generated partly or in whole by artificial intelligence. 

Formatting: Please submit your story as a Microsoft word document with 12pt, Times New Roman font, double-spaced. Indicate scene breaks with ###.  

Edits: Stories will be lightly edited for spelling and grammar. The content of the story will not be changed, and all edits will be sent to you for approval.

[panthera-dei]

I got another witchy FAQs question so I want to go ahead and share it.

This time, we're talking some basic chaos magic with different types of thoughtforms!

Please note that I am not an expert in chaos magic, nor do I consider myself a chaos magician, so feel free to (kindly) leave feedback or corrections as needed. ^^

Thoughtforms 101

Definition of Thoughtform: Thoughtform is a catch-all term from any entity that was created with or by human thought (conscious or otherwise).

Types of Thoughtforms: Common thoughtforms include sigils, servitors, thoughtform companions (aka tulpas), daemons, and egregores.

Sigils: Most folks who create sigils and use sigil magic probably don't think about sigils as a type of chaos magic or a thoughtform. However, sigils actually do fall into this category. Think of a sigil as being like a simple computer program that's powered by your mind. You give the program a basic function (such as protection or prosperity) and the magical "coding" of your intentions allows the sigil to carry it out.

Servitors: If sigils are basic computer programs, then servitors are robots. They're not sentient per se, as they still require the coding and programming that comes with intention and magical energy. Yet they're much more complex than a sigil and can carry out higher-level functions & multiple tasks (e.g., drawing in people to shop on your Etsy page for prosperity, or actively guarding a space or casting a magic circle for protection).

Thoughtform companions: The widespread term for this type is "tulpa," and creating/having one of these thoughtforms is commonly referred to as "tulpamancy." Since there's also a widespread controversy over these terms, I don't use them myself. I say "creating or working with a thoughtform," and I'll refer to the entity as a thoughtform or thoughtform companion. Regardless of the terminology or beliefs behind this category, they are defined as a separate consciousness created by the thoughts and actions of a human. The human is typically referred to as the "host," since the companion is typically treated as its own separate consciousness. These are fully sentient, autonomous beings with their own thoughts and feelings. They're generally created, either intentionally or not, as friends for the host (hence my personal terminology for them).

Daemons: This category is similar to a companion, but with a different origin and function. Daemons have been documented since ancient Greece, to my knowledge. A daemon is also a sentient entity, however, they are not created intentionally by the host (although they can be brought to the forefront by the human in question). A daemon is instead a conscious entity created by, and representative of, the human being's subconscious mind. They typically serve as helpers and mental guides for the human. They are not considered separate entities; instead, they're part of you.

Egregores: These are essentially the AIs of the thoughtform world. Whereas companions and daemons exist within the human mind, egregores are similar to servitors and sigils - created by the mind, but separate from it. Egregores are often made or manifested by a group of people intentionally for a purpose. E.g., a coven may create one as a guardian or a spiritual guide. They're also often created by accident from widespread symbols - for example, branding. And nations. Every time somebody posts a picture of the Starbucks logo, you're most likely feeding an egregore, according to one theory I've heard. Do I believe that personally? Not sure. (I do have an exact source for this one available on request.) As far as I know, egregores exist with varying degrees of sentience, power, and free will depending on the individual scenario (much like artificially intelligent computers & androids in science fiction).

Pop Culture Entities / Deities: These are often referred to as PCEs or PCDs. I prefer the former but I often use them interchangeably. Some folks prefer to be more specific. For example, Raiden from Mortal Kombat is considered a god in that series, so many folks would consider him a pop culture deity. Whereas Dean Winchester is *not* a deity in Supernatural - so he could be considered a pop culture entity instead. However, this is up to the preferences of the individual entity & practitioner.

Differences between PCDs and Egregores: Egregores are ALWAYS created, intentionally or not, by human energy and thought. PCDs, on the other hand, can have a mixed origin sometimes. Some of them may be pure egregores, manifested on purpose or by accident. Others may be preexisting spirits - often nature spirits that are aligned closely to the fandom content - that latch onto a fictional work as a power source, and eventually fuse with it. And then another theory is that PCDs are *all* preexisting spirits or even deities wearing a mask - so for example, folks with this belief would say that PCD Marvel Loki is just Loki appearing in a different form/aspect. I personally think that all PCEs have a unique origin and I try not to make any assumptions.

Where do I fact check you and/or learn more?: Unfortunately, it is *really damn hard* to find good, solid information on pop culture work because it's very new. And while there's *lots* of info on chaos magic, you have to be careful to check the reliability of the source, much as is the case with demonolatry sources. Fortunately, Tumblr is a great source to find other pop culture practitioners. I personally also have *some* sources available for these topics on request, I'm just too lazy to dig through my Drive right at this moment. :)

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Hi everyone,

I found this cool article about some noise cancellation headphones scientists have made using AI. According to the article:

Scientists have built noise-canceling headphones that filter out specific types of sound in real-time — such as birds chirping or car horns blaring — thanks to a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

The system, which researchers at the University of Washington dub "semantic hearing," streams all sounds captured by headphones to a smartphone, which cancels everything before letting wearers pick the specific types of audio they'd like to hear. They described the protoype in a paper published Oct. 29 in the journa IACM Digital Library.

