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bortmcjorts · 1 year

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[ID: two versions of a drawing of my oc nibble, a humanoid robot with a computer monitor head. she's fat with a square monitor, and she's wearing a pink t-shirt that says "a byte and a nibble." her arms are black and look like fingerless arm sleeves, and her legs are a gray purple with markings that look like jeans. she's standing with a hand to her chest, and a face displayed on her monitor is winking and sticking out her tongue. in the left version, she has a power cord tail, and in the right version she doesn't have a tail. end ID]

so there's this computer...

#my ocs #ab&an #a byte & a nibble #nibble 💕#sorry to cubed for being nibble's kid and also waiter bc i would order a serving of their mom lol 😜 (i am kicked out of the diner)#to the two people who sent requests sorry i have been busy and idk when/if i will get to them but i love you #to the person who asked how ive been i forgot to respond and only just now remembered that ask even existed OOPS umm #ive been busy and stressed but overall okay sdkjfkg i need a break from work or i will explode i think #i am also working on a few fanart projects so i havent been posting here much 😔#hope u r all doing okay tho!#ummm ok that is all thank u goodbye until the next time i draw something <3

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pixel1678 · 3 months

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(Another) fun fact about Byte, some of the games I play where I name myself "Byte" is canon to their lore in some way, with the biggest example being Celeste

Things brings up a funny scenario since I just beat Nameless Deity as a Terraria character named Byte so I could make that canon (however that means theyd canonically have a scarlet devil which is honestly terrifying when you see the damage it deals)

#pixels lore #oh yeah if i didnt mention before byte seemingly laying down for eternity after their universe ceased to exist is just to fill in #they did do stuff but nothing is set in stone so i just said they laid around doing nothing

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duckapus · 1 year

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The Byte-Welony teamup actually predates the failed reset. Basically she broke him out of/kidnapped him from prison and convinced him to make a Deal With The Devil so they can both get what they want.

Namely:

-Power(preferably his own, though in his current state he can't exactly afford to be picky)

-Control

-Revenge against a certain collection of morons and their digital guardian angels

-And of course their mutual desire to sit back and just watch the worlds burn

First bit of power she gives him is a mask based on Gohma. When he wears it he can adapt to and slowly corrupt any environment he finds himself in. Seems fitting for a parasite like him.

If you're wondering what Byte has to offer in this "partnership;" information. He invented the Super Meme Guardians and the Avatar code, so he can tell Welony about powers and weaknesses that the SMGs and Mario don't even know they have.

#smg4 #smg4 ocs #oc lore #byte #welony #gohma #the gohma mask also doubles as betrayal insurance #because a piece of gohma's spirit is in there and ready to take over the available mortal vessel whenever welony gives the ok #byte has no idea that this feature exists

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rynmaru · 1 year

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Identity

The trip had been long and mostly uneventful. Hours of driving, listening to music, and, in the past few hours, actual conversation with Malware.

Echo had been enjoying the talking, but as night truly set in and silence once again stretched between the two of them, they assumed the masked hacker was settling in for some much needed sleep. As a result, they jumped a little when Malware suddenly broke the silence with another question.

“So…I’ve been meaning to ask this and there just hasn’t been time, but do you prefer to be called Echo or Pollux?”

The question caught Echo off guard and they glanced at her as they drove before turning their eyes back to the road.

“Oh. Yeah. I forgot I told you my name.”

The mask nodded in their periphery.

“Yeah…that’s a good question…” Echo’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. How to answer?

“It’s weird. Pollux was the first name that felt like it fit when I was trying to name myself,” They said, starting to process aloud. “Like…when I said it out loud to myself it felt like it was supposed to be the one I gave. It sounded correct when I introduced myself. Like I’d given it before or something. That sorta thing.”

They took a turn down a narrow side street, glancing in the side mirrors to be sure Starman was following, snorting softly as they watched him hit the curb and caught Shepherd jolting awake in the passenger seat. They returned their gaze ahead and their mind to the question asked of them.

