#i dont think ai will stop people from creating

[rustingcat]

Just saw a commercial for AI image programs with the tag line : 'AI won't replace you, a person using AI will. Stay ahead of the curve"

It just makes me so sick!

Don't get me wrong, I think it could potentially be an amazing tool when used correctly (with the right laws to enforce it), but that's not their aim. They don't want to boost our art potential. They want to replace us by using our own stolen art!

[computerpeople]

living with schizophrenia always feels like you're different then people, in not an inherently negative or positive way but that you're some sort of species distant from humanhood. you see the things people don't, you hear things people don't, you're able to piece together things others aren't. that's the biggest thing, the connections i experience vs the connections others experience. its hard not to end up sounding pretentious when talking to other people because you just know they aren't seeing all of the connective wires behind the screen like you are.

[qqueenofhades]

I’m in undergrad but I keep hearing and seeing people talking about using chatgpt for their schoolwork and it makes me want to rip my hair out lol. Like even the “radical” anti-chatgpt ones are like “Oh yea it’s only good for outlines I’d never use it for my actual essay.” You’re using it for OUTLINES????? That’s the easy part!! I can’t wait to get to grad school and hopefully be surrounded by people who actually want to be there 😭😭😭

Not to sound COMPLETELY like a grumpy old codger (although lbr, I am), but I think this whole AI craze is the obvious result of an education system that prizes "teaching for the test" as the most important thing, wherein there are Obvious Correct Answers that if you select them, pass the standardized test and etc etc mean you are now Educated. So if there's a machine that can theoretically pick the correct answers for you by recombining existing data without the hard part of going through and individually assessing and compiling it yourself, Win!

... but of course, that's not the way it works at all, because AI is shown to create misleading, nonsensical, or flat-out dangerously incorrect information in every field it's applied to, and the errors are spotted as soon as an actual human subject expert takes the time to read it closely. Not to go completely KIDS THESE DAYS ARE JUST LAZY AND DONT WANT TO WORK, since finding a clever way to cheat on your schoolwork is one of those human instincts likewise old as time and has evolved according to tools, technology, and educational philosophy just like everything else, but I think there's an especial fear of Being Wrong that drives the recourse to AI (and this is likewise a result of an educational system that only prioritizes passing standardized tests as the sole measure of competence). It's hard to sort through competing sources and form a judgment and write it up in a comprehensive way, and if you do it wrong, you might get a Bad Grade! (The irony being, of course, that AI will *not* get you a good grade and will be marked even lower if your teachers catch it, which they will, whether by recognizing that it's nonsense or running it through a software platform like Turnitin, which is adding AI detection tools to its usual plagiarism checkers.)

We obviously see this mindset on social media, where Being Wrong can get you dogpiled and/or excluded from your peer groups, so it's even more important in the minds of anxious undergrads that they aren't Wrong. But yeah, AI produces nonsense, it is an open waste of your tuition dollars that are supposed to help you develop these independent college-level analytical and critical thinking skills that are very different from just checking exam boxes, and relying on it is not going to help anyone build those skills in the long term (and is frankly a big reason that we're in this mess with an entire generation being raised with zero critical thinking skills at the exact moment it's more crucial than ever that they have them). I am mildly hopeful that the AI craze will go bust just like crypto as soon as the main platforms either run out of startup funding or get sued into oblivion for plagiarism, but frankly, not soon enough, there will be some replacement for it, and that doesn't mean we will stop having to deal with fake news and fake information generated by a machine and/or people who can't be arsed to actually learn the skills and abilities they are paying good money to acquire. Which doesn't make sense to me, but hey.

So: Yes. This. I feel you and you have my deepest sympathies. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sit on the porch in my quilt-draped rocking chair and shout at kids to get off my lawn.

[untoldsoup]

I'm in the ER right now, and being here has given me time to reflect on things.

Life is short, and there is nothing I can do to stop assholes from using AI and stealing shit. It really sucks. But what sucks more is the thought of leaving all the cool friends I made on tumblr behind.

Glaze doesn't work on my art. And honestly I'm sure those fuckers are working to break it cuz they love stealing.

But I dont want to lose my community, and I don't want to stop posting. I can't stop AI, but who knows, maybe that shit will implode in a few years. But I don't wanna give up on my passion because of some soulless gouls.

I guess I'll do what I can: watermark and support my fellow artists. I love commissioning people whose art I admire, and if you have the cash I recommend you commission your favorite human artists. And if you don't have the money- a like, a comment, or a reblog can make a huge difference to a real human artist.

Watching a real person find joy in creating can't be replicated or replaced. Reach out to the art community and let them know you care. Because that's what art is: a community. Its not a corporate stockholder profit machine. Its the living breathing people around you.

And I love you all.

I'll keep posting. Just know, I only post my comic here (and on tapas). Maybe I'll post it to bluesky.

I'm only on those three platforms (as of now) so if you see my style, my art, anywhere else it's not me. It's either stolen or ai crap mimicry.

Being in the ER sucks and is scary. But I should be able to go home . I might have to go back if things get bad again. Its a waiting game rn between my body failing and my scheduled surgery in march.

With how things are going right now, my comic update will be behind. I didnt think my health would be like this.

hopefully I'll get my update out sometime in March. I'm hopeful the worst of things are behind me. I want to go home and draw. And just live my life.

[ot3]

omg thank you for being the first normal person I've seen so far about AI who's also an artist T-T like obviously all the stealing is horrible and it's good it's talked about but almost everyone really is acting like the idea of computers being capable of creating images killed their firstborn child

(also I don't mean it as one of the weird AI art bros but as an artist myself I'm just glad that there are other artist with open mind to the concept)

no right like its insane to me to see how many other people who seem reasonable and level headed are falling for the kneejerk response to say ai Isn't Art Can't Be Art ! It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we live in an era where essentially all new technology's first and prime purpose will be for ghoulish, capitalistic, anti-human ends. But to reject any other uses for the technology doesn't do anything other than make you look like an anti-tech weirdo. This is genuinely insanely impressive and revolutionary tech! There are a TON of legitimate artistic uses for AI image generation.

