A (as of now) 'lesser-known' voice from the depths of the Asylum, offering willing listeners an insight on the happenings there. Of course, this won't be coming from the maximum security wing; too many ears and eyes for any freedom of speech to be properly practiced there. Regardless, it really is a fascinating world in here. Oh, my little darlings, the stories I could tell you ...
For those who don't remember, here's the lawsuit two years ago where Tumblr (or specifically Automattic) settled with the New York City Commission on Human Rights regarding Tumblr's terribly implemented porn ban targeting LGBTQ folk more than it should. Here's an excerpt detailing what the NYCCHR ordered Tumblr to do:
The settlement gives Tumblr 180 days to hire an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues and provide related training to moderators. It must also hire someone with experience in this area as well as expertise in image classification, who will review Tumblr’s moderation algorithms to see if they’re more likely to flag LGBTQ content. As part of an overall review, Tumblr will reexamine 3,000 old cases where a user successfully appealed a takedown, looking for patterns that could indicate bias.
Now, on a totally unrelated note, here's the complaint page for reporting discrimination to the NYCCHR. Completely unrelated to what's going on right now or the rest of this post, I swear.
Here is your reminder in light of recent events that have made us really appreciate this site mechanic all over again:
Reblog. Old Tumblr culture used to be reblogs above all else. More reblogs in the notes than likes or comments, to the point the ratio was insane.
Please try, you guys. Together we can bring that back.
And I think we should. @staff @changes have backed down for now, but I think we should really make an effort to back up our protest to the changes they tried to make and show the people running this site as well as one another why reblogs are so great. Why this has always been the backbone of Tumblr culture.
We can do it. I believe in us. Start reblogging (and kudos if you hit the daily post limit doing it!)
Sick sick sick of possibility of being fucking recorded every waking second by tiktok obsessed quasi celebs. Video titled something like "Caught him thinking he's the main character" but it was just a kid wearing headphones, looking out the bus window. Of course it was posted without his knowledge. Stop recording strangers and everything you see, nobody gives a shit and not everyone is happy to be on tiktok or youtube because of a moron with no braincells and an account. What could be a forgettable awkward moment is now permanently there for the victim of lackabrainis infested idiot to get anxious about forever.
Okay, this seems like a relevant thing to share today: I've been in this position. Back in college while on that student lifestyle, I somehow ended up with a pretty bad iron deficiency. How bad? I was not only sleeping too much, I was falling asleep everywhere -- in class, in the library, in cafes five minutes after drinking coffee. It was terrible. Anyway, during a class I enjoyed, I was sat at a table with a few classmates, and I started falling asleep while taking notes; nodding off, dropping my pen, startling awake and falling asleep again, until my head was on the table. No one seemed to mind, we were all going through it I guess, and my lecturer was nice enough not to make a big deal out of it.
Cut to the next day and I was in the Students Union, when a friend came up to me and told me how funny that video was of me falling asleep in class was. What? I asked her about it, what did she mean, who made the video, and she realised I literally had no clue about it. Kindly, she told me who to talk to and I thanked her. I was already upset, but I knew it wasn't the messenger's fault. So, I took to Facebook and messaged the girl who made the video -- a girl on my table in the class from before. I asked her about it, and she admitted it right away -- she took the video on her phone during class and posted it to her snapchat. That's how the other girl saw it, not to mention countless others.
Sorting this out was an absolute toil. I felt betrayed and violated that someone would do that while I was obviously not in a position to have any say about it. I lost friendships with the people who took the girl's side, as if it was no big deal or "funny". I had to tell the lecturer about it, because let's face it, that's a shit thing to allow to happen during class itself, the department moved to be more alert and proactive about restricting phone use in class, and all that girl had to do was give a half-hearted apology. The next semester, she was still openly using her phone in another class we had.
For a long time, I couldn't trust anyone who held their phone up around me, as if to take photos or video. It would make me so anxious and put me on edge. I never did speak to the people who cosigned her behaviour, who acted like it wasn't their problem that their bff video-recorded a person in class over their health condition without their consent.
I did eventually grow out of my anxiety around phones, and I resisted the urge to break that girl's phone, but, I will absolutely bring back that energy if I see someone record a stranger in public without their consent. Take it from someone who's been that target -- if you think it's okay, you deserve to get your shit wrecked.
