live reaction of Vizzy T finding out that his former wife married someone that is more handsome than him and treats her like a goddess instead of an incubator (as drawn by the talented @feignedsobriquet )
A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause "you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes" not realising that every single one would be shit, you'd have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could've been spent just writing a screenplay.
Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.
Matthew Dow Smith: "Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date."
I study graphic design and my tutor recommended and used this in his classes at art college last year, it’s so good it has SO many features for free, I really recommend it, even if you’re just trying to learn the basics of PS, such a wonderful thing <3
you can open mspaint and crudely draw the most fucked up uneven line and it'll be worth more love and support and awe than any genai piece of shit out there
Have you seen one of these dipshits? If you post regularly on ao3, chances are YES, but more likely you didn't notice nor suspect it was a bot. Sometimes they start off nice, or even praise you before getting nasty out of nowhere, like so:
But much like Grok, their newest obsession is nazism.
I don't know where they come from, or what purpose this could possibly serve other than suicidebaiting random people in the internet, I guess; but apparently they've started parroting names from real users to send these comments and shifting their general length to go by undetected. Maybe those are scrappers trying to train 'reviewbots' to be sold as part of some scam service promising to give feedback for newbie writers, who the fuck knows.
Here are more examples of the tone and backhanded compliments you can find in these:
If you regularly post on AO3 or interact with writers in it, please pass this along so they don't feel insane receiving bombs in their inbox. This is ridiculous.
from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.
This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.
While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:
Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW
Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW
Follow your moots at their places NOW
I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.
It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.
The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.
TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.
Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.
And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.
Some suggestions:
Pillowfort and/or BlueSky
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)
Dreamwidth
If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth.
While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there).
Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.
But what about Discord?
By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom.
Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't.
So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.
Image hosting
It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.
Closing thoughts
Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.
Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.
Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.
If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.
Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.
To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.
Minor technical correction: Dreamwidth does have image hosting, it's just extremely limited and will be non-intuitive for a lot of web users more used to modern image interface.
If what you want is a place to host a lot of art, Dreamwidth is not it. You can host some art there, though, and the restrictions on what kind of art are very similar to AO3's. (So yes, sexually explicit stuff is a go.)
Adding this, because it was behind the cut, and it's one of the many reasons I HATE Discord:
But what about Discord?
By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom.
Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't.
So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.
Everybody who wears The One Ring in LOTR starts to refer to it as ‘My Precious,’ and Tolkien’s right that is super creepy, but what I really love is that everybody does it, which says to me that this super powerful scary evil sentient ring has a favorite pet name and just, like, will not respond to anything else.
look i’m just saying, even as educated as frodo is, would he really KNOW the true name of sauron? like shit, of any of the elves left in middle earth by the time the events of LotR actually happen, only círdan and galadriel are old enough to remember that sauron existed in valinor (not counting old sindarin/avari elves because iirc sauron was never called mairon on the shores of ara [except possibly by melkor wink wonk]), let alone what his name was.
so to everyone in ME, he’s always been sauron, and there’s no connection to “precious” in any linguistic sense…
but mairon remembers.
no you’re a hundred percent right!! no one would know, and it wouldn’t make sense to anyone except maybe Gandalf, but that shredded little piece of sauron’s souls remembers
I hate you AI, I hate you sites making deals with souless corporations that think creativity can be replicated by an unthinking machine, I hate you money-hungry investors and ceos, I hate you opt-out models, I hate you tech bros, I hate you having to spend precious free time having to scramble our art in a desperate attempt not to getting stolen from, I hate you minimization of the hard work we put into our craft, I hate ''''machine learning''''' being compared to a very human person putting in the hours to better themselves, I hate you commodification of the very core of human's expression, I hate you scams being helped along by uber plagiarism, I hate you AI, I hate you AI, I hate you AI, I HATE YOU AI
BTW this also applies to chatGPT and that character-chat thingy I've seen people in fandom use.
Stop.
Stop using that shit.
"But it's fun!" I don't care. Writing AI have been trained on stolen content just as much as art AI.
"But I'm not hurting anybody!" I don't care, and you are. Even if you are just using those AIs for your own entertainment without gaining anything monetary from it, it doesn't delete the plagiarism that its built upon.