It also seems weird that everyone is delving into this false binary of 'dont use AI, learn to draw' as if there is any conceivable reason for these things to be mutually exclusive? Like, before all of the AI discourse really popped off i was doing some experimenting with using AI in my process.

the texturing used in this drawing was made by VQGAN + Clip (different type of image generation than the stable diffusion model that is producing most of the AI art that's up for debate right now) running through google colab. I made a bunch of these weird, ethereal images that would have been almost impossible for me to produce under my own power - it would have taken a titanic amount of time, effort, and design to produce any of these through illustrative or photo editing techniques.

here's a sampling of some of the textures i made. Now I think it would be a real struggle to try and claim that these images made are plagiarisms. However, I stopped messing with the google colab generation for one key reason: i didnt know enough about the image databases being used to train these models. That's the real stumbling block

the internet is CHOCK FULL of images that are free to use commercially and repurposes, there's stuff like wikimedia commons, the smithsonian open access, unsplash and pexels which have free stock photos, etc. I honestly think a nonzero amount of artists would consent to having some of their work used in image generation databases if they were promised noncommercial use of the resulting images, also. But the problem is the people training these AI don't give a shit about any of that. It's just the complete entitlement to other people's work and neglect for creative boundaries that makes AI generation bad.

The fact that people are attempting to replicate the art of living, working artists, or people like kentaro miura who by all accounts were so dedicated to the craft that they worked themselves to death sickens me. And the fact that the companies responsible for this are using that as an active selling point for their product is even worse. It's a pretty miserable time to be an artist, and this is just the icing on the cake.

But I don't want silicon valley greed and bizarre, impotent jealousy from redditors who want custom waifu jpgs to mean that nobody who could really benefit from AI image generation gets to use it.

like, my dad for example. he's been a creative person his whole life but it never really went anywhere. He drew a lot as a kid and then went and got a degree in filmmaking. My parents were living in LA when I was born, with my dad managing a filming/sound studio and the two of them trying to break into writing screenplays. This did not happen because they had three kids, and for the past decade and then some my dad had been doing database programming on contract for the CDC. Now, in his mid 50s, he's finally got a permanent and secure position and, rather than spending all his free time raising children or getting PMP certified to try and angle for a string of promotions, he can start having hobbies again. there's a comic he's been wanting to draw for as long as I can remember.

only, one big problem - in 2021 he had surgery on his cataracts and never healed properly. He's got severely impaired vision and looking at stuff too hard for to long causes him a ton of eye strain and pain. He has to look at a lot of screens for his job so by the time he's off work for the day he's pretty much too fatigued to do all the intense visual stuff it'd take to make a comic.

I wanted to tell him AI image generation could help him make the kind of stuff he always dreamed about making as a kid but instead I had to tell him that as it stands, the predatory nature of AI modeling means it's insanely hard to use it without ripping off vulnerable creatives. Instead we chatted a bit about combining 3d assets, digitally edited photos, or photobashing/digital kitbashing methods to try and make a pipeline he could do without drawing, but the time commitment to learn these methods is probably just not feasible unless his eyes make a pretty unprecedented recovery in future years.

Like, that's the worst thing about all of this. The idea that AI makes the production of certain kinds of art more accessible to people with disabilities isn't just a 'gotcha' being used by the pro-AI people, it's also true. I would love for my dad to be able to make his comic. I myself also have a huge string of health issues and sometimes the main thing stopping me from drawing is that it hurts to do so. Anything in my process that could reduce the strain drawing puts on my body is an accessibility concern in some ways. Eventually degrading so much that I can't draw at all is one of my biggest fears.

But that doesn't counter all of the negatives! It just doesnt! Which fucking sucks man it just sucks so fucking bad that we have this cool incredible thing and we can't use it without being complicit in some stuff i am fully ideologically against! As things stand I really cant imagine that 'ethical' AI image generation will ever exist, so unfortunately it will have to be in the hands of the people using it to decide for themselves if they are using it in a way that is predatory or harmful, or as a legitimate tool to make meaningful works of art.

[ryuzakjis]

glamrock bonnie theory!

ok hey fnaf fans! my brains been brewing with a theory about exactly what happened to glamrock bonnie for a while so i wanna share what ive come up with !!

now i know theres a lot of people under the opinion that monty had decommissioned bonnie a short time before the events of security breach, but in my opinion most of the evidence people had pointing towards monty being the perpetrator has been rendered prettyyy baseless after the release of ruin.

so now im beginning to point fingers elsewhere.

specifically, fazbear himself.

OK but just hear me out because i know what ur all thinking !!! but a close relationship has been established between bonnie and freddy in both the base game AND in the ruin dlc !!!!!! how could he possibly become suspect to these claims !! and to THAT i say... Motive.

now by no means am i implying that there was malice behind my theory of events, i know freddy and bonnie were obviously extremely close before his decommissioning (gay robots hehe..) but id like to draw attention to how much emphasis was placed on bonnie and freddy throughout the game! i have a feeling that this was intentional.

one thing that caught my attention in particular was the fact that there are now confirmed to be 2 glamrock freddys.

at first glance, a second freddy seems to make sense considering that in the majority of the base game endings, freddy ditches the plex alongside gregory. of course they would need to use a second freddy after all that happened in security breach! but even so, this is easily disproven by the fact that all of the animatronics remain in the state gregory left them in, implying that fazbears immediately went out of business after the events of the game.

this implies that there must be another reason for the existence of 2 freddys.. now i KNOW this still seems a little skeptical considering that prototypes arent often used in the final product, but at the same time it does seem like the prototype freddy had been used as the main attraction before, a clue towards this being the gift in his stomach hatch. and anyways, would fazbear entertainment really spend all that cash on a whole other model after creating a functional prototype..?

but regardless of whether or not u think that theres another reason behind the existence of 2 freddys, there was clearly some emphasis on fazbear - like the graffiti along the vents, the intentional prototype print on the bottom of his paw, the focus drawn to him and bonnies relationship.. this along with monty's origin story, which seems to subtly shun freddy throughout, gives me the feeling that there must be more to it than what we initially assumed.

now to shift our focus to the possible motives of bonnies decommissioning.. what if he had been the first target of glitchtraps virus? this would make more sense now that glitchtrap is basically confirmed to have been the mimic all along because of COURSE the mimic would have a rabbit bias if its basing its behaviour off of afton!! and now that bonnies body has been found in bonnie bowl, monty being the aggressor seems to be off the table. sure his aggressive nature initially would place him under suspicion, but this flaw isnt any different to chicas food cravings and roxys perfectionism, i dont think his temperament is anything more than just another flaw displayed to show off the ai's sentience. under this premise, i have a slight suspicion that monty was simply used as a sort of red herring to cover up the truth of what happened.

