#genai

[yourbookcouldbegayer]

PSA: Your AO3 work might have been scraped for a GenAI dataset

(PLEASE NOTE: At this time, access to the dataset has been disabled. You can file a DMCA takedown request if your work is included in the scraped data to campaign for full deletion, but at this time it is considered unnecessary.)

This is intended as a general notification for all the writers following this blog who post on AO3.

Approximately 12.6 million public works were scraped from AO3 and several other published-work sites, including PaperDemon, which has regular updates on the situation as well as resources. Here is the link to their updates.

Affected AO3 users are those whose work IDs were public-facing (that is to say, not locked to registered AO3 users only), and whose work IDs are between 1 and 63,200,000.

Your work ID is the number in your work's site URL, like so:

This work has an ID only in the 61-million range, and so was scraped for the dataset.

If you wish to lock your works to be visible to logged-in users only, you can do so through Works > Edit Works > All > Edit > Only show to registered users.

[smiegrin]

Yeah, there really needs to be a better word for it, because the other one people will reach for is "lie." That is better at capturing the misinformation aspect, but it leads to things like my dad getting worried that ChatGPT is capable of deception. Like there's a computer out there that's just biding its time and laying low before it STRIKES!!!!!

OP is right, though, "hallucination" is still a word that kind of implies there's a whole Mind/Self/Concept of the World behind the output regardless of truth value. (There is not, in fact, such an entity driving the output.)

I'm pissed they got away with calling it a "hallucination" when their dumb computer thing says wrong information. I don't think they should get to have that.

[leidensygdom]

So, Discord has added a feature that lets other people "enhance" or "edit" your images with different AI apps. It looks like this:

Currently, you can't opt out from this at all. But here's few things you can do as a protest.

FOR SERVERS YOU ARE AN ADMIN IN

Go to Roles -> @/everyone roles -> Scroll all the way down to External Apps, and disable it. This won't delete the option, but it will make people receive a private message instead when they use it, protecting your users:

You should also make it a bannable offense to edit other user's images with AI. Here's how I worded it in my server, feel free to copypaste:

Do not modify other people's images with AI under ANY circumstances, such as with the Discord "enhancement" features, amidst others. This is a bannable offense.

COMPLAIN TO DISCORD

There's few ways to go around this. First, you can go to https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/requests/new , select Help and Support -> Feedback/New Feature Request, and write your message, as seen in the screenshot below.

For the message, here's some points you can bring up:

Concerns about harassment (such as people using this feature to bully others)

Concerns about privacy (concerns on how External Apps may break privacy or handle the data in the images, and how it may break some legislations, such as GDPR)

Concerns about how this may impact minors (these features could be used with pictures of irl minors shared in servers, for deeply nefarious purposes)

BE VERY CLEAR about "I will refuse to buy Nitro and will cancel my subscription if this feature remains as it is", since they only care about fucking money

Word them as you'd like, add onto them as you need. They sometimes filter messages that are copypasted templates, so finding ways to word them on your own is helpful.

ADDING: You WILL NEED to reply to the mail you receive afterwards for the message to get sent to an actual human! Otherwise it won't reach anyone

UNSUSCRIBE FROM NITRO

This is what they care about the most. Unsuscribe from Nitro. Tell them why you unsuscribed on the way out. DO NOT GIVE THEM MONEY. They're a company. They take actions for profit. If these actions do not get them profit, they will need to backtrack. Mass-unsuscribing from WOTC's DnD beyond forced them to back down with the OGL, this works.

LEAVE A ONE-STAR REVIEW ON THE APP

This impacts their visibility on the App store. Write why are you leaving the one-star review too.

_

Regardless of your stance on AI, I think we can agree that having no way for users to opt out of these pictures is deeply concerning, specially when Discord is often used to share selfies. It's also a good time to remember internet privacy and safety- Maybe don't post your photos in big open public servers, if you don't want to risk people doing edits or modifications of them with AI (or any other way). Once it's posted, it's out of your control.

Anyways, please reblog for visibility- This is a deeply concerning topic!

