oozey mess
Today's Document
Janaina Medeiros
Keni
RMH
blake kathryn
JBB: An Artblog!
@theartofmadeline
JVL
#extradirty
noise dept.
DEAR READER
titsay
Show & Tell
Cosmic Funnies
if i look back, i am lost
No title available
KIROKAZE
Mike Driver
cherry valley forever
seen from United States
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seen from South Korea
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@glass-threads
maybe this is a dumb question but why don’t amab trans ppl want to hang out in amab queer spaces
So a basic element of trans existence is a level of disagreement with the assignment, and it's generally been a fixture of trans politics since... Forever.......... To not enforce a grouping of people according to birth assignment
how does accession to the Throne of Stars work Megacrit
Megacrit what do your funny words mean
There's this super-specific dynamic that I love to death. You see it a lot in human x vampire ships, or human x giant (but not so much in fairy x human, notably), or frequently wrt to disability. But when one member of the pairing is so much more powerful or abled or dangerous than the other, so often the physically weaker partner will exploit a need to be overwhelmingly dominant. Vampires work great for this, as they have this built-in need for blood, which can be easily twisted into an addiction. Sometimes actual, addictive drugs are used for this, but more commonly it's a more psychological need; praise, or validation, or purpose. Yes, you could crush me with one hand. Yes, I couldn't hope to resist you. But you know better than to go against me, don't you? Good girl. Now come here and drink your fill. It was sooo hard waiting, wasn't it? I'm very proud of you, being so obedient for me.
het femdom
lace kind of looks like she's wearing 綿帽子, a Shinto bridal veil
Yeah there's valid critique of A.I. but it certainly doesn't lie in the realm of defending I.P. and worrying about small artists losing 'potential' profit
why is artists losing work not a concern?
The other branch of this post is fun, but for a serious answer in case you're asking in good faith: there is a difference between the proletarian artist concern of losing your employment to AI (e.g. getting fired because your boss decided that he doesn't need an illustrator when he can just use AI go generate graphics), which I think most serious socialists on this website including OP recognize as a valid concern rooted on labour issues, and the petit-bourgeois artisan concern of losing *potential* profits because of AI (e.g. being a commission artist and getting mad when you see someone generate an image with AI because they didn't commission you or someone like you instead), which by and large is rooted in the bourgeois logic that your imaginary potential profits are being stolen whenever someone who *hypothetically* could have paid for your services decides to access those services some other way instead.
this would be an extremely salient point if the AI art models weren't STOLEN FROM THOSE ARTISTS.
This would be a kinda clever response if I had the same definition of "stealing" as those fucking "You wouldn't download a car" ads.
Ah yes the bourgeois artists of the economic bracket of "relying on other people to pay them to draw to make ends meet". Clearly these are the same as those that own the means of production.
What do you think means of production are? It's not just giant factories and such.
Also, oh if only we had a term for the low end of the bourgeoisie. Something like small bourgeoisie or little bourgeoisie maybe? Idk. /s
What point of the means of production do comission artists control? Do they control every fucking pencil? Are they preventing people from accessing knowledge on how to fucking draw? Art has probably the most open means of production available.
Insanely funny new way to completely misunderstand what class is. None of these things are required to label independent artists as petit bourgeoisie.
You, independent artist, own the tools used in the production process you are part of, you are not employed by anyone, you earn money not from wage but from selling products to customers thus you are part of the bourgeoisie and not the proletariat. Petit bourgeoisie, but still. It is as simple as that.
1. Most digital artists do not own the tools in production progress, Adobe usually does.
2. So I am confused here, nobody should be allowed to sell anything? Like I am legit asking in good faith. Labor is only valid if capital pays you? If I repair someones car and ask compensation for parts and time, I am a petit bourg? It seems contradictory. Could you clear this up for me?
A marxist describing a person as petit bourgeois does not express a moral condemnation, but a description of their position within an economic system and a description of the economic incentives they are subject to.