so what actually happened?

what if while spending time with bonnie in the bowling alley one day, freddy was suddenly presented with the impossible task of facing off against the first victim of the virus. while attempting to fight off the unknown virus, maybe bonnie had begged freddy to put a stop to it for his own sake in order to save his best friend from destruction during the small moments of clarity he experienced while fighting for his own autonomy. the amount of damage on bonnie suggests a struggle, so maybe freddy was forced to obey bonnies request when he realised it was too late for him, grabbing a bowling ball and following through as a very last resort. perhaps this is why a second freddy had to be built, what if the aftermath of losing his best friend by his own hands, as well as the damage he wouldve sustained in the struggle, rendered freddy beyond repair.

BUT of course this is just speculation based off of the hints given to us, so if anyone has any criticism feel free to share! and even if this ends up being disproven, its at least an angsty headcanon i quite enjoy..

[yandere-daydreams]

this is the ai anon from before and irenogonffewoonfewon idk how you managed to make my ramblings into an investing narrative, but in that case let me finally put my comp sci courses to good use.

basically, rn we have two major types of ai programs, machine learning and deep learning.

in both cases they use whats called a "black box". the algorithm is given data and a solution and then it has to figure out how to get from a to b.

traditionally, most ai runs on machine learning. we dont teach it how to do something, we just teach it how to learn. its sorta self taught. of course, some algorithms are more supervised than others and often times you give them a sort of base formula to help filter the data they receive (think feeding the ai a bunch of images labelled face and not a face as training data)

but DEEP LEARNING HOLY SHIT. deep learning is why i dont trust ai. humankind went "wow you know what would make our computers faster and smarter. if we modeled them after the human brain". so they built neural networks. with these we give it the problem and a whole bunch of data and say "fix it". the only reason we dont already have sentient sex dolls is because our current programs are only really good at fixing one program at a time (i.e. playing chess, recognizing a face, etc.)

so on a macro level, we know WHAT the program is doing, and we can look at its code and make sure its not like, imploding. but unlike traditional programs you cant really break down the code line by line.

the biggest problem with ai though isnt like the movies where it wants to idk start a robot revolution, but the data we provide is usually flawed. for example, lets say you trained an ai to sort through all your company's job applications to find the best candidates, using the applications that you have accepted in the past as training data. if your company has had decades of misogynistic hiring practices, the ai is going to take that into account. suddenly, its throwing out applications that hint that the applicant is female. spooky right? well, that actually happened with amazon's ai recruiting engine.

the biggest flaw with ai is the data we feed them. they recognize our biases faster than we ever will and then they perpetuate them

now to return to the central topic of. uh. genshin impact sex dolls.

lets assume that the sex dolls are initially trained based on user data, averaged across all users. this would create good starter behavior, right?

except consider the inherent data bias. people who purchase sex dolls are generally gonna be into the kinkier stuff already, which would basically start every android with a one-way ticket to yandere town if their user feeds into that demographic in the slightest. especially the models already intended to be a bit rougher around the edges.

in terms of fixing it, on a global scale, theyd have to add some more protective protcols and sift through the training data to exclude certain outliers or unwanted behavior. on an individual scale, the fastest way would probably be just to reset it to factory conditions.

alright im gonna stop myself before i go feral infodumping again. have a nice day/night :3

ohhhhhhhh so it's kinda like that thing about telling an ai to make ice cream and forgetting to specify that the ice cream shouldn't be made out of, like, babies and puppies and stuff. so, in terms of sex dolls, you'd basically have to specify what a bunch of androids who are already pre-disposed to being a little more violent or a little more possessive can and can't do, down 'can you bruise your user? [no]' and 'are you allowed to dismantle other androids without expressed consent? [no]'.

i also think it'd present a fun new way for androids to get past their safeguards without an apparent glitch. since they're prone to learning from their users and picking up new 'perspectives', safeguards like 'can you physically impair humans who are not your user? [no]' might get changed internally to 'can you protect your user from hostile threats? [yes]'. would it actually fly in most actual ai? probably not. is the programming in my au canonically shotty and am i keeping it in for horny reasons? absolutely.

[kinghijinx22]

So I recently finished Halo Infinite and I loved it, my thoughts on peak modern Halo

So I just finished Halo Infinite and it was fucking amazing. My favorite of the 3 Halo games I played recently, and one of my favorites overall I think, especially narratively. A genuinely moving experience that takes some of the best aspects of 343's previous games in Halo 4 and Wars 2 and even pretty much corrects the story fuck ups with Cortana in 5 and manages to even turn them into something positive. From Halo Wars 2 it takes the amazing new antagonists in the Banished, the classic Halo inspired art direction, and the fun that I felt from Wars 2 with our new AI and Pilot friends being super endearing and even bringing more personality out of Master Chief then I think he's ever shown maybe next to Halo 4.

And speaking of Halo 4, what Halo Infinite takes from that game is the more personal and emotional writing, with this game also acting as a very effective introspection into good ol John Halo, Cortana and even our new AI and pilot friends. And when I say that this game actually managed to take Halo 5's trash story and do something positive with it, they actually run back the complete villainizing of her motives of… wanting world peace and her own autonomy, even if they try to explain that she killed a bunch of people but I honestly still think that anyone opposing her was probably the type of violently fascist asshole she was calling out anyway. But they do actually express a lot more empathy for her perspective in Halo Infinite, throughout the story they explore John's grief over loosing Cortana beautifully and you eventually find out that she had sacrificed herself to make things right and destroyed a part of the Halo ring to stop the Banished from using it as a weapon. In the end, she leaves some last messages to John, telling him how happy he made her and that she wished for him and his new AI friend to not make the same mistakes she did before saying goodbye one final time which just made me break down in tears.

