#generative ai

[turbo-toast]

Poll for writers and artists

Whether you write fanfic or original works or paint/draw, be it fan art or original work or whatever else - I have to know, because I have a feeling this is going to be very decisive:

Please reblog for sample size!

[memendoemori]

Good morning everybody

[animentality]

[prokopetz]

It's true that there's no practicable way to frame "style theft" as an intellectual property issue that wouldn't have horrifying consequences for independent artist, but that doesn't mean we can't have sympathy for all the artists who've spent their lives perfecting the craft of drawing moist-lipped, glassy-eyed, vaguely oily-looking anime girls in three-quarter profile and now everybody thinks they're a robot.

[fans4wga]

Stand with game devs against AI

[ID: 7 November tweet from Erika Ishii @/erikaishii: "AI is egregiously disrespectful and dangerous to the workers who pour their time and creativity into making the games we love. In a year with thousands of layoffs despite record corporate profits, I sincerely hope to see peers and fans stand with devs and our labor movements."

This is a reply to a tweet from The Game Awards @/thegameawards which says, "Xbox has announced a partnership with InWorld AI to bring generative AI to games - including AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale."

[dalle2]

“The FULL Quaker Oats painting”

Created with DALL·E 2, a new AI system by OpenAI that creates realistic images and art from a description in natural language.

Sharing is caring!

Substack: dalle.substack.com

Twitter: @Dalle2AI

The heading of this post was used to generate the image, src

[straycatj]

家主がせいせいAIでオレとでしを出してみようと思ったら

オレのかわりにぱんがーさんみたいなシロネコが出てきたのです

My landlady has tried to make a picture of me and my apprentice, then it makes cats like my apprentice and a white cat like Ms.Pangur

[thedailyplatypics]

ARTISTS, STOP POSTING TO DEVIANT ART

(Gen Ai/BDS)

Learned today that DeviantArt is owned by Wix, an Israeli company listed under boycott by the BDS Palestinian human rights organization.

Under Wix, who acquired DeviantArt in 2017, DV has been pushing Israeli occupation propaganda and allowing Generative Ai to completely takeover the platform and be sold on it.

It’s clear that under Wix, DeviantArt DOES NOT CARE whatsoever about the art or the artists it was originally created to cater towards. It only cares for profit.

Even if you are not well-versed on the current politics surrounding the Israeli Occupation and the erasure of Palestine for some reason, everyone can agree that Wix has changed DeviantArt for the worse and the best case scenario is that they sell it to someone who actually cares for art, not profit.

I absolutely adore to death so much of the art there, but for now I will stop posting my art there and I suggest that other artists do the same. They DO NOT DESERVE YOUR ART.

Please transition towards using alternatives like Tumblr, Insta, Twitter, and Newgrounds. Newgrounds especially is the best alternative to DeviantArt. Please suggest other alternatives as well.

[incognitopolls]

For the purposes of this poll, research is defined as reading multiple non-opinion articles from different credible sources, a class on the matter, etc.– do not include reading social media or pure opinion pieces.

Fun topics to research:

Can AI images be copyrighted in your country? If yes, what criteria does it need to meet?

Which companies are using AI in your country? In what kinds of projects? How big are the companies?

What is considered fair use of copyrighted images in your country? What is considered a transformative work? (Important for fandom blogs!)

What legislation is being proposed to ‘combat AI’ in your country? Who does it benefit? How does it affect non-AI art, if at all?

How much data do generators store? Divide by the number of images in the data set. How much information is each image, proportionally? How many pixels is that?

What ways are there to remove yourself from AI datasets if you want to opt out? Which of these are effective (ie, are there workarounds in AI communities to circumvent dataset poisoning, are the test sample sizes realistic, which generators allow opting out or respect the no-ai tag, etc)

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Coprophagic AI crisis

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TORONTO on Mar 22, then with LAURA POITRAS in NYC on Mar 24, then Anaheim, and more!

A key requirement for being a science fiction writer without losing your mind is the ability to distinguish between science fiction (futuristic thought experiments) and predictions. SF writers who lack this trait come to fancy themselves fortune-tellers who SEE! THE! FUTURE!

The thing is, sf writers cheat. We palm cards in order to set up pulp adventure stories that let us indulge our thought experiments. These palmed cards – say, faster-than-light drives or time-machines – are narrative devices, not scientifically grounded proposals.

Historically, the fact that some people – both writers and readers – couldn't tell the difference wasn't all that important, because people who fell prey to the sf-as-prophecy delusion didn't have the power to re-orient our society around their mistaken beliefs. But with the rise and rise of sf-obsessed tech billionaires who keep trying to invent the torment nexus, sf writers are starting to be more vocal about distinguishing between our made-up funny stories and predictions (AKA "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion"):

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

In that spirit, I'd like to point to how one of sf's most frequently palmed cards has become a commonplace of the AI crowd. That sleight of hand is: "add enough compute and the computer will wake up." This is a shopworn cliche of sf, the idea that once a computer matches the human brain for "complexity" or "power" (or some other simple-seeming but profoundly nebulous metric), the computer will become conscious. Think of "Mike" in Heinlein's *The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress#Plot

For people inflating the current AI hype bubble, this idea that making the AI "more powerful" will correct its defects is key. Whenever an AI "hallucinates" in a way that seems to disqualify it from the high-value applications that justify the torrent of investment in the field, boosters say, "Sure, the AI isn't good enough…yet. But once we shovel an order of magnitude more training data into the hopper, we'll solve that, because (as everyone knows) making the computer 'more powerful' solves the AI problem":

