#remain a machine

[connor-sent-by-cyberlife]

"Nothing personal, Lieutenant."

(click for better quality)

³ᴰ ᵐᵒᵈᵉˡ ᵖᵒʳᵗ ᵇʸ ᴰᵃᶻ ᶜᵒᵛᵉʳ ᵒⁿ ᴿᵉⁿᵈᵉʳʰᵘᵇ

[shinelikethunder]

You asked me to teach you chess, and I've done that. It's a useful mental exercise. Through the years, many thinkers have been fascinated by it. But I don't enjoy playing. Do you know why not?

Because it was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little and everyone believed that some people were worth more than others. Kings and pawns.

I don't think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. I don't envy you the decisions you're going to have to make. And one day I'll be gone, and you'll have no one to talk to. But if you remember nothing else, please remember this:

Chess is just a game. Real people aren't pieces. You can't assign more value to some of them than to others. Not to me. Not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice.

The lesson is: Anyone who looks on the world as if it were a game of chess deserves to lose.

— Harold Finch, not knowing how to explain to his AI offspring that it should care about people (but doing his best), Person of Interest 4x11 “If-Then-Else”

[soldier-poet-king]

Thinking abt body horror as romantic. Body horror as intimate recognition of the self and the other and the other as the self. Body horror as an encounter with the divine.

[ourstaturestouchtheskies]

florence + the machine lyrics x colors x textiles in art – grey/silver

Spectrum – Ceremonials // Portrait of a Lady – Guillaume Voiriot 🪦 Spectrum – Ceremonials // Empress Elisabeth of Austria – Georg Decker after Franz Xaver Winterhalter 🪦 Remain Nameless – Ceremonials // Artemisia Prepares to Drink the Ashes of Her Husband, Mausolus – attributed to Francesco Furini 🪦 Mother – How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful // Portrait of a Lady – Guillaume Voiriot 🪦 Mermaids – Dance Fever // Melancholy – Francesco Hayez

[ssstrawberryflowers]

don't know who may need or want this but here have some not even properly dressed Gabriel sketches i did recently (exhausted but desperately wants to draw more Garbrbrrl like that)

[itsalwaysforyou]

hold me together.

kenny ortega, descendants 2 / holly black, red glove / nicole homer, underbelly / ada limon, a new national anthem / k c cramm, christmas eve forever / kenny ortega, descendants 3 / the crane wives, curses / silas denver melvin, let dead dogs lie / natalie wee, least of all

[calamity-calliope]

The New Sequence is absolutely wonderful because yes, they are doing a great job of infiltrating society, but it's frankly hilarious how blatantly un-stealthy they can be. Like sure, walking around bright-eyed in public would certainly attract attention, absolutely. But is it any better to be recognized as the people who wear sunglasses in a cave.

[eldritchdilf]

Happy new year! 🥳

[burquillos]

what are your overall thoughts on the fontaine arc so far? i've been dying to know!

OooHhh I LoVED IT!!

I wasn't as hyped for Fontaine as I was with Sumeru (but that's just due to aesthetic preference and because the forest region and the akademiya resonates with me) but I really enjoyed the ride including the world quests.

The storytelling was a bit different and it felt like they've learned a lot from former AQs. It was less bombastic and more subtle (at the start) and the scope of the story was a lot smaller relative to Sumeru/Inazuma. Which was PERFECT buildup for the reveal at the end.

For me it has the same sense of heartfelt fantasy of the Mondstadt AQs but also the layers and big reveals of the Sumeru AQs (both quests that I really love!!)

I knew they were cooking. I was patient and my patience was greatly rewarded. That is all I could ask for as an audience. The catharsis was delicious 👌👌👌

AND YET they are not done yet. Still so many unanswered questions. Major endgame players like Skirk and the Hexenzirkel are starting to show their hand. But Furina (or Nuevillete's??) 2nd Story Quest is still bound to happen + Interlude chapter(s) as well as our annual Dainsleif shenanigans is still something to look forward to and I am excited 😊🎉👏!!!