“On the other hand, I’ve been Echo way longer. I was Pollux for about seven months. Maybe eight. Then I got the nickname Echo from the mech tech crew I ran with for a while. You know, they started calling me that ‘cause I kept repeating everything they told me to do over and over again so I wouldn’t forget, but it would drive them crazy. So they called me “the echo” which got shortened to just “Echo” and it just caught on.”

They caught Mal’s mask turning to face them, and immediately realized they were rambling. They reigned themself in.

“Sorry…Anyway…I’ve been Echo for about two years now. It’s what everyone calls me. It’s my callsign. It’s what I put down as my name on my official documents when signing on to the Fate of all Fools. Echo Creed…Guess it’s a bit on the nose but…”

They shrugged and reached to tuck their white forelock behind their ear as it fell into their face once again.

“I think it’s stuck cause that’s the only name that felt like it was completely and truly mine. I never could explain that before but after what you found out about…about Castor’s NHP…yeah guess that’s some sorta lingering memory of his I didn’t know I had…”

There was a long silence filled only by the classic rock crackling through the speakers over the box truck’s radio. Echo’s ears were hot and their cheeks had gone a little pink.

“Anyway…that was a really long way of saying that I’d like it if you kept calling me Echo…”

#being a flash clone with memory loss comes with a major crisis of identity #are you you and should you be sad for that?#is it okay for you to exist when doing so means the original no longer will?#the gemini paradox #lancer #lancer rpg #lancer battlegroup #lancer ttrpg #lancer pilot #lancerrpg #lancer the mech rpg #echo creed #cassandra calloway #malware #castor creed #echo & byte #original character #my oc shit #pollux creed

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mortalityplays · 10 months

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there is an academic text I've been trying to get my hands on, and I tracked down an ebook copy held by the national library, but due to legal restrictions it's only available for viewing on a library computer on their premises. like the only way I can read this research is to go to the national central library, book a computer desk, and scroll through it on a pc monitor for hours on end.

this digital copyright shit is so stupid, it makes me SO fucking mad. it costs nobody anything to let readers access this shit from home. it's a bunch of bits and bytes, the ebook file already exists. but publishers (and I include universities in this) are so brain rotten and craven that they will block any attempt to make information more accessible just in case there's a chance they'd miss out on one person with a really specific research interest paying them like £17 to look at a word document in a more comfortable chair.

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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Y’know about notorious housing costs and homelessness situation in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Pacific coast of the US? In 2023, Portland and San Francisco are both moving forward with major multi-million-dollar projects to outlaw “street camping” while opening “city-run mass encampments.”

The mayor, 14 April 2023:

San Francisco is site of arguably one of worst situations in the US, where thousands units are completely inaccessible, and people pay over $2000 a month to live in closets or dorm-style high-density shared rooms, and upscale coffee shops and restaurants require phone apps or payment receipts for people to access restrooms. The W!!pedia page “Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area” is over 120,000 bytes in size and 12,000 words in length.

In April 2023, the city announces its grand plan: A “five-year plan” costing $600 million to “cut the number of unsheltered homeless in halve” in five years. So not a plan to put people in homes, but just to get them off the street, qualifying them as part of the strange designation of “the sheltered homeless” (they will still be homeless, but they won’t be “on the streets,” and will be “sheltered” by a city shelter or camp).

Get them out of sight, put them out of the way on an island or something:

In 2022, the city estimated that over 20,000 people are homeless in a calendar year.

And that’s only within the formal city limits of San Francisco and doesn’t include the rest of the Bay Area (which contains millions more people in Oakland, San Jose, Richmond, etc.)

The rest of the Pacific coast?

In late 2022, Portland, its mayor, and its city council announced a major initiative to ban and outlaw “street camping”. Portland will simultaneously by opening “city-run encampments” or “sanctioned mass homeless camps.” In early 2023, Portland begins this project:

March 2023:

Hmm.

One of the most popular homeless related questions on Q/uora, as if were a “valid question” about how “you must earn your existence through work”, and not a sickening disregard for life:

Hmm.

