gremlin dwelling

elias, 27, really just post whatever tickles my brain 18+ lots of art and fandom, varies quite a bit and is sometimes NSFW (art blog @ne-cropolis-art, inspiration blog @brain-tickles) i try to tag for sensitive material but arent always great at it, please let me know if something bothers you!

[notlayingroses]

Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday

[fluoresensitives]

Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.

[castrolle]

wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees

[postillfastill]

Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.

[almostdefinitelydying]

Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in

Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American com

[danieyells]

I think about this so goddamn often. Even the good uses are trained on slave labor.

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them. Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling.

 Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They're often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.  "And that is gross, before tax," Wambalo said.  Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.

It's destroying the environment. It's taking advantage of people who're desperate. It's traumatizing them for dollars an hour--if they're lucky and they aren't denied their pay for no reason. I think about this a lot, that these people were made to look at awful and disgusting and illegal things for the sake of training these stupid AI.

"I looked at people being slaughtered," Wambalo said. "People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide." Berhane Gebrekidan thought she'd been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims. 

[...]

SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by "fully-licensed professionals." Workers say it was woefully inadequate.

It's just absurd and disgusting and infuriating. Yes the good applications are worth humans working on. It's not a bad thing--if the people employed to do the work are compensated appropriately and cared for. But so many of the uses are just unnecessary.

It just. Sucks. And all they'd have to do to make it suck just a litte bit less would be to pay people appropriately, give them access to the counseling needs they have, treat them like human beings worthy of respect and care on a basic fucking level. It wouldn't resolve the environmental issues or the fact that people are thinking less and less for themselves in the name of getting all of their answers from gen AI but at least they could do one thing to make it a little less The Worst Thing Ever.

[leakinghate]

Well shit. I knew AI was monstrous, but somehow in all this time I completely missed the slave labour part of it??? Christ, every new thing I learn about AI is grosser and more hateful.

[vexheart]

This

[findyoump3]

is it ok to add this image

[isnyr]

[ne-cropolis]

Sick and tired of being sick and tired and not able to provide enough for myself and having to rely on other people. Sick of losing friends because im too sick. Shits fucked.

[yellow-cat]

actually hate that the bodys response to anything is nausea. ate too much? nauseous. ate too little? nauseous. an imaginary threat got you scared? be nauseous. on your period? you guessed it. sawed into your hand and need to go to the emergency room? perhaps throwing up into your open wound will be of help

[watermotif]

once i get taken out back and shot i'll be fine

[oneshotprincess]

13 years later we must all admit, nothing fucks as hard as the dragon age inquisition tarot cards

[funeral--pyre]

'Cause people tend to not get the memo: People acting strangely in public is not a danger to you. Pacing, talking to themselves or something you can't see, laughing to themselves, stimming, twitching, ticcing, making "weird" noises--it doesn't fucking matter. They're not your personal freak show, they're not broken, they're not a murderer and they're definitely not going to be fucking helped by you calling the authorities or anyone else on em. These actions alone are not indicative of danger to you, as a random person on the street. Shut the fuck up and move on, leave disabled people alone.

[exai]

i no longer respect the hustle i want universal basic income and dignity for everyone

[disneyvillainsdaily]

Thinking about Lilo & Stitch makes me really appreciate certain things about the original + the series. Almost every single named [human] character in the movie isn’t white: the only exception being Mertle, y’know, the bratty little girl we’re not supposed to like.

Besides all of the racial representation, Lilo herself is very much a neurodivergent icon, and her portrayal as the protagonist is amazing considering how characters like her are typically either sidelined or depicted in ways to make them less sympathetic/human (modern media does at least a slightly better job at adressing that kind of thing tho).

So all of that is great, but to anyone that hasn’t seen Lilo & Stitch: The Series, it also does some extremely refreshing stuff.

