zexreborn

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Ears for days ~

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Saw some of your posts about AI recently, but don't really know very much about you. I have two questions:

1. Are you an actual artist, or do you just do genAI?

2. If you are an actual artist, why do you use/support AI?

We're going to get into this in a minute, but yes, by what you'd likely use as a definition of 'actual artist', I am. I have a BFA in graphic design, a minor in art history, I've been working as a freelance artist either on the side or as my main hustle since 2001, and I've been making art since I was five. Multimedia, 3d modelling and sculpting, photography (in a darkroom type and digital), acrylic painting, illustration, writing, puppetsmithing, I'm a jack of many, many trades.

Because it's a potent force multiplier that lets me do things that I could not previous (as well as helping compensate for my increasingly arthritic joints) and because it's entirely keeping with the copyleft principles I've had since the 1990s. It's just plain interesting and fun. And I had my fill of moral panics in the 1980s.

This is gonna be a long one, enjoy a song while you read.

I've gone over all this many times before, (for full reading, here's the #AI Discourse tag on my AI blog) but the short version is that I agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's position on AI art.

To demonstrate, we've got some of my non-AI photobash work, and some of my AI-work of the same type. Both were made using many, many public domain images broken down to B&W lines, scaled, reinked, normalized and colored.

On the left, is a comic made with specific panels from comics that have had their copyrights expire (back when that could happen), on the right, a comic made with about 35 individual dall-E 3 gens. The techniques are the same, the only difference is the source of the pubic domain images.

No one debates whether what I've done on the left is art, yet somehow the one on the right is a problem for some people. Yet I have vastly more control over the latter than the former.

And it's hard to get more transformative than 'broke down into math and blended with literally millions of other math formulas in order to make a completely new image" Replace 'math' with 'memory' and you have how all human creativity works.

Moving to covers, one of my parody deepdream-adjusted comics, and a reinked-recolored AI one on the right. The one on the left no one had a single problem with, but Bruce Wayne and Jessica Fletcher are screencaps, the Specter is a sales photo of a statue with a copy of 1989 Ted Dansen's face, and I'm using direct DC trade dress. Crickets.

On the right, no actual images by humans are used (outside the barcode, comics code authority emblem, and the 30 cent mark.) Same techniques, same situation. Very different reaction.

I also was a young artist in the 90s when Disney and the RIAA bribed and lied their way into extending copyright to its current ridiculous 120 year term, and I recognize what's happening with the anti-AI movement.

The exact same fear-mongering was used to get small artists to rally their congressmen against their own self-interest, and that's what the Copyright alliance is doing now.

Copyright does not help the small artist. It's also a relatively new invention, one that would be baffling to humans through most of history. You can't own art. Not even the people who make it. You can own a canvass or a carved rock or a book, but you don't own the art itself because you can't own feelings or ideas.

Copyright is a limited patent on specific expressions intended (supposedly) to encourage production, a limitation on the business use of art. The arguments levied against AI would kill fanfic, fanart, pastiche, collage, and more.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature, because...

The anti-AI side isn't actually anti-AI, they're pro-regulatory-capture-of-AI-by-Megacorporations. The copyright anti-AI argument conveniently leaves it open for Disney, Warner Bros, Nintendo, Sony, the RIAA, all to make their own AI systems to lower their production costs, because they own more than enough material to make powerful datasets.

They get it, you don't, worst of all possible worlds.

Now, at the start I mentioned that we'd get into the "actual artist" situation. All those people making bog standard waifu-pics with AI? They're also making art. Kids using a spirograph make art. Duchamp's fountain is art. And people who make art are artists.

But more than that "if you're an actual artist why do you use AI?" is an interesting question, because if more people actually used the tech and saw how it works, you'd see a lot less people against it. Most of the anti-AI talking points are just factually incorrect or greatly misrepresent the situation, but nobody is gonna learn that if even using it is treated as a transgress worthy of 'fair game' treatment.

Funny how that works out.

To close out, enjoy one of my music videos, made from dozens of clips made using reference images made with dozens of heavily modified gens that I totally could have made the hard way, except for the lack of 5 million dollars and access to Geena Davis and Ron Ely circa 1982:

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Religious people lack empathy; news at 11.

it's been a year so i feel more comfortable talking about it..

when you're atheist and you lose someone, religious people don't really know how to interact with you. it's fine, we have different worldviews.

'He's in a better place, now.'

Sorry auntie, but I don't believe that. I believe that his brain stopped working at 5h55pm on december 11th 2022, and that's it. Nothing after that.

It makes grief very difficult, because not believing in god or the afterlife also means accepting that you will never, ever see that person again. That's it. The end. Nada mas.

But, back to the aunties and other faceless people gravitating in the grey blurry waters of your awareness.

They tell you 'He's with god now' and you tell them 'Yeah I don't believe that' and.

they. get. annoyed.

Here I am, gutted open, the worst day of my life, barely holding myself together, and they! Get annoyed that I won't smile and entertain their point of view!

Another faceless person tried to heal me with cristals. She also got annoyed when I told her I didn't believe in that.

I usually don't really mind religious people. It's fine, we have different worldviews. I think I'm right but so do they. As long as they're good people, I don't judge them for their faith.

I'll even be grateful for them trying to console me. I get that you're trying to give me strength and love. Thank you.

But I'm going to be true to myself, yes even when I'm mad with shock and grief. And I still can't believe they got annoyed that I didn't play along to placate them, on the worst day of my life.

