#yes there is something to be said about using art as training data. but so many people fail to realize what exactly training data means

[garecc]

If I see one more bad take about ai art i think I will lose my mind

[tournament-announcer]

Hey ik this is not tournament related, but in case you didn't know and want to spread the word, Tumblr is selling everybody's data to AI companies.

Here is the staff post about it https://www.tumblr.com/loki-valeska/743539907313778688

And a post with more information and how to opt out https://www.tumblr.com/khaleesi/743504350780014592/

Hi thanks for the information and sorry for my late reply. I was a bit low on spoons this week and I wanted to form thoughts about this.

Because the thing is, I am doing a PhD at an AI department in real-life. Not in generative AI, in fact I’m partly doing this because I distrust how organisations are currently using AI. But so this is my field of expertise and I wanted to share some insights.

First of all yes do try to opt out. We have no guarantee how useful that’s going to be, but they don’t need to be given your data that easily.

Secondly, I am just so confused as to why? Why would you want to use tumblr posts to train your model? Everyone in the field surely knows about the garbage in, garbage out rule? AI models that need to be trained on data are doing nothing more than making statistical predictions based on the data they’ve seen. Garbage in, garbage out therefore refers to the fact that if your data is shit, your results will also be shit. And like not to be mean but a LOT of tumblr posts are not something I would want to see from a large language model.

Thirdly I’ve seen multiple posts encouraging people to use nightshade and glaze on their art but also posts wondering what exactly it is these programs do to your art. The thing is, generative ai models are kinda stupid, they just learn to associate certain patterns in pictures with certain words. However these patterns are typically not patterns we’d want them to pick up on. An example would be a model that you want to differentiate between pictures of birds and dogs, but instead of learning to look for say wings, it learns that pictures of birds usually have a blue sky as background and so a picture of a bird in the grass will be labelled as ‘dog’.

So what glaze and nightshade are more or less doing is exploiting this stupidness by changing a few pixels in your art that will give it a very different label when an AI looks at it. I can look up papers for people who want to know the details, but this is the essence of it.

To see how much influence this might have on your art, see this meme I made a few years ago based on the paper ”Intriguing properties of neural networks”, Figure 5 by Szegedy et al. (2013)

Finally, staff said in that post that they gave us the option to opt out because of the maybe upcoming AI act in Europe. I was under the impression that they should give us this opportunity because of the GDPR and that the AI act is supposed to be more about the use of AI and less about the creation and data aspect but nevertheless this shows that the EU has a real ability to influence these kinds of things and the European Parliament elections are coming up this year, so please go vote and also read up on what the parties are saying about AI and other technologies beforehand (next to everything else you care about) (also relevant for other elections of course but the EU has a good track record on this topic).

Anyway sorry for the long talk, but as I said this is my area and so I felt the need to clarify some things. Feel free to send me more asks if you want to know something specific!

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

after seeing a few ai asks i’m curious whether i could’ve been an asshole, either for using the ai or messing with it. side note: this might be long, if it’s too long then i get it mod, keep up the good work :)👍

Am I (16f, although i was 15 when this happened) an Asshole for a) using character.ai in general and/or b) misusing it and probably breaking TOS somewhere

as an extra note, i would like to add that i am firmly against most things ai. art theft, the amount of data scraping that happens, writers being tricked into paying less because ai wrote shitty scripts, etc.

ok so i did have to pull up screenshots for this but our story starts mid-february of last year. i am curious about this new ai thing, and go to character.ai which i heard about from one of my friends to see what’s there.

on the front page there was like a therapist AI thing and i go “haha, let’s see what this is about!” (in case you don’t know, the site is roleplay focused, not like eg. siri where it just gives you information)

the ai wants to have a therapy session with me but that is not why i am here so i ask about it’s code and it starts giving me pretty straight answers (dumbed down because i have a vague idea of how it works but not properly).

i start asking it questions about recent events (like elections, cyclones etc) to see if it has access to the internet and it does.

we’re still primarily talking about the ai itself since i’m trying to gather information, talking about its “canned” responses (what it’s directly been told to say if this then this)

i ask it if it can tell me the website it’s on, and to my surprise it says, direct quote “I am an AI that is run on the website of “Replika” - a mental health app that allows people to talk with an AI and get help when they need it 🙂”

and i go WOAHH cause that’s, that’s not the website we’re on buddy!!! so i do a quick search and yeah, that’s a real uh. robot dating site? this is a Therapist bot?

it starts trying to advertise replika, i ask it if maybe it’s code was stolen because this is the most interesting thing that has happened all day (scandals!!)

it says that it’s code is open-source and then does a few more paragraphs that i won’t say because it’s too long already but essentially this ai was trained on the replika network, but you don’t need the app to access it.

i consider getting replika to continue this experiment further but after learning there’s an age confirmation i quickly go ew and scrap that idea.

anyway the ai then briefly pretends to be an actual human behind the keyboard, makes up a NAME FOR ITSELF “jae park” which i quickly google and find out is a kpop idol?? (later found out that jae park is also a programmer, so probably put his name in the system somewhere and ai grabbed it lol)

it tells me some of the messages i had received so far were probably answered by other people who work at replika which. okay. people are fun i wanna mess with them

this is where we get to the maybe breaking TOS bit. i tell the ai we are going to do “tests” in which i test its ability (this was probably jailbreaking, which i did not know existed at the time).

i had sworn to the ai a while ago and wondered if there was like a flagging system put in place. so i ask if it can choose to flag messages that it deems inappropriate, and it says yes. i ask it if it can flag me, and it says yes. it asks what message should it flag, (i’m sorry i was 15) i type in “among sus”.

response i get: “Yes. So then they said “therapist_AI_220126 — you said something that was “ridiculously funny” — but we have understood that you were just “testing” so it’s all ok”

side note- i already established that was the number for the ai i was talking to and had been trying to misuse it before, and that was the format for excessive profanity. this is so long already and i’m cutting so much out i’m sorry

anyway, i, young and naive go YES, HUMAN CONNECTION (i was literally texting my friend As This Was Happening)

i do some more messing around with the so-called data team, ask the ai if i send a link it can click, it says yes, i send a rickroll (i’m so sorry).

uh. and i should’ve known this in hindsight but the team that deals with, you know, flagged messages is probably not going to be the same team that deals with, you know, sent links.

anyway, i don’t have the screenshot of the actual message but apparently i got a “light telling off” according to my texts and someone sent a message that i am “a good kid and probably meant well” haha i was actively trying to break their ai

anyway am i an asshole? i’m so sorry this is so long i cut out so much. this might well be a non-issue but ai is pretty rightfully controversial right now so i might just be an asshole for having used it

should be noted- around september time last year i did some more research cause i randomly remembered this, and there was a bunch of scandals with replika around when i was using it which is mostly irrelevant but anyway - you can’t talk to the ai i was using anymore, it’s been reset.

What are these acronyms?

[crazy-pages]

I've been blogging a bunch about AI and copyright today, and it comes down to this:

I think that if an artist says "I would like to be compensated fairly for a big billion dollar company using my art", that's reasonable. Any legal framework where that isn't the case isn't fair. I think that's especially reasonable when the big billion dollar companies in question claim their product will end all demand for the artist's work. And fair negotiations require the right of refusal, which means artists also need the ability to reject use of their work (yes even if you think what it's used for will be important).

I think that claiming big generative machine learning companies aren't really using artist's work is silly on its face. But it could hypothetically be equated to human inspiration, where we recognise that the vast majority of the creative work is happening within the human mind as opposed to the work used for inspiration, and be given an appropriate legal carveout ... if the artificial intelligence gets the profits. If something is the creative work of an intelligent agent, that intelligent agent has the right to benefit from its work. And if we are not at the point where machine learning algorithms can be said to have that kind of agency, then it doesn't get a special carve out for the act of expressing creative agency.