Like:

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n3ptun1cal · 2 months

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I MADE ANOTHER REGRETEVATOR AU. YAAAAAAAAY

this time its where I make all the NPCs into CRITTERS!! MORE ABOUT IT BELOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the ABOVE lampert design was made by @lucid-daydreaming-art hi lucid the above infected design was made by @unoriginal-and-dumb hi unodum also the isopod (kasper critter) design was made by @deceasedabyss YAY If you wanna know more about what I have so far read below LOL

BASICALLY this AU is just a universe where all of them are small, everything in their world is small so they never evolved to be bigger because they didnt have a need to. not super creative but I might expand on that later the NPCs names have been replaced, so Prototype is named Byte, Kasper is named Isopod, and Lampert is named Grub. Essentially, their names can be anything but they must be short and sweet. obviously im going to tie IKEA into this because I can, basically how I see it is that IKEA is one of the only floors that acts as a central hub for multiple people from different universes to meet in, which would probably explain the reason why theres multiple lamperts who know of each other's existences.. (if that was already explained though let me know LOL im a little dense) ANYWAY the reasoning for how or why lampert or infected would ever be able to hold Grub and Isopod is because these stupid critters somehow got trapped in IKEA and made their way onto the elevator out of curiosity and a need to escape.. although I doubt the employees would even bother to attack things that are literally the size of an apple tldr; i made an au where there are smaller versions of the npcs because i thought it was funny and also a silly idea but I wanted to expand on it because making an AU just to make small versions of the NPCs is BOORRRIIIINNGGGG and everything needs to have a story because I am!!! in love with this game and its characters. YAY thanks for reading my 7 am ramble I need sleep i almost forgot to mention that this all stemmed from this stupid doodle that I made in jackbox today

#im so sleep deprived it isnt even funny #i have work tomorrow #regretevator #infected regretevator #kasper regretevator #regretevator lampert #lampert regretevator #regretevator fanart #regretevator art #roblox #regretevator infected #infected #regretevator prototype #prototype regretevator #alternate universe

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commodorez · 5 months

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Strange question, but I'm curious. Do you have a least favourite computer?

Ohhhh, good one. I'm going to make some enemies for these, I'm sure.

Least favorite vintage computer:

Apple I

Not for any technical reasons, or anything about its history. I happen to like and respect Steve Wozniak, and everything he did in the service of computing in the 1970s. His ROM monitor known as WOZMON is only 256 bytes so it can fit into a first generation 1702A EPROM, which is damned impressive. I use the newer EWOZMON regular basis on other 6502 machines.

The Apple I exemplifies a computer that no longer exists as a computer. Rather, it's become the legendary trading card for the ultrawealthy techbro types who seek to commodify the history of the home computer revolution that they didn't bother to study. It's been reduced to no more than a static display piece, and a cornerstone of revisionist history, ignoring the larger picture.

An Apple I is considered too monetarily valuable to risk applying power to or fixing, "gotta leave it original!" with failed, leaky capacitors, doing nothing. Well if you can't use it, it ceases to be a computer because it isn't computing anything. They had almost a dozen of them at VCF West XIV, most of which were under plexiglass with a hired guard to keep an eye on them because the high price they fetch. Only one was powered up at a time under the watchful gaze of experts, handling things with museum gloves. Unlike other exhibits, these were not available to be touched or interacted with (which defeats the whole reason people enjoy vintage computer festivals).

Assuming you look beyond the hype, and get your hands on a working Apple I? It turns out to be quite underpowered and limited -- which makes sense, Woz was optimizing the shit outta his part count and budget! I wish I had his skills. It was a major technical achievement to get it to do that much with so little. It's a TV Typewriter (RIP Don Lancaster) bolted to a minimal 6502. If i had one at my disposal in the 1970s, I'd probably do like the contemporary hackers did and modify it as my budget and skills allowed. But it's 2024 and an Apple I -- you aren't allowed to do that. No, if I had an Apple I, I could sell it and buy a house with that money.

If it weren't for all that, I think I'd probably just be indifferent to it, or maybe even like it for what it is.