(I wanted to share because I've never heard anyone talk about atheism and grief, and the loneliness that comes out of it.)

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happy "closer to 2050 than 2000" day everyone

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we should let rouxls kaard deltarune create polycules in other universes i think

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So I started playing Ace Attorney but I accidentally started with the third game, Trials and Tribulations, and played the first case (Turnabout Memories) before realizing my mistake – but I did think, at the time, that it was a brilliant and daring design choice to start you out as Mia Fey, Phoenix’s mentor, in flashback, and play has her against several condescending, infantilizing, or even outright sexist court personnel in a drama that just so happens to feature the cool lawyer guy on the box in the most pathetic and embarrassing state imaginable before you even get to play as him. But then that “first” mission dovetailed into the actual first mission from the first game (The First Turnabout) perfectly, because Turnabout Memories is more or less a fanservice recreation and expansion of that first case, but by playing them in opposite order and immediately in sequence, it comes off instead as seeing right away via timeskip just how well that blubbering idiot you helped can handle himself in a court of law now, thanks to Mia’s tutelage – which is itself a continuation of Grossberg’s, as experienced prior. And every note is there, right down to your mentor getting stressed out to the point of exacerbating a medical condition, and opposing the same loser prosecutor.

And then the second case from the first game (Turnabout Sisters), of course, is about the death of Mia Fey that was foreshadowed at the end of Turnabout Memories, making it the first case where you (the player, mechanically) and Pheonix Wright (the character, narratively) are effectively on your own. You (as Pheonix) finally meet Grossberg again, and his staunch refusal to assist in the case is only made more concerning and significant by your firsthand experience playing as Mia under his wing in Turnabout Memories as the “first’ case, and you wonder immediately about their falling out. Maya’s introduction also keeps Mia in the world (including somewhat literally) by revealing more about the Fey family and Mia’s history, relationships, and legacy, and the thing is that I do have to say that playing Turnabout Memories first and getting that experience as Mia, and seeing her as a flawed and insecure rookie fighting for the win before we see her as the effortlessly cool and confident mentor figure, made for a much more narratively satisfying death of a woman than I think it would have been otherwise. You even get a line from Edgeworth in Turnabout Sisters where he calls Pheonix out for using “Mia’s style” of cross-examination – what he calls cowardly nitpicking of perfectly fine testimonies isn’t just how Pheonix does it narratively, it’s how you (the player) do it as the core mechanic of the game, because it’s how Mia does it, and while she is your guide in The First Turnabout, playing as Mia before you play as Pheonix and doing the same thing shows you firsthand that she’s taught him so well that even the prosecution can see it.

This accidental play-order of Turnabout Memories before The First Turnabout and Turnabout Sisters shows off an invaluable amount of Mia Fey’s character, agency, and development that combine to make her feel like the main character for a perfect and holistic three-act introduction to the series, where it doesn’t feel like Pheonix truly “takes over” until Turnabout Samurai – in which he literally does, in fact, take over the law office with Maya as his assistant. It left such a massive impression on me – much more of an impression, I think, that the intended play-order would, which I don’t think does Mia Fey a total disservice at all, but definitely relegates her to a relatively more one-dimensional mentor figure in Pheonix’s shadow for almost the entirety of her short on-screen lifespan if you don’t have the experience of playing as her in Turnabout Memories first. You as the player develop a much richer relationship to Mia that makes her death in Turnabout Sisters feel so much more personal, and the stakes of cracking the case so much more significant. It just enhances her character, and her role in these two cases, immeasurably.

And I mentioned it earlier, but it can’t be said enough that the player’s relationship to Pheonix benefits from this play-order, too – it’s because of Mia that he goes from the sobbing idiot who ate a bottle of poison on the witness stand for a girl who tried frame him for murder into the hotshot rookie lawyer through which you (the player) get to ask Mia for help during the trial in the first place! And she gives you that help because she has been in this same position herself and understands completely! You (the player) were there! The First Turnabout is also, honestly, kind of an underhand toss after Turnabout Memories (it's literally the first ever case so of course it's easy), but it only benefits the pacing of this play-order to have it as a second act before the much more complicated Turnabout Sisters. And when you, the player, are on your own after Turnabout Sisters and have to start Turnabout Samurai without her help, the only way that I can describe it is that you feel ready to make Mia proud.

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Being the only bi cis guy amongst almost exclusively trans friends and peers is wild because in theory its like im living in a horny manga where all of a dudes friends turn into hot babes, but in reality they are hunting me like the last bison on the prairie. 5 years ago I mentioned bionicle and one of them asked when I was starting estrogen.

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You vote for far left candidates in Democratic primaries. Exactly what far-right Americans as did to the Republicans.

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just remember, one day you're going to open tumblr and the crabs will be raving like they never have before

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It wasn’t always toothless; Sally’s literal first line in SatAM is “You know not to call me that (princess), Antoine. Out here the only royalty is mo5er nature.”

Like the ancillary media used to be near Captain Planet levels of environmentalism.

That the Sonic the Hedgehog film series has increasingly felt the need to soften its source material's implicit criticism of state and police authority is very funny, because how gutless have you gotta be that an E-rated video game about a cartoon rat fighting evil robots is too political for your taste?

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Beg For Mercy

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I’ll never forgive y’all for overusing ronpaulitshappening.gif before it actually started happening, it could have been beautiful.

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