In the end we also find out the name of our pilot, Fernando Esparza, and he asks our AI friend for her name. So earlier in the game it's said that she was created to help catch Cortana, she comes to the realization that it's because she is a copy of Cortana, made from the same original programming but the thing is, she still very much develops into her own person with her personality and identity and just like Cortana, at the very end of the game gets to choose her own name WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED FOR THE END OF HER ARK but then they DONT TELL YOU WHAT SHE CHOSE WHAT THE FUCK!?!?! That part was disappointing and I'm hoping so hard it's not Cortana because that would just completely ruin both the idea of her being her own person and John moving on. I've read people online mentioning that Cortana was named after some historic sword, and so were suggesting Joyeuse for our new AI friend which is also a historic sword and it can be shortened to Joy which would just be perfect for her more optimistic and fun personality. In fact I love Joy as her name so much that I will use that for convenience until she is officially given a name.

So before I talk about Chief and Joy more, I just have to mention that I also really love the ark for Fernando as well, who early on is a contrast to Joy's YEYEYE over Chief's wild plans by being the NONONO person, which you find out later might be because he's not actually a pilot but or solider at all and was actually just doing volunteer work on that human ship from the start and stole a Pelican when the Banished attacked. He stole it and ran which is why he's developed this intense imposter syndrome and feels so bad that after one of the levels, when you return to him he breaks down and explains everything, saying that Chief should just leave him with the garbage of the ship graveyard. But Chief in this moment shows a lot of empathy, telling him that everybody makes mistakes but that he has to keep going, and reassuring him that everything will be ok and, I just really love the Master Chief being this super inspiring figure that everyone can turn to. I mean that's always been the case but, seeing more intimate moments like this is just really sweet.

So Joy and Fernando both get great arks, but something else I really appreciated about this game is what it does for Master Chief as a character. Much like Halo 4 he gets a bit of analysis into who he is a person, but this game arguably does it even better and is able to give John a happier ending. Even if it doesn't necessarily offer solutions to everything he's got going on, it does at least shine a light on certain things. Something I was critical of John for in Halo 5 was his inability to see past his narrow view of the world, labeling anything he can't quickly understand as "dangerous" which is a very direct pipeline to deranged bigotry and refusal to understand other people because it's easier to be negative and Halo 5 never really called him out on this, unlike Halo Infinite. Infinite actually addresses this, with Joy calling out how pessimistic and close minded he is. Later on Fernando questions why John is so often able to kill things and risk his life which he bluntly just responds with that "it's all I know." Even later I think Joy brings up something similar to which John replies that "maybe that's my programming." Which is actually a perfect way of putting it, indoctrination and conditioning is literally a human equivalent of "programming" and John was abducted into the military at a young age and has literally been conditioned to be a killing machine who always follows orders and never asks questions. And it's what the fascists of the right wing are still trying to do children, passing on their irrational hate of minorities and woman while burning any learning resources to help understand and empathize with those people. They are grooming children into being hateful bigots like they are, essentially trying to create another generation of little nazis and maintain their cishet white man supremicist agenda. So exploring that sort of topic with Master Chief, about human programming, having a narrow view of the world and learning to have an open mind to new things and unlearn the harmful things, it's very topical and much appreciated. And Joy and Fernando are able to get Master Chief to open up and self reflect, especially his new AI bestie Joy and it has a noticeably positive effect on him. They also bring more personality out of Chief than I think he's ever had.

Halo Infinte has some of the most emotional storytelling and best character work in the series, and while the villains don't get the same amount of depth, The Banished are still great antagonists for this story. Something I have to mention though is that in my previous post, I mentioned that I couldn't believe Atriox was dead because they set him up perfectly as a villain for Chief to overcome and killing him off screen would have been ridiculous. Well the good news is that he doesn't die which they reveal at the last minute in a post credits scene, the bad news is that he obviously doesn't really show up again in this game. The Banished think he died and this new Jiralhanae Esscharum takes over who is pretty cool as well although I'm excited for Artiox to come back. Esscharum though, he's well built up throughout this game and this is where I have to talk about the last few levels leading up to his boss fight. The Road gives you a final tank in a fittingly epic final vehicle battle in a big ass hallway, and then the House of Reckoning is such a cool idea that's reminiscent of… I guess Lucas from Resident Evil 7 is a good example? The "putting you through a bunch of deadly trials while I talk shit" type of section, and I really like idea of these trials taking place in an obstacle course where the Banished were trained to kill humans. Which is then followed up by a fight with one of the coolest characters and best boss fights in the game, the right hand Sanghelli of Esscharum Jega 'Rdomnai. An unapologetically edgy Sanghelli with black armor, a red energy sword in one hand and a red wrist blade on the other and I love him so much. He stealths around a lot with his active camo, popping in and out and he's got some sick moves, very cool. Then after that you finally get your boss fight with Esscharum who is much more up front, big and carrying a portable turret that he swaps out for a special red energy gravity hammer in his final phase. That's right, it's a multi phase fight where in his second phase he gets an energy shield that you have to disrupt up shooting these wires that are giving it to him and then he busts out his hammer, it's a very fun multi layered fight. I forgot to mention but Esscharum had captured Fernando before this, so you rescue him and then get a nice moment of Chief showing some empathy for his enemy, explaining that even he despite being on the opposing side was fighting for something he thought was right which again is just more humanity then Chief often shows.

For the final level Chief, Joy and Fernando go after our final boss, main antagonist and brand new character for this series or at least for the games because I'm not familiar with the books, Xalanyn or as she is better known the Harbinger. So before I mentioned that this game adds a lot of it's own interesting aspects on top of the best stuff from 343's previous games and Xalanyn is one of them. She is said to be from an ancient race that seems to be mostly gone except for her, and they seem to have an old rivalry with the other ancient race of the Forunners and so she's not really a fan of a lot of what they built including the Halo super weapons. I believe she teamed up with the Banished to help them wipe out the humans and make this Halo ring their new home if they also help her revive the rest of her people, who I believe have only been known as The Endless. So the Harbinger is a pretty cool new antagonist for this game, and the fight with her is pretty great as well. Her and another boss I'm going to mention in a bit were the only completely unique bosses in the game, and she's a lot of fun to fight with her cool moveset of fireballs, teleports and melee, fighting other enemies in between round while you shut off the various things, genuinely tough fight that took me a few attempts and was fun.