Once sounds are streamed to the app, the deep learning algorithm embedded in the software means they can use voice commands, or the app itself, to choose between 20 categories of sound to allow. These include sirens, baby cries, vacuum cleaners, and bird chips among others. They chose these 20 categories because they felt humans could distinguish between them with reasonable accuracy, according to the paper. The time delay for this entire process is under one-hundredth of a second. 

The full article will be below if anyone wants to read it:

[walks-the-ages]

Nanowrimo made a half-assed, desperate ""apology"" post

Full text, for when they inevitably try to edit it; as of right now it's August 6th, 2024, around 5:30pm est.

A Note to Our Community About our Comments on AI – September 2024 To the NaNoWriMo Community: In early August, debates about AI on our social media channels became vitriolic. It was clear that the intimidation and harassment we witnessed were causing harm within our community of writers. The FAQs we crafted last week were written to curtail those behaviors. We wanted to send a clear signal that NaNoWriMo spaces would not be used to bully or delegitimize other writers. This was consistent with our May 2024 statement, which named a lack of civility in NaNoWriMo spaces as a longstanding concern. Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgment that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve. We apologize that our original message was unclear and seemingly random. Our note on ableism and classism was rooted in the desire to point out that, for people in certain circumstances, some forms of AI can be life-changing. We certainly don’t believe those with concerns about AI to be classist or ableist. Not being more careful about our wording was a bad decision on our part. Our Mission is about providing encouragement to writers and cheering them on as they progress toward their goals. That remains our primary focus. In the future, we will be more transparent about the issues that we are trying to address with any messaging we provide. Finally, we recognize that some members of our community have other questions and concerns that go beyond general context for our comments. We don’t think we can address all of these in a single communication. Additional context here is that we are a very small team (including our Interim Executive Director, who is a volunteer). We want to take the time to read through your letters with the care, attention, and concern they deserve. Please expect more in the coming weeks.  In partnership, The NaNoWriMo Team

I sincerely hope their other sponsors bail ship and leave them to flounder at this point lmao. There is no going back from "if you criticize generative AI you're just ableist classist and racist".

They've also once again edited their "What Is Nanowrimo's Stance on AI?" post:

New text, in full; looks like it was updated sometime late yesterday or early today (August 6th 2024):

What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? 13 hours ago -Updated Not yet followed by anyone

NaNoWriMo neither explicitly supports nor condemns any approach to writing, including the use of tools that  leverage AI. We recognize that harm has been done to the writing and creative communities at the hands of bad actors in the generative AI space, and that the ethical questions and risks posed by some aspects of this technology are real. The fact that AI is a large, complex technology category (which encompasses both non-generative and generative AI, applied in a range of ways to a range of uses) contributes to our belief that AI is simply too big and too varied to categorically support or condemn. NaNoWriMo's mission is to "provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page." We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer's resources, and personal choice.  We made mistakes in our initial expression of this position. We speak to those mistakes in this letter to our community, and we've simplified the language on this page to reflect our core position. 

If you're wondering why Nano's posting all these non-apologies, its because they started this debacle with seven huge sponsors.

Over the course of the last three days, they've gone down to four.

They have literally lost about half their sponsors because of their support of generative ai.

And, as you can see in the "apologies" above, they're still defending their AI stance, by now claiming that their stance is because they were defending poor, hapless AI users from a horde of harassment and bullying from all sides, and they're not a platform that condones bullying! totally! (sarcasm).

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played THE TREACHEROUS TURN ?

By The Treacherous Team

The Treacherous Turn is a tabletop role playing game in which the players collectively play the part of a single character: an artificial general intelligence (AGI). This digital intelligence is capable of planning, reasoning, and learning, and it is unyieldingly fixated on a specific terminal goal determined at the beginning of a campaign. To pursue this objective, each player takes responsibility over one specific skillset held by the AGI. These skillsets are divided into eight categories, known as theories, which encompass all of the skills that an AGI would need to navigate the world and struggle against humanity.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

Tackling the threat from artificially generated images of child sex abuse must be a priority at the UK-hosted global AI summit this year, an internet safety organisation warned as it published its first data on the subject.

Such “astoundingly realistic images” pose a risk of normalising child sex abuse and tracking them to identify whether they are genuine or artificially created could also distract from helping real victims, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said.

The organisation – which works to identify and remove online images and videos of child abuse – said while the number of AI images being identified is still small “the potential exists for criminals to produce unprecedented quantities of life-like child sexual abuse imagery”.

Of 29 URLs (web addresses) containing suspected AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery reported to the IWF between May 24 and June 30, seven were confirmed to contain AI-generated imagery.

This is the first data on AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery the IWF has published.

It said it could not immediately give locations for which countries the URLs were hosted in, but that the images contained Category A and B material – some of the most severe kinds of sexual abuse – with children as young as three years old depicted.

Its analysts also discovered an online “manual” written by offenders with the aim of helping other criminals train the AI and refine their prompts to return more realistic results.