"But I'm just one person doing one little thing, how much could it hurt?" And like you hundreds upon thousand of other people have this exact same thought, and it's not just 'one person' anymore. By using AI in any way, shape or form you are feeding the exec and investors numbers that make them think there's money to be made upon the theft of real people's effort.
Are You Opting Out of Tumblr Allowing Third Party AI Model's to Train on Your Data?
Yes
No
I hadn't heard of this before, but now I'll opt out
Show me the results!
I'm planning on abandoning tumblr and deleting my blogs
Other (please explain in the tags)
Voting ended onMar 5, 2024
From instructions on how to opt out, look at the official staff post on the topic. It also gives more information on Tumblr's new policies. If you are opting out, remember to opt out each separate blog individually.
Please reblog this post, so it will get more votes!
They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.
What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?
An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:
I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.
Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.
A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)
So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.
And I just got confirmation from a second ex-colleague that a deal with midjourney has been brewing since months ago. Not any extra details, just that's a real thing.
Shit, I don't see any way for this to happen that doesn't make it an apocalyptic event the size of the porn ban. Fuck.
Shit. This may be pure chance and coincidence, and it's not he is in a position to be able to talk about anything, but seeing prominent staff members announcing they are moving their original photography out of tumblr just two weeks ago seems a pretty significant cue of shit to be about to hit the fan.
Just tested. It’s possible to swap out pictures on already-published posts. So in that case, a solution:
Nightshade your photo posts now.
Even if you don’t post your own art anymore, go back to your old stuff and watermark it.
Do it ASAP, before the deal goes through and the scraping begins.
This will not only protect your art, but has the opportunity to fuck over this deal on a pretty large scale. The more of these posts that are glazed or poisoned, the less valuable this deal becomes for tumblr and midjourney.
Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist).
As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.
(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)
Everyone reblog! Spread the word so more and more artists learn that in addition to Glaze that coats art against ai scraping mimicry there's also an offensive tool now, able to skew and poison data pools.
Now poisoning will need many artists to nightshade their art and it's most important to get this ou to those the most at risk of being scraped. Reblog!
Lock your Ao3 accounts from public viewing, make it that only registered users can see it
Google's new AI is not just targeting your Google docs
It's going for anything publicly available. Which means the works you posted lovingly, for free can be used by Google in their scrapping without credit. Google has admitted this and is currently facing a class action lawsuit about it, but nothing they're doing is technically illegal because no ai laws
Private your shit, don't use Google docs or web-based/internet connected versions of Microsoft Word. If anyone has links to free writing sources, please reblog with them.
It’s finally here! The Reforged preorder store is now open for business!
Come on over to reforgedzine.com to get sweet early bird specials before Saturday, Feb 18 ends for awesome limited time deals.
Choose from:
1) Digital Zine: Just the PDF - €12
2) Printed Zine: Printed and PDF - €35
3) Small Merch Pack: Printed, PDF, postcard, 2 stickers, washi tape - €45
4) Big Merch Pack: Printed, PDF, small merch, 3 acrylic charms, enamel pin - €65
5/6) Big Merch Pack PLUS an additional, original sketch by either KotaRiverroad or MassiveSpaceWren - €90
+ Add our NSFW bonus book for 50 pages of steamy, 18+ comics, art, and fic!
Early Bird Specials are an additional FOUR prints, if you order before Saturday, Feb 18 ends.
The preorder shop will close after March 11, so get your zine while you can!
Marked down the clear grey winteriron one since it does have a crack in the top left piece from the cutting process- it is held in place by the solder so even if it does someday run all the way through it will stay there, but still
~ Prices are what is shown + shipping (and I will only charge what it costs to ship- if you want an idea ahead of time I’m shipping from 50014 USA)
~ DM me either here or on Discord (Ibreathebooks#6783) with which pieces you want and the address you would like them shipped to, I’ll double check total price with you including shipping to make sure you are still okay with that
~ Payment is only through PayPal
~ First come first serve, but I’ll keep a waiting list incase someone else changes their mind or you would like to be specifically pinged next time I have that item
~ right now going to be posting listings here and at least one discord server,
so feel free to let me know where you’d like a ping
~ Yes I will ship international, just be aware of how much shipping might be
pixelskylines
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
gummygunk
2087
yousharknotpass