[incognitopolls]

This poll is asking about voluntary use of generative AI. For the purposes of this poll, do not count instances where you were required to use generative AI (e.g. for a school assignment, job required it, etc).

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[ahb-writes]

(from The Mitchells vs. the Machines, 2021)

[ibboard]

Some of this could just be coincidence, like how people suddenly see a thing everywhere after first learning of it (the frequency illusion). Maybe it the Amazon seller is just the most prominent seller and it got trained on lots of their reviews, or they're in a fairly obvious city (or mentioned enough things in previous chats that nudged the context of the discussion towards that city)

But it could also be that OpenAI are working with data brokers for "personalisation" and people are starting to realise how invasive it is.

Either way, GenAI is crap and surveillance capitalism is crap and the world would be a whole lot better without either of them!

people who are just finding out about internet tracking and data mining in the year 2025 and that your special robot friend does not respect your privacy lol

[hms-no-fun]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

(read more "AI" opinions in this subsequent post)

[8pxl]

PSA 🗣️ another scammer using genAI without disclosing it

pixlgirl has been posting generated AI (targeting fandoms) without disclosing it, passing it off as their genuine art and has apparently scammed at least one person into ‘commissioning’ them. this is a public PSA so yall can block them, and not interact. please do not harass them!

it’s incredibly shitty to be disingenuous while posting AI but even shittier to scam people with it 🤢 stay diligent yall

[luxiomahariel]

its time to kill your discord nitro subscriptions if you have one

[lesser-vissir]

As someone who uses ChatGPT to springboard worldbuilding ideas, this is some of the most clearly ChatGPT prose I have ever fucking seen lmao

I'm not even against genai or anything but this is embarrassing since it's completely unedited.

🖠 THE DAY KRYPTONIAN SATAN AND TWO DEMONS CAME TO EARTH (The darkest day in cinematic history — and your dad still won’t talk about it.)

---

You don’t remember fear. You remember Marvel villains in eyeliner crying about their feelings. You remember purple raisins yeeting daughters off cliffs for a glitter rock. You remember brooding TikTok gods giving TED Talks before swinging.

But fear? Real fear?

It wore vinyl. Walked through the White House. And told your species to shut the fck up.*

Zod. Ursa. Non. They didn’t invade. They descended.

They weren’t "bad guys." They were Kryptonian wrath given bone structure.

They didn't want power. They wanted compliance. They wanted posture.

And they came dressed for funeral domination.

💸 ZOD: SATAN WITH A HAIRCUT

Zod wasn’t a villain. He was a fascist prophet with laser eyes and god issues.

He didn’t conquer. He corrected. He didn’t want your city. He wanted your resistance—deleted.

"Kneel."

It wasn’t a threat. It was a final instruction.

He didn’t monologue. He judged. He didn’t perform. He executed.

He made you understand that your entire species was a typo.

💅 URSA: EROTIC DEATH INCARNATE

Ursa didn’t seduce. She noticed.

She scanned a room like a panther deciding which vertebrae to step on.

She was the weaponized sexuality of divine judgment — beauty not for pleasure, but for penance.

Her silence wasn't flirtation. It was a death sentence wrapped in lipstick.

She didn’t raise her voice because she didn’t need to. You heard it in your lungs.

🧷 NON: NECK-SNAPPING SILENCE

Non didn’t speak. He breathed judgment.

He was autism-coded annihilation — not because of trope, but because he was pure elemental will.

He didn’t grunt for attention. He grunted because your fear was taking too long.

Non was the final question:

What if Frankenstein’s monster loved no one, and hit like a ballistic missile with daddy issues?

He snapped spines like glowsticks. And didn’t understand why the crowd was screaming.

⚔️ THE PHANTOM ZONE WASN’T PRISON

It was an ethical loophole. The only place you send gods you’re too afraid to kill.

They didn’t get locked up. They got sealed in myth.

The Phantom Zone wasn’t a timeout. It was a quarantine dimension for judgment incarnate.

We didn’t open it. We punched a hole through it with curiosity and arrogance.