For example, a proletarian artist employed by a corporation has no economic incentives to defend the expansion of bourgeois intellectual property rights, because such rights are presently being used to exploit their labor, while a petit bourgeois independent artist often does have such an incentive, because their business model benefits from the expansion of such IP rights. Again, this is not a moral condemnation; you can still be a class traitor! An independent artist need not be anti-piracy, even though it hurt their business model. Plenty of petit bourgeois are subject to terrible economic precarity, which means they are under threat of proletarianization (gotta go work at McDonald's if this art thing doesn't work out) and this means there is plenty of capacity for solidarity with the proletariat there- if they so choose. The other choice is to cling to a temporarily-embarrassed-rightsholder mindset and side with the haute (big) bourgeoisie in matters of (for example) IP law.
As for the first thing, there is some room for nuance here. The level of control the entity that owns the means of production has over the independent worker determines their relationship to the means of production. Adobe has relatively little power to tell you what to do with their software, and if they try, you have alternatives; in contrast, a rent-to-own long-haul trucker (for example) is locked into a terribly exploitative agreement with the entity that rents them their truck, and this leads to proletarianization. In contrast, big corporations (haute bourgeoisie) often rent things like office space or software solutions from outside entities, but since these outside entities do not have much leverage, the haute bourgeoisie maintains effective control.
See, I've seen a lot of comparisons like this. But coming from someone who has absolutely no skin in this game, from an outside perspective it's looked a lot more like a guy got in a car and all of a sudden someone ran up and started banging on his windows shouting that he shouldn't drive that car.
And the guy in the car was like "I'm just going down the street, and the car is the easiest way to do that", and the guy outside was like "um actually, if you can't enjoy the feeling of running then you shouldn't be going places, and taking joy in the freedom of movement is literally what makes us human and your soulless machine can never replace that feeling."
And the guy in the car was like "okay, but my leg is broken and I can't walk." And the guy outside was like "Nice try but I know plenty of people with broken legs who hop and crawl along the ground without having to use that gas-guzzling pollution machine, so actually YOU'RE the ableist for suggesting that you need it to move."
And the guy in the car was like "well this is actually a race car and while of course it's not the same as a marathon, driving a race car takes its own set of skills and talents that I've practiced and developed over time", and the guy outside was like "yeah right, everyone knows that driving a car doesn't take talent, just putting your foot on the gas doesn't make you a racer."
And the guy in the car was like "okay, well, I'm gonna keep driving I think", and the guy outside was like "oh my god you "drivers" are SO pathetic, you just can't stand that everyone knows that you're talentless hacks who don't understand the true meaning of racing. Why can't you just leave us real racers alone?!"
See, I understand your metaphor. But actually, in this case, the car is built from actual human body parts. Of people who used to run, or who still run. And when they say “ow, holy shit, stop using my body parts, they’re mine, and without my body parts you fundamentally would not have a car. Also, the fact that you have that car means that my marathon running will not be seen as valuable to many, many industries under capitalism, and thousands of us will lose jobs and income, all because of your cars that would not function without us,” the driver… what? Doesn’t care? Throws a middle finger out the window as they go?
AI ‘art’ is wrenched from the bones of the artists. And it’s not fair to ignore that fact, because that fact is fundamental. AI ‘art’ may require skills, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is inherently stealing from others. Just like how, i don’t know, gem theft is a skill, but it’s not really legal to brag about. Or how plagiarism requires work, technically, but if you plagiarize you generally get consequences for it, even on the internet - just look at James Somerton. (And no, by the way, I’m not an artist, I did one charcoal drawing class in uni and was awful at it.)
AI art is not theft by any reasonable definition of the term. I like this framing of it.
