sheepfilms
JBB: An Artblog!
art blog(derogatory)
Kiana Khansmith
Cosimo Galluzzi
Three Goblin Art
izzy's playlists!
Jules of Nature
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Show & Tell
DEAR READER
Claire Keane
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@monsterbroth
we’re friends now : ) !!!!
Parrots from RuneScape (5 October 2004 – 9 July 2007)
Cognitively disabled people deserve gender access to affirming care.
Psychiatrically disabled people deserve access to gender affirming care.
Physically disabled people deserve access to gender affirming care.
Being disabled doesn't erase the possibility of being trans, having dysphoria and/or wanting to pursue a medical transition.
So do intellectually disabled people! I know multiple transgender people who are also intellectually disabled and they have a very difficult time accessing social and medical transition unless there are supportive caregivers!
This , so much this . Pixie got very lucky , both with understanding and supportive doctor and with very helpful and good and supportive guardians .
Not many cognitive disability intellectual disability developmental disability trans people are also so lucky .
Transitioning as disabled person should never ever be based on luck . But it really really is and that be so not fair .
Hey when I search "hamster" on reddit the top things coming up are:
-"what's your craziest hamster death story?"
-Picture of old hamster "I've never seen a hamster die of old age. That's crazy"
-r/hamsterdeaths
I feel like the joker for real. The shared experience around literally killing your pet hamster should be enough for people to realize that they are very difficult pets to properly take care of and NOT for children.
Imagine if you looked up your favorite animal the dog and all the results were about how funny it is that everyone maims and neglects their puppies.
People call me over sensitive when I say that Hamsters Deserve Better but when I tell people that my favorite animal is a hamster they will tell me how they killed one. They do this most of the time.
Please refrain from sharing stories about how a hamster or other small animal you knew died on this post.
This is not a confessional, I don't want to hear about it and I thought I made that clear.
Annoying that dairy products are demonized as Unnatural and Disgusting when it's actually kinda neat that humans figured out a way to fulfill omnivorous nutritional requirements without killing any animals (and populations historically dependent on dairy even evolved lactase persistence!). This is biopunk to me
I've seen weird memes and stuff like "Milk is BODILY FLUID that came from a COW" and the fact that people exist that would find this distressing concerns me.
Y'all are not going to like learning what fruits are...
A fruit is an OVARY that because SWOLLEN AND ENLARGED after PLANT GENITALS were rubbed in PLANT SPERM by a BUG
we have got to stop acting like we’re better than nature. we drink animal fluids and eat flesh and it’s gross because being alive is gross work and that’s so fine. we’re part of the ecosystem, and this “humans are a disease on earth we shouldn’t be interfering with animals at all” mindset that some people have is so oppositional to all the people who don’t live a first-world type life.
Beaded centipede bracelet, done as a christmas gift.
noisy birds abundant in my undisclosed rural hometown in South East Queensland, Australia
the thing about white people is they do not understand black erasure as being an act of racism and will try and explain to you what modern associations are instead of asking themselves why black culture is erased.
i have had this discussion repeatedly surrounding ska, a genre that originated from jamaica, where white people will keep telling me that "it's associated with white people now therefore it's ok to see it as a white genre" without ever examining why blackness was erased from ska.
Today's xkcd is going to be another hit with the boat crowd. [x]
*gamedev voice* settings with temperate forests, four seasons, and in the northern hemisphere populated by animals like red foxes, raccoons, white tailed deer, brown bears, grey wolves, and eastern cottontails and flora like pine, oak and maple trees only are the default, easiest and most familiar landscapes for players to traverse and build in. everyone is familiar with this. so of course this will be the starting or beginner biome or just the only biome with some variation in my game.
*gamedev voice* jungles, marshes, and deserts are the hardest places to live in and no one actually lives in those places in real life. these places are lacking in fertile soil or normal food, with the exception of Exotic ones. players would not want to live in places like these. only animals more aggressive than the ones found in prairies and temperate forests live here
it makes perfect sense for my game that takes place on an earthlike planet to have summer in june and winter in december everywhere you go, and spring and fall in-between. everyone experiences these seasons and during those months.
Even if 99.99% percent of the human population lived in the northern hemisphere, it is ridiculous that a large amount of video games that center around some sort of natural environment with time default to an experience only include a northern hemisphere perspective, even if it wouldn't make sense in their game. I will assume this tagger lives in the northern hemisphere.
Would it not be irritating if every game you played mentioned an aurora australis but no borealis, north as hot, and december as a hot season? If you were playing a game that took place in the "north" but you had to head north to go to the tropics?
As of writing, 10-13% of the human population lives in the southern hemisphere. That is 987 million people. That is almost 1 billion! Sure, a majority of people live in the northern hemisphere, but 212 million people live in Brazil. Is that insignificant? 747 million people live in the European continent. A very small number. Surely no one there plays video games, so there's no reason for us to add European fauna and flora in games. That's such a small number compared to the other 7.3 billion people in the world!
