(an ask from my retrsopring)

Apologies in advance, this is going to sound harsh.

'What is different then?' It's not complicated. A computer is not a human. A computer can't think. A computer can't feel. A computer can't experience. A computer can't learn. To equate a computer's ability to copy and regurgitate data to a human's ability to communicate through art is so existentially offensive as a premise that it's inherently bad faith, even if you yourself aren't asking it in bad faith. You may as well be asking me what's the difference between a plagiarist and a writer, because if that difference between those two things is even entertained as a debate, then either you're being made an idiot or you are indulging idiots. At worst, both.

No one seems to debate this when it comes to the idea of, say, athletes. A machine can ostensibly produce the same results as a basketball player, throw a ball in the hoop and score points against other machines. But that's patently ridiculous, isn't it? People don't watch sports for the concept of throwing balls in hoops, people watch sports for human spectacle and physical ability.

It's a mistake to think art is only about the results, that's capitalist thinking in that only the end conclusion of the process has any value (fiscally or otherwise). Propaganda made by mediocre people who think being an 'idea guy' is the only important part of any project. Art is about ability, it's about expression, it's about making history. It's about human labor and craftsmanship. It's about being alive.

That a creator who is too lazy to respect their own art doesn't have the imagination to be good at it, and also they hate the planet and want humanity to die, ostensibly.

:C

I’m so fucking sick of AI

Happy Trans Day of Visibility

i love you more than words can say ♥︎ 🏳️‍⚧️⚧🏳️‍⚧️

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

Can't be sincerely dark without being called edgy, can't be sincerely emotional without being called melodramatic, can't be sincerely silly without being called stupid. They're gonna hate every emotion you put in your art no matter what so make it anyway and be as sincere as you can be

Not every character needs to be in a romantic relationship reblog if you agree

asbestos-free cornflakes

I actually know this one!

There's a traditional coconut farming technique in Thailand where they send monkeys into the trees to pick the coconuts. This is like a traditional centuries old thing that doesn't hurt the monkeys at all. Since Thailand is in asia, animal rights groups have been focusing on it the last few years as some kind of issue even though if a monkey doesn't want to do something there's nothing you can really do to make it do that because it's a monkey.

Nonetheless racist "animal rights" groups go around discussing it as though it's slavery or a labour rights issue. Personally I think they're being paid by people who get coconuts some other way but I can't prove anything.

Anyway, it's basically MSG again in that it catches on because of anti-asian stereotyping and none of the allegations are true or really even make sense when you look at them. Animal labour in agriculture is really well-established. That's where we get the term "horsepower". Because horses were doing the. The power. But there are no monkeys in Europe so Europeans didn't do that so it's an evil rights issue.

We domesticate animals and use them for labour. Big if true.

We domesticate

animals and use them for

labour. Big if true.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Like. As far as I can tell the monkeys in question are macaques, which... Yeah you're not getting a macaque, the monkey known primarily for attacking humans, to do anything it doesn't want to do, especially through violence. They use violence to establish dominance and that's a battle the macaque will always win. This npr article says every couple of trees the monkeys get inspected for ants and a little massage, and every other link in the search I did was from PETA, so. Yeah pretty sure the monkeys are fine.

the most annoying stage of burnout is when i want to write, and i have the urge to write, and somewhere in my skull are the words that want to be written, but they have to get through the cursed minotaur maze first and nobody remembered to bring string

NASA released the clearest pictures yet of our neighbours in the solar system

Oh and of course us

Honourable mention

Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.

Reminds me of how everyone freaks out when museums are forced to close, but none of the people freaking out had set foot in the museum in the past five years.

CHECK OUT THE BOOKS!

You don't even need to read them (necessarily), just check them out!

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Spread their names!

elon is really mad about this so it would be a shame if people kept spreading the names around

on it 🫡 🌈 📚

Certified Library Post

memes are fun and relatable and all that, but don't let them discourage you. all of that stuff that doesn't make it into the final product is part of how the final product gets made

im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

I just installed this and it's SUPER EASY took less than 10 minutes, God bless github users who put this work up for free