#acx

[comme-des-chatons]

[morlock-holmes]

Still thinking about that Astral Codex Ten AI Art Turing test...

I mean... Obviously the one on the right is the human one. Is this some kind of prank? Am I on candid camera?

My suspicion is that what this test demonstrates most conclusively is that we are so thoroughly bombarded with images that we have developed the defensive measure of paying as little attention to them as possible.

We get the gist and then move on as quickly as possible.

Here's someone who did much better than I did on this test explaining their results.

This demonstrates fairly conclusively that nearly all the AI images Alexander chose do in fact, have "tells" which are extremely plain when you attend closely to the details.

In fact, I managed to get 2 out of every 3 correct even with an incredibly lazy and fast-paced assessment carried out on my phone without much recourse to fine detail.

There are two trends I noticed in the comments of the results post.

First, a significant number of ACX posters harbor a suspicion and resentment towards art and good taste, which leads them to suspect that all artistic judgement is essentially arbitrary and based on clout. They don't notice the difference, so there must not be a difference.

Second, a number of people who are clearly AI skeptics gave ground and accepted the idea that the AI images were lacking in "tells" and were especially good, and instead attempted to attack the test on the grounds that this kind of curation was itself unfair.

Both responses indicate, to me, both a fascination with images and a kind of, for lack of a better word, illiteracy about them.

And perhaps most interestingly this illiteracy doesn't seem to obviously vary between pro and anti-AI readers.

To go back to the side by side landscapes up there, the landscape on the left probably has the fewest obvious "tells" of AI art, maybe of all the AI images.

It's also just, you know, a much worse piece of art than the one on the right?

To go back to what I said in an earlier post, the painting on the right draws the eye down the hill. The two figures on the path are expertly set off so that even though they are barely suggested with just a couple of brush strokes, they immediately stand out and draw the eye, causing you to follow the same path they are taking down into the village.

Contrast the image on the left. Which part of the painting is your eye drawn to first? It could really by almost anywhere. No part of the picture is more important than any other, there's very little contrast between, say, the village on the right and the wildflowers on the left. What detail there is is largely because, well, otherwise there wouldn't be a painting.

If you asked 100 art critics which of those paintings was by a renowned master and which one you found hanging in a dentist's office I think all 100 would give you the same answer.

Or take this one:

If you really, really zoom in on the hand on our right, the anatomy is probably wonky, but I didn't notice that, I just thought,

"Okay, but, like, what is this angel, like... Doing?"

This figure, painted in this style, is rife with symbolism. Most likely an angel, or at the very least Icarus, it ought to be extremely clear what sort of emotional/cultural/allegorical/etc. meaning is being communicated, but it is just sort of... looking off yearningly towards nothing.

Culturally, it's just not something that a human would paint as a finished piece.

Actually in general AI seems to tend to either not have a clear focal point, or to have one extremely obvious subject placed right smack dab in the center of the frame.

One of the subtle visual gags in Monty Python and The Holy Grail is that the peasants are often doing things that look, on very cursory examination, as though they are some kind of agricultural activity, but actually they are just hitting random patches of ground with a stick or sitting on the ground and moving mud into a big pile.

And same with this Angel; it looks, at casual glance, to be doing "Angel type stuff" and if you just keep moving you leave with the impression that everything was fine.

But if you stop yourself, go back, and ask, "Wait, specifically what is it doing?" you really can't come up with anything more specific than, "Angel type stuff".

This sort of vagueness is also a tell of AI art.

If what I'm saying sounds a bit frustrated or mean-spirited I think it's because looking at this test has solidified something that I haven't really been able to articulate before, which sort of sums up to the vast majority of talk about AI, regardless of what the conclusion is, evidences a strong emotional investment in images paradoxically combined with a sort of estrangement from them and often even a strong resentment towards them.

Both pro and anti-AI imagery camps contain a tremendous number of people who feel imagery as a kind of imposition, with AI as either an emancipatory force aimed at a tyrannical art world bent on crushing us with arbitrary, incomprehensible images or, on the other hand, as a tyrannical force set to flood us helplessly with a set of incomprehensible images almost entirely against our will.

[sweetfirebird]

The weirdness going on with Audible rn

(It is complicated, but Audible has a new listening scheme where people can listen to some audiobooks but not own them--like streaming, or buy them using Audible credits. Except that if you spend your credit on an audiobook, the royalties might be split between that book's author and the authors with books in the streaming "Plus" pool. So that they get extra royalties, taken from the authors not in the Plus pool.

I believe Audible is telling authors that they are raising royalty rates but not mentioning that part of those royalties will get siphoned off to help pay the Plus authors.