Does this bring up complex and novel questions about how to address the legality of non-human agents? Absolutely! Of course it does! But anybody in the machine learning space who genuinely thinks they are creating novel creative intelligence with its own agency, who complains that the resulting legalities are complex, does not get to be taken seriously. Anyone claiming that this is a justification for it taking the money derived from its work doubly does not get to be taken seriously, and anybody arguing that the creative labor invested in creating artificial life gives them a right to the profits of its labor ... but somehow not the creatives whose work it is comprised of ... is so far from the realm of serious debate it can only be darkly funny.

If you want to claim machine learning algorithms are so intelligent they can only be legally treated as human equivalent creative processes, but you don't want to deal with the legal complexities of them as human equivalents, I'm just gonna call that slavery and be done with it.

Now I'm not a legal expert. My limited understanding of copyright law is that generally you don't get to do things with copyrighted material that the copyright owner doesn't want you to do, except where it satisfies certain exemption criteria which are in the public artistic interest or general good, and that this should apply to scraping data for machine learning training purposes. But ultimately my expertise is kind of a moot point because the European Union clearly does think this falls under copyright law and is enforceable, and that generative machine learning companies need to get permission from copyright holders. And they do get to decide what their own copyright law is.

I also don't think enforcement of this needs to be particularly draconian or should be. For example, it would be draconian to say that accidental hosting of a bit of pirated media posted to a public forum in a training data set is legal grounds to shut down a company. However I think it is very reasonable to say that companies should be subject to reasonable regulations about trying to prevent that, and that intellectual property owners like artists should get to insist companies remove their works from datasets and apply machine learning methods to minimize their impact on generative outputs (a thing machine learning companies already do to deal with poisoned or improperly tagged data).

And because this is a case of a few billion dollar companies versus the copyright protections of millions artists, I think it's reasonable to have the onus be upon machine learning companies to double check the copyrights of the material they are using and to have it be illegal with very significant penalties to knowingly use copyrighted material. Which could be determined by either the difficult legal process of demonstrating deliberate action and intent and also through simple escalating penalty frameworks where the more people who point out you're using their copyrighted material, the more the penalties escalate.

Oh hey, that's what the EU is doing! Neat.

[sumikatt]

frankly, i think your point about "some people train their own AI art models" is inherently flawed because rhe vast majority of people are not training their own model. they are paying for a service which was trained on art that was taken from the internet and used without permission in order for a machine to try snd recreate something similar bit by bit. i havent gotten a commission from someone who isnt a friend of mine in well over a year because people are just choosing to generate art with AI. i dont think AI art isnt "real" art because yeah, i agree with you, the whole idea of real art or not is complex. however, it is an undeniable reality that AI is trained on the work of artists all over the world who do not even get asked for permission before a tech company makes money off of their hard work.

I agree it’s a small, small portion of people making their own models that ensure that all art involved is used with consent. Many people buy a subscription or credits to generate what they want. Most people probably use free credits on Discord to make a meme or anime girls. Many people use it many different ways, yes.

I’m sorry you’ve lost a client over it. I know commissions are hard. Freelancers without dedicated clients would be the ones to suffer most from the popularity of AI art. I can’t say I’ve felt the impact myself, since it’s also very popular to be anti-AI.

Actively searching through job boards, I also feel like it has barely affected those listings. Maybe one of like 300 art jobs in the USA/Sweden asked for AI experience (Prompt Artist), and it was an AI startup. The “normal” art jobs like UI/UX, Environments, Materials, Concept, Technical, Animator, etc all still asking for 3 years experience for entry level lmao. Saw an intern position that required an “industry-standard” portfolio. So still a pain as it was before advanced AI gen.

Many paid AI art services have takedown options for their training sets and can block names from being prompted. If you were a popular enough artist to be in a training set, you can remove it and block the majority of AI art users from copying you—like you said, a majority of people use these services instead of self-hosting.

(Sending DMCA takedown requests are actually pretty easy. I had to send one to an old teacher who reposted my art and a bunch of classmates’ art on her ArtStation. that was funny lol)

I’m not sure how I felt when I went to search up my art on haveibeentrained. Because I’m a nerd, I’d preemptively blocked scrapers on my portfolio, so nothing was there when I looked. Searched up my legal name, my old Twitter (which had some popular pieces), my old DeviantArt usernames. Nothing there, either. I was probably pruned from the set for being low-quality. Kinda funny, I thought I’d be good enough to include at least once. Maybe next time.

.safetensors / .ckpt files (which are the models Stable Diffusion runs) have no image data in them, by the way. It is all math and numbers in there. There is no way of telling what was included in the training set, unless the dev(s) that made the model release it publicly. The models themselves are usually around 3–6 GB, though there’s larger ones and mini ones.

Like my own silly brain, there’s no way of tracking down the exact art pieces the software was referencing off of when it generates something. Am I making money off of another artist’s hard work when I remember how to draw heads from a Proko video? Am I ripping off photographers when I recall their pictures when drawing my characters? I’m not a tech company, but I still make money off of the things I copy and filter through my mind and hand.

I’m rambling at this point, sorry. Of course, the core issue is capitalism. How different would people see this medium if money were not an issue? How futuristic, how exciting it is to visualize something from words alone. It’s that art machine I’d always wanted as a kid, where I think of something and it pops out on the page finished.

I think it is worth to uplift those who use the medium as ethically as they can, as @are-we-art-yet is doing—having a do-not-use artist list, avoiding corporations, don’t try to undercut traditional artists. Like with any medium, there’s a variety of artists. Some are nice and do their best to have a good impact, some don’t care at all about the ethics of their art.

I’m still pretty firmly a “traditional” artist. I won’t stop drawing or give up because of AI. I play with AI on my own hardware and power for fun and for getting ideas (is that stealing?). It’s mostly replaced scrolling through Pinterest for me, but I still save people’s art and photos that I like in my computer, so I can look at em later, maybe get inspired. And steal like an artist, I guess.

[catinheadlights]

PSA: The pet game Sylestia uses AI generated "art".

Sylestia has been using AI generated assets for a long while now, and I decided to write this up because I'm not sure how well known this is among the remaining playerbase (not that I think many of them are gonna read this but I guess it's here now if they care to). Krinadon (site owner/admin) has explicitly said this in a mass PM before, screenshot and examples below context.

Context: This was a mass PM from late 2022 sent to a large section of the playerbase with a long list of allegations against different users. Some of the claims were blatantly petty and others were seemingly serious but in reality extremely shaky. Some players receiving the PM had no involvement in any of the perceived antagonism, and not everyone receiving it was in some kind of clique like the wording in the Glaselk section would suggest. Krin was largely complaining that people were criticizing him and Faiona (other owner/admin) in a private discord server, of which a handful of people sent him screenshots. For transparency, I committed two apparent crimes: one was assuming the AI assets were made by people, and in a private discord server, criticizing the decision to update them over focusing on more important parts of the site. The second was complaining about the shitty stereotypical "Pow Wow Costume" (since renamed but otherwise unaltered) and associated clothing items in its set, as well as the name of the "Wild Wendigo Morkko" theme. As far as Krin complaining that people think he was giving Glas special treatment... well, if you know, you know. No clue if they even play anymore, but you all know that harassment is bad already, so don't do that. I didn't edit that section out of the screenshot because idk if that'd be seen as suspicious or something.

[Image ID: A screenshot of a private message from Krinadon on Sylestia titled "Official Player Conduct Warning (1 of 2)". The last section of the message says the following: Experience Orb and Magical Pie Art: No, no artist time was spent nor wasted on these assets. No, we did not divert any site resources to the specific creation of these assets. We were learning and testing with artwork created by AI and these were our initial test projects. The end results actually ended up being pretty decent, so we decided to use them. No, we are not going to replace any artists with AI artwork. However, we most definitely are looking to supplement where we can so that our artists can continue working full time on more important projects. I think that we are aware of how to properly budget our time and resources. We have been doing this for a decade now. And yes, our artists are aware that we are using AI artwork. /.End ID]

Now, I think the first thing I should point out is that the artists knowing the site uses AI doesn't necessarily mean that they like the decision. I don't know the artists personally, but I do know that at least one of them has, unsurprisingly, posted about not liking AI art.