AI databases do not store art. They do not and cannot "copy and paste" from artwork as I've seen people claim, so it's not plagiarism. An AI program being trained on your artwork does not deprive you of the work or of your copyright, so nothing is being taken from you. There is absolutely no way to frame AI art as theft that does not also entail making fanfiction and fanart illegal, and the harder people push for stricter copyright and IP laws, the easier it will be for large corporations to weaponize it against independent artists. (Not to mention, I've never seen anywhere NEAR this level of vitriol towards people who profit from fanart, despite that being a MUCH more clear-cut example of IP theft under the law.)
And I've said it before and I'll say it again - "automation is taking our jobs" has been a problem for literal centuries and it is buck-fucking-wild that people keep acting like this is a new and imminent horror and not something that the rest of us have already been through. And the people up in arms about all these jobs lost to automation seem to ONLY care about artists - unless all of your furniture is hand-made by a master carpenter and isn't cheap MDF slop from Walmart? I hope all of your t-shirts were made by union printers working for a living wage and not overseas sweatshops? I hope you've never used a self-checkout register that was used to justify cutting cashier hours?
In any case, someone fucking around with chatGPT or OpenArt online isn't costing you your job or stealing from you. Boycott companies that use AI instead of paying workers, join or form a union that negotiates to prevent companies from using AI instead of paying workers, but harassing people for their hobbies isn't praxis and isn't helping anyone.
Alright, I’m back, and I think I’ve discovered what was bothering me.
The points of yours that I now agree with, at least to an extent:
That AI doesn’t technically take actual identical aspects, just “learns” from existing artwork.
That it is fiendishly difficult to change the laws surrounding copyright so that AI art is banned, and fanworks are not.
I have three points in rebuttal, primarily:
Sources are a thing
Laws are not necessarily promoting the most ideal behavior
Recognition ability
When I write an essay using sources, I cite them. Not citing the sources I learned my material from is considered academic dishonesty, and I am not allowed to do that. When you look at a scientific study, even, to cite an example not implicitly within the realm of “teachers want to make sure your sources are valid,” they cite their sources. And what they come back with is a product built upon others’ work completely ethically.
AI does not cite its sources. It does not communicate to the viewer where it obtained its information. And the reason that this differs from human-created artwork, where people don’t cite their sources either, is that the AI is not thinking for itself. It does not produce any original material. There is no individual touch. It spits out data in a pattern it has been told to follow. And you may say that makes AI artwork more of a tool or a style than an artist, but I would also like to argue that there isn’t nearly as much of a hand involved in the work as there is in, say, photography or Impressionism, even though those are both famously art forms derided when introduced because of the lack of work critics deemed they involved.
Laws are fiendishly difficult in any situation. They have to say “this behavior should be followed,” “this behavior should not,” and do all of that in a manner that does not allow for loopholes, unintentional interpretations, or future laws that allow for something the lawmaker does not want. Laws are not the ultimate decider of morality. They never have been. Just because something is legal, doesn’t mean everybody should or will like it or agree with it, or the opposite.
I am going to give an extreme, black-and-white example, that I do not believe is in the vein of AI artwork in the slightest, to demonstrate that point. I repeat, NOT comparing this to AI art, simply showing how laws do not and should not equate to morality.
Nazism was a political party. All of its actions were legal, at least in Germany at the time. Jews could be legally thrown out of their homes and property and sent to concentration camps. Those objectively evil actions were legal, and were actually illegal to circumvent.
Laws are NOT equal to morality, and they never have been. Hopefully they trend in that direction, but the primary point of laws is to denote what behavior is and is not viable for a successful society, at least from the point of view of the lawmakers.
And, furthermore, people on the internet having a view of something does not inform legalities. I can believe that lobbying is bad because it means that those with more wealth get to determine laws; that does not make it illegal, or mean that a lawmaker is going to introduce a law that makes lobbying illegal. Someone else could believe that taxes are theft; that does not mean the government is going to eliminate taxes.