I just want to add, in case anyone reads this and isn't sure -- yes, it is absolutely fine to reblog this, and in fact I encourage you to. If testimony from a former target of this behaviour is the one thing that makes it click for anyone thinking of doing it, if it makes them reconsider before potentially ruining a stranger's life, then my experience will be worth it for me.
Don't record strangers and put that shit on the Internet or social media without their consent.
this is your periodic reminder that for all the artifacts and errors and "tells" one could possibly list, the only reliable way to actually determine if an image is ai generated is to investigate the source. it is becoming increasingly common for "fake classical paintings" to circulate around curative aesthetic blogs, and everyone should be using this as an opportunity to not only exercise their investigative skills but also appreciate art more in general. you're all checking out the artists you reblog, right? 🫣
so what are some signs to look for? let's use this very good example.
what a lovely late-impressionist piece blended with evocative leyendecker-esque themes! why haven't you ever heard of this artist before? surely tumblr would be all over an artist like this. who is justin brown?
your two options from here are to do a search for the name, or a reverse image search. i prefer reverse image searching, particularly when it comes to a common name like "justin brown". so what does that net?
Immediately, without looking at any text, something is wrong: it barely exists. an actual historical piece would turn up numerous results from websites individually discussing the piece, but no such discussions are taking place. Looking at the text, though, does show the source-- and at least in this case, the creator was honest about their medium.
But let's also look at the "exact matches", in case a source doesn't make itself apparent in the initial sidebar results like this.
This section will often tell you post dates of images, and here it can be seen that the very first iteration of the image was posted 15 days ago. It did not exist online prior to that.
Seeing how long an unsourced image has been floating around is a skill applicable to more than just generative images! See a cool image of an artifact or other intriguing item with a vivid caption? Reverse search it! If all the results are paired with that caption and only go back a few months, you might just have viral facebook spam.
Sometimes generative creators are dishonest about their medium and do not tag it like in the example, so that's when establishing "jpeg provenance" becomes important. While it can be a little trickier to determine if someone is using generative images and not admitting to it if they aren't trying to pass it off as a classic, something to consider is the age of their account and the frequency with which they post. Here are some account red flags:
-Did they only start posting art after 2022, or if they did before, did their style/skill level WILDLY change? Not gradual improvement-- I'm talking amateur graphite portraits straight into complex digital renders. Everyone starts somewhere, newness is not a red flag alone; it's newness combined with existing in a vacuum away from any community.
-Do they post fully-finished paintings several times a week?
-Do many of these paintings seem iterative of a similar theme or subject matter ("three well-dressed young men face each other under shade and dappled sunlight")?
-Does their style change in inconsistent ways? An artist that can swap between painting like Drew Struzan and Hokusai should be pretty well known, right? Why is no one hyping this guy?!
-Do they have social media besides the source instagram? If so, what are they posting about? Are there any WIPs? Doodles? Interactions with other artists? Gallery dates? 3am self-doubt posts? Or is it all self-promo? Crypto? Seemingly nothing art-related at all for someone pushing out 3 weekly paintings?
Basically, if it's important to you to omit this stuff when you curate, please don't just smash reblog if the source doesn't seem to be the OP themselves. Seeking out sources was important even before this became an issue, now it is more than ever.
My friend wanted me to share this who is a big Alice and Lewis Carroll fan ❤️🌹
Quote from Lottie:
"IT'S HERE: my magnum opus. all known rules of heartslabyul, each annotated with relevant passages from lewis carroll writings and speculations as to their meaning and references. i worked harder on this stupid thing than my final paper."
~ Rules of Heartslabyul, Annotated link ~
(She said it may be useful for writing and to let me know if theres anything missed thats specific to the japanese version of the movie.)
To kind of add onto @vagueconfusion 's post from yesterday about ai bands:
fellbrink always knows whats up and is one of the only people in the alt/metal influencer scene on instagram & the clock app that seems like he doesn't suck
Block these bands where you can, make a list of their names and if they come up through YouTube's recommendations tell YouTube you're not interested in them
There's only so much we can do alone, but together we can try to slow their traction. Support real musicians.
Meet the Robinsons things I think about way too often.
I love this movie so much and have been fixating on it for like a year now, so here are some unsolicited thoughts of mine about it.
-How Lewis was so affected by the countless rejections from potential families that, never, in twelve years, did he ever think that there was a possibility that his birth mother might have wanted him until Mildred brought it up.
-How Bud and Lucille got to spend one more day with their son as a child.