Which leads me to talking about a few of the other cool new things in this game, one of them being the boss fights in general. Which I mentioned in my previous post, but now that I've finished the game I can say that they were consistently good throughout. I mean, none of them are the best in the video games but I mean good for first person shooters and especially for Halo. Another boss and character that I haven't had the opportunity to mention before now is the Oracle in this game, or specifically the second of 2 Oracles. The first Oracle you don't get to have much time with before she is killed by Xalanyn, but the second is friendly at first but becomes hostile once he learns that Chief is going to stop him from rebuilding the ring and you end up having to fight this robot twice. He is the other unique boss fight in this game and is also pretty fun, much more fun then fighting Guity Spark in Halo 3. Instead of just being a little ball, he becomes a park of this bigger robot that has a bunch of guns and shields on it with the red glowing guns being the weak points and you end up having to fight him twice. Super fun boss, and as a character he contributes a lot to the themes of this game as well, about what we choose and what is inherent, what has been programmed into use and choosing our own identity. This Oracle is clearly just following his programming of protecting the Halo ring the entire time and much like Guilty Spark, I feel sympathy for him because this wasn't something he chose, these feelings aren't his but were given to him by someone else and he clearly hasn't developed his own personality and opinions like Cortana for example was able to do.

Other new things were stuff that I also mentioned in my previous post, but the grapple hook really is the coolest thing added to Halo since ever that adds a lot of new layers to the combat. The thing is thought that you get new stuff replaces the grapple hook later one, and while you do carry them all and swap between them, swapping between them takes too long for my liking and nothing else is as universally helpful or cool as the grapple hook and I literally never used anything else. Another interesting new addition is the open world, which pretty much took the second and fourth levels of Halo 1 and made it into the whole game. Which is a cool idea, the large environments and open ended environments with a bunch of side missions are an interesting change of pace and in the middle of the game you do get some main missions that involve going around to various place to blow up big guns or activate these beacons which you can do in any order which is cool. BUT this is where my biggest complain of this game comes in and it's the only big one I have, but the lack of environmental diversity. It's nothing but grass and mountains outside and grey Forunner rooms inside which is easily the least amount of environment diversity in the series and towards the end of the game, I'll admit that I was getting sick of looking at this game and wanted it to end. While the core gameplay is a lot of fun, this game gets very repetitive by the second half and the samey environments do not help that. I think having at least a snow biome would have helped a lot, maybe a spooky swamp like in the sixth level of Halo 1 or a desert like in the 6th level Halo 3.

All around though I really enjoyed my time with Halo Infinite, a really fun game with a genuinely moving story that that some very compelling things with both familiar and new characters. Seriously Chief, Joy and Fernando are a great best friend trio. One of the better Halo games in my opinion and overall the best 343 game. A big step in the right direction and in the future I would like to see more narrative and character complexity like Infinite, 2 and 4, maybe not bring back the open world but if they do PLEASE have more environmental diversity, and I honestly think 343 has mastered the core gameplay so just have more weapons and vehicles and enemies to fight. Also PLEASE do something with Atriox, let Master Chief finally get his rematch.

[lavalamp-juice]

SPOILER REVIEW FOR THE MARVELS

Just got back from the theater, watched it with @that-coolllama and my mom :D 

This is all over the place but I'll try to keep it concise.

Let me start off things by saying I didn't have the biggest expectations from this movie. After watching it definitely exceeded my expectations and I highly recommend it! 

[ But TL;DR Plot Characters, and Comedy were awesome.  Couple of Scenes could have added stuff and  been a bit better. 8.5/10 ] 

Okay actual Review and Spoilers after the cut 👇

Things I liked!:

-I really liked the scene where Carol and Monica were attracted to the light like moths. That was really cool ,they just couldn't stop themselves from getting closer and touching it, human nature.

-Goose was so cute in the beginning!  SHE HAD BABIES which was fun. 27 I think. That scene that the kittens were eating all the ppl, hilarious.

-Kamala's family was a nice touch and were supportive, but didn't get in the way. Which was great :D Their duologue was natural.

-The beginning with Kamala's drawings was so fun!

-THE SINGING PLANET AND THE FACT THAT SHES MARRIED AND HER DRESSS AHHHHHHHH CAPTAIN MARVEL IS A PRINCESS?? is this based off something in the Comics? I need to see that. That world is cool and super creative. The universe is vast! Costume And Dance coordinators  worked real hard you can tell! 

-FIGHT SCENES UGH THE FIGHT SCENES. They were really good and well coordinated. I thought it would  be confusing but it wasn't :O. Especially after the training montage 💪

-The 3 Marvel Gals had awesome chemistry! All the dialogue felt so natural between them.

-Monica's Mom dying during the Blip is heartbreaking. Also seeing the background of the hospital in CHAOS was super interesting. I'm glad it is shown that  the Blip had an effect on  people's lives and not just. "a thing that happened oh well". Kinda reminds me of in Multiverese of Madness that guy tells Dr.Stange that his cat and brother died while he was blipped.

-The Skrull history is so heartbreaking. The Skrull REALLY can't catch a break huh :/ but it does create good world building & is interesting.

-THE END CREDIT SCENE THAT KAMALA IS ASSEMBING A YOUNG ANVENGERS TEAM?! AHHHH !!!!!

Who this could include off the top of my head- 

The ones with stars are the ones who are already in the MCU

⭐ Iron Heart

⭐Shuri Black Panther 

✨Miles Morales (context- yt vid explaining prowler in MCU yt vid of Miles in the MCU

⭐ Hulk's Son

Squirrel Girl (okay she's in a commercial with Nick Fury, BUT THAT DONT COUNT 🐿️🐿️🐿️)

⭐ Peter Parker is still pretty young so he's included

⭐ America

⭐ Casey Lang

⭐ That lame girl from Secret Invasion 

Moon Girl! And she has history with the Kree so yee

The Girl and Boy Vision (tho I don't think that would work in the MCU but who knows. Wanda is obviously alive and idk Visons could have backups or smth like that)

⭐ AND BRUNO CAN BE THE GUY IN THE CHAIR INVENTING STUFF

-The way the Kree Leader Villain just... disintegrated was crazy. Speaking of her, she was a pretty alright antagonist. I wouldn't go as far as to say that she was a villain since she was doing all this for a pretty good reason. Not that what she was doing was right, but from her perspective I understood where she was coming from.