And uh some of the books in the Plus program are public domain (hmmm) or are huge sellers anyway. Like Tolkien. Meaning that Amazon is keeping the money for the public domain stuff (despite taking some of the royalties from smaller authors) and that a lot of the big name authors in the Plus pool do not need the stolen royalties.

Also this contributes to the "own nothing" problem.

In the comments on the video is a link to a petition you can sign or just talk about it with people.

Also, heeey, Libro.fm

[liskantope]

I remember when I used to comment regularly on Slate Star Codex some 10-11 years ago. Now it's once in a blue moon, but today was one of those days. I've trodden the following lines before on this blog, but I might as well repeat my comment about dog culture and dog-free people here:

This post is interesting to me, because while it's clear from Scott's samples of the subreddit that a lot of it would go way too far for me, and I don't think I have a diagnosable disorder analogous to misophonia, I do spend a not insignificant amount of emotional energy "fuming about the existence of dogs" (to use Scott's phrase). I generally consider dogs smelly and somewhat gross, find their forceful enthusiasm off-putting and their slobber disgusting, and had an actual mild phobia about their physical forcefulness and slobber as a young child. But overall, my issue is still not really about being unable to be around individual dogs or feeling like they're "infesting everything" -- I find some dogs endearing and recently spent the night at a dog-owner's house and enjoyed the company of their (elderly and mellow) dog (granted, since then I've felt the compulsive need to pick every piece of fur out of my sweatshirt). No, the real crux of my constantly-resentful-towards-dogs attitude has to do with how obsessive I perceive our culture around dogs to be, how any taboos against excessive gushing about one's children clearly don't apply to gushing about one's dog, how animals in general but especially dogs are treated as flawless innocent angels (which is at odds with my philosophical perspective), and in particular how obsessed with dogs women of my generation (millennial) who are single and don't have kids are (in other words, the demographic I pursue on dating apps). At this point, some part of me just deeply resents their existence and place in our culture. Of course I'm able to reason intellectually that dogs bring immense amounts of joy to hundreds of millions of people, including many people I care about, and that dogs even save tons of human lives. I don't *actually* want all dogs to disappear. But the gut-level resentment is still there. (I have at worst a minor version of this issue with pets in general, with maybe none of it applying to cats -- I'm even seriously thinking of getting a cat one day.)

[fantasykim]

Audio Book

I'm at a point in my life where I'm turning my book into an audio book, which is super cool, but I'm not the one reading. I got the chance to hire an amazing woman to do the reading for me.

my friends have been nagging me to make it into an audio book for forever, but i had been under the impression that in order to hire someone I had to pay them up front, and I've never had that kind of money, so I was sad and resigned to never having an audio book.

I was telling my friend about this the other day while we were at Wendy's, and a man paused to let me know he was an Audio book narrater. he found his jobs on a website where they could be paid with royalty shares, with no upfront payment.

this man is a mini miracle to me, that was only a few months ago and now my first audio book is in production! if you're looking for a way to start your career as an audio book narrater, or you want to get your book as an audio book but don't have the money for an upfront payment, I highly recommend this website.

the woman I hired has never done an audio book before, but is very talented and has a lovely voice, one that I feel is perfect for my book. It felt meant to be for us to work together and I owe it all to the man from Wendy's.

website : acx.com

[mhaikkun]

🦋 ACX CATALOGUE!! 🦋

coming in clutch but you should call me the postman because ya girl always delivers 💃✨

come visit me and my friends at the smx convention center table FL-01 this weekend for some tasty yummy colorful prints and more!! 🤠

[dantelionwishes]

🌟🍑🥭

i'll be tabling with the girls @pfsotead & @anj-iety !!

here's my catalogue for ACX 2023 !

i've got: golden kamuy, pokemon sv, (the great) ace attorney, japanese horror (ib, witch's house, mad father, junji ito), and will be opening comms...possibly artfight attacks too 👁️👁️

catch us at booth fi-03 on july 15-16, smx convention center- see you guys there!

[blue-kyber]

I was up until 4am trying to make this audio work, but in the end, failed. It's just too destroyed.

I spent a straight 1 hour 54 today re recording chapter 1. Now I'm editing it, which will take me another 2 2 1/2 hours removing retake, dead air with unwanted sounds, and fixing spacing between segments within the chapter. Thankfully, I learned how to create a macro in Audacity, so I don't have to go through every effect needed to engineer the audio to fit ACX's narrow range of requirements.

I'm editing it now.

If anyone tells you audiobook narration is easy, feel free to flick them in the forehead.