#these google ai posts are killing me

[daydreamingtomatos]

sticks my finger in my ear like a nonchalant anime boy. listen i know we're all worried about chat gpt or whatever and im not wild about the idea of my surgeon using it to skate through uni without actually learning anything, but you do know there were already surgeons skating through uni without actually learning anything right. before chat gpt people would just Buy their essays. students were already doing and have always done that. swaths of ghostwritten unresearched health advice books already crammed amazon's shelves. youre telling me that some lazy dumbfuck fiction writer is using inauthentic methods to push out as many books as possible with no integrity and the goal of profit over everything else? shit let me pull out my copy of Judge And Jury by James Patterson

[evanthefunky]

Personally, I think its awful that I remember what kind of society I live in- one cool or ignorant with surveillance for the sake of convenience, one that indeed hates the rich but doesn't love the poor, one that is so open-minded its lost, one that is hopeless and yet continues on, one that hates so much and loves to a fault, one cool and even excited about advertisements everywhere aka every available space known to man- and then just have to go about my day.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

What do you think about the "kill notice" about the new Catherine pic? I looked at the picture, there doesn't seem to be any distortion or manipulation. Some filters have been used but nothing is misaligned or photoshopped in or out. No dodgy shadows. Wtf is with the reporters agreeing with it?? Is this a shady attempt to force Catherine to be out in the public sooner than she would like to be? Apparently the controversy is about her left hand and somewhere along Charlotte's left sleeve. Part of me feels it's because reporters know she is now well and are angry she isn't back to work and giving them content. But, the picture agencies pulled the pic, so what's with that?? Such an unnecessary controversy.

I think it’s much ado about nothing. A lot of what people are point out as edited can be explained away, such as:

Kids are wiggly so of course they’d be blurry.

It’s a still from a video or a Live Photo.

Kate isn’t wearing her rings because maybe her fingers are still swollen from all the post-op meds and steroids, or maybe she just doesn’t want to wear them.

It's a program/app on William’s phone that stitches together the best parts in a sequence of photos to fix a squirming kid. (Like Google’s Best Take feature, in which case it’s AI, not photoshop.)

But wait, what about that pap pic last week of Kate with all weight in her face looking unrecognizable, and now in this photo she looks like herself? It’s about camera angles and body positions. There’s a pose - I call it the goose pose - where if you tilt your upper body forward just slightly and push your head/chin all the way forward, the extra weight in your midsection, neck, and face disappears from the camera if the photo is being taken from the front. (When you do this pose and the picture is taken from the side, you look like a goose.)

It’s great that the wires all have standards and that they take it seriously but the “kill” request illustrates a bigger problem: that in todays age of photo editing, filters, and AI, is any photo we see real and original? Once you permit minor edits like removing dust (which is an AP allowance), it opens the door for other edits and who’s the authority to say what’s right or wrong? So it’s a sticky line.

The reporters are writing about it because they have nothing else to write about. The media makes a ton of money off Kate and the children (more than they care to admit) so of course they’re going to pick up on this and write about it. They’re desperate for Kate content because she sells.

[[Interrupting now to say that I've just seen the update from KP of Kate (scroll to the end) acknowledging the edits and apologizing for any issues. It's bullshit she had to do this but I understand why she did it: she's proud of her photography, it's her own picture she edited and not one from anyone else, and it's overshadowing the Commonwealth Service coverage.]]

I mean, it's no coincidence that a prolific royal fashion blogger notorious for bashing Kate while simultaneously profiting from her appearances and photographs announced she's taking a break to Easter. Other royal events are still happening. Other royals are still working. Other royal families are still working. But that doesn't matter: she makes her money from Kate and when Kate doesn't work, she can't make money. So why bother keeping up the blog?

Anyway, believe what you want to believe about the photograph, but just be ready for all of this to backfire. And trust me, it will backfire.

If it's true that the Sussex Squad is behind this, well, Meghan may work hard but karma works harder. Harry and Meghan's own photoshopping and photo-editing may become equally under fire: Harry's Friar Tuck bald spot is world famous and everyone knows about it, no matter how much photoshop they do.

If it's true that the media and social media is making this a bigger issue than it actually is (which it sounds like, given Kate's newest message), then reap the consequences of your actions: fewer pictures from Kate and fewer pictures of the Wales family. The chances are extraordinarily high that they'll stop sharing pictures of their family now. It's already happened - back in ye olde days, it was custom for the royal family to have a photo call during a ski holiday so the press pack could get their pictures and leave them alone. William and Kate did this in 2016 on a skiing holiday, and boom - immediate criticism. Now no more vacation photos.

If it's true that the reporters picked up on this to force Kate to returning to work sooner than expected, well, I hope Kate retreats further into the cocoon of privacy and doesn't give you the satisfaction of new birthday pictures.

If it's true that this is a sign of how shambolic KP's communications office is, then hopefully the right people learn the right lessons and make more professional decisions. We know Kate will. She always learns from her missteps, even if it takes some time.

If it's true that the wires and the press associations need to revise their rules because everyone edits, I hope they do. Trust me, there are more worrying matters about photo editing and AI manipulation to write and "kill" than a touched-up family photo of the future king's family posted to social media. This is not the hill to stake your professional reputation on.

But I guarantee you that the same people who are making a fuss about these photo edits that EVERYONE does are the same people who are moaning about the dearth of content from the Waleses and they're the same people who scream and shout when the Waleses don't do what they want them to do.

But at the end of the day, it's a family photo taken by a proud husband and dad, who probably made stupid cheesy jokes to make his kids laugh like that, which his wife and their mother edited to make sure everyone looks their best. Everyone does this. It's fucking normal.

It's much ado about fucking nothing and I hope that everyone, most especially the reporters, who fed into the hysteria understand what they've done. They've just signed the execution notice for Waleses family photos.

Kate's apology:

[nostalgebraist]

@oakfern replied to your post “it's going to be fun to watch the realization...”:

i feel like this is going to play out very similarly to voice assistants. there was a huge boom in ASR research, the products got a lot of hype, and they actually sold decently (at least alexa did). but 10 years on, they've been a massive failure, costing way more than they ever made back. even if ppl do think chatbot search engines are exciting and cool, it's not going to bring in more users or sell more products, and in the end it will just be a financial loss

​(Responding to this a week late)

I don't know much about the history of voice assistants. Are there any articles you recommend on the topic? Sounds interesting.

ETA: Iater, I found and read this article from Nov 2022, which reports that Alexa and co. still can't turn a profit after many years of trying.

But anyway, yeah... this is why I don't have a strong sense of how widespread/popular these "generative AI" products will be a year or two from now. Or even five years from now.

