Haze and Armor @holsterbone - Tumblr Blog

i don't actually care about the argument being had in the post this is from, but i just find this interesting:

the "just" is doing a lot of work here. there's an implicit belief that feelings are immaterial, subjective and therefore less real and less meaningful (hyperobjectivity), and meant to be overpowered by the rational objective will. and therefore, if gender is "just" a feeling, then it shouldn't have such a strong impact on one's life that one is not able to simply repress out of existence. which means that because one CANNOT do that, gender must be objectively real and not emotionally or socially based.

if you do not start from this hyperobjective perspective, this line of logic starts to fall apart. feelings are not "just," and they can have a profound impact on someone's life while nonetheless being subjective. the same goes for social constructs and the influence of culture over our feelings and ways of making sense of our experiences; none of this is "just" anything, and there should be no expectation that one can simply (or should simply!) make experiences born out of feelings or society "go away." but hyperobjectivity is deeply ingrained in our culture, and if you do not have the skills or foundation to make meaning differently, you won't.

i don't doubt this person feels genuinely supported and seen by 4tran. but i also think a lot of that has more to do with their broader worldview and meaningmaking practices & not finding other trans perspectives as credally accessible from where they are right now.

synjectivism

#iiiiiii dont think it’s deeply ingrained into ‘our’ culture#it’s ingrained into a specific type of person that oop is/was

if you are talking about hyperobjectivity, it is very much a part of Western culture as a whole. oop's experience is just one specific expression of it.

here's my definition of the term (linked above):

Hyperobjectivity: a hierarchy of knowing that views objectivity as inherently more important, trustworthy, valid, and real than subjectivity Hyperobjectivity rarely denies subjective knowledge entirely, but it is treated as inferior, downplayed, ignored, and written off.

this is a central part of, amongst other things, European Enlightenment philosophy and politics and the idea of rational inquiry conquering irrational bodily feelings, Cartesian dualism, positivism, the idea that a dominant social group's subjective experience is simply objective reality, while the objective reality of subordinate/oppressed groups is entirely subjective and therefore less real and important. it's also more than explicitly thinking that feelings don't matter. it's a way of making meaning that is part of the foundation of the social worldview of Western culture.

holsterbone

White Western European culture is not universal

#the word our is even in quotation marks like #why would you assume everyone comes from where you and that person do

reachartwork

can i just rant for a second? how is LLMs "stealing" images to train on any different from me going to a museum or deviantart and going "wow that's cool I'm going to learn to do that"?

human brains are computers made of meat (good) as opposed to computers made out of silicon (bad). to be less snarky; we don't know how to define what "learning" is in an mechanistically or ontologically rigorous way. what *is* learning? what is happening in your brain? and how is that different from a neural network? we just don't know enough yet to know. (neuropsych phds feel free to correct me if i am wrong)

datafags

@snitchanon distilled this into a perfect image:

theoretically-questionable

I think there's some kind of implicit anti-AI judgement being made about the categorisation of the machine-derived image as an inherently more commercial entity, also?

Like, there's a really odd approach some people have been taking that involves acting as if an arbitrary image generator's ability to produce images of copyrighted characters is somehow an argument or 'own' against its legitimacy.

This goes beyond the 'overfitting' issue wherein some generators are capable of producing almost exact screenshots of movies (which humans can do, and in fact do all the time). This is generally good evidence that those (copyrighted) media have been used as training data, of course, but that rarely seems to be the thrust of the argument.

The issue is often just baldly stated as 'these (free-access) genAI programs can create works that feature copyright-protected characters and that is bad', and it's framed as somehow a clear negative (or just plagiarism) in a way that humans doing exactly the same thing... is not?

In fact, some people apparently thought that selling merchandise featuring AI-generated art of copyrighted characters would result in a lawsuit against the AI company in question, rather than one against the person taking a genAI-produced public-domain artwork of a copyrighted character and using it for commerce?