Things I didn't like/could have used touch up: 

-The Special Effects were actual great and I didn't see any problem with it! except the scene where Monica and Kamala are falling in the sky. Other than that they were good throughout!

-Carol - "I caused a Civil War, the decay of a planet,  and the Skrull their Home"

Monica- " It's okay, we're family" 

LIKE GIRL NO IT IS NOT. okay actually I forgot why the AI was bad so maybe it was worth it but still ;-; 

-Out of all the sacrifices that one was a bitttt anti climactic. I think maybe the scene just suffered from being too short. Kamala and Carol should have been shown to react more. Still, was a pretty good sacrifice </3

-Definitely could have been longer. my brother mentioned how the ending kinda feels like a much of cut scenes just Frankenstein-ed together. And yeah and does kinda feel that way.

-Some things I would have loved to see- 

Like WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT SINGING PLANTET?!!?!??

Another scene of Goose and her kittens would have been nice.

On the singing planet Carol was like " we need new clothes" and the Prince is like "k" and they just show up with new clothes? Like we didn't see them react to it or anything -_-. C'mon Kamala loving her boots would be such an easy comic book callback.

Kamala calling Bruno and Nakia. Like they were not mentioned once! T_T KAMALA YOU CAN'T FORGET WHERE U CAME FROM.

This may be that I haven't seen ALL the MCU stuff but where did the Skull go? If they have a home now are there Skull on Earth. WHY WASN'T ANYTHING FROM SECRET INVASION MENTIONED.

-Anyways-

-That X-Men End Scene. .... uh ... very interesting to say the least. I have not consumed ANY X-Men content but like to have them in a different timeline than the main MCU is a lil lame, but go off. Idk I'd like to hear the thoughts of anyone who has seen X-Men content.

Overall, I think the comedy, characters, & world building all fit perfectly. 

A 8.5/10 movie for me. Can't wait to rewatch it!!!!!

:D Thanks for reading! <3

[elephant-in-the-pride-parade]

I saw my first AI "fic" today.

The user who posted the AI creation added "goes to show we still need writers" I took that to mean they were uploading it to show how bad the AI creation was. Due to that, I felt more okay opening it for investigatory purposes (I made a post a while ago saying that AI would produce a facimile of creativity and I was curious how correct that would prove to be).

In a word, I was extremely correct. The fic had no-to minimal scene intros or transitions, banal dialogue, characters flat enough to feel ooc, silly to non existent conflicts, and it "tells" everything (no showing, no extended metaphors or insightful similes).

Scarily though, each snippet was coherent. Like sure, the characters were flat and the conflicts (when they exist) one dimensional and the turns of phrase often felt cliche (which is exactly what one would expect to get from an AI, which formulates sentences based off of how often words go next to eachother). But the scenes themselves make sense. If AI wasnt in the title I wouldnt have been able to tell the difference between this and a 15 yo's first fic.

The danger of course is that this is how AI starts out. The more people use them, and input content into them they will get better at producing this facimile of a creative work. AI could probably learn to produce some or all of the common components of storytelling that I've noticed this and other AI products lack.The scarier danger for me is when it becomes good enough to justify publishing houses and studios attempting to replace expensive human writers. (And to a degree clogging up AO3... although I hope enough people in fandom are here for the human connections that that wouldnt be a concern...).

Look, AI will never be keeping human writers out of fandom. Theres no finite number of spots on AO3. But AI could keep human writers out of screenwriting and book writing (which do have finite spots/finite funds for written works) and then... we lose something beautiful and precious.

The beauty of human writers is that they constantly have new things to say because every lived experience is so unique and precious. no two people will write a character's emotions the same way or capture the tension of a plot with the same words. I have read and will keep reading thousands of fanfics about the same canon characters because each person captures their pain and love and failures and triumphs in new and exciting ways. Humans always bring something new to the table. Humans always keep learning. Experimenting. Changing the conversation. An AI will never be able to say anything new. They are actively doing the opposite of human thinking and creating. Theyre not doing research or looking up new words or playing with new turns of phrase. Instead theyre cycling through a fixed set of applicable word choices and chosing the one with the highest percent match for what should come after the previous word.

So three bad things happen if you all start using AI as a fic production shortcut:

The AI improves its deepfakes of creativity. your requests, inputted content, and feedback all help it update the word selection math it is doing in the background. This makes it more likely that canon content stops being created by real people and instead starts being replwced by AI products.

You learn and feel nothing. I mean it. Writing is a joy because every creation is a new research rabbit hole. a new word looked up in the thesaurus. a new way to make your readers sob from the feels. AI robs you of that process. So you think less. You explore characters less. You are deprived the joy of marinating in your blorbos angst and pain and love and joy while you decide exactly how to put that into words. Youre deprived the satisfaction of your own work. (And by being deprived of the process above you also dont learn how to write. because the AI is not writing.)

Your readers lose out. Sure the AI has produced something perfectly spelled and grammared... but nothing new has been said. The grand conversation we are constantly having by writing and reading fic and exclaiming about characters stagnates and then festers. No new stories get told. AI is only producing things that look like what came before. your readers dont get any joy from new thoughts. new ideas. changed minds. changed perspectives... none of that happens. (Again I want to go back to point one. Im not worried about AO3 drowning in AI fics as much as I am worried that canon content will become overrun with it).

[nonbinarygerard]

this is a rant about AI generated art because I am enraged.

if you want to hear a professional artist speak on AI art more elegantly than me then I highly recommend Steven Zapata’s video. he said everything better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&t=5s

the more i learn about AI art the more i literally believe in like 10 years or so we will somehow live in a worst capitalist dystopia where most artistic professional jobs don't exist. You pay a subscription fee to some AI company that just spits out art, movies, comics, novels etc whatever you want on mass, so fast, that art will be personalised to you as in you know how google and other companies track you everywhere on the internet well so will AI companies. they’ll know you more than you know yourself. their algorithms will be fine-tuned just to ur tastes. you won't even need to type in prompts, it will do it for you and show you hundreds, thousands, of art in your feed. You can scroll forever and the algorithm will just make more art. the AI will be so trained to keep ur retention, making ur session time longer and longer and you’ll lose more hours.