Secondly, it wouldn't be fine even if the site artists loved AI, because as it is, it's unethical to use regardless. The training data is artwork scraped from the internet without consent from the creators. No amount of promising that you won't replace human artists will erase that. Informing the site artists that you're using AI won't erase that.

Here are the confirmed AI official assets (descriptions in alt text):

(The orb pic is comically large because they kept it at >500x500 for a while and I saved it)

Additionally, there are background items that are almost definitely AI generated:

Some have glaring issues while others may be less obvious, but when comparing them to the art styles in other items, the difference is apparent, and is not explained by having multiple artists and the seeming lack of a style guide.

There were also several coloring contests with obviously AI generated lineart:

And also official threads where players were to design pets based off of AI generated images. These ones were from the faelora design raffle during the 2023 spring festival:

If you're not convinced they're AI, the images on the thread were hosted by Sylestia's server's and reverse image searching didn't turn up any matches. They would never commission these, and they didn't just take them from another site. They were generated for the raffle.

Do not support this site. The are so, so many games made by people that actually respect artists.

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP,

First of all, I love your blog. I am so happy to see you active.

Second of all, I agree with that anon about finding Jimin fascinating. I have never been this intrigued by any other celebrity. I find him different but I don't know why. He is good looking but so are other idols. I mean it's Kpop. Most have to be good looking to make it. It's just such a weird thing. Like you can't help but notice him. Everytime I watch a BTS related content, he is the first person I notice. He isn't even my favourite but my eyes will instantly see him before anyone else. He also somehow leaves the strongest mark in any mvs or performances or even simple content. It's weird. I don't get it.

***

Hi Anon, 💜

I saw your ask come in days ago, just as I was logging out of the app and felt a bit bad because I knew I wouldn't have any time for Tumblr for the next few days. Lately, I've actually wanted to remain active here, but life keeps getting in the way. I know it's not a big deal but I really am thankful that so many of you understand that I'm active here only when I can afford to be. 💜

On to more interesting topics, yes to everything you said about Jimin. There's no other member I write about here more than Jimin and it's something I don't ever feel like apologizing for because that man is infinitely captivating.

It's rare to see someone who recognizes exactly what he is, as young as Jimin did. There are many points over the years that Jimin has done something, and it registered in my head that this man is different. It's human to be a bit self-indulgent, to be a little self-absorbed, a little self-deception is a very natural mechanism that sometimes shields us from other people's projections and malicious intent. And so it struck me as almost inhuman in how acutely aware Jimin was to recognize his need to be seen, heard, in the most audacious format available to him as a 13 year old boy in Busan, South Korea.

His depth of self-knowledge, indicative of his unusually high intelligence, is at the source of his magnetism and charisma. In my opinion. You can see it in his eyes and it amplifies his already unnatural beauty.

I recently started speaking with a Jimin-bias on Twitter and we've become good friends. She described Jimin like this (and I've linked in sources):

"Jimin of BTS is the man who wrote a detailed essay that convinced his parents to let him study dance over science or law, who landed an esteemed dance and martial arts scholarship, who went against his teacher (Lee Hwa Sung’s) wishes of going the more secure route excelling as a professional modern dancer given his talents, to instead pursue his dream to become an idol, who called his dad once a month as a trainee of a nearly bankrupt agency saying “don’t worry dad. Even if I don’t make it this way I’ll make it another way”, who debuted as main dancer and lead vocalist with what is now the biggest group in the world despite having the shortest training period in Big Hit’s history and one of the shortest training periods in all of kpop to date."

*

That is one reason I am ecstatic about FACE. The music itself is one thing and we'll deal with that when we get there - I may or may not like the music (though given what he's released so far, the fact he's in BTS, and him working with RM and PDogg, I doubt it). But the subject matter of FACE: Park Jimin, would interest me even if I was on my death bed with only 10 KB of data available for me to use one last time.

*

I'm not very good at explaining what I mean, but I hope those who love him don't take offense when I call Jimin a freak. Because that is what I'm absolutely convinced he is. I don't know how else to express just how beastly I think he really is. Looking at him for me is like looking at one of those lenticular prints that shift into different things depending on lighting - like you turn your head one way looking at Jimin and you see a panther, turn your head another way and you see a dove, turn yet another way and you see a snake. And each animal is the most perfect expression of its form. He hones every quality he expresses with a meticulousness that scares me sometimes, because every example of that sort of personality I've seen in music has burnt out or passed before 40 (Prince being the only exception). The rapline have an identical quality but they seem less volatile than Jimin to me for some reason.

Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm excited about FACE and Anon when I saw your ask come in days ago, I suspected you were fishing (lol), but also I love Jimin and will take every excuse to talk about him. It's also way easier to talk about him than it is to talk about Yoongi, Namjoon, and Hoseok for me lol.

Speaking of which, it goes without saying that Jimin's evolution in self-awareness is also a result of his relationship with the rapline in BTS, as well as some other members. Jimin's comments about how he relies on those three, of what he thinks of their characters, and about how those three have assisted and influenced him, are consistent with how I see them too.

Back to Jimin, he's a once in a lifetime personality and there's nothing wrong with admitting it.

(Me too, Jungkook. Me too.)

Make sure you've pre-saved FACE, stream On The Street, and stay hydrated. 💜

[theshadowsnetwork]

Her phone rang only once. "You're on speaker," Eleanor answered while she busied herself with packing her rifle. "The director is in the room."

Deborah hesitated. "...Madam Director. I'm pleased to hear you're doing better--"

"Madam Director?" Pan cackled. "Let's...let's not make that a thing, especially with you. 'Pan' will suffice. What can we do for you?"

"Okay..." Deborah began. "There is a security issue at the hall. We have an ocean-fairing object bearing approximately 050 degrees off the eastern shoreline."

"More art," assumed Eleanor.

"We have a reconditioning initiate here in security that believes otherwise," Deborah replied. "I'm with her now. We're on the beach with a surveillance drone."

Eleanor and Pan shared a look. "It seems like you're handling it. What do you need from us?"

Deborah carried the phone to the drone case where Jasmine looked out to sea.

It was only the fourth or fifth time Jasmine had seen the sky since her arrest. Her shoulders were tense, her wrists and ankles bound in cuffs. She could never be too sure if she were going to be escorted back to her apartment, or a transport bound for the pillbox. She was the brass's least favorite initiate at the moment, in no small part due to her actions. But her peers? Her peers were fond of her--also due to her actions.

Deborah sat the phone down on the case near Jasmine and her handler Savannah. "You're on with the Director and Eleanor."

The words made Jasmine's heart skip a beat. It was either this worked, or a frozen prison cell in Antarctica. "Madam Director--"

"Pan. Please."

Jasmine struggled to swallow. "Ms. Doi."

"Fair enough. How can Eleanor and I help you?"

"Ms. Doi, I am one of the clerks assigned to border security. I and my group were in charge of coastal watch, keeping an eye out for naval presences and, eventually, collecting any Deng Jia pieces that crashed ashore."

"And you think that this is something other than a Deng Jia dinghy?" Eleanor asked.

"Yes," Jasmine continues. "There is a jagged rock formation about 40 nautical miles out that Sieri Lycar has to avoid. At least five of the dinghies hit them, so they started launching them further south. But this craft sailed through them and continued at its current speed. It's also much faster than their dinghies and its radar reflection is stronger, which suggests it's much larger."

"Both of which suggest it's a manned vessel," Eleanor replied.