Who cares if 'most people' live in a specific area. Should games only depict places with the most people, or the most prominent social and economic classes? Video games, especially video games focused on the natural world and exploring nature, should make adjustments based on what hemisphere parts of their game are in and not prioritize the idea of a "familiar" environment that "everyone" is used to.
If a game developer can program complex mob AIs and players can get used to landscapes and animals that don't exist in real life, it shouldn't be too much trouble for players to remember that when you're in the southern hemisphere going south is colder or some seasons are wet and dry or raccoons aren't found everywhere and so forth. Some gamers live in places that aren't in the northern hemisphere in some temperate area with four seasons, too.
Komodo Dragon
What a handsome Komodo dragon!
Except... what's going on with those labial scales? Something about them looks off. And that row of spikes down the back, Komodos don't have that. And their nostrils aren't so round. Hm. I think I know what's happening here.
I did not realize that this was AI at first glance; I thought it was just a really heavy editing style. I saw the missing central toe, yeah, but Komodos will do that to each other sometimes. The other forefoot, the one with four toes, is positioned in such a way that the fifth toe could be hidden, and the lifted hind foot could be similar.
But if you know Komodo dragon anatomy like I do, the inaccuracies pop up pretty quickly. Still, it's not like it was during the early days of GenAI; what I'm seeing here is that the GenAI image algos are getting better at discerning what part of a picture is a Komodo dragon. Since the inception, GenAI has really struggled to make accurate reptiles. In the beginning, everything was an iguana... even the Komodo dragons.
Over time, the models have been refined, but there are still some pretty obvious anatomy differences- the slit pupils, the mouth shape, the overall definition of the snout...
And they often struggle with the tongue. This isn't what the inside of a lizard's mouth looks like!
There's a lot of talk about how GenAI is bad for the brain- but it seems like most of it is actually about writing. And I think we should be talking more about images, too. Not even just about the stolen training data or the erosion of opportunities for artists, but... what is such easy access to these generated images doing to our ability to perceive what's real versus what isn't?
Every single one of the images I pulled is from a highly popular stock photo site. In case you don't know what a stock photo is, it's a photograph (you can also have stock illustrations and stock footage) that's been licensed to use in different applications. These pictures aren't taken for a specific client; anybody who pays can use them within the terms of the image's license.
But all of these images- they're not photos. They're inaccurate illustrations. I recognize them for what they are because I spend a lot of time looking at lizards, but what if you've got someone writing a quick news story, or designing a science worksheet, or throwing together a museum brochure or a zoo sign? If they don’t know what a Komodo dragon is supposed to look like, they’ll use whatever looks convincing.
Images trigger something deep within us- you know that saying "A picture is worth a thousand words?" We're wired to trust what we see. But the problem here is that genAI doesn't create an image of the thing; it creates what its internal logic says is associated with the subject of the prompt. It all comes down to probability; generative AI makes images by looking at its training data and creating output based on what the data is associated with.
(For more info on how AI "sees" what it does, check out the LENS project, which you can read more about here.)
We don't see things the same way the computers do, and we're willing to trust images more than words. How many stock photos do you think you see each day? It's probably more than you think; after all, the average American sees around 5,000 ads per day. And while those photos are marked as AI generated on the stock sites, they aren't marked as AI generated once someone has licensed them. And if the stock site doesn't have what you need? No problem, just use the AI image generator to fake that photo yourself!
We already have seen political deepfakes and AI generated images used to spread misinformation. Did you see the image of an ICE agent arresting a Doordash worker? That was an AI fake, part of a larger hoax. Some of us are already learning to respond with increased skepticism to important images, because people have an agenda to fake those. But what about the less important images, the background images, the completely mundane images? GenAI seems to be quietly coming for them, and it's something we should be paying attention to, because if we're exposed, constantly and quietly, to generated images and are trained to believe it's photography, we'll be more accepting of the bigger lies when we see them.
I don't really know what the solution is here, other than for people to be aware of the stock image issue, and to stop using stock sites that allow generated images, like Adobe Stock. We can't put the generative AI genie back in the bottle, but we can at least be aware of the damage it's causing. And maybe part of the solution is to look for alternative stock and reference options. Maybe we'll start to see more photographers licensing their images directly, or putting together specialized repositories of images based around a theme or topic that they specialize in. The downside there is that it's less convenient than the stock model where there's thousands and thousands of images on every conceivable topic to choose from. I don't know what genAI is going to do to the traditional stock model, but I'm concerned about what the end results might be and what those results might do to our ability to perceive reality.
This is a huge part of why I started the Animal Reference Photo Repository. What used to be reliable reference sites are now full of AI slop, and it’s damaging so many things. @kaijutegu did a great job of breaking down the issues with the data and information pollution GenAI is causing.
I chose not to license my photos for sale and made everything on the site free for non-AI artistic use: paywalls ruin the internet, and there has to be something accurate out there available for folks to access.
And if you’d like to see some real Komodo dragons, well, the site has a bunch.
Komodo Dragons — Animal Photo Reference Repository
Wahoo World (Big Run)
Wahoo World (Big Run)
Wahoo World (Big Run)
Wahoo World (Big Run)
NEW YEAR MORE ANTS