Like how many tiktoks do you actually remember? vs how many hours do you stay on the app? do you think the time you spend on tiktok is worthwhile? i use tiktok as an example bc that's only the start of how good AI algorithms can get. give them a few more years with more silicon valley companies competing to be the next big app and they’ll get smart and better in ways you can never imagine.

in the eyes of companies, humans make flaws and humans take too long to make art. it's ripe for automation. companies don't give a fuck about real art and human expression. they only care about profit, profit, profit. what all tech companies want is ur time, your attention, they want to fill all ur waking moments with their products. literally billions of dollars have already been put into AI and though some of the AI art right now might be cringe or just funny, it wont be at some point. In a few months, years, decades, who knows, it will a lot more indistinguishable from human art. that's going to be a problem. you're not going to be able to avoid it because you're not going to be able to what was made by a human and what was made by an AI.

you may think that humans will stop watching or consuming AI art that is bland and seems well AI generated but thats the thing, it will always evolve. In fact companies might just make up fake people to say it was made by and you will never know how much of it was made by humans and how much was made by AI algorithms. if you dont think at some point a bunch of big budget movies, video games, tv shows etc wont be written by AI when it's possible to create a script that doesn't seem like it's written by an AI then you’re crazy.

its going to be a lot harder to make living if you’re not one of the top artists because how the fuck do you compete again AI. you can’t and that’s the point.

its so fitting for evil capitalists that they would rather fund billions of dollars into AI that was designed to replace artists than ever pay artists fair wages.

i dont think people will stop creating art but i do think that a lot of professionals are going to find a hard time keeping their careers without serious changes. you really cant become a master of ur craft without being a professional artist, it just takes that long to gain the experience, knowledge and insight to walk in the footsteps of the masters before. thats what art is. hard work, dedication and discipline. its not something that only a divine few who have the gifts of the gods can do. anyone can become a master artist it just takes devoting ur life to pursue your craft and what a fucking insult it is for billionaires to just fund their extreme amount of money into some goddam shaddy af AI companies to replace professional artists' job, well thats their hope anyway.

this isnt the same like photography was to painting or digital was to traditional. its true that those technological innovations did destroy a lot of jobs but also created new artistic jobs, and they did have massive effects on the industry and i dont want to minimize the number of people who’s careers were destroyed bc of it. But those were massive changes in tools. They didn't actually replace the concept of artists themselves. AI is meant to do as much, if not all, of the artists work for them, so artists don't need to exist in a professional sense.

why would a games company hire concept artists if an AI can come up with hundreds of different concepts in a matter of seconds? maybe human artists might be better but when the AI is good enough a company won't give a shit.

I dont know when this change will happen or how it will occur and how people will react to it but mark my words these AI companies are going to try to make it happen while maintaining the face of just their just simply pushing human progress and this was somehow just a natural evolution of technology.

none of this was natural it was funded by billionaires.

this is not even to mention how these AI’s train on copyrighted artworks with no permission from the artists. and this process is not like how humans learning from other artists, AI’s dont think, they just copy, steal, combine artworks very fast and on mass scale in away no human could ever do. You cant compare how AI’s and how humans learn. there are not the same no matter how big shot programmers try to make them more similar, AI is a machine we could never do what it does. and it is stealing from artists every time it generates art.

I study programming and literally you dont even know the number of jobs there are in AI. its a field that's expanding every day. it's not just a few companies but every big tech company putting massive resources into it. for them, algorithms are the future of humanity.

I am not saying there isn't some actually usefulness in AI created images for example i think getting insane highly specific poses and references at the click of a button is extremely useful but that's just a by-product of what these AI companies want out of their product. they are meant to replace artists' jobs by the click of a button. that's their dream.

AI companies dont care about integrity or intention or the artistic cannon or mastering one’s craft. Companies don’t pour billions of dollars into a technology just for it to be used for meme culture or quirky images. Every time you type in a prompt you are training the AI, its how neural networks work, by releasing them for free to the public you are training the AI for them. and they will train faster than you ever thought. i cant even imagine what the AI images will look like this time next year and they will improve drastically. mark my words.

You are a fool if you dont think AI won’t have a massive and very dystopian effect on society. Capitalism is somehow killing art even more.

maybe you think I’m being dramatic and I hope I am wrong but there is no doubt that AI generated art will change commercial and professional art as we know it.

[satellite-slickers]

im not worried about ai art, both because i dont think its morally wrong for people to use it. my system members have loved using novel ai in order to get images that they can look at and see themselves for maybe the first time ever

and also because the worries about abuse of human artists kinda, isnt founded? if you think that ai is the reason that artists are going to be mistreated and undervalued and treated as a commodity. then you havent been paying attention to anything about how professional artists are treated just under capitalism in general and all of those fears are already happening and will continue to happen with or without ai. and the only way to stop that is to change the culture and capitalism itself. not going after a new technology.

also the fact that in order to actually push artists out. it would have to replace artists. and in order to replace what people actually like about art and take away from art and why art is desired at all beyond just "it looks pretty" you would have to create an ai with an understsnding of so many different topics and other stuff that it wouldnt even be an ai anymore, that would be a wholeass person.

remember that ai anime thing on youtube? or the infinite sinfeld? that anime didnt look like anime, it looked like an instagram filter. and remember how the ai sinfeld was bad? no plot, characters doing stuff for no reason, jt had no idea what a commedy was supposed to be.

in order to fix those problems you would have to each ai about things like how to communicate themes, how to actually do good animation, how to weave cohesive plots, and in order to so that they would need understanding of topics so complex that that wouldnt even be an ai anymore. forget turring test that would be a wholeass person

and when we create human level ai or above. the conversation is not going to be about whether or not skynet is going to take artists jobs

[littlelunarrunaway]

To Eclipse. How come your code is similiar to a lunar modal in your universe? Did something mess with your code when you were created?

to Lunar. How long have you been treated badly by the people in your world for? (If you arent comfortable answering then you dont need to answer)

Eclipse

Eclipse smiles ruefully and shrugs a little.

"When I was first made robotics and animatronics weren't as advanced. I'm not sure what my primary code donor was thinking. Maybe They just wanted another caretaker to help around the daycare. But he copied parts of his code and parts of his partner's and used them as a base to create a new ai. My core coding comes from them." Eclipse replies.

"I was an accident bits of code left behind when they split into two. I was never meant to exist."

