your neighborhood author @oddhour - Tumblr Blog

Ingmar Bergman on the creative process

[image text:] I make all my decisions on intuition, but then I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect. [/end image text]

Originally from here: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/08/movies/ingmar-bergman-confides-in-students.html

pangur-and-grim

sirfrogsworth

Looking at some of your work, it is stunning but it is very similar in style to AI artwork, do you have any recommendations for how to tell apart photography like yours from AI.

I've been thinking about this. And this may sound controversial at first, but I'm hoping people will hear me out.

We should stop trying so hard to detect AI art.

I think we should all lift that burden from our brains.

I have often talked about "woke goggles." Where conservatives have lost the ability to enjoy anything because they are hypervigilant about detecting anything woke. They've cursed themselves into just hating everything. All they have left is the "God's Not Dead" Cinematic Universe.

And I worry people are getting AI goggles now. They are so concerned about accidentally enjoying robot art and hurting artists that they have overcorrected to the point where they are hurting artists.

One cannot say "AI is all soulless slop that always looks bad" and then accuse a real artist of making something that looks like AI and not hurt them. By doing so, it includes the baggage of all of the "slop" comments along with it. This crusade is having collateral damage to the very artists we are trying to protect.

Yes, we need to be cautious about malicious AI images. Misinformation and deepfakes are going to be a big problem. People using AI imagery for profit is already a mess. But if you are cruising your feed and like a cool sci-fi robot gal or a photo of a waterfall and it turns out to be AI... that's fine.

It was trained by real artists and AI is going to create some cool shit because of that.

Honestly, I think a lot of the worst slop is because the dipshits creating the prompts have no artistic taste. People keep blaming the AI for how bad it looks and often don't consider it is a product of the loser who published it.

There is plenty of non-slop out there that has fooled me. And, like it or not, it is going to get harder and harder to tell what is AI. Until there are better tools or better regulations, I don't think there is much we can do to avoid enjoying AI art every once in a while. If only by accident.

Current "AI detectors" are mostly a scam. Even the best forensic-level AI image detectors struggle to stay above 70–80% accuracy across a wide range of models and image types. And that's in controlled lab conditions.

Free online tools often drop to near coin-flip accuracy (50–60%), especially with newer image generators and post-processing applied.

The best way to avoid AI imagery is to look at an artist's body of work. It's much harder to create consistent, non-obvious fake images in a large sample size. That is usually enough to have confidence in authenticity. Plus, if they have posted similar art before 2022, you can pretty much rule out any shenanigans.

Otis literally died before genAI was available.

But images you see in the wild, just let yourself enjoy them if that is what your brain wants to do. It'll be okay.

I just think we are attacking this backwards. If we want to protect artists, we need to support them.

Calling out random AI art does not support them.

It does not put money in their pockets.

It does not grow their audience.

Over a decade ago I tried to lead a fight to create better systems of attribution on websites like Reddit and Imgur. I even spoke to the Imgur team after an article was written about me.

I asked them to allow sources on their posts and to develop tech that would help people find where an image came from. They said they were "working on it" and it never manifested.

IMAGE SHARING SITES STEAL MORE FROM ARTISTS THAN AI.

But we just kind of accepted it. No one really joined me in my fight. The prevailing defeatist attitude was, "That's just the way it is."

I think now is the time to demand better attribution systems. We need to be vigilant about making sure as many posts as possible have good sourcing. If an image on Reddit goes viral, the top comment should be the source. And if it isn't, you should try to find it and add it.

Just to be clear, "credit to the original artist" is NOT proper attribution.

And perhaps we can lobby these image sharing sites to create better sourcing systems and tools. They could even use fucking AI to find the earliest posted version of an image.

And it would be nice if it didn't require people to go into the comments to find the source. It could just be in the headline. They could even create little badges "made by a human" for verified artists.

Good attribution helps artists grow their audience. It is one of the single most effective things you can do to help them.

I literally just got this message...

There are maybe 10 popular artists who I helped grow their audience early on. Just because I reblogged their work and added links to all of their social media. I even hired my best friend to add sourcing information to every post because I believed so much in good attribution.

Calling out AI art may feel good in the moment. You caught someone trying to trick people and it feels like justice. But, in most cases, the tangible benefits to real artists seem small. It impedes your ability to enjoy art without always being suspicious. And the risk of telling someone you think they make soulless slop doesn't seem worth it.