(Ten years from now? Maybe we can trust the verdict will be in at that point... but the tech landscape of 2033 is going to be so different from ours that the question "did 'generative AI' take off or not?" will no doubt sound quaint and irrelevant.)

Remember when self-driving cars were supposed to be right around the corner? Lots of people took this imminent self-driving future seriously.

And I looked at it, and thought "I don't get it, this problem seems way harder than people are giving it credit for. And these companies show no signs of having discovered some clever proprietary way forward." If people asked me about it, that's what I would say.

But even if I was sure that self-driving cars wouldn't arrive on schedule, that didn't give me much insight into the fate of "self-driving cars," the tech sector meme. It wasn't like there was some specific deadline, and when we crossed it everyone was going to look up and say "oh, I guess that didn't work, time to stop investing."

The influx of capital -- and everything downstream from it, the trusting news stories, the prominence of the "self-driving car future" in the public mind, the seriousness which it was talked about -- these things went on, heedless of anything except their own mysterious internal logic.

They went on until . . . what? The pandemic, probably? I actually still don't know.

Something definitely happened:

In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year [i.e. 2021] and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”

Whatever killed the "self-driving car" meme, though, it wasn't some newly definitive article of proof that the underlying ideas were flawed. The ideas never made sense in the first place. The phenomenon was not really about the ideas making sense.

Some investors -- with enough capital, between them, to exert noticable distortionary effects on entire business sectors -- decided that "self-driving cars" were, like, A Thing now. And so they were, for a number of years. Huge numbers of people worked very hard trying to make "self-driving cars" into a viable product. They were paid very well to do. Talent was diverted away from other projects, en masse, into this effort. This went on as long as the investors felt like sustaining it, and they were in no danger of running out of money.

Often the "tech sector" feels less like a product of free-market incentives than it does like a massive, weird, and opaque public works product, orchestrated by eccentrics like Masayoshi Son, and ultimately organized according to the aesthetic proclivities and changing moods of its architects, not for the purpose of "doing business" in the conventional sense.

Gig economy delivery apps (Uber Eats, Doordash, etc.) have been ubiquitous for years, and have reported huge losses in every one of those years.

This entertaining post from 2020 about "pizza arbitrage" asks:

Which brings us to the question - what is the point of all this? These platforms are all losing money. Just think of all the meetings and lines of code and phone calls to make all of these nefarious things happen which just continue to bleed money. Why go through all this trouble?

Grubhub just lost $33 million on $360 million of revenue in Q1.

Doordash reportedly lost an insane $450 million off $900 million in revenue in 2019 (which does make me wonder if my dream of a decentralized network of pizza arbitrageurs does exist).

Uber Eats is Uber's "most profitable division” 😂😂. Uber Eats lost $461 million in Q4 2019 off of revenue of $734 million. Sometimes I need to write this out to remind myself. Uber Eats spent $1.2 billion to make $734 million. In one quarter.

And now, in February 2023?

DoorDash's total orders grew 27% to 467 million in the fourth quarter. That beat Wall Street’s forecast of 459 million, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Fourth quarter revenue jumped 40% to $1.82 billion, also ahead of analysts’ forecast of $1.77 billion.

But profits remain elusive for the 10-year-old company. DoorDash said its net loss widened to $640 million, or $1.65 per share, in the fourth quarter as it expanded into new categories and integrated Wolt into its operations.

Do their investors really believe these companies are going somewhere, and just taking their time to get there? Or is this more like a subsidy? The lost money (a predictable loss in the long term) merely the price paid for a desired good -- for an intoxicating exercise of godlike power, for the chance to reshape reality to one's whims on a large scale -- collapsing the usual boundary between self and outside, dream and reality? "The gig economy is A Thing, now," you say, and wave your hand -- and so it is.

Some people would pay a lot of money to be a god, I would think.

Anyway, "generative AI" is A Thing now. It wasn't A Thing a year ago, but now it is. How long will it remain one? The best I can say is: as long as the gods are feeling it.

[obviousbaitfish]

woooow they blocked me. i dont know why i followed that person in the first place. i think theyre both assholes. oh well. anyone who Just Posts AI art is probably a dickhead anyway, disabled or no (though talking about killing yourself for a paragraph is giving emotional manipulation to me). Stay mad, stay miserable, im sure youll find comfort in each other with your shitty attitudes.

I'm not here to discuss the ethics of AI or anything I'm coming at it solely from an art discussion place (and environmental sometimes), which is that it's completely soulless and has no thought into it. Effort? To get the right prompt? Maybe. But it doesnt inspire thought or discussion as an art piece. Oh cool. It's a squid. It's a white women looking at a 3/4 angle. With the same kinda bland, flat, art style. Anyway.

Duchamps's Fountain isnt high art. It took no effort. It's a toilet he probably found in the trash. But it inspires discussion that's lasted like... decades. It's one of my favorite pieces because people STILL get mad about it. DaVinci has a similar art style, even - im not a fan of it. Realism, but kinda flat. It is much darker and more neutral though. Soft shading, soft colors. But there's a reason it intrigues people. It's studied portraits of people who existed. At least that's why it intrigues me. were they family? a friend? maybe it was a commission? why did they think that was the most flattering portrait for them if it was? If they didnt EXIST and it's solely the artists imagination, how'd they get that angle? That pose? What inspired this idea? The effort they put into the physical aspect can be a part of it. But then why is Fountain so iconic? The hardest physical part of THAT was lugging it to the gallery.

Maybe THATS why they were so mad. They realize there was no soul in it. The only thing they can bother to create is so menial and pointless. They can type little prompts into a bar and turn up with... something "physical". But theres nothing behind it. They cant explain why they painted the tree that color, or the women has that expression. The robot did that. They can say "I wanted it that way - i saw it on my way home" but I dont know... that doesnt have the same zing. It's not showing me what YOU saw. It's showing me what it's lumped together from 15,000 results for "green tree" on google. I think maybe that's it. Art in any form comes from the mind of a person - no matter how complicated or "good" it is. It's from the direct point of view. A kindergartener draws their family and it sucks but it's like a little snapshot of how they saw that particular moment. They noticed the bright sun and grass and drew it. You can get a robot to do that, but then that's from X amount of people's point of view that it's dredging from. Not yours. You typed in "bright sunny day green grass happy family" but that's not YOUR view of that snapshot in time. Even if it's not from something irl it's a little snapshot into the person's mind, how they were feeling, what colors they liked... a AI cant do that because it's a separate entity doing it.

Anyway. I dont know what moods inspired this. I think I just miss my art history classes and stuff. I'm not smart enough for like ethics or philosophy but art history I can get behind.