Lastly, recognition is relevant here. When I buy a bookcase from Target, I know it’s not equivalent to the work a carpenter would put into it. It’s made of dubious materials, thin sheets of cardboard backing, and a few nails and screws that I insert myself. I can very obviously tell the difference.
Same with clothes made from sweatshops, and self-checkout. None of those are the same experience as an actual human putting in the work to create the thing.
[And, furthermore, sometimes to exist is to participate in unethical systems, even when I try to avoid them to the best of my ability. (Was I supposed to tell my first job at 16 not to mass-order camp T-Shirts from a sweatshop? Am I not supposed to use a self-checkout machine when I need something cheap and sensory-friendly to eat and I’m at the airport inside a completely autonomous shop?)]
But human-created furniture and shirts, and human-ran grocery stores, still exist. And I can find them, if I believe in the value of those things (and can afford them, in a society that constantly wants me to pay more for less when it comes to things I need to survive). The problem with AI is that it is nearly indistinguishable from human creation in many cases, because of how it learns from an inherently human product.
I am able to remove certain things from my experience completely, all by myself. I can pick a cash register with a human, I can buy a real wooden desk, I can buy ethical clothing. It is impossible to ensure that the art or book I am purchasing was not created with AI. There are certain tells, but those will be going away when the technology improves.
With Impressionism and photography, you can tell that the product is different. I can tell Tumblr to hide any posts which mention the DSMP from my homepage. If people choose to pass off their AI as something which they made, I cannot choose to disengage from it. And when somebody sells an AI-generated book on mushroom foraging on Amazon that gives literally deadly advice, people will buy it, and people will be killed by it.
When people use AI, they are training AI. And the more AI is trained, the sooner we will be entirely unable to extricate ourselves from it.
That’s one of my biggest problems with the usage of AI.
(I do, however, believe that harassing well-meaning people is bad. As is any harassment towards anyone that isn’t “I disagree with you about this thing and I am going to say so.”)
Same with clothes made from sweatshops, and self-checkout. None of those are the same experience as an actual human putting in the work to create the thing.
...sweatshops have, people, working in them...
is the solution to sweatshops banning sewing machines?
it's actually a pretty straightforward parallel with "AI", given how armies of underpaid third-worlders are necessary to refine and quality-control an LLM for it to work
start looking at "AI" from a labor perspective, rather than a consumer perspective or a petit-bourgeois intellectual-property perspective
the problems with AI, as with the problems with the power loom, are problems of capitalism, and with problems of capitalism, consumerist and intellectual-property approaches are a dead end
hey wait hey no hey wait. hey. clown dildo with honk balls. has anybody made this? clown dildo and it has honk balls. find it for me
nobody's finding me clown dildo with honk balls. daddy's getting sad...
весна пришла..
Out of every image in the game and artbook.... this one... I think this one is Jupiter's truest self
I also have these Eugeos in dresses. Again, idk if this is fanart or not. Please tell me if it is!
more images from the game these are from
You know, I'll give Arcane S2 this.
There is actually one attack we are shown in full, from start to finish, during which attackers are shown to explicitly bypass civilians, and to target and engage with only clearly-designated enemy soldiers, enemy heads of state, and one (1) additional individual actively engaging in combat against them.
So let's all give it up for our ethical queen:
going directly for the culprit responsible for her son’s death, in a targeted strike? cait could take a few notes
though jokes aside it’s very telling how renni is framed in a significantly more villainous and two dimensional light than caitlyn. especially when their respective revenge campaigns are so drastically different in scale, collateral damage, and ethical considerations. also, it’s hard not to notice the unfortunate pattern of extreme augmentations and facial differences typically being attached to characters who’ve been ascribed a more villainous role by the narrative
Fulgrim is not a girl, but Fulgrim would be a beautiful name for an irl girl
hot hot hot
Ferrus Manus is an objectively terrible name regardless of gender. But can you imagine being the girl who named herself Fulgrim and then some other guy comes out as transfem and names herself Ferrus.