But putting that time and effort into attribution *would* be worth it. I have proven it time and time again.

I also think people should consider having a monthly art budget. I don't care if it is $5. But if we all commit to seeking out cool artists and being their collective patrons, we could really make a difference and keep real art alive. Just commit to finding a cool new artist every month and financially contributing to them in some way.

On a bigger scale I think advocating for universal basic income, art grants for education and creation, and government regulation of AI would all be helpful long term goals. Though I think our friends in Europe may have to take the lead on regulation at the moment.

So...

Stop worrying about enjoying or calling out AI art.

Demand better attribution from image sharing sites.

Make sure all art has a source listed.

Start an art budget.

Advocate for better regulations.

#it takes time to cultivate an understanding/appreciation of art that goes beyond aesthetic #AI is very good at creating aesthetically pleasing things!#if you only cared about aesthetic and not meaning/intent then most generated art might seem amazing #but it's usually immediately soulless otherwise (and with p obvious poor composition and lack of direction as well)#i have fewer quibbles with someone who makes actual interesting art using AI tools than someone who makes soulless art #which people were also making long before genAI lol

the-tenth-arcanum

🗣🗣🗣 free youtube premiere of the national theatre the importance of being ernest announced!

nationaltheatre

wovi

krispycl0uds

This one resonated with me

door

“Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.”

Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (emphasis mine)

milksockets

sculpture to wear: the jewelry of marjorie schick - arnoldsche art publishers (2007)

orangekittyenergy

People say about Gen AI ''well its going to be basically in every game in the next few years so get used to it" like, no... do you have any idea how stubborn I am? I will never play another new game in MY LIFE if that is the case. There are plenty of old ones I missed. "Oh what about books and TV?" SAME. I do not care. I will stop consuming new media forever if GenAI is going to be in everything.

Yes, This is absolutely the hill I will die on (AND WE WILL ALL DIE ON IF COMPANIES DONT STOP PUSHING AI AND BUILDING FUCKING DATA CENTERS EVERYHERE FUCK)

oddhour

when people tell me "but big data already has all my personal information, who cares if they track my silly meme scrolling" I say: "yeah it pisses me off that they think they can track me, why should I make it easy for them? I'm going to DRAG MY FEET and MAKE IT AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE because fuck 'em!!!!!"

same for AI and if you didn't know, ublock origin can block any UI elements on a page. here's a subscription list to block all AI-generated search blurbs, search results, and more:

A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-A

maryoliveoil

FLORENCE WELCH Late Night with Seth Meyers (30 October 2025)

#iykyk

soothedcerberus

Slowpoke loafin!! 🩷

schoolhater

the co-founder of 'crips for esims for gaza' and disability advocate, alice wong, has died according to her twitter account.

alice's disability advocacy naturally led her to palestine solidarity as the quote from the blog post announcing 'crips for esims' illustrates:

We also recognize that everyone in Gaza is now disabled due to the massive number of deaths, new disabilities, life-threatening illnesses and destruction of medical facilities going on. Such destruction also debilitates the land, water, and air, which will impact Palestinians and all surrounding life for generations to come. We owe our kin in Palestine to throw sand on the gears of genocide with our every breath. [source: the disability visibility project]

since december 2023, crips for esims for gaza has raised well over $3.1M and bought and maintained over 5,000 esims, undoubtedly saving lives.

in the past few days there has been intense winter flooding in gaza. donate to honor alice wong's memory–to keep people connected, to give disabled people the tools to advocate for themselves, to refuse to let palestine be silenced.

Crips for eSims for Gaza is a collaboration between Jane Shi, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong.

thefireiscentral

pasted her last message below. please donate in her honor

image description in alt

taciturn-nerd

Twelfth Night is premiering on PBS on Friday!

"The cast includes Lupita Nyong’o, Junior Nyong’o, Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Daphne Rubin-Vega"

The Shakespearean comedy of mistaken identity starring Lupita Nyong'o, Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Junior Nyong'o and m

monstermonger

AAAAA PHEW i just finished binding a bunch of new zines that compile my PNW fantasy sketch pages :”) just in time for when I get to table at the Portland Zine Symposium tomorrow!!!!! if anyone’s in the area come say hi!!!

I’ve loved walking through this event for several years now, I’m so happy that i get the chance to table this time 🥹🥹🥹