[lime-bloods]

some less cohesive thoughts wrt something touched on in that last post.

i have assumed in some previous posts that by killing Calliope, Caliborn carves out some essential part of himself, and is thus cursed to an eternal Lack no matter the effort he might put into self-improvement. and while this is at least one interpretation proferred by the text, there is a fair argument i think to be made that it's a cruel or even ableist one. the idea that Caliborn is "stunted" is ultimately a bit of poking fun (possibly even at the author's own neuroses). while Caliborn makes it easy for us to come away with the impression that he's stupid, he's clearly not: his original plan to pass on the assassination of Calliope's dream self to Jack Noir is, yes, an evil plan, but it's a clever one! Calliope's underestimation of Caliborn's twisted genius is clearly a part of what allows the plan to work in the first place, and in retrospect this subterfuge clearly prefigures the kind of underhanded dealings that allowed Caliborn to take such complete control of Alternia.

I think it's very tempting to see Scratch's knack for manipulation as something Caliborn "stole" wholesale from Dirk-as-AR: the "Land of Someone's Handicrafts I Took" certainly comes across as a suggestion that Caliborn is incapable of truly creating anything for himself. but this too is just making fun of Homestuck's long-standing love affair with the Google image result photobash, and in the end the copy+paste only serves as one small step in Caliborn's creative journey. Lord English is a dark mirror of Hussie, after all, and to accuse Caliborn of being creatively bankrupt is to suggest Homestuck itself of lacking originality... but of course that's all part of the point. we can't necessarily assume Homestuck's default position is one of self-confidence; while it's never been particularly shy about the bits and pieces it aped from the works of fiction that came before it,* the comic crucially does set out to question the ethics of reusing ideas, or even of telling a story in the first place. that Hussie didn't even "create" his own characters - that they originate as some kind of timeless Platonic ideas that one merely plucks from the void when they're needed to tell a story - is essential to the comic's mythology; hell, how much of Homestuck even is there that isn't just a remix of Hussie's own previous work?

I asserted a couple years ago now that Homestuck is "only superficially" about creation and reproduction... but one particular rebuttal, that Homestuck actually very much is about reproduction in the sense that it is about the reproduction of images and ideas, has stuck with me since i first heard it. and though conversations about the difference between stealing / copying / learning / coming up with an original thought are obviously a LOT older than modern machine learning, given that Caliborn very literally goes on to become a Terminator-esque AI singularity (in a setting where all AI is just direct copies of living people's essences, no less!) and even played with early examples of tech bro grift a couple years before the debate really took off, I find it a fun thought exercise to ponder the ways in which Caliborn's contribution to Homestuck preempted the current discourse on algorithmically-generated art... which I suppose grows not just out of the more pedigreed argument about digital art as a medium, but probably stems all the way back to the dawn of comics as a medium, in all their entanglement with the burgeoning pop art movement. but that's about where my area of expertise ends.

*it's probably meaningful that the name of the planet Lord English "stole" his ideas for Alternia from, "befor-us", is so widely reinterpretable as referring to pretty much anything that came "before us".

[cleolinda]

Weekend links, May 26, 2024

My posts

My neck is fucked up in some inexplicable way (silent migraine?) and I have been trying everything I can think of. It’s a little better, but the strain persists. 

I am hoping everything in this post is coherent and spelled correctly, but it’s a gamble at this point. I only just caught "Spiders George."

Reblogs of interest

U.S. Justice Department seeks breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster through major antitrust suit

Google’s AI Overview results, “the new Lies Your Older Cousin Tells You machine” that uses headlines from The Onion to answer your most pressing questions, are a menace and they’re going to get someone killed. Here’s the magic code to get rid of it.

The Hot Vintage Lady Semifinals are Hedy Lamarr vs Diahann Carroll and Rita Moreno vs Eartha Kitt. “But what about--?” They were already knocked out several polls ago. “But--” Them too. Check out the (very lighthearted) Dracula fantasy cast polls while you’re there.

Tolkien imitators never actually understood Lord of the Rings

If your Willy Wonka isn’t at least partly horror villain, you may not have understood Willy Wonka

A handy guide for finding (tagged) posts on Tumblr

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, a helpful website/browser add-on

News you can use: Paranormal experts say there may be a portal in an English forest letting in werewolves. 

The last time I saw the Dark Grocery Store on my dash, someone had it tagged “chilla’s art coded,” iirc, and I watch so many game playthroughs that I laughed a little too hard at that.

Something else I laughed at harder than I should have: “Soulsborne bitches will be like omg they brought back Lactus the Intolerant” in the middle of a post about Glup Shitto, Bumbo Wexler and friends.

This cat pole is awful. Let me love it.

If Godzilla fits, Godzilla sits.

Video

PBS Great Performances’ Shakespeare in the Park streaming schedule for May and June (with Danai Gurira as Richard III, even), free to watch.

Considering how much you’re able to see of Frog and their paintbrush, I’m still not entirely sure how India Rose Crawford makes these videos. Also, that amigurumi frog is a better artist than I am. 

The sacred texts

Will any of you motherfuckers ever help Blade fight the vampires

Spiders Georg broke containment and ended up in... Business Insider.

Heart eyes, motherfucker

Personal tag of the week

Some really interesting posts on my jewelry tag, including an emerald ring.

[writersneedreblogs]

okay so I'm a broke bitch who's trying to recover from a shopping addiction so I'm avoiding mobile games altogether... BUT. can you tell me pls what actually happens in zaynes third anecdote?? I've googled endlessly and can't find anything, so I'm living vicariously through everyone posting about here on Tumblr. if u could tell me what that anecdote is about (tagging spoilers obviously) I would be eternally grateful!!

Okay I gotchu it’s gonna be shit but I’ll do the best I can

ENTIRE ANECTDOTE 3 SPOILERS VERY LONG

It starts in the pov of a boy named Georgie who was getting attacked by a wanderer that wore human clothes, his mother pushes him out the way of an attack and takes it instead. Suddenly a figure in black emerges and uses an ice evol to kill the creature after it let go of the mother and it dissipates leaving blue fragments. Georgie asks if the figure is the Grim Reaper but doesn’t get a response and the figure leaves after I’m assuming giving a once over on the mother and son

Georgie stalks Zayne afterwards on where he goes (mostly to a store to buy chocolate) so he could approach him, eventually he does and points out that he buys chocolate every day and offers zayne a jar of wrapped chocolate in exchange of finding the person who killed his mother. Zane refuses coldly saying that he should be asking the police

Next part is in the pov of a detective called Ivan who has been tracking down a serial killer they dubbed Dawnbreaker (the name of one of Zaynes battle options) who has left nothing behind at the crime scene except for blue fragments, the victims have no connection to each other except for the blue fragments which reminds him of a wanderers protocore. He’s puzzled on why they leave a similar energy of a wanderer behind and why the killer was targeting people with it so he used an AI to predict who would be next.