Pleakley gets tons of validation to dress in drag, everyone always referring to Pleakley as “she” when dressed up as “aunt Pleakley.” There’s even an episode that tackles Pleakley dealing with the pressures of his family that wants him to marry a girl and settle down to have a “normal life.” After the episode's shenanigans, there's a realistic depiction of the misunderstanding of a heteronormative/traditional parent with their non-traditional child: Pleakley's mom says that she just wants her children to be happy, but when Pleakley says that he is happy, she thinks he's only trying to console her as she insists, "How can you be happy? You aren't even married." But Pleakley finally gets it through to his mom when he says, "I don't want to be married, mother! I'm happy just as I am."

After getting to meet all of Pleakley's ohana throughout the episode and hearing from Pleakley himself -after all of the previous misunderstandings- that he really, truly, is happy, she's finally starting to understand.

Even though his mom comments as they leave that she wants him to “try wearing men’s clothes more often,” she still does walk away accepting that she simply doesn’t understand her son's way of thinking. It’ll definitely be hard for her since she’s so much more “traditional,” but she’s finally coming to grips with the fact that her son is who he is, and likes being that way, so she’ll love him regardless. She's trying her best.

The portrayal of people with physical disabilities is also great. It’s not because there’s one recurring character with some condition, but almost because there are non-recurring characters. It isn’t in every episode, but here’s an example: they want to show someone at the park playing fetch with their dog for just one shot. They could very easily have it be any a random person, but they decided to make it a lady in a wheelchair. There's another episode where Nani's friends from highschool show up and one has forearm crutches, but not just because she had some recent accident. No one in the episode questions her condition or feels the need to point it out, the only comment on it being that the friend will use the crutches to lightly bonk the others' arms, and Nani jokes, "You are still deadly with that thing."

The fact that they include characters with disabilities when they "don't have to" makes it that much more normal. These people aren't some special case or the main highlight of the episode, they're just another person. They're normal.

There's so much that all of the original Lilo & Stitch media did right, but now the name will forever be tainted with the association of the remake, which I'm sure will have absolutely none of the tasteful writing and ideas of anything prior to it.

[sutzrainbow]

It seems to me that Disney was a lot better at representation when they weren't even trying.

[depsidase]

[malewifesband]

its always helpful imo to remember theres a cis person with whatever problem you have as a trans person 9/10 times. theres a cis man as short as you, a cis woman as tall as you, with hands and feet as big or small as yours. theres a cis woman scared to go out without shaving twice a day, theres a cis man whos upset bc he will never grow a beard. theres a cis woman who worries her infertility makes her less of a woman, and theres a cis man feeling similarly about his lack of potency. theres cis women who dilate and cis men with phalloplasty. theres a cis man scared that painting his nails will make people think hes not really a man and a cis woman whos exhausted with spending hours grooming just so people treat her like she wants to be treated as a woman. they dont put it in the terms we do but theyre worried that these problems make them inadequate at the gender they want people to see them as. our patriarchal system has made the boxes were supposed to fit into so small and you arent alone in not fitting it--nobody really fits

[shadow-von-vamp]

twitter is good for showing me how they do things to hedgehogs for example anesthesia & x-rays

[recoiled4]

[gutterbrat]

hi. fuck ice. here is how you can help families affected by unlawful deportation

edit: and FUCK LAPD. here is how you can help bail out protestors who are in the trenches, facing mass arrests and putting their bodies on the line.

[rabbitscreams]

something white people (and nonblack people of colour) need to know is that if your friend of colour comes up to you to tell you that you were being racist in some way or another, that is an act of trust.

[rabbitscreams]

to elaborate: if they dont trust you to react well to criticism about your behaviour, they wont say fucking shit to you. theyll just silently absorb it until they cant take it anymore. do you know just how many microaggressions and casual acts of racism are tolerated every day by the poc around you? probably not!

your friend saying "hey that was kinda racist :/" is you being given a chance to apologize to them and do better, rather than you getting relegated to being Yet Another Source Of Pain.