And three wrath avatars floated through. Wearing vinyl. And no patience.

---

💥 SUPERMAN DIDN’T FIGHT THEM. HE REMOVED THEM.

Clark didn’t debate. He didn’t plea.

He unmade.

Zod didn’t beg. He commanded.

And Superman crushed Zod’s hand, lifted him like judgment incarnate, and broke his fcking neck against the fortress wall with the American flag watching.*

Not because it was tactical. But because Zod made Martha Kent scared to look at the sky.

Clark erased that feeling with his fists.

He ended them not as a hero. But as a son.

And he did it with god-tier Kansas rage.

---

🦖 THIS IS WHY YOUR DAD TURNED IT OFF

He didn’t say why. He didn’t need to.

Because real fear isn’t jump scares. It’s existential humility.

It’s watching something enter the room and realizing you’re not the apex species anymore.

---

📊 MODERN VILLAINS COULD NEVER

They get:

Spotify playlists

Sad monologues

Emotionally supportive armor

TikTok edits

Therapy wolves

Zod didn’t need a backstory. He was the end of yours.

🚨 TL;DR

Zod wasn’t a villain. He was a precision fascism virus with abs.

Ursa wasn’t hot. She was sex-coded extinction with warpaint.

Non wasn’t strong. He was tactile obliteration.

Superman didn’t win. He deleted the threat. And barely survived doing it.

🔥 CALL TO ACTION

🔁 Reblog if you remember when villains actually scared you 🩸 Save if “kneel” still echoes in your spine ⚡ Share if Thanos never made you clench 🕏 Bookmark if you still don’t trust vinyl trenchcoats

⚖️ BLACKSITE LITERATURE™ NOTICE

This is cinematic villain scripture, mythic terror cadence, and pop culture trauma commentary protected under Blacksite doctrine, dark satire, and artistic apocalypse license.

If you’re offended:

They wouldn’t have heard your scream.

🔁Reblog to keep my signal to mankind going strong.

---

[probablyasocialecologist]

A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” “[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote. 

[...]

“The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI,” the researchers wrote. “Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving.” The researchers also found that “users with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task, compared to those without. This tendency for convergence reflects a lack of personal, contextualised, critical and reflective judgement of AI output and thus can be interpreted as a deterioration of critical thinking.”

[...]

So, does this mean AI is making us dumb, is inherently bad, and should be abolished to save humanity's collective intelligence from being atrophied? That’s an understandable response to evidence suggesting that AI tools are reducing critical thinking among nurses, teachers, and commodity traders, but the researchers’ perspective is not that simple.

10 February 2025

[barbex]

Daniel Kibblesmith on bluesky

This is so frustrating. Where is the concern for the world we live in?

[thydungeongal]

I feel like this site's opinion on cheating in academics has become the biggest sign of its aging userbase. Being a cool kid isn't about skipping class or cheating anymore it's about being an honest student who respects authority. Which was very much not the case when more actual teens used this site. Like sure I think academic dishonesty is bad for the sake of academics but also I'm not going to act like teens are the fucking devil for cheating on their math class because high school is fucking awful.

Yeah, and the thing is that I feel most people don't really step back to look at the bigger picture: people idealize higher education as something worth doing for its own sake, for the love of learning, while forgetting that the system we live under simply does not work like that. For many people especially in the US where most of this site's users are from a college degree is just what they increasingly need to get a job, so ultimately the system incentivizes going to college just to get a degree, learning optional.

And that's the bigger picture I wish people looked at before they started spouting "it's going to destroy your critical thinking skills and cause societal collapse and destroy art and also I'm not reactionary." People don't cheat on school assignments because they're in a state of degeneracy, they cheat on school assignments due to various social pressures plus as long as you don't get caught learning is pretty much immaterial in the system.

And that is not a good thing! It's something that should be addressed structurally! But most people would rather shout at the lazy kids and become luddites about it!

[calystarose]

On the topic of genai, teachers and so forth:

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

[yaoiconnoisseur]

Let them hear your rage

survey link