It then cuts to him arriving at the scene of dawn breaker attacking his next victim who is an elderly man. Suddenly the old man attacks and transforms into a wanderer injuring dawnbreaker but is immediately killed in response and leaves a blue fragment behind Ivan tries to shoot dawnbreaker but is pinned by ice and is unable to call for back up, mumbling to himself that the old man wasn’t human. Dawnbreaker then leaves and later Ivan discovers that the latest Jane doe was the mother of Georgie who has gone missing from an orphanage he was taken to, leading Ivan to believe that it will lead him to dawnbreaker

We cut to Zayne now and he sees Georgie at his apartment and remarks that he had noticed the same jar of chocolate placed by his door. Zayne ignores it and leaves his apartment, when he returns Georgie is asleep by his door with the jar and is mumbling mom in his sleep.

Georgie wakes up to Zayne crouched by him opening the jar and asking tentatively if he will help him. Zayne says nothing and opens the door to his apartment but lets Georgie come inside.

Georgie notices that the room lacks humanity to the point where the only sign of it is cracked and aged walls, he then spots a hologram of a very old doctor tv show that Zayne is completely engrossed in. Georgie criticises the show and Zayne gets up off the sofa towards Georgie which makes Georgie think he’s made him angry but Zayne only grabs the jar and starts eating from it.

Georgie is puzzled by him treating it as his dinner and asks what he usually eats and is shown that Zaynes fridge only has bottles of nutrient solutions and Georgie drinks it out of hunger, he questions if the drink and lack of meal make Zayne human.

Georgie falls asleep on the sofa and wakes up to Zayne tending to a budding jasmine he kept in his room, placing it on the window sill to get sunlight and watering it and pruning it. Georgie is stunned with the soft glow in Zaynes eyes and asks him about the plant and if someone important gave it to him but gets no response, he gets frustrated with this and gestures to the jar in that Zayne accepted it so he must now help with his mother.

Zayne stops tending to the flower and gets dressed in his dubbed grim reaper clothes, Georgie sees that his bedroom has no other furniture in it except for the wardrobe. Next to the bed is a screen showing a lot of moving green dots but gets no response when he asks about it.

Zayne and Georgie leave and go to a convenience store where Zayne buys a soda bottle and a jar of chocolates which he gives to Georgie, they leave and Zayne pours the bottle out and freezes it into a popsicle. He then follows Zayne to an abandoned plaza and sees him gazing at a patch of jasmines, Zayne then walks to a bench that faces the flowers and Georgie realises the bench is clean, he then asks if he comes here often and gets no response.

Zayne then pulls out a book from his pocket and Georgie reads out loud that it’s a Linkon city travel guide and that he’s marked several locations on it like museums, ski resorts, parks, restaurants and Linkon City’s hospital. He asks why he’s interested in an old book on an old city and Zayne stares at the jasmine and remarks that he often dreams of the place with a briefly different look on his face

The night before, Zayne dreamt that he and a girl bought snacks and froze a soda into a popsicle, he’s been getting dreams like this almost every night. In those dreams he lives out a surgeons life with this girl and hes had those dreams since he was 12 and that they happen in no order. At 12 years old he knew he would meet the girl when he was 27 and he’s thinking the doctor is him but then rather says that he wants to become the person loved by the girl in his dreams. He records as much as he can through the guides because he wants to experience them and have them consume him.

We come back to Zayne stepping out of a shower and looking at his scar ridden body, he gets dressed and see Georgie asleep on the couch, he covers the boy in a blanket and watches the doctor tv show again. Georgie wakes from a nightmare about a monster escaping through his chest and asks of what his mom said about dreams being the opposite of reality is true (to the man desperately wanting his dreams about the girl to come true)

Zayne changes the channel to a story about a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly and woke up with the same feeling and he couldn’t tell if he dreamt about being a butterfly or the butterfly dreamt about him. Georgie is confused but wonders if he’s in a monsters dream, he then asks about who Zayne is when he dreams about Linkon city. Zayne switches back to the medical show in response and he correctly guesses that he dreams of being a doctor which Zayne nods to.

Zayne looks at the boy and notices a small bump under his eye and starts to conjur up an ice blade behind his back. Georgie says he understands that Zayne probably doesn’t want to help him find the killer but asks to celebrate his 12th birthday tomorrow with him and he will leave, the ice blade melts away. Zayne doesn’t respond and goes to his bedroom where he spots a red dot amongst the green ones and says good night to Georgie.

The next day Zayne takes care of the jasmine he has and takes Georgie to a dessert place and orders a macaron, stating that he dreamt of eating it along with another person. Georgie asks if the doctor dreamt of Zayne celebrating his birthday and Zayne says maybe. Georgie is given a birthday cake and Georgie is very happy, stating that the only other person who celebrated was his mother. When Georgie makes a wish before blowing out the candles there’s a blue glow under his skin, he eats the cake and asks Zayne when his birthday is and Zayne says he stopped celebrating his birthday after he turned 12

When Zayne turned 12 on his birthday, his adoptive father transformed into a wanderer and attacked him and his adoptive mother, after his mother died he killed his father in self defense with his evol and that was his first kill. He stopped celebrating his birthday since. Later that night he dreamt of the doctor treating a girl and it became his only solace.

Georgie says he will give Zayne all different kinds of chocolate on his birthday and gazes at the sunset, he remarks how pretty it is and how when he used to live with his mother in the dorm it didn’t have windows. Zayne asks “what if you look at the sunset and feel nothing at all” and Georgie responds with “what’s the difference between that and being dead? Mom used to say that dying with clarity is better than living like a corpse”

All of a sudden dozens of police officers enter the place and surround them and Detective Ivan walks in saying “we can negotiate as long as you let the child go” Georgie argues that they’re just celebrating his birthday and Ivan states that Zayne is the one who killed his mother, Zayne says nothing.

Ivan positions the boy behind him but when he turns to look at Georgie he is no longer human and a tendril erupts from the bump under his eye, hooking into Ivan’s arm. Zayne pierces an ice shard through Georgies chest and he goes down, looking up at Zayne through tears and asking if the monster woke up, Zayne gently closes the boys eyes as he fades.