[egoborderline]

I love harvesting machines like fuck yeah dude those carrots are going to heaven

[raiasintended]

Scraper Bots, Fuck Off! How to "Opt Out" of Your Artistic "Data" Being Used in "Research"

How can artists protect their work from being used by art-generating "AI" bots? How can we take a stand against this continuing, as more and more programmers build their own forks and train derivative models?

Here are a few steps artists can take to keep their work from being used to train new art generators (and one step non-artists can do to help). For the reasoning and explanation behind these steps, click the Read More.

The Method:

Remove images that do not have watermarks. Take down every one of your images that can be accessed publicly and does not have a watermark. (In fact, if you have the resources, take down every image, even those with watermarks, and reupload them with new names or URLs).

Add watermarks to your images and re-upload them. Put a watermark on every image you intend to share publicly. It doesn't have to be huge and obvious, but for best results, it should have text, and if you really want to be a pain in some engineer's neck, it should be colorful. I explain why below the cut. @thatdogmagic has shared an absolutely brilliant watermark method here (https://www.tumblr.com/thatdogmagic/702300132999397376/that-your-audience-wont-hate-this-is-a-method).

Watermark everything. From now on, any image you share publicly should have a watermark.

One host domain only. Strive for keeping your image files on only one domain—for example, tumblr.com, or your personal domain. Again, I explain below the cut.

ADVANCED: Configure your domain's robots.txt. If you have administrative access to your host domain, update your robots.txt file to contain the following: User-agent: CCBot Disallow: /

ADVANCED: Configure your meta-tags. If you have administrative access to your web pages, update your meta-tags to include the following: <meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

ADVANCED: Configure your .htaccess. If you have administrative access to your host domain, update your .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking to images. There are a few ways to achieve this, and a simple tutorial can be found here (https://www.pair.com/support/kb/block-hotlinking-with-htaccess/).

Bullying Campaigning. If you do not have administrative access to your host domain (for example, if you host on tumblr, or deviantart), ask your administrator to block CCBot in the domain's robot.txt, disable hotlinking, or take similar actions to prevent image scraping.

Aggressively pursue takedowns on image sharing sites. The best known sources of this issue are Pinterest and WeHeartIt, but especially focus on Pinterest. The image takedown form for Pinterest can be found here (https://www.pinterest.com/about/copyright/dmca-pin/), and the image takedown form for WeHeartIt can be found here (https://weheartit.com/contact/copyright).

Non-artists: do not reupload images, do not share reuploaded images (no, not even to add the source in comments), do not truck with re-uploaders. If you see an image without a watermark on image share sites like Pinterest, and it doesn't look like the artist themselves pinned it, give them a heads up so they can file a takedown.

The Reasoning:

Why watermarks? Why meta-tags? What good will any of this do?

Below the cut, I explain how these art-generation bots are "trained," and how we can use that information to prevent new bots from training on stolen art.

Those Who Can't, Program

Deep learning models capable of generating images from natural language prompts are growing in both capability and popularity. In plain English: there are bots out there that can generate art based on written (and sometimes visual) prompts. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney are examples of art-generating "AI" already in use.

These models are trained using large-scale datasets—and I mean, large. Billions of entries large. Because teaching a learning machine requires a lot of examples.

Engineers don't make this data on their own: they acquire datasets from other organizations. Right now, there is no better dataset out there than the Internet, so that's what most engineers use to train their models.

Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org) is where most of them go to grab this data in a form that can be presented to a learning model. Common Crawl has been crawling the publicly-accessible web once a month since 2011, and provides archives of this data for free to anyone who requests it. Crucially, these are "text" archives—they do not contain images, but do contain urls of images and descriptions of images, including alt text.

The Common Crawl dataset is, in some form, the primary source used to train learning models, including our art generators.

Nobody Likes Watermarks

Watermarks are one of the easiest and most effective ways to remove your art from the training set.

If the model is trained using the LAION-5B dataset (https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/), for example, there's a good chance your art will be removed from the set to begin with if it has a watermark. LAION-5B is a filtered, image-focused version of the Common Crawl data, with NSFW and watermarked images filtered out.