And then, of course, there's this tremendous backlash against the genAI 'Ghibli filter', as if the 'style' of a set of works is (or should be) in any way a protected feature under law; something that very notably has not existed for human artists doing the exact same thing, sometimes for profit. are instagram or your samsung phone camera violating copyright if you take a photo of a tv screen during a movie, give Aragorn a kittycat face filter, and post it online? (no)

Hyperprotectiveness around art and originality has existed forever (see the deviantart-era fever around "don't trace" and "don't reference" and "don't pick colour palettes from other art" (all of which were whole-chestedly equivalated to 'stealing' and 'theft')), but this is a pretty odd double standard and I struggle to really get to grips with the rationale.

Ink markers aren't the cause of a person selling hand-drawn Black Widow yuri at a convention, photoshop isn't the cause of a person making photobashed/edited fan comics with screenshots from Marvel movies, and Midjourney is not the cause of a person typing in "black widow from marvel; wider than she is tall with tits to match" into the prompt box. is it?

if i can take a free, open-source image generator trained only on public-domain images and get it to output a Mario, is that 'better'? 'worse'? where's the line, and why is it there?

uncleasriel

A human brain isn't private property.

A human brain can tell you where it learned the techniques it uses, why it used them, and can come up with novel applications of those techniques within contextual constraints.

A human brain is more complex than an autocomplete function.

A human brain conceptually understands concepts like "left" and "right" and conceptually understands natural numbers (as opposed to thinking of them beyond simply strings of text that are associated with Arabic numerals).

A human brain cannot produced thousands of images an hour and use this glut of low-quality imagery to devalue human labour to such a degree that it destroys lucrative creative industries so that moneymen can produce products more cheaply and line investor pockets to further the class inequalities that hollow out modern economies.

I'm not merely hyperprotective of the pwecious "human soul" that makes art possible, I'm also hyperproective of my class interests and view askance at technocratic petit-bourgeois who lack the barest understanding of art history and onanize over a technology back by the same fiscally irresponsible creatively ultraindividualists who thought NFTs were the future of banking.

reachartwork

neither are 90% of ai programs. most of them are free and open source.

so can ai, sorry

so is ai, sorry

so does ai, sorry

my human brain can certainly think of thousands of images an hour, but my shitty hands can't keep up. if you can't that might be a you issue. do you think we should be limited by only what our bodies can do? if so, smash your art tablet and your keyboard right now. garbage argument. everything else you say will come to me by carrier pigeon, handwritten on vellum, or not at all.

yeah you definitely seem hyperprotective of your class interests alright, but i think you might be confused as to what that class is, exactly.

i have taken several art history courses (as you snarkily refer to in my tags). i have a double major in music theory of which art history was part of my elective choices. people said basically everything you said about AI, but about synthesizers and DAWs when they were new too.

2/10 for making me respond. get news from sources that aren't red-faced twitter artists.

iridescsens

counterpoint:

AI raises concerns over its ethical implications and environmental footprint. This article explores AI’s energy consumption and impact.

With the rise of generative AI, companies have significantly raised their water usage, sparking concerns about the sustainability of such pr

go suck on a leaky capacitor

reachartwork

what a weird counterpoint that has nothing to do with the discussion we were having before.

counterpoint to your counterpoint;

actually the energy costs of AI seem pretty reasonable and they shouldn't be a problem

instead of being rude i'm going to just politely tell you to go research more. can you imagine if i told a stranger to go suck on a leaky capacitor? that would be crazy impolite.

flooberino

Hey I can also play cherry pick a screenshot from the article that proves my point.

ML models that select and mash images (from a remarkably efficient database) are an excuse for capitalists to fire artists from jobs they deserve and need. If you can't appreciate that this very reasonably pisses a lot of people off I don't know what else to say.

reachartwork

ML models that select and mash images (from a remarkably efficient database)

this is, as i have repeated exhaustively now several times, emphatically not how they work. it is not even in the same ballpark of how they work

are an excuse for capitalists to fire artists from jobs they deserve and need.

this is true of literally all labor-saving advancements including art tablets. we used to employ a lot more artists back when you had to draw animations on cels!