Afterwards Zayne is seen with two tombstones one big and one small, he places a jar of chocolates at the smaller one. He remembers the woman buried here and that she had approached him asking him to kill as she was turning into a wanderer and did not want to harm her son

He is then joined by the detective who has flowers for the graves and asks if Zayne always knew the child would turn so he kept him by his side. Ivan states he will stop investigating dawnbreaker and destroy the records so no one will know of him. Zayne states that he hopes that this will be their last meeting and Ivan asks for Zayne to kill him the next time they meet as that would probably mean he was a wanderer.

It ends with Zayne dreaming again and this time he is celebrating his birthday with the girl who says that she will always be by his side when it’s his birthday. Zayne couldn’t resist the urge to caress her cheek and spots that they’re holding hands, he reaches over to touch her cheek but the girl is shocked and says that he isn’t Dr Zayne and asks who he was. Zayne wakes up and ponders on what it meant, wondering if the girls saw through time and noticed that he wasn’t the doctor. It ends with him looking at the jasmine flower he was taking care of.

[nerves-nebula]

OK im still thinking about if sun wukong actually killed macaque. at first i was like... probably not, right? that seems pretty brutal for lego monkie kid and wukong doesn't really seem to act like it, like i don't recall him saying "you're supposed to be dead" when we're introduced to macaque, and idk if he's ever said anything that implies macaque has ever been deceased. So at first I was like. ok he probably didn't kill this guy there's prolly something else going on.

but then in season 4 wukong off-handedly mentions that he sent azure to the underworld himself in like the finale (i dont remember if he brought it up before then) which implies that he did actually kill Azure and that having done so wasn't so important to him that he felt the need to mention it before then. so ok. maybe he's run into macaque since macaque was revived and has already had his "but you're supposed to be dead!" moment. or maybe he's just not easy to catch off guard in that way since he knows people can be brought back from death, i guess.

HOWEVER the EXACT WORDING Wukong uses when talking to Azure is "I put you in the underworld myself, how did you get out?" which is just vague enough that he could mean that he imprisoned Azure there, but didn't like. KILL him. SO THE JURY IS STILL OUT.

an of course there's also this tweet, which seems to imply that wukong DIDN'T kill macaque

but then you gotta think well, if wukong didn't do it then who tf did? *SOMEONE* had to have done *SOMETHING* because Macaque has the scars to prove he was fuckin, bludgeoned to death through the eye. unless we're supposed to believe that Wukong just scarred him and didn't actually kill him (which would be disappointing to me only because i really like the idea of a guy dying by getting a staff shoved through his eye but makes the most sense for a kids show i guess)

or maybe this tweet is only implying that Macaque wasn't actually resurrected by LBD but maybe some other force working for LBD? that would be a bit confusing but it's a possible reading, considering that Azure also isn't entirely sure who resurrected him. seems unlikely tho since LBD corroborated this part of the story herself, though I guess she could just be playing along with whoever it was that actually raised Macaque.

anyway i don't have a conclusion here other than "probably didn't kill macaque, probably just wounded him" but i did want to mention that while using google to try to find the tweet above this happened

so i guess I'm googles fucking. preeminent Did Lego SWK kill Lego Macaque scholar out there. fantastic. EXCEPT. WHEN YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK? IT'S NOT ACTUALLY QUOTING MY POST. IT'S QUOTING A REPLY SOMEONE MADE TO MY POST. I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW OR WHY GOOGLE WOULD DO THIS? WHAT IS THE AI BEHIND THE SCREENS UP TO THAT IT'S SCOURING THE REPLIES OF A TUMBLR POST AFJSDILFMDSGKASMGD

oh but also when i added "tweet" a the end to try to find the sceenshot in images, this happened.

also the post referenced there is good. i like it. it does less rambling and wishy washy ranting than mine and we basically came to the same conclusions, except they have better photos to prove it sfdfdsf. idk when google started pulling tumblr blogs as sources but i guess we're the only ones talking about damn show.

anyway thank you for coming to my post where i overthink stuff and screenshot google results instead of doing my work

[frostyreturns]

"the tinfoil comes off when you have to imagine the government as smart." This is one of the responses to my post about government having access to technology far beyond the general public. This is a pretty common dismissal of conspiracies and it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard every time I hear it.

A.) What you think the government is and what the government actually is are two different things. This attitude only works if you actually believe the puppet they parade in front of a camera is in charge. Can you honestly tell me you believe that, for example Joe Biden a demented old fuck that doesn't even know where he is...is the one writing and enacting policy right now? You have no idea how smart or how dumb the people in charge are because you don't even know who they are. There's video footage of him signing laws where he says the words "I have no idea what I'm signing." But sure I guess if you're dumb enough to think guys like him are the government I guess thinking the government is too stupid to plan stuff makes sense. The government has so much power and so much control over your life that this idea that they are just too incompetent to plan anything is beyond ridiculous.

Bureaucracy is just one part of government and yeah they're going to have incompetent workers maybe even more than the general public but to say the people in charge are too dumb to plan anything...come on. They were smart enough to trick you into allowing them to steal from you every week, to control your entire education and to be able to send armed men to kill or imprison you if you do anything they don't like.

B.) You know Hanlons razor "never attribue to malice what can be explained by stupidity" well that's retard shit go ahead and reject that premise in totality because reality is actually the opposite of that, the world is full of malice especially when you look to the upper echelons of power....those people are all psychopaths.

You have made the mistake of assuming the terrible things they do are because of stupidity and that they just keep screwing things up by mistake...the screwing up is very intentional. Every socialist policy maker who claims "oh I'm raising the minimum wage 5 bucks to fight inflation because I care about the poor" knows 100% that they are causing inflation and that it will make life harder for everyone and especially hard for the poor. They know...they want your life to be harder, they want money and power and wish you harm. It's not a bug it's a feature.

They knew when they went on tv and said get this shot it will save your life and your grandmas life...they knew they would be injecting you with heart attack cancer juice, that was pure unbridled malice, not stupidity.

C.) You understand it's not DMV employees and politicians doing science for the government right? You do understand that when I say the government has tech we don't it's not because I think Justin Trudeau figured out AI before google right? They use those private companies as contractors to develop technology and then control how it is accessed used and if and when and how it is released to the public. Or they just hire the smartest people to do R and D directly for them. Like when they invented the internet at DARPA. But usually they just swoop in and take what they want that someone else created. People also have this idea that major corporations and the government are separate competing entities when they're not. They dump funding into companies and install CEOs and board members to control them. Google for example only exists because of the government, oh did you think google does whatever the government wants purely coincidentally? The idea of corporations vs government is a fantasy that should have been even more apparent during 2020 when the will of the state was summarily executed by virtually every corporation on the planet.