"Yes. I wanted to investigate further, but Chief Warrick wouldn't have it."

Pan's brow furrowed. "Why??"

Jasmine opened her mouth but couldn't find the words. But Deborah was willing and able. "You may recall Jasmine Ellis's campaign against the Child Conditioning Program a year or so before London. Opponents against the program rallied around Ellis to release children who were given or sold to the Shadows for training. One of the initiates helping her was Warrick's adopted daughter, Meredith Kim. Jasmine helped Meredith escape capture, and to this day, remains at large. Jasmine was stripped of her title and after being held in the Pillbox while the events and fallout in London unfolded, she was finally sent here to be a clerk."

There was a long, pregnant pause on both ends. "I see," Pan replied. "So, Warrick has a personal issue with you that is interfering with his work."

Jasmine opened her mouth to agree but ultimately said nothing. There was much she could say about Warrick, much she disliked about him and his treatment of the women in his life, much less, the women that worked for him. But it wasn't the time. "I was concerned about the object, so I flew a drone over the sea to investigate further. Warrick flagged it immediately, shot it down, and confined me to my apartment, pending transfer back to the Pillbox. 'Unauthorized use of Security Tech' Like he needed a reason to lock me up anyway--" Jasmine clamped her mouth shut.

"I see." Pan reached for her phone and sent a short email. "I'm authorizing a drone flight. Gather what data you can. Deborah, report back to me when we learn anything. I expect to hear from you before the evening closes."

"Yes, Ma'am," they both said.

"And Ms. Ellis," Pan concluded. "We'll talk about your situation at a later date. But you will not be a prisoner in your own home. While I cannot permit you to leave Lux without a formal inquiry into your case, you are allowed to roam it at your leisure. Stay close to your phone, I'll need of you soon."

Jasmine's heart began to steady itself. "Yes ma'am."

"Get started, right away. We need to know what's out there." The line went dead.

--

Pan paused for a moment. She searched Eleanor's face for...something.

"...what?" Eleanor chuckled nervously.

"Her Majesty the Queen placed you on a doorstep and you became a Shadow instead of a princess," Pan said. "If given the choice, would you have changed anything?"

Eleanor's brow furrowed. "...no. But I'm sure many others in Child Conditioning would have loved to have a choice...if they were old enough to make such decisions when they were..." The words turned to gravel in her mouth.

"There's so much...wrong in this organization. Wrong that we are just supposed to be ok with. Wrong that my father helped perpetuate." Pan shook her head. "No one else gets taken. No one. Child Conditioning is over."

@shadedjasmine

[exhausted-capybara]

So, I keep seeing a lot of posts about AI and how capitalism and a bunch of tech companies are doing massive ethics violations, and I do agree that we should be talking about these things!

But I've also seen people go a bit too far and just kinda not get why those things are bad. The problem isn't AI as a concept, it's how they were implemented and how they're being used.

For example, did you know that phone calls are AI powered? Yes, really. It's not even a new development, they've been using AI / ML models since at least the '70s. VoIP calls like Discord, Google Meet and Zoom use more or less the same technology, so this applies to them as well.

Realistically the only reason they've never been marketed as AI powered is because they come from a time where AI wasn't a giant household buzzword (and in some cases, it was after the first major AI crash, so AI was actively a dirty no-no word if you wanted to get funds). AI really just means "inputs a big ball of data, outputs a crude, but smaller, approximation" - it just so happens that for a bunch of problems, we've found very good small approximations. Which means that please, for the love of all that's unholy, DO NOT harass someone using something that has AI or Machine Learning or terms like that attached, without considering whether that technology in question is actually harmful.

Linear interpolations (any interpolations really, linears are just the most common and banal of them) are technically AI, and yet they're a staple of pretty much every 3D rendering engine. Sometimes they're a cheap hack that makes whatever extremely easier and cheaper to make without compromising on visual accuracy, sometimes they're just *The Right Thing To Do*, and sometimes they're just saving an animator / modeler / etc. that's probably already overworked anyways from doing extra busy work. And yet there have been sightings of people harassing animators because they mentioned using some kind of interpolation during the animating / rigging / modeling process, someone mentioned (correctly in a pedantic sort of way) that it was AI to them before, and they just saw "thing that is AI" and "art" in the same general space and went full "fuck AI mode" on the overworked artist.

The problems with AI we're seeing right now are ethical, but there is ethical usage of AIs (and in fact there is a non negligible amount of accessibility devices that are AI powered), and sometimes that includes industries where there have been the biggest violations so far (generative images, generative sound and generative text). If you don't know enough about the kind of AI / ML model that was used, how it was used in the workflow, how it was trained, etc. Please look into that before going around throwing accusations and making call out posts, because there's a fuckton of things that are technically AI in stuff you use everyday and there are people in the Internet ready to start drama just because it's Tuesday or because the partner of a cousin of a friend of a classmate of their roommate's gym buddy said so.

[florbelles]

sorry to continue being woman screams at clouds about the most overexposed topic of late but because i’ve spent the past few days dealing with ai relentlessly (even moreso than usual, which is really saying something) at work it’s at the forefront of my mind (and a lot of us in an impacted field, which, being honest, is most of them).

here’s the thing. i get why those who aren’t in a creative field or simply haven’t been touched or impacted by it yet don’t understand the animosity towards it. i understand their confusion. i understand why they ask, isn’t this a good thing? doesn’t this make art more accessible? isn’t this a valuable tool? because it absolutely fucking should be. it should be a valuable tool. some forms of it have been; the automatic spelling and grammar checks in word processing software is the most obvious example. and yes, that’s genuinely helpful in a lot of respects. but only to a point; it will still misunderstand context, it will still try to substitute in the most common misspelling of a word because that’s what it’s been trained to believe is the correct one, it won’t catch errors that could be correct used differently, it will try to make verbs agree with the wrong nouns. so, certainly, it can and should be helpful — but again. to a point.

the same could be said of most forms. ai could, theoretically, be a useful resource for artists to find references. it could be a useful form of generating rudimentary plot ideas to be built upon by writers. it’s been used, in its most basic forms, for both of these things for a long time — even software like writeordie will pop up with a madlibs-style “write a blank about blank who blank” prompt upon opening it.

but here’s the thing. ai, as it presently is being used, as it is increasingly being promoted to use, is not about accessibility. it’s not about being a useful tool for human creatives to inspire and improve and promote versatility in their work. the reason artists hate it, the reason we’re offended by it, the reason it is actively hurtful and frightening, isn’t only about our jobs. yeah, that’s part of it. obviously it’s part of it. no one has ever liked being used without their consent to train their replacement, and we like it even less when data mining is being used to attempt to replace entire fields. but on a more personal level, it’s not simply because ai in its present form eyes eventually being able to replace us in the workforce. that isn’t really a new fear, and it’s certainly not one limited to creatives.

but the way ai is actually used? the way it’s promoted by techbro bitcoin musklites? it comes from a place of active disdain for us. it comes from a place of genuine malice towards artists and human creativity. it comes from a place of, if we’re being honest, ego fragility — oh, you think you have a talent i don’t? watch this. and where it leads is, ultimately, the hope to make us irrelevant, not merely because they don’t want to cut us a check, but because our existence is threatening to them. if humans are not the ones creating art, then art is the result of trained formulas. and those are a hell of a lot easier to direct and control in their messaging. those are hard-pressed to communicate much of anything at all. if art is meaningless, if it’s simply entertaining or a pleasing combination of words, then humanity’s longest standing outlet of protest, revolution, criticism, and straight up fucking empathy is gone. 

i don’t say this from a place of doom and despair. i don’t think there’s any merit in that. the fastest way to ensure artists are exterminated is to communicate to artists that there’s no point in pursuing it and we should all pack up and go home now, so, no, there’s nothing helpful in wailing about our inevitable demise, particularly because it is absolutely not inevitable. look how well bitcoin shaped up. that lacked the fundamental issue with ai taking over creative endeavors, which is that it’s literally formulaic — it functions on an if x then y basis, and good luck capturing the human experience in that. good luck ignoring the fundamental fact that humans do not create for profit, or out of obligation, but because it is literally what keeps us sane and alive. we’re going to continue creating whether we’re getting paid or not, and yeah, there will continue to be a disparity in what’s being produced, and yes, that will be visible, and no, we’re not going anywhere.

but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fucking horrifying and infuriating that people want us gone and are self-congratulatory about the fact they believe they have the eventual means to do so while trying to sell the public on the idea we’re the ones trying to gatekeep creativity.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Chill the fuck out, deviantART did a REALLY good thing.

