Cats are life

He/him. Writer. Mostly cats, fandom, and social justice.

[hoardeofcats]

kitty cat

[thefakehedgehogaroundhere]

btw you're allowed to enjoy two differing interpretations of the same character and you don't have to justify why you like it to anyone. you can like your evil character to be malicious and serious and you can like depicting them as a silly goober. you can enjoy seeing people draw two characters in all sorts of different contexts and dynamics without having to pick one over the other. you don't have to come up with a complex reason. you don't have to explain yourself to anyone. you can like a character multiple ways without having to justify why it's not problematic or why it's not weird. do what you want. it's fandom, not a testimony before the court.

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

well maybe you should blearily wake up at 5:08 in the pre-dawn light and find the sleeping soft tiny mammal body of your cat just inches from your head like a miracle too beautiful for speech, and you should rustle one hand out from your blankets to rub fingertip circles across the warm eggshell dome of her little velvet-wrapped skull and on the bristly patches just where the cups of her ears begin, and as she inclines her head into your fingers and purrs without ever opening her little eyes you should feel a love so tender that you understand how that love could have reached out from the fireside into the inky spangled nights long gone to reach her, and then you'll feel better

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

i am at a complete loss as to how to adequately express to you how much this cat throws up yeah

[cosmonautroger]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (sound on)

[lovely-v]

I’m gonna propose “I guess you haven’t read the silmarillion then :/” as a default response to anyone not understanding a reference to something obscure. even if it’s not remotely Tolkien related. I want to build up a perception that perhaps the sum total of human knowledge is contained in the silmarillion

[lovely-v]

[10-4ward]

This is the polar opposite of this:

[froginakettle]

[myonlypen]

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 3 days 6 hours

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 3 days 6 hours

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 3 days 6 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[readsandsuch]

“you cant ship them theyre sibling coded!!” and it’s just two people who are friends

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[famicom]

[catladychronicles]

[wulfhalls]

hes such a prick he knows he isnt allowed on the fucking glass roof. look at that smug lil face

[pizza-thecat]

on a very important mission to chase the sunlight

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[eraserheadadult]

big scary creature with a little pink bow on her head is the only type of character design that matters

[eraserheadadult]

tutorial how to draw a beautiful baby girl

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

[littlepagodatree]

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

[seananmcguire]

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

[jennelikejennay]

Very often, all you can really say is, either this is AI or not very well written.

AI cannot pass for good writing at any length; you may not know what's wrong with it but you can see it's short on meaning and completely uniform in tone and emphasis. But it can pass for amateur writing, and amateurs need to be encouraged and not accused.

So that's why, even though I am pretty good at detecting AI, I don't throw out accusations. Because maybe they're just starting out and they haven't yet learned their individual voice, how to pack writing with meaning, how to vary the tone and emphasize the important parts.

You do not ever need to change your writing to "sound less AI." As you pass "competent" and move on to "inspired," your writing will distinguish itself easily.

[razielim]

i think too many fans have become disconnected from just how truly terrible plenty of fic is NATURALLY. Idk if it's bc they:

sort their Ao3 queries by popularity and only read stuff that enough other people have approved of,

click away from bad stuff too fast to really appreciate how bad it is and how much worse it could have gotten,

have in the past few years mentally shifted to attributing ALL bad fic writing to AI, thus creating a feedback loop for themselves where bad=AI always, with no chance to correct this perspective, or

have benefited from Ao3's, let's say, reputation as a site for "good writing only," (not true, but many believe this) which has resulted in many beginner, young, self-aware, or self-critical writers sequestering themselves to wattpad or other platforms. this is purely anecdotal, but despite still only ever sorting by date, i believe i'm encountering far less "bad" writing in any given fandom than i used to back on fanfiction.net, which didn't have the potentially intimidating reputation for "high quality" writing that Ao3 enjoys. this might give someone who hasn't been in fandom for literal decades the impression that most fic is average at worst, so that when they do see the "outlier" bad fics, they feel there must be some explanation for why those exist. "since they don't fit in with the rest, must be AI"

meanwhile, the fics they're reading:

anyway, bad writing is good and should be left alone.

it might be bad for you, but it may be plenty fine for the author's friends and they're having fun together so don't be sour and go read something else

it might be bad for you, but it's actually doing a bit, and you didn't understand, aren't privy to the joke, or are too young/old to "get it"

it might be bad for you, but the author is fighting for their LIFE trying to write in a language that isn't their native one, and they know. they KNOW it's not the best thing you've read. just shut up and let them express themselves, learn a language, and have fun

it might be bad for you, but the author is 14 and has literally never written fiction before in their life outside of a prompted school assignment short story. they may or may not be aware of the "quality" of their writing. doesn't matter. leave them alone. i can't even imagine the damage being accused of sounding like AI would do to someone at that stage, before getting even half a chance to develop their own voice, perspective, style. you could leave them questioning whether they have anything worth saying or are capable of doing anything uniquely so bad they'll never write fiction again til the very day they die.

it might be bad for you, but it belongs on Ao3. full stop

it might be bad for you, but Ao3 isn't a writing pageant or a "good fiction" vending machine; it's an archive. think of it specifically as a historical archive if you have trouble with the idea

it might be bad for you, but this person hasn't tried writing anything since graduating high school five decades ago and a) needs practice just as much as the hypothetical 14yo above bc skills can't just be plucked off a tree on a whim b) this person is doing something for fun in their limited time and they can either get the chance to grow into a unique voice in the community or you can chase them off with your prickly standards c) doesn't "get" all your ideas of "good" writing that may actually just be a collection of fads, tropes, and styles that enjoy popularity at the moment, and they are actually just doing things their own way that might be way more interesting and good than your narrow taste can recognize

it might be bad for you, but it's actually good for you. seeing your own mistakes in someone else's writing, where those same mistakes are finally revealed to you by being laid bare without the fig leaf of a brain working hard to supplement what you wrote with what you had intended to write, is a great way to grow as a writer. seeing something that makes you cringe and swearing to never do that yourself is a great way to find your voice and style. read some bad fic once in a while; enjoy it; learn something

bad writing is a good and natural byproduct of humans writing. many different kinds of people (with different levels of language proficiency, different experiences, different tastes) sitting down and writing results in a huge variety of content, aesthetics, and quality. such high natural variability means no one here is a big enough expert to reliably sort the failure of inexperienced humans (to form something ~like what they have read before) from the failure of AI (to form something ~like what it has been fed and given value data for).

the cost of accusing bad writers of using ai is too high for the questionable benefit of playing whack-a-mole with "potentially" ai fics

it would be really nice if we could somehow reliably separate "generated by ai" (boo) from "cooked up by a gremlin" (yay) but, for reasons previous replies have detailed, we can't so leave it be.

many fans are excessively worried about the number of kudos and comments they get over just having fun, but no one more so than people who are using ai to "post content" and "generate engagement," so simply clicking away and not leaving any feedback is the least harmful thing you can do to an author whose writing you don't want to read while still having the effect you were going for of denying someone your positive feedback.

[yorgen-sh]

[thevulturesquadron]