Remembered another convo i had with that same friend.
They asked something like “why do the eversions of the trios in wktd and hwbm look and feel so different? The wktd feel much more human than the everted hwbm trio”
And it gave me so many thoughts that im gonna compile (hopefully) all in this post.
Ok the first thing to look at their different contexts, and what eversions mean for each.
So the wktd trio are in a conservative religous environment of the midwest, eversion is embracing the non-human, in this cultural context what is human is a much narrower definition, any queerness is seen as inhuman and other.
In comparison to the hwbm trio, who grew up in space, free to define themselves, their context of being human was much wider, and thus to not be human far stranger.
The wktd trio while inhuman, were still concepts a human can somewhat conceive of and also retained some human components, an angel of light and eyes, a storm of blood and hands, a flood that is a witch.
The hwbm are less nailed down, they fused with their ship-selves, but they also became so much more, bands of stars and nebula and things just at the corner of your eye.
Another component to consider, on the final set of days intro, Saturn says “The shortcut to attaining it is to forsake everything that humans already are.” I think another component is that the wktd did it the hard way, despite all the pain and risk, they stuck together and embraced what made them inhuman, they didnt quite let go of being human, not to the extent children of space do post-cm ending.
Which leads to why? Well i think its cause the differences between the terrestrial and stellar existential threats, the latter were always much weaker than their terrestrial counterparts. And thus the ability to evert much more difficult, They could never possess people like back on Earth, but you can become it by using a gravity reactor and turning inside our, letting go, and embracing the unknown.
Whereas the wktd, were able to assert themselves despite the overwhelming culture-gravity pressure, and thus a more powerful existential threat, they didnt have a shortcut.
Also this is just my ambient thoughts after typing it all out, but i wonder if the fact that in wktd, the “devil” is described loosely, always with fear and losthing, whereas hwbm the existential threats are clearly defined, maybe not measure, and do you measure all that isnt? And so with those cultural contexts each of the girls eversions are expressions of what they think their respective existential threats are.
yeah what gets you labelled as a threat is gonna be different depending on whether you're in a conversion camp or the LGBTQ+ Space Force (so, respectively, gay, and communist)
doll nesting-habits can take some getting used to, especially for a new keeper. the common domestic carries a conditioned fondness for small, close spaces, with the capacity for claustrophobia thoroughly excised by most responsible dollmakers; in fact, house dolls are rather prone to developing agoraphobia if not tasked with out-of-home errands now and then (see chapter ix for more on preventing your dolls from becoming 'house-bound' in this manner).
as with the other aspects of the house-servant conditioning profile, this is a pragmatic measure: dolls need sleep only marginally less than other thinking creatures, and storing them in boxes or cases overnight is much neater and more space-efficient than providing bunks. in the absence of a clearly designated nesting place, a domestic may seek out other enclosed spaces, such as storage cupboards, accessible crawlspaces, coffins, or the cavities beneath person-standard beds.
the princess in the swamp-witch's lair 🍄💫
We Know The Devil (2015) / I Saw The TV Glow (2024)
i had to go find the damn post i was thinking about and it was a comment some guy added to a diff post about how homestuck fans should read the comic NOT REALIZING THE ORIGINAL POST. WAS MAKING FUN OF THESE KINDS OF FANS. (& the original post was good) but like. THIS IS AN INSANE TAKE. LIKE THIS IS INSANE? I CANT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT.
imgoing to be honest if this is your mentality about media you consume and favorite characters maybe you should just like read slice of life or something. and not a narrative work. because this is how narratives operate. "smashing toys together until they're broken" you mean having plot and conflict. or like characterization. or literally anything interesting
whydo you run a Homestuck Blog if this is how you feel about the comic. I cannot fucking understand
#tbh this attitutde is what drove hussie insane#or insaner than they already where
the kids yearn for la commedia dell'arte