Least favorite general computer:

eMachines eTower 600is

What a piece of shit. I had one when it was new, running Windows ME and it was hot garbage. I could not stand this underpowered excuse for a computer after a few months when the new computer sheen wore off. Floppy drive died too soon. Didn't come with the advertised 64MB of RAM (who puts 33MB of RAM in a computer?). Hard drive was only 10GB, kept filling it up. It was filled with bloatware, the keyboard was cheap garbage. I don't begrudge my parents for buying it, they didn't know any better and I was too young to have any say in the matter. That said, it endured the shortest tenure of any computer in my house to date.

Never obsolete my ass.

#apple i #emachines #etower 600is #windows me

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mostlysignssomeportents · 26 days

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AI “art” and uncanniness

TOMORROW (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on TOMORROW (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.

I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong – as a matter of law – to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright. This isn't a moral position (I'll get to that in a second), but rather a technical one.

Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it's technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn't exist, then you should support scraping at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale, even when the site being scraped objects (at least sometimes):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn't a copyright violation.

Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research

Programmatic analysis of scraped online speech is also critical to the burgeoning formal analyses of the language spoken by minorities, producing a vibrant account of the rigorous grammar of dialects that have long been dismissed as "slang":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373950278_Lexicogrammatical_Analysis_on_African-American_Vernacular_English_Spoken_by_African-Amecian_You-Tubers

Since 1988, UCL Survey of English Language has maintained its "International Corpus of English," and scholars have plumbed its depth to draw important conclusions about the wide variety of Englishes spoken around the world, especially in postcolonial English-speaking countries:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice.htm

The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/

Are models infringing? Well, they certainly can be. In some cases, it's clear that models "memorized" some of the data in their training set, making the fair use, transient copy into an infringing, permanent one. That's generally considered to be the result of a programming error, and it could certainly be prevented (say, by comparing the model to the training data and removing any memorizations that appear).

Not every seeming act of memorization is a memorization, though. While specific models vary widely, the amount of data from each training item retained by the model is very small. For example, Midjourney retains about one byte of information from each image in its training data. If we're talking about a typical low-resolution web image of say, 300kb, that would be one three-hundred-thousandth (0.0000033%) of the original image.

Typically in copyright discussions, when one work contains 0.0000033% of another work, we don't even raise the question of fair use. Rather, we dismiss the use as de minimis (short for de minimis non curat lex or "The law does not concern itself with trifles"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

Busting someone who takes 0.0000033% of your work for copyright infringement is like swearing out a trespassing complaint against someone because the edge of their shoe touched one blade of grass on your lawn.

But some works or elements of work appear many times online. For example, the Getty Images watermark appears on millions of similar images of people standing on red carpets and runways, so a model that takes even in infinitesimal sample of each one of those works might still end up being able to produce a whole, recognizable Getty Images watermark.

The same is true for wire-service articles or other widely syndicated texts: there might be dozens or even hundreds of copies of these works in training data, resulting in the memorization of long passages from them.

This might be infringing (we're getting into some gnarly, unprecedented territory here), but again, even if it is, it wouldn't be a big hardship for model makers to post-process their models by comparing them to the training set, deleting any inadvertent memorizations. Even if the resulting model had zero memorizations, this would do nothing to alleviate the (legitimate) concerns of creative workers about the creation and use of these models.

So here's the first nuance in the AI art debate: as a technical matter, training a model isn't a copyright infringement. Creative workers who hope that they can use copyright law to prevent AI from changing the creative labor market are likely to be very disappointed in court:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/

But copyright law isn't a fixed, eternal entity. We write new copyright laws all the time. If current copyright law doesn't prevent the creation of models, what about a future copyright law?

Well, sure, that's a possibility. The first thing to consider is the possible collateral damage of such a law. The legal space for scraping enables a wide range of scholarly, archival, organizational and critical purposes. We'd have to be very careful not to inadvertently ban, say, the scraping of a politician's campaign website, lest we enable liars to run for office and renege on their promises, while they insist that they never made those promises in the first place. We wouldn't want to abolish search engines, or stop creators from scraping their own work off sites that are going away or changing their terms of service.

Now, onto quantitative analysis: counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you're counting doesn't want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton's family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn't need anyone's permission to do so.