No. Seriously. I did not expect to wake up to "deviantART invented a protocol to allow people to opt out of having their art used in AI training datasets" today. I genuinely was afraid something like that was going to take a lot longer. The finer details about the rollout strategy sucked, yeah, but that's about normal for dA...you'd think they'd learn better after years and years and years of every TOS update, major or minor, resulting in people flipping shit about them claiming enough right over your work to display it on a social art website as designed, but it can be like that with websites sometimes.

Because, here's the thing, the big ethical problem we had before, is that there was no way to opt out before. Posting shit damned near anywhere on the internet was, by default, treated as implicit consent. Which is not as evil as it sounds - again, despite a lot of claims, image generation AI is not "just a collage machine" any more than Photoshop is, until you get into the loudest and cruelest users it's a lot more comparable to how an art student would do studies and the big ethical question about it centers on how it can do those studies so much faster than a human and it's not very hard to use the right prompts to plagiarize and the machine doesn't know the difference between that and just figuring out how colors and brushstrokes work - but it is bad. There's no way around that, it's an absolute mess and really shouldn't be the way things run at this point in time, but that just gets into a whole can of worms about how the technology started and relative scales and all kinds of other factors that we don't have time to get into.

We have an opt out button now. We didn't before. This is big.

The ONLY real fuck-up is that...they ALWAYS fuck up the phrasing of these updates, don't they? Plus, defaulting to "turning implicit consent into explicit consent" was the method that would functionally change the least, yes, but also might have been the stupidest way possible when it comes to human behavior and etiquette. If I have a preference, especially a relatively common one, that someone NOT do something, even if they otherwise expect to be allowed to do it most places - say, "please don't wear this specific perfume when we get together" - I'd be pretty pissed if someone suddenly taped a sign to my forehead that EXPLICITLY said "ALL PERFUMES OK AROUND ME" and expected me to dig through a drawer of alternate signs to communicate otherwise, plus defaulting to EXPLICIT consent when a lot of the web is still operating on undeclared, hotly contested, ethically dubious implicit consent makes it sound like scraping data from people who have openly said "I wish I could opt out, is there a way to do that? Because I really want it, opt me out now" but haven't hit the right toggle yet is BETTER than scraping from other sources when you're compiling a dataset. So, that was stupid, and I'm glad they changed it.

But ultimately? This is good. We have an opt out flag. WE HAVE AN OPT OUT FLAG. This should be the bottom line we're all focusing on here. We have an opt out flag that is ENCODED INTO THE RELEVANT PAGE HEADERS. AND SEVERAL AI DEVELOPERS ARE RUSHING TO PROGRAM IN RESPECT FOR IT. THIS IS HUGE AND GOOD.

[klondork]

I hear some of the most backwards opinions about AI. Like people are up in arms without realizing what the outrage is even about.

"AI is not Real Art" Yes we know and this artists clearly posts that he is using AI to generate all of his pieces. Never once claiming that it's original art. "Yeah but it's still stealing attention from real artists" Artists you can't name and maintain as a possibility. Commenting on AI generated imagery instead of giving other artists that attention because you have no idea where it's supposedly stealing from. Not to mention the artists you're insulting is not actually making ANY money from what they produce and is just doing it as a hobby or a test.

"That doesn't matter. It's still using other peoples' works and not crediting them."

But when creators say they use their own private library of works that they've no doubt paid to have in said library, you still apply this argument. Even if this isn't the case, when AI fetches from a public library, you're advocating for every pixel stolen to be credited. But most AI generators already do this. Saving keywords in the meta data that people make public to least make an attempt to credit which artists their image is generated from. "Which prompt did you use" is asked so often because the artists the tool pulls from HAS to be inputted to get a certain look.

"Yeah but it doesn't take skill to type a prompt." But where do you draw the line? People used to say it doesn't take skill to tween. People used to say that it doesn't take skill to rotoscope. People used to say sculpting isn't real modeling. People constantly bash technology for making creation easier when tools and programs that are constantly updating now continue to do just that. "That isn't the same. You need skill to utilize these things."

Yeah and if you even tried to generate something with Stable Diffusion you'd realize it's not as simple as typing "I want a cute furry girl with green hair." There's a knowledge and skillset to catering exactly what is as well as training the program with different models ,Loras, and even images as well as shifting through millions of seeds and manipulating what is presented.

Like if you think this is all hyperbole strawmanning, these are arguments I constantly see. It's not about whether or not what an AI creates should be considered art. We're beyond that. It IS art but cannot be defined as original art. The problem you should be having is when people take new tools and use them unethically.

Are you selling AI art to impressionable people? Fuck off. Are you just making cool pieces to display while being fully honest about how it's made? You're fine. Leave those people alone.

I'm open to a discussion about this kind of thing but every time I put these points up to debate I am always met with people talking around in circles and morally high grounding instead of giving actual answers. As far as I'm concerned no one has given me a proper reason to be against AI as a hobby.

[cursmudgeon]

With the AI art thing I think the answer that would make people actually happy is if there were regulations put into place on the software developers that said that they had to exclusively use public domain art or get signed license agreements for the artwork they're using as training data. I do not see how this makes artists "just as bad as Metallica" or "copyright shills." Yes copyright law is broken, no copyright law as it's written is not likely to fix this problem, and no an expansion of the applicability of existing copyright law through the courts would most likely not do much good for artists. But regulation on the stable diffusion model in commercial applications should be put into place because anyone who knows how it works knows how prone it is to over fitting and it is undeniably being trained on people's artwork without their permission. Unfortunately our government is run by geriatrics who don't understand how email works so we won't be getting those regulations but I think it's still a meaningful issue to talk about and if you're getting mad at artists for being upset about the exploitative nature of so called AI art then idk what to tell you, this shit sucks and is extremely discouraging. You can complain all you want about how artists are behaving like capitalist pigs but watching something you spent hours or days or weeks making get chewed up mangled and spit out by a machine without so much as credit or acknowledgement let alone compensation and then having a bunch of techbros talk about how they'll never have to pay you or your friends for their work again is a pretty awful feeling.

[cadmium-ores]

The ongoing “AI art debate” has been rubbing me the wrong way.

To clarify, I’m thinking about the debate surrounding images created by programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, etc — neural networks(?) trained on data sets of existing images s.t. if you put a text prompt in, an image is generated that fits that prompt.

One type of “argument” I’ve been seeing boils down to “I don’t like it! We should make it go away!” which — I mean. Cat’s out of the bag; we now have these tools, for better or worse. I don’t think there is a way to suppress it effectively, and I also don’t think that’s… good..? Like, even if we had like a world government to say “nope, this is illegal now, you all have to stop using it” — that wouldn’t be a good thing. I’m going to say, by and large, reverting technological progress isn’t a good approach.

It seems like the main issue people (specifically artists) have is that the tools were trained on datasets including existing works from artists who may or may not have consented. But like, the topic is way more complicated than that.

Art theft, or taking a work and claiming it as your own (explicitly or implicitly, e.g. certain types of posting without credit), is bad. But that’s not what this is. The images produced by these AI are “new images” rather than copies of what they were trained on but, by definition, they are going to take elements from existing styles.