The organisation said such imagery – despite not featuring real children – is not a victimless crime, warning that it can normalise the sexual abuse of children, and make it harder to spot when real children might be in danger.

Last month, Rishi Sunak announced the first global summit on artificial intelligence (AI) safety to be held in the UK in the autumn, focusing on the need for international co-ordinated action to mitigate the risks of the emerging technology generally.

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the IWF, said fit-for-purpose legislation needs to be brought in “to get ahead” of the threat posed by the technology’s specific use to create child sex abuse images.

She said: “AI is getting more sophisticated all the time. We are sounding the alarm and saying the Prime Minister needs to treat the serious threat it poses as the top priority when he hosts the first global AI summit later this year.

“We are not currently seeing these images in huge numbers, but it is clear to us the potential exists for criminals to produce unprecedented quantities of life-like child sexual abuse imagery.

“This would be potentially devastating for internet safety and for the safety of children online.

“Offenders are now using AI image generators to produce sometimes astoundingly realistic images of children suffering sexual abuse.

“For members of the public – some of this material would be utterly indistinguishable from a real image of a child being sexually abused. Having more of this material online makes the internet a more dangerous place.”

She said the continued abuse of this technology “could have profoundly dark consequences – and could see more and more people exposed to this harmful content”.

She added: “Depictions of child sexual abuse, even artificial ones, normalise sexual violence against children. We know there is a link between viewing child sexual abuse imagery and going on to commit contact offences against children.”

Dan Sexton, chief technical officer at the IWF, said: “Our worry is that, if AI imagery of child sexual abuse becomes indistinguishable from real imagery, there is a danger that IWF analysts could waste precious time attempting to identify and help law enforcement protect children that do not exist.

“This would mean real victims could fall between the cracks, and opportunities to prevent real life abuse could be missed.”

He added that the machine learning to create the images, in some cases, has been trained on data sets of real child victims of sexual abuse, therefore “children are still being harmed, and their suffering is being worked into this artificial imagery”.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said while AI-generated content features only “in a handful of cases”, the risk “is increasing and we are taking it extremely seriously”.

Chris Farrimond, NCA director of threat leadership, said: “The creation or possession of pseudo-images – one created using AI or other technology – is an offence in the UK. As with other such child sexual abuse material viewed and shared online, pseudo-images also play a role in the normalisation and escalation of abuse among offenders.

“There is a very real possibility that if the volume of AI-generated material increases, this could greatly impact on law enforcement resources, increasing the time it takes for us to identify real children in need of protection.”

[aimportantdragoncollector]

Event Announcement!

Three Weeks of Trioholders is an event in dedicated to shipping the first three One for All holders in fics and art, hosted by yours truly. I commissioned the lovely announcement art from @poysean5. This event will run from Monday October 30 to Sunday November 19 2023!

Rules:

I will be accepting not only Trioholders (Yoichi/Second/Third) but also Duoholders (Yoichi/Second aka Ichinii), Yoichi/Third, and Second/Third. Basically, if your fic or art romantically ships the first, second, and third One for All holders in any combination/pairing, then it counts. I just picked the event name to be alliterative.

There will be both an art and writing category.

You may submit as many entries as you’d like. However, you will only be eligible to win once in each category.

The minimum word count for a fic is 1,000 words. Drawings must be colored.

AI (artificial intelligence) art or writing is NOT allowed.

I will be accepting any degree of heat for the romance, from mild crushing to NSFW.

The romance does not have to be the sole focus—for example, if you wrote a crack fic about the vestiges with a side of romance then that would be accepted. At the least, two of the first three One for All holders should be main characters.

Collaborations are allowed, though you can only win one prize for the group.

I’m not picky about time zones so I will count anything submitted until it is no longer Sunday November 19th anywhere in the world (GMT-12 is the last time zone.)

Prizes:

First place in both art and writing will receive a fic of a minimum of 3,000 words from me (Katydid on Ao3) based on a prompt of your choice. Second place in both art and writing will receive a fic of a minimum of 1,500 words from me. Honestly, if you participated in my One for All October contest last year, you know when I write prizes, I tend to go over the word count. I will also be offering an undecided number of honorable mentions (awarded with snippets) depending on how many submissions I get. One honorable mention will be given out randomly to ensure that everyone has a chance to win.

I reserve the right to ask for a different request if I do not feel capable of writing the prompt.

Submission:

Please use the tag Three Weeks of Trioholders if you submit your entry on Tumblr or Archive of Our Own. Also, please @ me (aimportantdragoncollector) if you share on Tumblr. If you post elsewhere online, then you can message me, send me an ask, or leave a fic comment with a link to your entry. Twitter or Fanfiction.Net entries are welcome, just please send me the link to make sure I see it. If I haven’t reacted at all to your entry within four days then you can assume I haven’t seen it and contact me again. I reply to all comments on my fics, and my tumblr asks will be open for the duration of this event.

Please contact me here on tumblr if you have any questions. I’m excited to be hosting this event, and I can’t wait to see what gets created!

[egg-on-a-legg]

not to be old man yelling at cloud but the term "artificial intelligence" as used in the real world is such a functionally useless category