Using this example provided by the LAION team, we can determine what kind of watermark will ensure your art is filtered from the dataset: partially transparent text placed over the image. Bots trained with data filtered similarly to LAION-5B will not be trained using your images if you use such a watermark.

As a bonus, if you include a watermark in your image and it somehow still makes it into a training set, the additional visual data will skew the training. It will assume any images it generates that are “inspired” by yours should include similar shapes and colors. The bot doesn’t actually understand what a watermark is and assumes it’s a natural element of the image.

404 Art Not Found

The reason we want to remove and re-upload images with new URLs is simple. The datasets these models study do not have actual images, they have the URLs pointing to images. If your image is no longer at that URL, the model can’t load your image, and any models trained with out-of-date datasets will not be able to locate your images.

However, this is only a temporary fix if you can’t prevent Common Crawler from recording the image’s new location in its monthly archiving of the internet.

Unusually Polite Thieves

The slightly more advanced tricks we can use to keep crawlers from recording the URLs of your images rely on the etiquette of crawler bots.

Firstly, keeping all your images in one domain has a chance to reduce the number of times models training from filtered datasets will reference your images in training. Crawling or scraping that results in significant negative impact on a domain’s bandwidth is bad. Like, legal action bad. The people behind the learning model generally want to avoid pissing off domain admins. So, there is a narrow chance that simply having all your images hosted on the same domain will prevent a model from trying to access all of them. It’s a bit of a stretch, though.

Something that is much more likely to see results is to plant the equivalent of “KEEP OUT” signs in your domain. Common Crawler, for all its presumption, follows bot etiquette and will obey any instructions left for it in robots.txt. Common Crawler’s bot is named CCBot. Create a robots.txt file and place it in the top-level folder of your domain. Make sure robots.txt includes User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / and CCBot will not archive your pages.

Using meta-tags in the headers of HTML pages on your domain will also help. Adding <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> will tell any crawler robots not to follow any of the links from this page to other pages or files. If CCBot lands on your page, it won’t then discover all the other pages that page leads to.

The more advanced tactic is to disable hotlinking for your domain. When someone accesses an image hosted on your domain from somewhere other than your domain, this is called hotlinking. It’s not just a bandwidth sink, it’s also the exact process by which models are accessing your images for training.

This can be tricky: it involves creating and configuring a hidden file on your domain. The tutorial linked above in the step-by-step gives a simple look at what you can do by editing your .htaccess file, but searching “htaccess hotlink” will provide a bunch of other resources too.

Fucking Pinterest

Let’s cut to the chase: a majority of images in these training sets were scraped from Pinterest. Not DeviantArt! Not ArtStation! Literally 8%, of the billions of images collected, were from Pinterest. Image sharing social sites are the worst.

There’s no easy way to prevent people from resharing your images there, but between your new watermarks and the Pinterest takedown form, you can potentially keep ahead of it. 🫡

Now for the Downside

This won’t work on the models that already exist.

Unfortunately, we can’t untrain DALL-E or Midjourney. We can’t do anything about the data they’ve already studied. It stinks that this happened without common knowledge or forewarning, but all we can do is figure out how to move forward.

The good news is that while the current models are powerful and impressive, they still have some significant flaws. They’ll need more training if they want to live out the bizarre pie-in-the-sky, super fucking unethical dreams some of these weirdos have about “democratizing” art (which seems to mean eliminating trained artists altogether).

If we educate ourselves on how these models are trained and how the training sets are compiled, if we continue to make noise about artists’ rights to their own data, we can make sure this art-generator trend doesn’t somehow mutate into a thing that will genuinely replace living, biological artists.

[warpedlegacywrites]

Chapter 16: The Crimson Council

After long months of planning, the delegation to address the growing problem of red lyrium finally takes place. But for all her meticulous planning, there's one thing Theresa hasn't accounted for.