The idea that people still think the government is separate from corporations after minimum wage employees at walmart were tasked with being bouncers at the door and making sure everyone was wearing a mask had their injection and weren't standing too close to each other because the government told them to ...is ridiculous. 2020 should have been the death of the "private company can do what they want" nonsense.

D.) We tend to use ourselves as barometers of what others are capable of but the problem is there are ways of life and being that are totally foreign to us. Many assume because they are not smart or sociopathic enough to collude and scheme to achieve power and control over others...then nobody must be like that. You went to public school smoked weed the whole time and learned how to write in cursive poorly...I don't think your experience is the same as someone who was born into wealth and power and can spend every minute of their life for generations learning how to keep and amass more wealth and power. You have no idea what it's like to have everything you could ever ask for, all the money you could have to indulge any whim and get weird and disconnected because of it and to feel entitled and superior and spend your days trying to exert your will on the rest of the world. That's not even going into any secret cults or organizations...which are also a thing.

Embracing the tinfoil is the only rational way to proceed with what we know. The only alternative is comfortable delusion. And this wasn't even about a wild or hard to swallow reality...it was just the notion that the government is ahead of the consumer market with technology...that's not even a conspiracy it's a demonstrable fact.

[dduane]

Just a quick note about DeviantArt...

...for the nice people who anonymously (or otherwise) messaged me about what was going on with AI over there.

I see from the various articles making the rounds that there was confusion about the opt-in/opt-out status of AI usage of people’s DV art. I’m clear on the situation now: thanks to all.

And that said: I’ve still killed my old DeviantArt account, for a number of reasons. 

It wasn’t getting any use (i.e., even I tended to forget about it almost all of the time)

Over the course of nearly seventeen years, very, very few people noticed it

I have other, much more effective ways to store and manage my digital art and photos these days

So it was time to let that account go: and I have.

...There were only seventeen or so items in the account, about half of which weren’t either terribly noteworthy, or vitally important to keep... so those I deleted, knowing I have copies elsewhere. Of the ones I did decide to keep, anybody desperately anxious to see what kinds of photomanips I had in there is welcome to go have a look at the Google Photos album where I’ve got them stored.

The one of the gentleman at the top of the post, though, is by far my favorite. It was taken with a Sony Clié (anybody remember those?...) in the early 2000s, in the up-against-the-back-wall bar of one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Brasserie Federal in the main train station in Zürich, Switzerland. This handsome space was once the station’s second-class ticketing hall: its stained glass ceiling is worth seeing.

...The gentleman in the image above—who’d been having a beer while waiting for his train and watching the football—struck me as looking as if he’d just dropped in from another century. He kindly agreed to let me take his picture (though plainly wondering why on Earth I was so interested). ...When I got home, I massaged the raw image with a Photoshop plugin called BuZZPro 2.0 (now no longer supported, as the company no longer exists) for a more watercolorish quality: and there it is.

...Anyway, thanks to everyone for the assistance! It’s much appreciated.

[timeboundterra-reblogs]

No no please write the essay I love to see people’s takes on Satanael

So it only took 14 months for me to get to this, but here we go.

Please take this with a grain of salt, I’m getting a lot of info from a Gnosticism explanation website which might not be all correct. And it’s also being written at midnight.

In the tags I left on your post, I mentioned that the biggest reason for Satanael being Joker’s ultimate persona is because Satanael is the child of Yaldaboath.

According to Gnosticism, Yaldaboath is the demiurge created by the heavenly being Sophia (which might be where Sophia, the AI from Strikers, got her name, but that’s another thought for another essay), who is basically the Gnostic equivalent of an angel (they’re refered to as aeons, divine entities descended from God the Father, and most were born from male-female pairs, along with the blessing of god). Yaldaboath was cast from the heavens into a realm below so early into his existence that he was convinced that he was the first “living” existence. It is explained that Sophia gave birth to a son that was the product of the rebellious and profane desire that had arisen within her, and due to being birthed only from Sophia and without the blessing of God, he was “a misshapen, belligerent creature that was utterly unlike the other heavenly beings.”

Because of this ignorance, foolishness, and malevolence, he created the material world, also trapping sparks of divinity in Adam and Eve. That last bit isn’t too important right now, but it’s clear that Yaldaboath didn’t make the world out of the good in him. There’s a lot of other stuff that happened that also proved that he’s not a good entity, such as creating the old ten commandments and then completely ignoring them, gaslighting those that he created into thinking that he was the one true god, and telling Adam and Eve that the fruit of the tree of knowledge would kill them if it was consumed, among other heinous acts.

As much as I’d like to back up my original claim, I can’t find anything that states similarly or differently, and whenever I do try to google it, lots of persona 5 and megaten (as well as other mythos based games and stories) come up and clutter the results, so there isn’t much. But if I’m understanding this correctly, Satanael was created by Yaldaboath to serve him, along with Yaldaboath’s other “higher” creations.

After some time, Satanael rebels against Yaldaboath, for some reason or another (again, can’t find reason, but one source did mention that Satanael rebelled with a heavenly light rivaling Yaldaboath’s). This leads me to believe that Satanael either found out about the true nature of Yaldaboath being an unjust demiurge, and that he was the bastard son of Sophia, one of the Aeons of Pleroma (greek for Fullness, literally the Gnostic name for Heaven) who atoned for her sin of rebellion and profane desire to conceive without the involvement of her own partner or the consent of God, OR he pitied humanity, OR he simply did not like Yaldaboath’s game of ruin.

In short, Satanael rebelled for the greater good of humanity, where Sophia’s rebellion caused grief and anguish, and Yaldaboath’s own rebellion from the true God put his creation of material on the path to ruin. In a way, Sophia’s rebellion created Yaldaboath, Yaldaboath’s rebellion created Satanael, who then rebelled against Yaldaboath (making Satanael basically a fallen angel), allowing for humanity to continue on in its own path of rebellion.

How does this relate to Joker? Well, we see that Joker’s story in P5 starts with him rebelling against who we think is the big bad – Shido. In most places, you wouldn’t directly rebel against an adult as a child/minor, as you’re unlikely to win. Joker’s rebellion in this part of the story is what kicks off his “fall” as a phantom thief. Shido is the one who created the phantom thieves, if you think about it, that rebel against him towards the end of the story (yes I know they fight Yaldy I’m getting there). While for a time, Yaldaboath is the player’s guide, eventually, Joker does rebel against him, in a direct parallel to Satanael. Yaldaboath created Satanael/chose Joker as the wildcard, and then Satanael/Joker saw the truth of Yaldaboath, and rebelled against him.