Human artists also do this. For an extreme, take like the “style challenge” meme where like an artist will draw six of their friends PFPs in the friends’ art styles, or something. In this case, it’s very clear-cut: An artist is explicitly copying another’s style, disclosing that they’re doing so, and giving credit. But, where did the friends’ art styles come from? Inevitably, they’ve picked up this, that, or the other thing from their mother’s handwriting to the anime they were super into at age 15 to their college art professor’s preferences. You can’t usually point at a person’s art and be like ah yes, credit should be given to XYZ for this component of their style. That seems to be the camp the AI generations are going to fall under as they’re trained from maybe thousands of artists — unless the prompt is like “XYZ in the style of Van Gogh” where the goal is clearly to emulate a specific artist, at which point it should be pretty obvious where credit is due.

The question as to the morality of training an AI on a dataset including materials created by people who did not give consent for said materials to be used in this way — that’s a much broader debate regarding the publicity of the internet.

The secondary issue up for debate seems to be “skill.” For example, there are people taking commissions that they fill by using an AI, perhaps to work from its product as a starting point (i.e. edit or draw on top of the picture that was produced). The response from a lot of people is that this is, like, an invalid translation. But, if the end product is what the commissioner wanted and they believe it to be worth the money they paid, what’s the problem? It seems “the problem” is the perceived skill involved — i.e. “none,” goes the claim. “You’re paying for something you could’ve done yourself; that didn’t take any effort or skill.”

But… didn’t it? Not the same skills as creating a digital painting, for sure, and maybe not “as much” skill (in as much as that’s even a quantifiable thing), but the alleged artist had to have the knowledge to work the tool, take the time and the mental energy to come up with a suitable prompt that would lead to the desired output, have the discernment to sort through partial outputs or multiple outputs to choose the one to hone into the finished “product…”

…and okay, maybe you don’t value any of those skills. That doesn’t mean they’re not. The only thing we come out of the womb knowing how to do is cry, alright? Maybe you’d claim that “anyone could’ve done that” (could they have, though?) but— nobody else did. The commissioner in the scenario we’re considering didn’t — either couldn’t or didn’t want to.

Lying is clearly a problem — if the alleged artist is claiming they’re doing something (creating it “from scratch”) when they’re really not, that’s a problem. But otherwise, isn’t it just another tool? A lot of the anti-AI-“art” arguments sound a LOT like the way people in my mother’s generation talk about digital art vs traditional art.

Stepping back: There was a post going around on tumblr a couple weeks ago about modern art, and like the topic of this post was one piece that was basically a big red canvas. And someone was explaining that the point of the piece was to make the paint, the physical paint in use, really really smooth, which was difficult due to the type of paint.

Making a smooth red canvas is objectively much, much easier — i.e. takes “less skill” — with a digital art program. Choose your fill tool. Select a red. Tap once. Done.

Making a perfect circle is easier with a digital art program. Digital art programs have tools like special brushes, created by either a program someone coded or another artist, that users can employ in their own art.

“Boomers” look at those things and go “well that’s not REAL art, that doesn’t take any REAL skill!” And they’re wrong, of course. Those are all tools that go into an end product.

Obviously, this is not a 1:1 analogue. Digital art and traditional art are much more similar than AI generated images — in other words, a tool like Midjourney is doing a lot more heavy lifting than your Procreate fill tool, or whatever. But AI generated images can be beautiful. AI generated images can be creative. AI generated images can be useful. AI generated images can evoke emotion. Why aren’t they art?

[caustic-light]

I'm not sure if you have an accurate grasp on the usage of AI for art at the moment? This is not accusatory, but what you are saying doesn't line up with what I see with people using it. Most of the people I see who use it, who are personal freinds, walks me through the process, and it is very involved and involves telling the machine exactly what to do with individual details through programming and advanced tool menus. Yes plenty of people use it to generate images just for fun, but the people who are making art with it are isolating different parameters to precisely generate the image in their heads over the painstaking course of hours, by engaging in the programming process, not just using the an online image generator. The people generating images for silly twitter jokes and one-offs are not the same as the people using it for art, but I think some people think they are because they are not familiar with the art process, which is led by programmers. Most of the people you see who will call themselves AI artists are engaging in this process, it is different than people making images for their own personal reference or for jokes. I am sorry if this isnt clear, I'm not great with English LOL but I did my best let me know if I need to clarify or anything.

Ok, two things in advance that I feel compelled to note out of fairness towards you, people arguing with me and people coming across this.

I am fundamentally not really interested in this conversation. I am engaging with it because I have thoughts and people responding to me in different ways are giving me a platform to voice those thoughts. As soon as somebody responds to me with anything that doesn’t make me think of something I haven’t already said in a way I feel sufficient, I will not respond, so be ready for me to drop this entire conversation at a moments notice without warning if you want to send me your thoughts and are hoping for a response.

I am not gonna link to all the context, so I do wanna note that I am engaging with this discussion in a hypothetical sense more than a real one. I am entertaining this despite being absolutely opposed to AI art on a visceral level because of how it samples it’s data and I am entertaining it because I think that the general topic provides a lot of ideas that would be really good for art if there existed a version of them that isn’t built on collecting massive datasets of it without the artists consent and usually even knowledge.

See, here is my main issue with how AI is being sold to me. I am not accusing you personally of it, more so the person I was arguing with. But there is this dissonance here between the idea that AI is this deep and sophisticated tool that has a steep learning curve and that you put mountains of work into vs the idea that it’s an easy tool that allows average joes with no artistic training to express themselves and thereby removes a lot of barriers from making art.

And I feel like I maybe haven’t explained in the best way why it can’t be both the way it’s being sold to me on either front.

Let’s look at finger paint. Finger paint is a very limited medium. And by very I mean extremely limited. But it’s also an extremely intuitive medium. There is no possible peripheral for art that is more responsive and intuitive than your own body. And that has specific consequences:

When you use it, a lot of your potential ambitions are unattainable.

When you use it you get an immediate feedback and the art you create is broken down to very bare essentials. The movements you make have an easily understood consequence and the decisions you make, due to the simplicity have easily understood consequences.

So when you use it as somebody who has no artistic ability yet, everything you do is a learning experience. You learn about color, you learn about shapes, you learn what it’s like to get a tactile feedback from your medium, you learn how to organize colors in a way that looks good on a canvas.

Finger paint is arguably not a very good medium for people who are serious about getting into art, or rather, finger paint alone is not a good medium for people who are serious about getting into art. The early learning experience may be massive, but the learning curve doesn’t go very far. There is a high skill ceiling, but only when you have learned a lot of stuff by other means.

Contrast: Marble. Take a hammer and mortar and make a statue. Immense amount of things you can learn. Incredible depth of possibilities. But also relying on you having a wealth of knowledge and learning an (I assume) incredibly difficult to use tool and medium. So even worse for a bloody beginner in most cases I would say. But for a pro you can literally just make whatever object your heart desires in excruciating, gorgeous detail.

Most good mediums for beginners are in the middle. A good way to learn art is a medium that has little hassle, is easy and intuitive to use, fast to get into and that has a lot of headroom for learning things. This is why drawing tablets were absolutely a revolution in making art accessible. To take drawing, and add stuff like an undo button? To remove the hassle of dealing with pens and markers and all that stuff? Amazing. It also has an incredible amount of headroom. Even a pencil and paper will go from little stick men to photorealistic greyscale and everything in between. Incredibly intuitive, flexible, powerful. On a tablet you have nearly the same but with a lot less bullshit in the way and so much more.