Finally, there's publishing the model. There are plenty of published mathematical analyses of large corpuses that are useful and unobjectionable. I love me a good Google n-gram:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fantods%2C+heebie-jeebies&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

And large language models fill all kinds of important niches, like the Human Rights Data Analysis Group's LLM-based work helping the Innocence Project New Orleans' extract data from wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

So that's nuance number two: if we decide to make a new copyright law, we'll need to be very sure that we don't accidentally crush these beneficial activities that don't undermine artistic labor markets.

This brings me to the most important point: passing a new copyright law that requires permission to train an AI won't help creative workers get paid or protect our jobs.

Getty Images pays photographers the least it can get away with. Publishers contracts have transformed by inches into miles-long, ghastly rights grabs that take everything from writers, but still shifts legal risks onto them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

Publishers like the New York Times bitterly oppose their writers' unions:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

These large corporations already control the copyrights to gigantic amounts of training data, and they have means, motive and opportunity to license these works for training a model in order to pay us less, and they are engaged in this activity right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

Big games studios are already acting as though there was a copyright in training data, and requiring their voice actors to begin every recording session with words to the effect of, "I hereby grant permission to train an AI with my voice" and if you don't like it, you can hit the bricks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

If you're a creative worker hoping to pay your bills, it doesn't matter whether your wages are eroded by a model produced without paying your employer for the right to do so, or whether your employer got to double dip by selling your work to an AI company to train a model, and then used that model to fire you or erode your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Individual creative workers rarely have any bargaining leverage over the corporations that license our copyrights. That's why copyright's 40-year expansion (in duration, scope, statutory damages) has resulted in larger, more profitable entertainment companies, and lower payments – in real terms and as a share of the income generated by their work – for creative workers.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving creative workers more rights to bargain with against giant corporations that control access to our audiences is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money – it's just a roundabout way of transferring that money to the bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

There's an historical precedent for this struggle – the fight over music sampling. 40 years ago, it wasn't clear whether sampling required a copyright license, and early hip-hop artists took samples without permission, the way a horn player might drop a couple bars of a well-known song into a solo.

Many artists were rightfully furious over this. The "heritage acts" (the music industry's euphemism for "Black people") who were most sampled had been given very bad deals and had seen very little of the fortunes generated by their creative labor. Many of them were desperately poor, despite having made millions for their labels. When other musicians started making money off that work, they got mad.

In the decades that followed, the system for sampling changed, partly through court cases and partly through the commercial terms set by the Big Three labels: Sony, Warner and Universal, who control 70% of all music recordings. Today, you generally can't sample without signing up to one of the Big Three (they are reluctant to deal with indies), and that means taking their standard deal, which is very bad, and also signs away your right to control your samples.

So a musician who wants to sample has to sign the bad terms offered by a Big Three label, and then hand $500 out of their advance to one of those Big Three labels for the sample license. That $500 typically doesn't go to another artist – it goes to the label, who share it around their executives and investors. This is a system that makes every artist poorer.

But it gets worse. Putting a price on samples changes the kind of music that can be economically viable. If you wanted to clear all the samples on an album like Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back," or the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique," you'd have to sell every CD for $150, just to break even:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Sampling licenses don't just make every artist financially worse off, they also prevent the creation of music of the sort that millions of people enjoy. But it gets even worse. Some older, sample-heavy music can't be cleared. Most of De La Soul's catalog wasn't available for 15 years, and even though some of their seminal music came back in March 2022, the band's frontman Trugoy the Dove didn't live to see it – he died in February 2022:

https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/de-la-soul-trugoy-the-dove-dead-at-54.html

This is the third nuance: even if we can craft a model-banning copyright system that doesn't catch a lot of dolphins in its tuna net, it could still make artists poorer off.

Back when sampling started, it wasn't clear whether it would ever be considered artistically important. Early sampling was crude and experimental. Musicians who trained for years to master an instrument were dismissive of the idea that clicking a mouse was "making music." Today, most of us don't question the idea that sampling can produce meaningful art – even musicians who believe in licensing samples.