-How guilty and hurt Franny must have felt after making Lewis the offer to adopt him and then taking it back right after it was revealed to her who he really was, knowing just how much her husband wished to hear that a family wanted him after being turned down so many times as a child, and having to take that hope away seconds after, making her husband's younger self feel rejected once again.
-How Lewis looks at young Franny when they meet at the science fair.
-How Lewis built the memory scanner to try and find out what his mother looked like, and when it finally works, we see Lucille.
-How Cornelius most likely had to wait 17 whole years to see his best friend again.
"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die
114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.
I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.
Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.
There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:
1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.
2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.
3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.
The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.
Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.
A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.
We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.
Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:
"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."
The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.
I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.
So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.
I've been thinking about this post since I first saw it, bc I think, like...
It is important not to walk away from it thinking "but I'm not going to be an engineer, so that's fine."
In my adult life, I have (among other things) run a small business, I have managed a bank branch, and I have been a mortgage processor. In any one of those three jobs, not knowing the exact correct laws and procedures for what I'm doing could really fuck up someone else's life.
If I don't set up payroll correctly, I could create a huge disaster for myself and employees, either immediately or come tax time. QuickBooks keeps trying to get me to let AI manage my payroll and I would rather stab myself in the hand.
If I didn't handle deposits and Fincen reporting correctly in my branch banking days, I could end up accidentally committing many many crimes and making it harder for people to catch some of the really big, really terrible crimes. (Hint: this was important to uncovering all the Epstein shit!) That's not even counting all the actual cash I was responsible for. (It makes me want to throw up thinking about the fact that I literally handled about a million dollars in cash every week for 2 years.)
If I didn't handle my mortgage processing exactly right, people could lose their homes. I cannot stress enough how easy it is for shit to get REALLY FUCKED UP if deeds and mortgages are not filed exactly right. People get their homes (legally!) stolen from them every year.
Yes, it's important for engineers to learn how to do their jobs, but man... our lives are so interconnected, and so many things matter much more than you know. If the shit you do matters at all, in any way, to anyone, ever, you fucking need to do it right, because someone is counting on you doing exactly that.
I previously worked for a program in disability employment services and there were two things I was constantly at war with within practices by others:
1. My seriousness for protection of minors in all fonts regardless of how the company wanted me to handle it, I was very serious about meeting my states legal requirements.
2. The amount of Ai being used in disability services to cut corners on everything from emails to reports. Including people using it to write the meant to be personalised notes.
And at this point in time, despite being new and plenty of people saying that it was not a reliable or good idea and was absolutely a privacy risk; multiple companies and fields around us were having it become not just common office practice but written in to the company meetings that it was allowed and encouraged in some ways. (Despite absolutely not making writing an email any shorter than my own personal method of keeping a word document for it so I could copy paste whatever I needed into an email and have it available).
This has lead to constant issues; people's claims getting rejected because instead of local law it was being written to an American 'standard' (who knows if it even met any state disability laws there either), information leaks and privacy breaches, constant bad advice that's not relevant for clients needs bc Ai writes generic file notes that aren't actually relevant to the clients conditions, etc.
Ai is dangerous for everyone, especially the most vulnerable and those who will be brushed off when they voice concerns.
And the thing about people who try to make a fuss about it within a workplace by calling out its mistakes and refusing to use it; is we just become ignored and moved out of and away from projects.
Which means you have less oversight from those who'd pick it up, or it'll take longer to pick up because Ai constantly makes small mistakes that are ignored and need to be corrected so it takes longer for the larger ones to be seen. If it's something that even actually gets multiple layers of checkpoints, which a lot of things aren't.
People are lazy with checking Ai.
They assume because they've 'given the correct parameters' that the task has been met to a standard they want.
And then because it's done in a shorter amount of time than actually writing and proofreading a report would take, companies up the workload and demand more of employees, meaning even more mistakes get missed.
Ai in basic admin jobs will lead to people being harmed because anything that requires reporting has a layer of impact, whether legal, financial, medical or other.
Especially in the medical field, Ai is going to hurt people. Not just because of bad Ai google summaries, but because inaccurate reports written by a machine that misrepresents information will absolutely get people killed.
It's been a problem experienced due to dismissive doctors and nurses, what happens when someone already dismissive decides to use Ai and not even re-read their prompt let alone the answer they receive?
I've already seen people not receive care from the NDIS and Centerlink due to Ai being used when it shouldn't have been, and this is absolutely going to be a reoccurring issue.