Personally, I would think that Satanael would be empathetic towards Joker, in that both were “created”” by Yaldaboath, and then both saw the truth of Yaldaboath, making both rebel against their creator. Kindness isn’t always a driving factor – Joker didn’t save the world for his love of the world, he saved the world because he didn’t want to live in a world where he would be punished for doing the right thing. It’s why he stood up to Shido both times, why he stood up against all of the phantom thief targets. All of them had an influential power that they used for their own gain/devices, just like Yaldaboath. And like Satanael, Joker couldn’t sit by idly. Sure, the way Joker went about his justice wasn’t correct, but correct isn’t always right, nor just.

Joker and Satanael both rebelled for what was right, even if it caused their downfalls, they were both held aloft in the end. In one text, it’s said that Satanael was brought up to Heaven, and Joker parallels this in the fact that he’s found innocent of his initial false crimes of assaulting Shido.

[dazzlerazz]

Stop giving gen ai attention. Stop giving it negative attention. Stop posting your 'this is what the ai gave me when I googled this' screenshots. Stop saying "I hate ai, but...." Stop using chat gpt for asking questions. Stop using gen ai to show you what your favorite character would look like in x style.

The only way to kill the gen ai boom is to stop paying attention to it, leave worth of mouth behind. Let it die quietly. If someone asks you or talks about gen ai with you, absolutely have a discussion with them.

The aim of not talking trash about gen ai is not meaning that it's good, it's to stop letting it be in the spotlight. Because all attention and engagement is positive attention and engagement on the internet and to companies and those searching to make money. Rage Bait Exists For A Reason.

[alitheakorogane]

SAGAU?

The SAGAU or Self-Aware Genshin Impact AU, especially Imposter AU, is a very intriguing concept... if we never counted the mischaracterization and irony of some of the characters.

I mean, the Archons are being batshit crazy hunting over you when these little hypocrites are doing the same thing with having similar faces with their statues, and their damn people never connected the dots on how the Archons are just beside them playing 'guess who' (Zhongli and Venti, I'm talking to you)?!

And where is Celestia in all of this shit (in some fics)?

So I have a great idea to explain why the characters are acting like medieval men with pitchforks in my version of the AU.

There are two real-life Genshin events that inspire me to do my twist on the AU:

Hoyoverse's plan is to create a virtual world by 2030, with Genshin Impact as the "prototype". They are also keen on putting an effort into AI-related research.

The recent controversy regarding the famous anti-cheat driver used in Genshin Impact is allegedly used for malicious intent by hackers, where it kills antivirus processes and services for mass-deploying ransomware.

I was also inspired by the Gravity Falls episode "Soos and the Real Girl", where a video game character, "GIFanny", who is from a dating game simulator (inspired by real Japanese dating sims), became sentient and zaps her programmers to oblivion when they try to delete her. Heck, her most prominent ability is the power to override computer functions, transfer herself between electronics, and can download a person's conscious mind into the digital world, thereby uniting that individual with her forever.

In short, she's a Yandere. Perfect.

Because of all of these, this SAGAU idea was born.

What if the rabid attitudes of the characters in SAGAU Imposter AU were caused by a computer virus attack on a certain vulnerable code in the game that was intended to introduce an AI for the developer's incoming virtual reality project?

The AI was designed to create the characters, whether playable or non-playable, very interactive in the digital world. The technology allows for the characters to gain 'sentience', to allow them to talk and interact with the players without any difficulty.

Unfortunately, because it was slightly unfinished, the code was vulnerable to hacks and computer bugs that could possibly attack the code, and eventually, the game installed by the player.

The hacker, who is also a Genshin player, eventually finds out about it and made a computer bug to try how it will affect the game and warn others about the danger it causes. Then they posted it on some shady website under the guise of a private server or something.

And there was this unlucky player, who unknowingly opened the computer bug this hacker had sent when they wanted to open a private server (the player doesn't know how to obtain them so they stumbled on this website).

Unknown to both of them, the AI had been affected by the virus differently than they expected. The characters, the lore... it all changed and twisted to something different.

The characters were now sentient, but the virus had made their personalities deviate from their actual personalities in the original lore, and the AI added one thing to the now-changed lore: the existence of the "Creator", the Almother of Celestia and Teyvat who made the fantasy world by the flick of their hand.

The virus, now knowing the existence of the Creator, created an imposter based on what it had gotten from your user preferences, and your social media accounts. Just like real-life malware does: stealing your identity online... to rule Teyvat and at the same time, fully infecting the game and the computer, finally sending the infected codes at a fixed time, this time on the surface web (like Google, Instagram, etc.)

Since they are now sentient, the AI can recognize the virus spreading on the game, and release their last resort to combat the imposter and the virus itself: bringing the real Creator to Teyvat by any means. The golden blood rushing in the Creator's veins acts like an antivirus or the cure to the game.

The Creator will also have allies intended to help the real one navigate through Teyvat. The Chosen Vessels, including a certain little Archon (with her being connected to the Irminsul, served as the AI's server), will help the Creator defeat the Imposter and their now corrupted Acolytes.

And the unsuspected player, who just loved playing Genshin Impact as a means of escaping reality, was the victim of all of this.

[mariacallous]

Artificial intelligence was once something the average person described in the abstract. They had no tactile relationship with it that they were aware of, even if their devices were often utilizing it. That’s all changed over the past year as people have started to engage with AI programs like OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the technology is rapidly advancing. 

As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what’s real and what’s fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation. 

“We’ve seen pretty dramatic shifts in the landscape when it comes to generative tools—particularly in the last year,” says Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert. “I think the scale of content we’re now seeing being produced is directly related to that dramatic opening up of accessibility.”

It’s not a question of whether AI-generated content is going to start playing a role in politics, because it’s already happening. AI-generated images and videos featuring president Joe Biden and Donald Trump have started spreading around the internet. Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician? 

There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It’s easy to generate a clone of someone’s voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.

“To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates,” Ajder says. “Video is really the next frontier in generative AI.”

Some deepfakes of political figures have emerged in recent years, such as one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to surrender that was released last year. Once the technology has advanced more, which may not take long considering how quickly other forms of generative AI are advancing, more of these types of videos may appear as they become more convincing and easier to produce.

“I don’t think there’s a website where you can say, ‘Create me a video of Joe Biden saying X.’ That doesn’t exist, but it will,” says Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. “It’s just a matter of time. People are already working on text-to-video.”

That includes companies like Runway, Google, and Meta. Once one company releases a high-quality version of a text-to-video generative AI tool, we may see many others quickly release their own versions, as we did after ChatGPT was released. Farid says that nobody wants to get “left behind,” so these companies tend to just release what they have as soon as they can. 