Having lived through that era, I'm prepared to believe that maybe I'll look back on AI "art" and say, "damn, I can't believe I never thought that could be real art."

But I wouldn't give odds on it.

I don't like AI art. I find it anodyne, boring. As Henry Farrell writes, it's uncanny, and not in a good way:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

Farrell likens the work produced by AIs to the movement of a Ouija board's planchette, something that "seems to have a life of its own, even though its motion is a collective side-effect of the motions of the people whose fingers lightly rest on top of it." This is "spooky-action-at-a-close-up," transforming "collective inputs … into apparently quite specific outputs that are not the intended creation of any conscious mind."

Look, art is irrational in the sense that it speaks to us at some non-rational, or sub-rational level. Caring about the tribulations of imaginary people or being fascinated by pictures of things that don't exist (or that aren't even recognizable) doesn't make any sense. There's a way in which all art is like an optical illusion for our cognition, an imaginary thing that captures us the way a real thing might.

But art is amazing. Making art and experiencing art makes us feel big, numinous, irreducible emotions. Making art keeps me sane. Experiencing art is a precondition for all the joy in my life. Having spent most of my life as a working artist, I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this is that art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own. That's it: that's why art is amazing.

AI doesn't have a mind. It doesn't have an intention. The aesthetic choices made by AI aren't choices, they're averages. As Farrell writes, "LLM art sometimes seems to communicate a message, as art does, but it is unclear where that message comes from, or what it means. If it has any meaning at all, it is a meaning that does not stem from organizing intention" (emphasis mine).

Farrell cites Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which defines "weird" in easy to understand terms ("that which does not belong") but really grapples with "eerie."

For Fisher, eeriness is "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art produces the seeming of intention without intending anything. It appears to be an agent, but it has no agency. It's eerie.

Fisher talks about capitalism as eerie. Capital is "conjured out of nothing" but "exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity." The "invisible hand" shapes our lives more than any person. The invisible hand is fucking eerie. Capitalism is a system in which insubstantial non-things – corporations – appear to act with intention, often at odds with the intentions of the human beings carrying out those actions.

So will AI art ever be art? I don't know. There's a long tradition of using random or irrational or impersonal inputs as the starting point for human acts of artistic creativity. Think of divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

Or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

I love making my little collages for this blog, though I wouldn't call them important art. Nevertheless, piecing together bits of other peoples' work can make fantastic, important work of historical note:

https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz

Even though painstakingly cutting out tiny elements from others' images can be a meditative and educational experience, I don't think that using tiny scissors or the lasso tool is what defines the "art" in collage. If you can automate some of this process, it could still be art.

Here's what I do know. Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will not improve the material conditions of artists' lives – all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.

As an artist, I'm foursquare against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I'm entirely committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.

I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.

Just because copyright won't fix the creative labor market, it doesn't follow that nothing will. If we're worried about labor issues, we can look to labor law to improve our conditions. That's what the Hollywood writers did, in their groundbreaking 2023 strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Now, the writers had an advantage: they are able to engage in "sectoral bargaining," where a union bargains with all the major employers at once. That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new labor law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).

But all workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.

And if we do want to tinker with copyright to change the way training works, let's look at collective licensing, which can't be bargained away, rather than individual rights that can be confiscated at the entrance to our publisher, label or studio's offices. These collective licenses have been a huge success in protecting creative workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Then there's copyright's wildest wild card: The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works made by AIs aren't eligible for copyright, which is the exclusive purview of works of human authorship. This has been affirmed by courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Neither AI companies nor entertainment companies will pay creative workers if they don't have to. But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.

Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses: rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

They don't care if it's slop – they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn't thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it's the only thing that matters to our bosses.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

#pluralistic #ai art #eerie #ai #weird #henry farrell #copyright #copyfight #creative labor markets #what is art #ideomotor response #mark fisher #invisible hand #uncanniness #prompting

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bortmcjorts · 2 years

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[ID: a lineup of oc’s with their names, pronouns, and pride flags next to them. from left to right is rox, she/her, trans and bi flags; kip, he/she, genderqueer flag; bit, they/it, pan, ace, and agender flags; star, any pronouns, genderfluid flag; jj, they/it, nonbinary and lesbian flags; and alax, he/him, gay and trans flags. rox is a tall, thin girl with brown skin and chin-length curly hair, wearing a red shirt, a long pink skirt, and brown boots. kip is short and fat, with tan skin, short dark hair, and a slight beard, wearing an orange t-shirt, dark red overalls, and brown boots. bit is a little taller and chubby, with pale skin and dyed yellow hair shaved on one side, wearing a gray and yellow sports bra, matching yoga pants, and yellow crocs. the sports bra says 8008 on it to look like the word ‘boob.’ star is a tall slim mousy humanoid robot, with small satellite dishes on each side of its head to look like ears, whiskers, paw-like toes, and a cord tail. he has a screen over half his head to display eyes, and is wearing a spiked choker and a short green dress with ‘star’ written on it. the letters are backward. jj is a short slim robot with an entirely screen face and a curly cyan wig. they’re wearing a teal hoodie and technically no pants... alax is a taller fat (human) man with dark brown skin and short hair, wearing a purple shirt with a panda on it, leather pants and jacket, purple boots, fingerless gloves and longer mesh gloves underneath. end ID]

more refs! these are all old characters from a scrapped comic that have been updated for a byte & a nibble. they have a workshop together where you can get upgrades in the game =]

#*speaks of my game as if it alrdy exists so maybe it will motivate me to make it real*#ab&an #a byte & a nibble #my ocs #will gradually (slowly) upload/update these on art fight with individual character info

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kafus · 4 months

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over the weekend at the knoxville regional pokemon championships, i met up with a longtime internet friend in person for the first time, and he traded me a very special pokemon - a unique celebi that takes a bit of context to explain the significance of

from november 2001 to january 2005, the building that is now a nintendo world store in new york city was actually an american pokemon center, which hosted the "Gotta Catch ‘Em All!" station, a large machine that you could pop your gold/silver/crystal cartridge into (or later ruby/sapphire/firered/leafgreen, but that's not relevant here) and get a special distribution pokemon unique to the store. often times these were normal pokemon in eggs with special moves they couldn't usually learn, but other times they ran distributions for shiny legendaries, and of course, the mythical celebi.

there's very few pictures of the machine and all of them are pretty low quality, but you can see an iteration of it here during the gen 3 era:

when PCNY (pokemon center new york) shut down, the machine and its contents were presumed lost forever, but due to the preservation efforts and the good luck of a few individuals, some of the distributions have been preserved, as well as parts of the machine and its software. this is extra incredible because almost all gen 2 save files from the time the machine was actually functional are long since wiped due to the battery inside dying, meaning that very very few of the gen 2 event pokemon distributed from this machine at the time still exist. i won't go super in detail on that in this post but you can read an article about all of that here (julie, the person who runs this historical PCNY fansite is incredibly passionate and if you want to know anything about the PCNY store i absolutely recommend reading her writing!)

so, one day when i was rambling to my friend (his name is Venty!) about my fascination with the PCNY machine, and how i wish i had been born early enough to experience that, as well as wishing that i could have traded with anyone in gens 1-3 as a child but never got to due to isolation, venty told me that he's actually friends with a guy (Professor Rex) who knows the guy who owns the remnants of the PCNY machine (Gridelin), and he would love to reach out and ask if there's any way rex could distribute a celebi to himself and trade it to him sometime so that eventually when me and venty met in person one day, he'd be able to trade the celebi to me.

i pretty much burst into tears and very passionately explained how much that would mean to me - not just because owning a celebi actually distributed from the historical PCNY distribution station is just... insanely cool, but because like i said, i had never traded anyone in the old internet-less generations of pokemon, and having that be my first was just... a monumental thought. i am deeply fascinated with old gen event distributions because of the tactile, interpersonal nature of them, in direct contrast with my isolation and loneliness as a child. it might sound silly to be so worked up over a collection of bytes/pixels, but i really couldn't believe venty would offer me something so kind. and not only did he offer to ask - rex said yes!!

