Tater's Gonna Tate @tatersgonnatate - Tumblr Blog

Fauns bathing Mermaids by Omar Rayyan.

you are alive on a planet with insects and whales and diatoms and mycelium networks and puppies and your human friends. literally so awesome to be a living thing

catsofyore

ALT

“Cat Asleep in Basket” 19th century. Source.

perriaeyjeve

huariqueje

Morning Haze III - Tuula Lehtinen , 2016.

Finnish, b.1956 -

Oil on canvas, 170 x 120 cm.

mijuki

Paper Crane Origami. I added coloured pencil especially around the outlines here, to give it some more texture

your-dewey-decimal-number-is

736.982 by way of 741.2

origami by way of drawing techniques (re: colored pencils)

phaeton-flier

would you rather take, (tax-free)

$50,000

50% chance of $1,000,000

Remaining time: 2 days 8 hours

#nope not taking any chances idk if i only end up with 50k i'll take it with a smile on my face

thatdiabolicalfeminist

are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.

cutecipher

On the prisoners point:

In a sweeping two-year investigation, The Associated Press found goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from F

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20251124

becauseits

here is every mention of the companies/products mentioned in the mpr article

Name the chains! At this point in the article it seems like contracting with prisons is the default for meat plants ☹

was it Hillary Clinton who lived in a mansion staffed by prison slaves? somebody please tell me which politician was called out

slavery is so deeply baked the meat and dairy industry & our food chain in general. the scale of it all is baffling. animal agriculture gets billions & billions of taxpayer subsidies while the labor is fucking free. never eat meat in this fuckin country i guess. honestly just never eat

uncahier

sleepyseaslug

romants

bebewrites

PSA for anyone who uses ingramspark, or anyone you know who does, you now need to opt out to prevent them from selling your books to AI tech companies to train their AI. 🤦‍♀️

ettawritesnstudies

Actually I'm still angry about this.

Here's the angry email I wrote to the customer service desk. I don't know if I'll get any answer but feel free to copy and paste if you want.

Hello, I am writing to express my deep disappointment and concern about Ingram's behind-closed-doors sale of author's work to AI companies. I learned about this new practice through posts on Instagram and tumblr, not through any official email announcement or documentation through my author portal, and I was horrified to learn that it was an opt-out situation. How do I know my work hasn't already been scraped or stolen before I opted out? Would I be paid for the sale, or would Ingram spark receive all the proceeds of my hard work? Furthermore, the opt-out form had to be linked in these off-site posts. This is a huge breach of trust for a small indie author who's trying to break out in the industry. When I searched for "AI" on Ingram's website, the opt-out page did not come up in the search results. Also, I publish through the IngramSpark Website, so I wouldn't have known to go to the "Ingram Content Group" website to find the page, and the opt-out page didn't show up in the search results on that page either. The only results that come up are "helpful" guides on AI marketing strategies, which I find offensive as well (though irrelevant to the topic at hand). It's as though the company is intentionally trying to hide the opt-out form to keep as many authors as possible ignorant and enrolled to unfairly profit off their stolen work. This is a huge breach of trust for a small indie author who's trying to break out in the industry. I am betrayed, angry, and hopeless. I chose Ingramspark because of your wide distribution network, access to libraries and small bookstores, and high print quality for my illustrations. I want to sell wide. I bring my book to art markets. I want to have a product I can be proud of. I don't want to rely on Amazon's monopoly, and other distributors don't offer what you do. Please reverse this decision and publicly apologize to the writing community. You would not have your business without us.

greater-than-the-sword

Okay so I went and looked into this and it's not exactly what it sounds like.

It's still bad that they offered this option to major publishers without making indies aware of it as well, but just FYI here is what is going on:

To escape the current piracy lawsuits, along with the often complex terms of use attached to ebooks, AI companies have begun purchasing physical copies of books and scanning the pages to run the data in their machines. It is pretty much impossible to tell whether someone is going to use a book for this purpose, and courts have seemingly ruled that it is "fair use". The only way they can tell if someone is going to do this is basically their corporate affiliation. So, Ingram offered people the ability to restrict book sales - not data deals - actual book sales - to these companies. Ingram has not made a deal for your digital book data without your consent, this is just an extra precaution.

ettawritesnstudies

@greater-than-the-sword

Thank you for the clarification, I appreciate it. I am thankful that Ingram has given us the option to opt out, and that the books aren't being stolen, they're being purchased legally. I kinnnndd of understand the whole "fair use" thing. It's like I can't stop someone from rebinding my book, writing fanfic, or making blackout poetry with it after it's been legally bought.

But I still think it's shady that

1) the loophole to buy physical books and then still train AI off of them is permissible in the first place (not Ingram's fault). LLM training is still fundamentally different from other transformative work in my opinion, but I guess that's for the courts to decide.

2) The option to restrict book sales is opt-out, not opt-in

3) The link to find the opt-out form is so difficult to find on their websites

4) These settlements were made in January (as far as I can tell) and now it's July and this is the first indie authors are hearing about it, unless you're following Publisher's Weekly and staying up to date on the news. This should have been a newsletter or a message in our author portals.

2-4 ARE things Ingram is responsible for, but didn't do because they stood to make their cut of money off each book sale, and on keeping as many authors ignorant of these sales and enrolled in the program as possible. Now that people are learning about the opt-out option, we are mad, and we would have opted out sooner if given the choice, even if it means (potentially) losing sales, on the principle of the thing.

I could have worded my email better, true, I fired it off between meetings at work without looking into the background. Mea culpa. The lack of transparency still bothers me though.