“It consistently amazes me that in the physical world, when we release products there are really stringent guidelines,” Farid says. “You can’t release a product and hope it doesn’t kill your customer. But with software, we’re like, ‘This doesn’t really work, but let’s see what happens when we release it to billions of people.’”

If we start to see a significant number of deepfakes spreading during the election, it’s easy to imagine someone like Donald Trump sharing this kind of content on social media and claiming it’s real. A deepfake of President Biden saying something disqualifying could come out shortly before the election, and many people might never find out it was AI-generated. Research has consistently shown, after all, that fake news spreads further than real news. 

Even if deepfakes don’t become ubiquitous before the 2024 election, which is still 18 months away, the mere fact that this kind of content can be created could affect the election. Knowing that fraudulent images, audio, and video can be created relatively easily could make people distrust the legitimate material they come across.

“In some respects, deepfakes and generative AI don’t even need to be involved in the election for them to still cause disruption, because now the well has been poisoned with this idea that anything could be fake,” says Ajder. “That provides a really useful excuse if something inconvenient comes out featuring you. You can dismiss it as fake.”

So what can be done about this problem? One solution is something called C2PA. This technology cryptographically signs any content created by a device, such as a phone or video camera, and documents who captured the image, where, and when. The cryptographic signature is then held on a centralized immutable ledger. This would allow people producing legitimate videos to show that they are, in fact, legitimate.

Some other options involve what’s called fingerprinting and watermarking images and videos. Fingerprinting involves taking what are called “hashes” from content, which are essentially just strings of its data, so it can be verified as legitimate later on. Watermarking, as you might expect, involves inserting a digital watermark on images and videos.

It’s often been proposed that AI tools can be developed to spot deepfakes, but Ajder isn’t sold on that solution. He says the technology isn’t reliable enough and that it won’t be able to keep up with the constantly changing generative AI tools that are being developed.

One last possibility for solving this problem would be to develop a sort of instant fact-checker for social media users. Aviv Ovadya, a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, says you could highlight a piece of content in an app and send it to a contextualization engine that would inform you of its veracity.

“Media literacy that evolves at the rate of advances in this technology is not easy. You need it to be almost instantaneous—where you look at something that you see online and you can get context on that thing,” Ovadya says. “What is it you’re looking at? You could have it cross-referenced with sources you can trust.”

If you see something that might be fake news, the tool could quickly inform you of its veracity. If you see an image or video that looks like it might be fake, it could check sources to see if it’s been verified. Ovadya says it could be available within apps like WhatsApp and Twitter, or could simply be its own app. The problem, he says, is that many founders he has spoken with simply don’t see a lot of money in developing such a tool. 

Whether any of these possible solutions will be adopted before the 2024 election remains to be seen, but the threat is growing, and there’s a lot of money going into developing generative AI and little going into finding ways to prevent the spread of this kind of disinformation.

“I think we’re going to see a flood of tools, as we’re already seeing, but I think [AI-generated political content] will continue,” Ajder says. “Fundamentally, we’re not in a good position to be dealing with these incredibly fast-moving, powerful technologies.”

[rlyc00l]

Okay I haven’t posted here for awhile BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I have a few Zerhys AUs that I’ve written stuff for in my google docs and idk if I’ll ever actually post anything because most of my fanfic writing time is for P0is0ned and this is just stuff I messily type up on my phone sometimes BUT:

1. BL2 AU: Rhys ends up on the train that Jack blows up at the beginning (like Vasquez set him up with a fake job down on Pandora or something IDK???) and thus ends up stuck with the Vault hunters, who naturally are initially distrustful of him but can’t justify just killing him. Jack realizes “oh shit one of my employees is down there with the Vault hunters, I have an extra card at my disposal besides just Angel” and contacts Rhys like “hey if you work with me here and spy on them and stuff I’ll get you back to Helios and get you a huge promotion” and Rhys is like “Sure I don’t see why not, these people are dicks” (headcanon that early in BL2 Zer0 is like, just the biggest “I don’t need friends” asshole).  Except then he does end up seeing why not as he starts warming up to these people (especially Zer0, because, yeah) but by then he’s already been selling him out and sabotaging them. (Bonus Rhys+Angel bonding at some point because they are in a very similar boat? And look I cannot just make this about Zerhys I love Borderlands 2 so so much) 

2. AU where immediately post-BL2 Rhys, Vaughn, and Yvette are among the Hyperions stranded on Pandora, and much like the Crimson Lance soldiers before them they turn to banditry. Rhys has Handsome Jack AI in his head at this point, and with Jack’s help he’s able to take charge as a very unlikely bandit leader. He carefully avoids doing anything that will call too much attention to his clan, trying to focus on survival more than anything.  This becomes a problem when some of his dumbass underlings manage to subdue and capture Zer0. Jack warns him against freeing Zer0, claiming they’ll likely kill him and bring Sanctuary’s wrath down on the clan. However, keeping Zer0 hostage or killing them seem equally risky options. Zer0 gets to sit in a cell and watch Rhys argue with himself, occasionally trying to work things out with him. 

3. Medieval fantasy bullshit. Hi I love medieval fantasy bullshit what if Rhys was a lord and Zer0 was some weirdo possibly-demonic hedge knight and medieval forbidden romance happens. Scandal occurs because of Zer0 being a weirdo possibly-demonic hedge knight. What if Lancelot and Guinevere shit except it ends good and no one joins any churches? Just the parts with the daring heroics and stuff. I don’t have good specific details for this. Just...Knights... 

4. A less well-socialized "only lives to be an assassin” Zer0 is hired to kill Rhys but then some bandits almost kill steal them as they’re following him. It is a matter of honor that they do not just allow this to happen and just take credit for someone else’s kill, so they save him- but by that point he’s been beaten up enough that he’s a little too pathetic to kill. Zer0 thinks “I’ll kill him later” and gets him to safety but by then he has already begun to endear himself to them. Later they’re waiting for the right moment to strike and Rhys will like see them lurking ominously in the shadows and go “Hey Zer0! How’s it going?” and then later he’s straight up asking for them to help him out with his “bandits want me dead” problem. Of course Rhys eventually finds out “oh you were planning to kill me” because conflict must happen. :) 

5. Something something Rhys is actually forced into being a janitor and Hyperion has Zer0 in R&D doing tests on them. As far as Rhys knows they’re a fucked up monster because they keep killing people. Then he actually encounters them and wow I know this sounds Shape of Water but this actually came out of thinking about befriending Jurassic World hybrids lmao. Because Zer0 is the indoraptor. To me.