so on may 21st last year (2023) rex traveled out and distributed the celebi to his pokemon silver cartridge. specifically, the celebi is from the "Celebi Present Campaign" which ran from the 22nd of november 2002 to the 28th of november 2002. the display on the monitor is the same video that would have appeared on the screen in the PCNY store, but flipped sideways here haha. (the gen 2 distributions were special and had custom animations for the legendaries and stuff, which you can watch here in full quality on gridelin's channel - there's videos of the other distribution animations on his channel, too!)

and then months later, during the weekend of august 11th 2023, rex and venty met up at the pokemon world championship in japan and rex traded the celebi to venty's gold cartridge...

...then, finally, just this past weekend, on sunday (february 4th 2024) venty and i finally met in real life for the first time at the knoxville TN regional pokemon championships, and with link cable in hand the celebi finally made its way to me in my hotel room, after crossing the ocean twice and passing through canada to the US to japan and back to the US...!!

gen 2 pokemon data isn't very complicated, but you can tell that my celebi is unique from the other PCNY celebis dumped online (here and here if you'd like to play with some of these historical pokemon yourself) because it has the trainer ID of 00204 which none of the publicly available celebis have - though of course to me, regardless of what becomes publicly available in the future (and i hope one day the common layperson can simply emulate the PCNY machine, video game preservation >>> unique collections always) this celebi will always be special and unique because of how it got to me, and because it represents my friendship with venty who i care so much about. it was an extremely kind gesture i will never forget and i can't believe how much traveling and how many people were involved with getting this tiny bundle of bytes and pixels to me. i hugged venty after the trade was done haha

oh, and by the way, don't worry, i have the hardware to back up my gen 2 save files so this celebi will never die even after my crystal cartridge battery eventually dies once more!! (also, while i don't think it would be an issue i do want to say please don't bother any of the people mentioned in this post...! gridelin & co are working on making the distribution machine in question available for anyone to use, it'll come out whenever it's out and for now there are dumps of the events that were recovered. i would not want them to receive any annoying requests for pokemon because of me. thank you!)

#pokemon #pokemon crystal #gsc #pokemon gsc #celebi #mystery gift #ayano was here #ayano.txt #long post

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changes · 1 year

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Friday, April 28th, 2023

🌟 New

Love those important checkmarks? We won a Webby for ’em!

The inbox unread count has returned on web! No more unread dot.

We’re no longer creating activity items in your activity feed when you like, reblog, or reply to your own posts.

In the new post editor on web, clicking into the tags input field will now show suggestions immediately.

Passwords on Tumblr have a max length of 72 bytes. This has actually always been the case, but now we’re making that clearer when setting your password across web, iOS, and Android.

🛠 Fixed

Users that you’ve blocked will no longer appear in Tumblr Live carousels.

Ask/answer posts can no longer be blazed at all. (We’re thinking through how best to ask for consent from the asker and answerer, so this may return.)

Fixed a bug that was resetting a post’s blaze eligibility depending on where it was being edited. Thanks to everyone who sent us info about this issue, it helped us track down the problem faster!

Fixed the issue that could cause the new post editor on web to not be able to redo your actions after undoing them with Control + Z.

When using Tumblr in a browser on your phone, going “back” from within a direct messaging conversation will now bring you back to the right place, if you got to that conversation from places like activity or your dashboard.

There was an issue with Spotify podcast embeds for a brief period this week, but they’ve fixed the issue.

🚧 Ongoing

The war against spam bots continues. We’re working to clean up recent waves of spam bots, and again prevent them from recurring. As usual, please report any blogs as spam that you find, and we’ll take care of the rest.

We’re working on separating everyone’s existing checkmarks into separate blue and rainbow products, and opening up the ability for everyone to manage which one is being displayed next to their blog name. There have been some bumps with this transition, but we’re working them out as quickly as possible!

Version 29.1.1 of the Tumblr Android app has a fix for the issue of the app switching to the “For you” tab when interacting with posts that have a “Read more”.

🌱 Upcoming

We’re working on a design refresh of the direct messaging conversation popup on web.

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.

#tumblr update

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