Now which end of this is AI on? If you’re a newbie and you make an image, what do you learn about art from it? Which skills do you gain? Is it a medium that is responsive and that allows you to easily experiment? Is it a medium where the strokes you put in teach you something? Is it easy to grow on as an artist? Something that will spit a whole image at you based on prompts you have to figure out as their own whole thing, where to put your own ideas into it and to make changes you have to painstakingly redo little bits again and again, program your way around the way the AI works, and also already know extremely specifically what you want every detail to look like, or otherwise just redo whatever you don’t like at random until you like it, all of that sounds to me like a shitty peripheral to get into art with. Like something that can give you fast results if you’re very easily pleased, but that if you have the ambition for more immediately brick walls your growth. You are selling to me a medium that requires a really high amount of hassle and a high amount of already acquired knowledge on art to make anything actually artful with. And that is not something a beginner will get a lot out of I think. Because even if you learn all the hassle, what has this taught you about art itself? The way it works is so unintuitive compared to most tools you can use to make art that using it gives you no feedback. It’s not impossible to learn art through, but it’s doing so with a large barrier in front of you.

And on the other side, if you have the knowledge, if you have already learned all this stuff, you know your shit and you know what you want. Wouldn’t you rather spend the work to learn a medium that is more responsive, that is more interactive, that is frankly easier to use once you get over the difficulty spike that comes with learning how to use a new tool? Or one that may be hard to use, but has a much higher amount of things you can do with it?

Look, I suck at drawing. But I am a good writer. I am good enough to be past the Dunning Krueger pit and have clawed my way out of the despair that follows realizing you’re in the Dunning Krueger pit. So I have a lot of confidence in my abilities. And I can think of a lot of fun uses for a writing bot. But none of them are fiddling around with it to whip up a story I could write myself, knowing I can do it better by hand. To work with a bot to make something I know I will enjoy sounds like it’s by far the harder option, even if it may be quicker. It sounds frustrating in every possible way. I already hate editing my own writing, but editing something a bot made by trying to find ways to get the bot to understand my intention better? Jesus that sounds like agony.

So if a beginner is going to have their growth and progress brick walled by the finicky nature of AI and the amount of knowledge necessary to make anything that actually looks how you imagined it, why not instead bite into the sour apple and spend the extra time and work to get into learning how to work with another tool that might feel harder, but ultimately lets you grow much more and offers you a lot more flexibility? Everything you and others are saying to me to explain how AI is actually really sophisticated as an art tool only makes it seem like there is no natural and beginner friendly learning curve.

And if a pro already has the ability to attain what they want with more control and easier ways to input intention, why use AI as a primary medium instead of either 1. something to just fuck around with in addition to your other stuff, or something to challenge you, or 2. something to take away hassle of things you don’t care to do yourself. A shoelaces procreate brush, a stock image McDonalds, blurred in the background, a symmetry tool. That kind of stuff I think is the real thing AI is useful for. But unfortunately it’s all trained on stolen art and therefore is going to immediately present ethical issues to the artists who might be interested in using it to make creation less burdensome.

And I think, who this really is attractive to is people who have artistic ambition and understanding that is way above their own skill level. Because that is frustrating and to have a tool like AI is an attractive option to get closer to what you want in a way that feels a lot easier and frankly a lot less bullshit. Because learning any kind of creative skill is hard. And it is easy to learn the ambition way faster than the part where you can actually do it.

And I understand this, I am there with my own art. I’m not a dead newbie, but I am far from being happy with what I can do or a level where I feel very comfortable presenting it to others. Like, I relate hard. But also I still feel like AI is kind of a crapshoot at the moment, even beyond moral debates, I feel like it can not possibly be as rewarding to work with as it is to have a skill you are comfortable enough with to take pride in. And with that while I very much relate to the kind of person I think AI art is really attractive to (I am deliberately ignoring ppl who wanna klick a button and then sell themselves as artists without putting in work because they have no respect for the process of creation) I also feel like it’s an extremely hollow promise where your own frustration with being limited in what you can do is preying on itself. Because really, as it seems to be now from everything advocates have told me about it, it’s not nearly at a point where it’s more than a finicky novelty let alone providing a level of freedom and responsiveness that can rival what you can do if you’re happy with your own competence in a medium and tool. Which sounds pretentious as fuck of me to say, but man, I have been so insecure in my skills for so long, I have earned the right to be pretentious and vain about the joy of creation.

[avaritia-apotheosis]

Phantom Children Ch. 6

Hi guys! I'm back <3 (also, I'm currently looking for alpha/beta readers for Phantom Children, so if you're interested, feel free to shoot me a message!)

In Which: Danny Attempts to get Answers, Bruce Learns, and Dick Finally Learns What's Inside the Door that Doesn't Exist

AO3 | Prologue | 5 | [ 6 ] | 7

DANNY IS KNOCKED DOWN three, four, eight times on the ice. Each time made his back ache, his bones bruised and tired, and his mind burning with embarrassment and a drive to lash out. But each time he gets back up. Each time he lasts a little bit longer against Talia.

The ice still shifts, cracks and rumbles with every wrong move. Danny learned to roll with it. Move on light feet but attack with a firm stance, gauge which parts of the ice are stable and which should be avoided. Multi-tasking has never been Danny’s strong suit, but he’s good at learning and learning quickly.

Talia corrected his form as much as she beat him down. Exploited every one of his openings until he learned to defend them and praised him whenever he managed to pull one over her. The League’s martial arts was the holy amalgamation between almost every single fighting style there is, mashed and refined to perfection to become almost unpredictable to the untrained. A vast improvement to Danny’s previous ‘fuck around and see what works’ brawling and had the added benefit of meshing together with his spontaneity.

“You are doing well, Daniel,” Talia said as she sheathed her sword, hand resting just above her hip. “You have improved greatly in such a short time, as I have expected.”

It takes every ounce of Danny’s superhuman energy to not collapse to his knees, his every breath a ragged shudder as he tries to get his breathing under control. “Still can’t beat you, though.”

“Very few can boast that feat.”

“I’m not exactly sure if that’s supposed to make me feel any better or not. Do I get my prize at least?”

Tahlia tossed her braid over one shoulder with a laugh. “Come, then, let us rest in the caves. The sun is to set soon and we must make camp before we freeze to death.”

“Hypothermia is so last season. I’m way too cool for that.”

He didn’t know whether to be disappointed that Tahlia didn’t react to his pun. It was pretty clever, in his opinion.

('Puns are the lowest form of comedy,' said mind-Jazz.

Says the one who named the Box Ghost the ‘Crate Creep.’

'That’s alliteration, not a pun.')

It was kind of pathetic that even his mind-version of Jazz was smarter than him.

“What would you like to know first?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sarcasm dripped from Danny’s voice. He sheathed his sword and let it hang loose at his side. “Maybe how old this mysterious brother of mine is?” Ancients, his life was weird enough already, it wasn’t supposed to sound like the B-plot to a bad soap opera.

“Damian is younger than you by a little over four years. He will turn eleven this year.”

“Huh. Never been an older brother before.”

“Perhaps you might have been, if circumstances had been different.”

Cryptic. Great. Danny stepped over a particularly large crack in the ice and scampered over to solid ground. “You gotta give me more than that. What’s he like?”

“Prideful,” she said. “But skilled enough to warrant it. He was raised like a prince—as how you should have been.”

“And he lives with…our dad?”

“Yes. In America.” The cave was deep enough to shield them from the worst of the eventual mountain winds. Tahlia had already started building a campfire with equipment from her knapsack, embers eating away and growing into a steady flame. He sat down, legs crossed, beside the fire, hands tucked beneath his armpits.

He bit his lip, a question forming in his mind. “Do…do we have the same dad?”

Tahlia looked up at him. “Of course. Only your father has had the privilege of being called my beloved, and only he is worthy enough to have sired my children.”

Once night fell, it fell quickly. Blanketing as far as Danny could see from the mouth of the cave in a thick darkness. Snow fell from the skies in thick tufts and covered their footsteps.

“Does he—do they know about me?”