I can also play cherry pick a screenshot from the article

this si doubly funny because none of those two screenshots are from the article, they are just from my independent analysis. on my side of the table we have math, facts, and numbers, and on your side you have snark and quips and also not facts. you may have noticed that the screenshots i posted were not from the article if you bothered reading it. now get off my post.

what-a-bastard

Okay this was a few additions ago but the idea that a person can tell you all their influences is just completely fucking laughable. Mama, you're being influenced by furry porn you saw on deviant art as a 13 year old and don't even remember let alone being able to credit the artist and point out their specific influence in your work.

sewercleaner

caats

soufre-de-paris

Study traces history of some of our favorite folk stories

GUYS THIS IS AMAZING

SERIOUSLY

6000 YEARS

STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS

STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW

STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME

STORIES

soufre-de-paris

GUYS LOOK AT THIS

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS

GUYYYYYSSSS

dwarven-beard-spores

“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.”

yuk-tepat

How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?

gacorley

“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”

This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.

science-of-noise

For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:

(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering. In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).

Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits. I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.

The full paper is here.

freedom-of-fanfic

Is it just me or is there a lot of overlap between antis, exclusionist and the critical crowd

(by ‘critical crowd’, I am guessing you mean the TERF lite and SWERF lite radfem identities ‘gender critical’ (terf ideology) and ‘kink critical’ (swerf ideology). I’m rolling with that assumption, anon.)

it seems like a natural set of beliefs to unite, doesn’t it? having conflated fandom and activism so completely, it’s easy to imagine that people who gatekeep real communities would also gatekeep creative fiction, and visa versa.

but tbh, I can’t say how strong a correlation these identities actually have.

a lot of the most vicious fandom antis are openly exclusionist, and a few mods on popular anti-fujoshi blogs have owned being transphobic - and of course, a huge amount of anti-shipping rhetoric is wholesale SWERF rhetoric, but aimed at fictional porn/kink instead of rl porn/kink.

but it’s definitely not a 1:1 correlation. there are ‘ship and let ship’ people who are ‘gender critical’ or ‘kink critical’ radfems and/or exclusionists (FFA has a lot of ‘SALS’ exclus). likewise, there are quite a few fandom policers who are inclusionists, and almost all fandom anti-shippers will say they are anti-TERF/anti-SWERF*, despite pushing their rhetoric**. I’m not sure how popular calling oneself ‘gender critical’ or ‘kink critical’ is among anti-shippers right now (October 2018).

tbh, i’d guess the correlation of real life gatekeeping & fiction gatekeeping is less about identifying as an anti-shipper or pro-shipper and more about how much one thinks fanworks directly affect activist causes.

those who are convinced that what happens in our little microcosm has a profound impact on the rest of the world will probably be anti-gatekeeping or pro-gatekeeping both irl & in fictional fanworks;

those who feel fandom has little effect one way or another probably don’t find it paradoxical to gatekeep one space but not the other if they so choose.

but that’s just speculation; I have no numbers to support it.

on a total side note: it’s hard to tell partially because gatekeeping factions usually don’t want to be associated with their identifier. i.e. fandom anti-shippers often don’t want to be called ‘antis’ anymore (though that was their commonly-claimed label for a long time); TERFs insist that ‘terf’ is a slur & try to claim that it’s synonymous with ‘lesbian’, insulting non-transphobic lesbians everywhere. SWERFs want to be called ‘kink critical’ or ‘anti-trafficking’.

exclusionists are proud of being exclusionist. and radfems/terfs/swerfs & exclusionists are all on the ‘queer is a slur’ train together, which they’re not afraid of owning. it would be interesting to know if there’s a correlation between fandom policing and being anti-queer (it’s hard to police when you don’t have exact labels to police), but I doubt it’s a strong one.

(*I think they sincerely are anti-transphobia and want sex workers to be safe. they rarely understand just how much anti-shipping rhetoric is on loan from swerfs or how much anti-fujoshi rhetoric is a creation of terfs).

(**anti-kink (swerf), anti-porn (swerf), anti-darkfic (sexist), anti-mlmfic (terf), and anti-genderbend (terf).)