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

As the lawyers say, this "cites facts not in evidence." But let's stipulate that it's true for a moment. If all we need to make the AI better is more training data, is that something we can count on? Consider the problem of "botshit," Andre Spicer and co's very useful coinage describing "inaccurate or fabricated content" shat out at scale by AIs:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4678265

"Botshit" was coined last December, but the internet is already drowning in it. Desperate people, confronted with an economy modeled on a high-speed game of musical chairs in which the opportunities for a decent livelihood grow ever scarcer, are being scammed into generating mountains of botshit in the hopes of securing the elusive "passive income":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Botshit can be produced at a scale and velocity that beggars the imagination. Consider that Amazon has had to cap the number of self-published "books" an author can submit to a mere three books per day:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concerns

As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. Even sources considered to be nominally high-quality, from Cnet articles to legal briefs, are contaminated with botshit:

https://theconversation.com/ai-is-creating-fake-legal-cases-and-making-its-way-into-real-courtrooms-with-disastrous-results-225080

Ironically, AI companies are setting themselves up for this problem. Google and Microsoft's full-court press for "AI powered search" imagines a future for the web in which search-engines stop returning links to web-pages, and instead summarize their content. The question is, why the fuck would anyone write the web if the only "person" who can find what they write is an AI's crawler, which ingests the writing for its own training, but has no interest in steering readers to see what you've written? If AI search ever becomes a thing, the open web will become an AI CAFO and search crawlers will increasingly end up imbibing the contents of its manure lagoon.

This problem has been a long time coming. Just over a year ago, Jathan Sadowski coined the term "Habsburg AI" to describe a model trained on the output of another model:

https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194

There's a certain intuitive case for this being a bad idea, akin to feeding cows a slurry made of the diseased brains of other cows:

https://www.cdc.gov/prions/bse/index.html

But "The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget," a recent paper, goes beyond the ick factor of AI that is fed on botshit and delves into the mathematical consequences of AI coprophagia:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

Co-author Ross Anderson summarizes the finding neatly: "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/06/06/will-gpt-models-choke-on-their-own-exhaust/

Which is all to say: even if you accept the mystical proposition that more training data "solves" the AI problems that constitute total unsuitability for high-value applications that justify the trillions in valuation analysts are touting, that training data is going to be ever-more elusive.

What's more, while the proposition that "more training data will linearly improve the quality of AI predictions" is a mere article of faith, "training an AI on the output of another AI makes it exponentially worse" is a matter of fact.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/14/inhuman-centipede#enshittibottification

Image: Plamenart (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Double_Mobius_Strip.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[renthony]

At this point I'm just assuming everything I ever create and post to the internet is going to be stolen. People have been stealing, reposting, and adding their own pay links to my art for years now, without the help of AI.

I've made D&D themed stickers that are now all over "free clipart" sites, despite me filing requests to have them removed. I've seen my graphics ripped off and included in someone else's art without credit. I've had people tell me that an ACAB image I made showed up as a sticker getting put up around Seattle. Facebook meme pages crop my username out of my posts all the goddamn time. Voice actors on YouTube use my posts for "dramatic reading" videos constantly, and only one has ever asked me permission or given me any cut of the profits from their video.

I see my art out in the wild with no source back to me, and I'm a tiny creator compared to a lot of others. People repost shit constantly, whether it's here, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. I remember the old tumblr days of "We Heart It is not a goddamn source" PSAs.

I think people are right to be concerned about AI, but at this point I'm much more concerned about it from the perspective of "companies want to use it to cut labor costs," and less "it's theft."

People didn't need AI to steal my art before now. I'm more concerned about trying to freelance in a market full of "oh, we can just get ChatGPT to write and illustrate our articles."

[therobotmonster]

Remember when I told you Disney wasn't going to "save you" from AI?

Megacorps like Disney have mountains of exclusive data they "own" that they can use to create their own internal, proprietary, AI systems. They have every sketch, development photo, unused concept art piece, cut scene, note, doodle, rotoscope/animation reference footage, every storyboard, merch design document, you name it.

And that's on top of every single frame of every movie and TV show. Every panel of every comic.

That's why Disney supports the efforts to clamp down on AI for copyright reasons, because they own all the copyrights. They want that power in their hands. They do not want you to be able to use a cheap or free utility to compete with them. Along the way, they'll burn the entire concept of fair use to the ground and snatch the right to copyright styles. Adobe has confessed this intention, straight to congress.

When the lawyers come, you won't be accused of stealing from say, artist Stephen Silver. You'll be accused of stealing the style of Disney's Kim Possible(TM).

But don't listen to me. Listen to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[thesobsister]

Using generative AI, a shithead art troll completed an intentionally unfinished work by Keith Haring. The work concerned the AIDS crisis, and its interrupted look acted as silent, eloquent commentary on it.

This is the only way it looks:

[prokopetz]

Imagine a Star Trek type food replicator that lacks an internal library of approved outputs and instead uses a generative language model to figure out what you're asking for. People having to do Midjourney-style prompt crafting to get the meals they want out of it. Abusing the system by describing things that absolutely are not food in ways which circumvent the safeguards. Occasionally it produces something that tries to eat you back which it insists with perfect confidence is in fact a strawberry crumble.

[ayeforscotland]

There’s not a single organisation that is implementing AI on a wide-scale.

Large businesses are often so siloed that they don’t know where all the data actually is to feed these algorithms in the first place.

The UK Labour Party are caught up in ridiculous hype. They think AI can solve everything, and it’s getting embarrassing. Follow me on TikTok.

Subscribe on YouTube.

[dalle2]

“An ear of corn with translucent colourless liquid dripping down it, in a field, at sunset, golden hour, award winning photography”

Sharing is caring!

Substack: dalle.substack.com

Twitter: @Dalle2AI

The heading of this post was used to generate the image, src