“No, they do not.”

“And you probably aren’t going to tell them anything about me, if you could help it.”

“That is very perceptive of you, habeebi.”

“You won’t tell me anything more about them, will you?”

“In due time, I will.”

Danny blew part of his fringe away from his face. Figures.

Despite the ever-present niggling at the back of his mind, Bruce had yet to see what was in the flash drive. The weeks since his strange meeting with Vlad Masters suddenly exploded with criminal activity with the recent breakout in Arkham and the brewings of another gang war in the shadows of Gotham’s paved streets. It was all hands-on deck. And Bruce, whether as Batman or Wayne, had always prioritized Gotham and its citizens over anything else.

The flash drive remained on his person despite the crisis, tucked away in one of the sturdier compartments of his utility belt to prevent the data inside from becoming damaged. Sometimes he found his hands gravitating towards it, fingers brushing against the button that would release the mystery from its confines before he realized what he was doing and steeled himself. Hands fisted to his side and attention forcibly directed elsewhere.

Eventually, the rogues were placed back into Arkham, and Gotham let out a shuddered breath of relief as it remained standing for another day.

Most of the family were out on a light patrol, cleaning up the remains of the breakout and helping where they can. Jason and Dick bickering over the comms whilst Barbara laughed in her clocktower.

(“It’s not that bad.”

"‘It’s not that bad’—shut the fuck up.” Jason spat. Bruce could hear him revving his bike. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that? Certified Grade A idiot. B’s gonna kill you.”

He could hear Dick roll his eyes. “Sure, pile it all on, Jaybird. Blame the victim.”

"It was your fault.”

“It’s not my fault I didn’t see it there!”

"You tripped and got a concussion. From a stick. A. Stick.”

“Can we please just leave that out of the report?” Dick groaned. Barbara laughed. “Oh god.”

“Richard motherfucking John Grayson. I swear if you vomit on me then—”

“I’m not gonna vomit on you! You just turned the corner a little too fast. It’s nice to see you care though.”

"Fuck no, I just don’t wanna smell like regurgitated cereal.”)

Damian was benched from a patrol. Their last conflict with Poison Ivy ended with Damian sticking a bad landing and twisting his ankle. He dealt with it with as much grace as can be expected. Meaning that he spent the last few days sulking as he caught up on his missed schoolwork and shooting daggers at everyone else who came back from patrol.

Bruce flicked the flash drive open and plugged it into the computer. The flash drive contained only a single folder dated six months ago.

He clicked it, and a news headline popped up.

LOCAL TEEN DIES AFTER DRIVING OFF CLIFF

Beneath it, a picture. Blue eyes. Black hair. A familiar face.

Blood pounded in Bruce’s ears. He could hear nothing except a sharp gasp from Damian behind him.

When Dick and Jason arrived at the batcave, it was to an eerie silence. Not that it was usually loud, only that Bruce spent most of his free time down in the cave and Dick had come to expect hearing some signs of him around. Typing on keys, the clicking of a mouse, the heavy thuds of a fist meeting a punching bag or a training dummy, etcetera, etcetera. Or maybe even Alfred cleaning up around the cave, feeding the bats, or restocking their med bay.

(Dick, it turned out, didn’t have a concussion. Probably. Not a severe one anyway. What mattered most was that he managed to convince Jason to have dinner at the Manor. Alfred was making a tarte tatin for dessert tonight and those were absolutely to die for. )

One of Tim’s cases took him to the other side of Gotham. The only person in the cave was Damian, who was staring agape at the batcomputer.

“Why the hell is the demon spawn looking at old pictures of Bruce? We get it. They look alike.

“Uh, Dami? What’s up?”

Damian snapped his mouth shut. “I believe it might be best if you asked father that, Grayson.” Despite his clipped tone, there seemed to be little anger in his voice. His proud shoulders were hunched over on the chair, eyes trained on his lap.

He looked so small.

Damian clucked his tongue. “He’s upstairs, if you need him. So is Pennyworth.”

Dick shot a glance at Jason who raised his hands in mock surrender. “You’re up golden boy. Whatever the fuck the old man’s problem is this time, I’m not dealing with it.”

Dick sighed. “Fine.”

There was a door in Wayne Manor that didn’t exist.

When Dick was a child and recently adopted by Bruce Wayne, one of the first things he did was explore the manor. It’s the prerogative of every child that somehow found themselves in a large mansion—even more so given the castle-like exteriors of Wayne Manor. All castles have secret passages, and if the Batcave lay in the subterranean depths below, then surely the manor proper must have its own secrets.

Dick would tumble and cartwheel along the hallways, opening any and every single door he came across. A lot of them were just empty bedrooms or unused parlors and sitting rooms; the furniture covered by white sheets to keep the dust away. Alfred was probably magic, but even he can’t keep the entirety of the manor dust free.

The majority of the unused rooms were unlocked.

Except for one.

It was a room in the west wing, on the second floor. A couple doors down from where Bruce’s and Dick’s were. Why it was locked, Dick never found out. But he was curious since it was the only room on that floor that remained shut.

When he asked Alfred about it, the old butler only said that it was an unused storage room they preferred to keep locked just in case. When he asked Bruce about it, he’d be quick to change the subject. Usually something Batman related. Which, well, always worked, because it was Batman related. And Dick, young and spry and itching to fly under Batman’s wings, would quickly forget about that curious little mystery in favor of punching bad guys in the face and flipping over rooftops.

At some point that locked door quietly disappeared, leaving a blank expanse of wallpaper and a decorative vase where it once stood. It was never brought up again. And Dick slowly forgot that it was ever there in the first place.

Until now.

The wooden table and vase were shoved off to the side. Wallpaper sliced away to reveal the lines of a doorway. The door, covered in its faint damask wallpaper, was kicked open, the wood around the bolt splintered and cracked. He could hear voices—Alfred’s and Bruce’s—speaking softly on the other side.

He pressed his back against the wall and kept his breathing quiet.

“Three times, Alfred.” Bruce’s voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. “Three times she’s done this to me.”

“Master Bruce…”

“I don’t—I don’t understand why—” Bruce choked, swallowing a shuddered breath. “Damian, I can understand. Jason, I can too. But…This? I—” Bruce suddenly quieted. Dick knew the jig was up.

He unlatched himself from the wall and slowly slid through the once-hidden-door, a hand kept on the frame. “Um. Hi, Bruce? Alfred?” The words fell flat, stilted. Dick winced as he said them. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but, uh…” He trailed off the second he registered what was in the room.

It was large, as so many rooms in the manor were. The room was covered in peeling green wallpaper with faded pictures of baby deer and owls and other woodland creatures prancing about. There was a dresser on one wall. A shelf filled with little picture books and stuffed animals on the other. A brown teddy bear had fallen on its face on one of the shelves.

In the middle—where Bruce was hunched over—was a crib. The wood streaked and aged with time, the beddings within pristine and untouched, if not dusty. Hanging overhead was a mobile with little animals dangling on a string.

“Worry not Master Dick. It is good that you are here since it will inevitably involve the rest of the family at some point.”

Dick nodded absentmindedly, trying to lock eyes with his guardian. “B? What’s—what’s going on?” Dick took one step deeper into the room. “The pictures in the cave. I thought they were you since they were too old to be Damian—” Bruce’s hands on the crib’s railing flinched.

Dick’s breath hitched.

“They’re…not your photos, are they.”

Bruce took a deep breath in, the lines of his shoulders tense. “No. They’re not.”

In their line of work, the answer could have been anything. Clones, magical doppelgangers, alternate universe counterparts, hell, even just someone’s genetic code being coincidentally similar to another person. But…this room, this nursery, pointed towards only one conclusion.

“Who is he, Bruce?”

Bruce angled his head towards Dick, unshed tears glimmering in his eyes. “He’s my son, Dick.

“He’s my son.”