Several voices rise at once, some concurring and some dissenting, and already Theresa sees things getting horribly sidetracked. She raps loudly on the table with one of her paperweights, waiting for enough of the din to quiet down before shooting Varric a pleading glance.  He quickly clears his throat and raises both hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Let’s keep this on task, shall we? Our first and biggest problem is that we’ve all found ways to deal with it on a smaller scale, but those methods are either temporary, ineffective, or impractical on the scale we’re talking about. And to stop this, we’ve got to think big. Continent-big.”  Feynriel crosses his arms and gives a thoughtful frown. “For the sake of argument, what happens if we do nothing? Nature is incredibly adaptable – isn’t there any chance that things will work themselves out?”  Everyone grows still, looking to Theresa and Varric, who share another grave look.  “No,” Theresa says flatly. “There’s no chance. I’ve seen firsthand the damage it will do if left unchecked. It will eat the world.”  Feynriel eyes her warily. “Figuratively?”  “Literally.”  The note of silence that follows is chilling. But at least now, everyone understands the stakes. 

DAFF tag list: @rakshadow, @rosella-writes, @effelants, @bluewren, @breninarthur, @ar-lath-ma-cully, @dreadfutures, @ir0n-angel, @inquisimer, @crackinglamb, @theluckywizard, @nirikeehan, @oxygenforthewicked, @exalted-dawn-drabbles, @melisusthewee, @blarrghe, @agentkatie, @delicatefade, @leggywillow, @about2dance

[shirkers2018dirsanditan]

LITERALLY the same argument i was making to myself. there are plenty of very famous and well liked men who have literally never been accused of sexual assault or domestic violence. when people were pulling the race card with majors, i was like. okay. damson idris? he's hot right now. his costar michael b. jordan? he's been famous for decades. and he was a child star. DENZEL WASHINGTON? will smith slapped a guy and though everyone was denouncing him, still no one came forward and accused him of being a sociopath or a rapist or a womanbeater. and people have been ragging on him for a while about being out of touch or being a secret scientologist or whatever. and then there's sidney poitier - who had his own moments of being a dog and treating women poorly in his personal life (being a philanderer and a deserter, namely how his relationship with diahann carroll went) or harry belafonte - who caught flack for divorcing his black wife and then marrying a white woman. both even died and still. nothing. but okay lol

[andthebeanstalk]

Favorite part about Death Note is that Light gets the Note and IMMEDIATELY becomes a serial killer fascist with a god complex.

No build-up, no Fall From Grace, no slow corruption of a good boy gradually becoming a monster. Just-- SPEED RUN STRATS. And I love that for him.

Tbh, I think there are a lot of folks (especially boys) from my high school days who would have immediately become monsters if given the power of life and death over every person around them.

It's kind of like how when people have apparently casual ableist beliefs, and you push them to elaborate on that just a little bit, they'll often end up openly saying stuff like "well, some people are just too disabled to be worth the resources it takes to support them." - Which is... eugenics. It's just eugenics, justified by the myth of scarcity. Now these folks almost certainly won't call it eugenics, or even think of it that way. But that doesn't make it NOT a core belief of the Nazis.

In a similar way, Light seems like a nice and well-adjusted boy with strong beliefs. No harm in that.

But to paraphrase Lindsay Ellis in her analysis of the Game of Thrones ending, "Power doesn't necessarily corrupt. Power reveals." [I think she was quoting someone else when she said this. It was someone who wrote a biography on LBJ. Whatever. Lindsay said it and she's smart as hell and I recommend her videos.]

And 15 minutes into the Death Note musical, I'm already thinking about how so many beliefs "casually" held by well-adjusted, nice people immediately reveal their monstrousness when talked through to their natural conclusion.

And I wonder how many of those people, given the power of life and death over everyone around them - the power to take their ideas to their natural conclusions - would also immediately reveal how their lack of self-reflection has laid the groundwork for them to become monsters.

[autogeneity]

think today's session I was meant to have exploded or something

[antirepurp]

in a perfect world frontiers would've leaned more heavily onto the elements of exploration and combat, taking the wonder rise of lyric wanted to create with the way it places the player into ancient ruins and abandoned facilities to learn more about them, and replicating the love that went into unleashed's werehog gameplay that gave us a fleshed out combo system and a competent beat-em-up. alas sega is a coward, and in this essay i will -