Shouting into the void.

Your average young (?) adult guy who reblogs things. Could've turned out to be worse really.

[imovedimovedimovedimoved-deacti]

Do any of you know about that one painting with Aphrodite being born out of lava with a black swan by her side or did i completely hallucinate that? Been searching for a while but i can’t find it for shit.

[thecavenest]

I tried googling that description but no luck either, anyone might know what painting this might be (or if it does exist? cause it sounds sick lol)

[semicolonthefifth]

It took a bit of googling magic, but I think I’ve found it.

This is “Kindled” by Laura K. Cannon, which is part of her portfolio that can be found here: http://navate.com/2wk6im1sartc92iwza7il07bxq2mk5

Is this what you were looking for? @sakyubaso

[tiffanygladiator]

I’m in love.

[nothisacrayon]

Y'all I’m-

[tftftdrwggjhuftguugufuh-deactiv]

the original artist states:

“This went kinda viral on tumblr and people are arguing whether it’s a painting of Aphrodite. It’s not. If she must be a goddess, I think she’d be Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire.

But it doesn’t depict anyone specifically. After some soul-searching I realize that, while I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, it’s a painting about battling depression. I live with MDD so the idea of emerging from the depths is a powerful thing for me.

Is she being born from the lava, or is she climbing out of Hell? I think it’s both.”

so. not Aphrodite, but someone beautiful nonetheless

[seracadash]

(goverment voice) we need to protect the children from pornography so our plan is to remove their eyes so they would never see something so traumatic. if you are against removing children's eyes you are basically a pedophile

[tainbocuailnge]

can the US empire please just fall already so we can stop having to beg americans to go beg their officials to vote against the "make everything worse for everyone in the entire world" bill that they're trying to push for like the 12th time by now. like this is just humiliating for everyone involved at this point

[quasi-normalcy]

I do think criticism of AI art is overblown and not always factually rigorous, but I must admit that my default reaction to AI art is an almost visceral disgust. Like, even if I was enjoying it somewhat, I will drop it like an apple that's crawling with maggots when I find out.

[notaaronsroommate]

there's this tendency I've noticed for some people to be a bit contrarian about AI art. Like, oooohhh you can't define what makes it bad, this is just like outrage over Readymades!!! and like, listen fine whatever. But it is just kinda gross? Something about it feels icky in a way that Modern Art that I find annoying simply doesn't. I think Warhol is an asshole and his work could be summarized as big jerkoff motion.

I don't mind looking at it though, I don't feel a bit slimy consuming Warhol images, I don't feel a bit hunted by them the way I do with AI.

Say what you will about Fountain, but even if we presume that it is simply an industrially produced urinal, human hands made it and I can appreciate its design, the form, the intention, in that way. And hell, even as a shitpost I can get behind it. AI art just sucks the fun out of the stuff it's trying to do. Even doing an intentionally disrespectful shitpost with AI, trying to do an equivalent to submitting a urinal to an art museum, it just lacks the fundamental sauce of hauling a urinal to an art museum.

AI generated imagery hasn't been remotely fun since the days when it was people making courtroom sketches of the xenomorph re-enacting a hit and run she had perpetrated. That was fun, the stuff before that was fun. Partially because it was kinda shit and I think the technology was a lot more jank, it was novel. idk.

I just find any of it so nasty, as you say.

[symbiotebadger]

I think the problem with AI art is how firmly it sits in the uncanny valley. Not "it can't make things look photorealistic enough to be believable," or any nitpicky stuff like that.

Art is at its core communication. It is entirely about communicating something to other people. Whether that's a symphony orchestra taking you through a 90 minute emotional journey to 'you should play Raid Shadow Legends!', art is a form of communication.

Like all forms of communication, native speakers have a very precise sense for what's "correct" usage. A child drawing a 'howse' with crayons has already unintentionally incorporated a million ideas that kid has been absorbing from birth in regards to how the language of art is used.

AI cannot understand the language it's speaking. It's an averaging engine. A word association engine that slaps pixels in the mathematically most likely place for them to be based on keywords. It cannot and does not understand any of the deeper meaning behind images. It does not know what the Coca-Cola logo is, what it means, how it's used, or even that it is related to food. It simply has a library of every Coca-Cola tagged image in its dataset and it can average out common pixel clusters to produce the most common result.

GenAI can write you a fanfic, but it doesn't understand tropes or prose or references or conventions. It can write whatever you want, but it can't understand the context or integrate it into a wider cultural framework. A 6 year old writing about their favorite dinosaur has infinitely more understanding of the nuances of human communication.

So you look at an image or video or listen to music or read a story or article that has been generated by AI and it's off. There's nothing inherently wrong with the words or the art or the sounds. They might even work well in that order. But something deep in our brains registers that this communication is off. Wrong. It makes us uneasy in a way that's hard to articulate but very impactful.

[quasi-normalcy]

Yeah, that's a decent summation. It's dead, but it has the appearance of life.

[earhartsease]

we still maintain that a way more accurate name for it is "simulated intelligence", because its "artificial" in exactly the sense that "artificial flavouring" is, it's literally just a poor simulation

[mediasideblog]

[fairycosmos]

girl something good has to happen at some point

[elbiotipo]

I am average south american man I work at precarized state job to play pirated videogames at medium graphic resolution

[boringkate]

You wanna log in? What's your username? No. What's your email address? What's your password? What code did we just send to your email address? Now what code did we just text to you? New IP address detected. We sent you an email. Click the link to confirm the new address. Scan your fingerprint. Turn on your camera for age verification. Sign the updated user agreement. Accept all cookies? That feature isn't available on the website. Download the app. Those features are in the app. The app that's really a web browser.

[demilypyro]

This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.

[bottom-growth]

ARE YOU SHITTING ME

[demilypyro]

phone somehow autocorrected "the joker" to "the worker." why so devoid of class consciousness, batman

[lakevida]

free the nipple has to make a resurgence for a number of reasons but bro look at our upcoming eternity of wet bulb temps youre smoking straight up cock if you think im keeping a shirt on when it hits 105° in new england

[lakevida]

everyone tits out with a parasol is such a beautiful world to imagine that the fact it doesnt currently exist fills me with equal parts fire and misery

[pankendev]

there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try

[punishedsaints]

[theparadoxspace]

you all really should be listening to patricia taxxon's music too, please. some of my favs from her:

[theparadoxspace]

she also did my fav version of bad apple:

[sivavakkiyar]

you know back then they didn’t use to romanticize the past

[neonshroudedgraves]

Discord planned to introduce age verification worldwide – and it's about to go live. | Tuta

Popular chat platform Discord plans to roll out age checks globally starting in or after June 2026, opting people into teens settings by def

[dragonmarquise]

Discord is supposedly saying this is going to affect "only 10% of users", but I really don't believe them at all. It's always going to be way worse and affect more people than what they claim.

So in case anyone needs it:

This browser-based tool can fool facial age checks using 3D avatars

After Discord announced plans to require age verification for all users, a free, HTML-based tool emerged that aims to bypass facial scans on

[oneheadtoanother]