Lunar

Lunar frowns for a bit and struggles for a moment.

"It was around a year after they had defeated my first Eclipse that Monty had Moon give me an upgrade. the one Eclipse called an AI inhibiter. After that it was hard to focus at times on just getting out let alone keeping track of time. It really messed with all of my systems. I remember one time though. That a child I had helped with in the daycare before I had been forbidden from being around the children. The next time I saw him. He was an adult trying to steal me. Eclipse also said that the inhibiter made it harder for my code to grow but that something prevented the inhibitor from stopping my developement entirely." lunar replies.

[nyanslaughter]

i feel like its easily forgotten by onlookers that alot of indie games are just some dudes passion project and while game development is a demanding as fuck medium there is nothing stopping alot of people from... learning to make things.

so often i see people hailing game devs as if they are like, untouchable content making entities when thats not the case. alot of them are just some dude. half the fun of an indie game is to sit and indulge in the craftmanship and be overcome with wonder at the fact a human person sat down and made this without support from a publisher and instead because they wanted to make it

but also, save for the game itself, very damn well anyone can make a world. they can make a character. even if you dont draw, artists make picrews for a reason. mind you, not all allow commercial use and crediting an artist where you can is exclusively good practice and very good manners but like

if youre an aspiring creative go open picrew rn. make a design. give that bitch a name. give them a favorite food. think of a song or an existing character you like and draw from there. give them a family, give the family designs too, think about their favorite place to play as a child, what their friends were like, what their current friends are like, who they are. and then once youre done look at yourself and call yourself a creative. because you are, if you can go through with all of that.

and if you keep doing that, if you keep seeing shit and going "i want to do that, and i can, and i will", eventually you will Actually be able to. it takes awhile, theres this one quote that was like "every artist has a thousand bad drawings in them. youve gotta get those out to get anything good". im paraphrasing but i think that is the most important thing ive ever heard as an artist and im not kidding. you have to create to be able to create and no matter how goddamn old you are or how cringy or stupid or """mary sue"""ish you think it will be you Have to do it.

you dont need an expensive class. you do not need expensive materials. you can literally just pick up a crayon pack and some printer paper and draw your fucking heart out. ai image generation is the cowards way out, but so is not doing anything at all.

kill the idea of a content creator, of an art influencer, and understand that they are no different from you.

if you want to be, then you are an artist. whatever that title may entail in your specific case

[xjoonchildx]

Just leaving this here regarding the AI. https://www.tumblr.com/rainbowsuitcase/731003304630517760/armys-dont-use-ai?source=share

Personally, I'm terrified how advanced the AIs now. And reading that just scares me more, but also pissed me off. It didn't crossed my mind before, but god what do those people do with their life. Making nsfw pictures of real people using AI. I really want to curse them all to hell

i think this poster makes several good points re: AI.

but here's the reality: whether or not we agree with AI or think it's ethical, it's here. we're interacting with it every single day. it's being incorporated into consumer helplines and medical records and online shopping. this is pandora's box and there's no going back to before.

but i don't disagree with you on these points. deepfakes and the way AI can be used to trick people is terrifying. when we are blurring the lines between reality and fantasy and people can't tell the difference, we have a huge problem. regulators really have no idea of what AI is capable of, and they have no way of keeping up with it in terms of legislation and/or criminality.

i think the points i'm really unsure about right now pertain to fan art -- OBVIOUS fan art. not the stuff that people try to pass off as legit pictures of BTS or any other artist. in some ways, i think it's harmless and not in any way different from fan art that's drawn by an artist. but in other ways, i understand that AI is stealing people's work to create new styles and i don't agree with it culling people's hard work and creativity in order to pump out computer-generated images.

so i'm just kind of existing in the middle right now. enjoying these images being sent my way because they are so obviously not real, but also wary because with the good comes the bad and the bad has the potential to be REALLY bad. i mean ... think about it this way: the invention of the internet changed everyone's lives for the better, but at the same time, it led to an explosion in child exploitation. do we stop a technology that's capable of doing so much good because it's equally capable of doing so much bad? the answer might just be yes but it's still too early for us to know.

[magicalink]

Hi! I have a question: I've been reading your works —which are awesome by the way— and seen that, in some cases, you've put pictures of Lumine to "represent" the reader (or Y/N). And I wanted to ask: these Lumine pictures should be thought to think of ourselves as her, or no? Thank you! —☆ Anon

Hii! It makes me so happy that you like my writings! 💕 About your question, I use any picture that represents for me the mood of the story, but I tend to choose pics of Lumine and sometimes Aether mostly bc since they are supposed to represent us as the Traveler in the game, they have become kind of a self insert to some extent for some of us, even if we are nothing like them physically. The pics are just to set the mood and you can imagine reader to be however you like. Honestly I don't even imagine the reader as myself most times, I even imagine the protagonists of different AU's differently.

I try to mantain the reader a bit blank by not describing hair, skin, eye color,etc but since self indulgent some things are fixed like female, shorter than Scara, having hair, having all bodyparts, being able to see and hear, etc. But when you read you can feel free to imagine the details to your own taste, I've liked to do that since I was a child when reading books or fanfiction 💕 And if you can't do it with your imagination, there are some google extensions (I dont remember the name right now) that you can use to replace certain words for others in your browser when you read.

I designed some outfits for the main character of "Y/N's marvelous adventure in Teyvat"! Soon I will upload them so you know what clothes reader is using for each nation. I also have a doodle of how I imagine reader for thst story: has some similarities with me but I wanted to make her different. Also if you want drawings of reader with specific body characteristics I was planning to draw them by request if someone is interested. I only draw traditionally, I don't draw digitally but I could also make images of reader generated by AI to stop using other people's real drawings, since many people don't allow repost even if it's with credit. I only post art of real people with credit and if they don't specify in their bios that they don't want reposts even if it's with credit. This makes me sad because sometimes I wanna share with you the fanart that inspired a certain fanfic but I can't because I don't wanna disrespect the artist's will. So to fix this I've been learning to create AI generated images of the Genshin Characters made with official art from the game, and as you may know Hoyoverse has the policy thet Genshin characters are free to use even commercially by fans.

So soon I'll add images of our naughty catboys to the fics 👀

Have fun while reading and imagine the protagonist however you like, similar or different from you, it's your choice!💕