I am a December 2013 graduate of Tusculum College with a Bachelors of Art; Studio Art Concentration. I was born April 28, 1990, and I'm still working on figuring out this artist thing out haha. I am looking forward to finding out where this journey will take me and who I will meet along the way. I hope you enjoy my work while I'm at it! Thank you for taking a look at my page.
Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell
The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin
There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words
**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.
I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.
If advertisers can use every manipulative trick in the book to get me to buy their product, I am fully within my rights to do everything I can on my end to make their job impossible
This video depicts a moment that is nearly impossible to observe: a sperm whale surfacing with a giant squid clenched between its teeth.
These predators hunt at depths exceeding 800 meters, where light does not penetrate, and only biosonar directs the pursuit. Consequently, clear surface images are exceedingly rare.
This is, factually, the first footage of this that we have ever gotten. This has never been observed by a human being before in recorded history. The only reason we knew these whales ate those squids before was the beaks of the squids found in the stomachs of dead whales, and the battle scars on whales consistent with fighting giant squids.
My favorite thing about this clip is that, in the original uncropped footage, you can see her calf is right beside her, ascending from the depths along with her. Whale calves don't dive until they're taught by their mothers. It is very likely that this footage is of a mother whale teaching her calf to hunt on one of its very first dives.
When I saw this footage for the first time, I cried a little tbh.
[ID: Image one is a Sesame Street gif of Big Bird throwing a frisbee to Cookie Monster, who promptly takes a bite of it. Image two is a set of tags that read: “#i want to appreciate how wacky a stunt tossing a frizbee to cookie monster is from a practical standpoint #guy inside the bird cannot see out of it. he gets a feed of what the camera sees. #he actually catches the thing the bird actually threw
#and the only reason i can tell they didnt fake it is because cookie monster doesn’t look at the frizbee when he catches it #because the puppeteer was focused on catching the dang thing at all #how many takes must this have taken to pull off #usually you achieve that with a cut #it’s so much easier to just cut to the other character catching a prop #i appreciate the effort #and i want others to notice it #it is also a left handed catch #on a right handed performer #someone else is doing the right hand.” End ID]
And again they didn’t even have to do this, the audience absolutely would have accepted a shot of big bird throwing followed by a shot of cookie catching, but they did it anyway, for love of the game
My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!
They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.
An episode from the life of Heather Greenmire (well, sort of life).
The song I've been listening to while drawing the comic
It's spooky season, and it's the perfect time to share this comic/storyboard I drew a while ago, showing what's been going on in Heather's Southern Gothic world. Things usually aren't great there, but at least justice can still be served… if you ask Heather.
I put a lot of time and effort into this piece, and I hope you enjoy it (including the little plot twist at the end).
🐸 THERE ARE THREE FROGS HIDDEN AMONG THE FRAMES 🐸
By the way, my Patreon supporters get to enjoy similar comics and artwork from me pretty often >:)
And you can read about Heather here
Youtube is full of ads, spotify is full of ads, tumblr is full of ads, pinterest is full of ads. Everything uses ai. Every new update makes the website/app worse. Youtube auto translates almost every video I want to watch. Sometimes pinterest only loads ads for me. Check out this new ai feature. Here's a new update that breaks ur laptop. Here's a new update that breaks ur phone. Why are u complaining about ur phone, just get the newest iphone lol. Join my patreon. Join my membership. Pay a monthly membership to get all features. Upgrade your membership to get even more features. Subscribe to netflix. Subscribe to disney. Subscribe to amazon. Subscribe to hulu. This content isn't available in ur country. This content was removed. This website was removed. This feature only exists for apple. This app only exists for apple. U need to a WiFi connection to play this game. U need an account. We need your email to finish creating this account. We need your number to finish creating your account. We need your id to finish creating your account. In order to delete your account please write an email. In order to delete your account you need a laptop. Oops our database was hacked and ur information was stolen. Ur data was sold from this random website u used once 10 years ago. Spam call. Spam call. Spam call.
I don't believe that "gen AI weakens critical thinking skills" is a faithful summary of the research so far. Especially when so many people are happy to rephrase it as "interacting with ChatGPT, Midjourney, or any similar tool means you have The Brainrot". Basically every paper repeats some form of "gen AI has a lot of potential for learning and progress, but also some potential drawbacks, so we need to be careful about how we use it," which is exactly what you would expect intuitively. The same applies to web search like Google, or even more basic tech like pencil and paper; appropriate note-taking enhances learning, while letting a bunch of kids do whatever they want with pencils and notebooks will certainly produce something, but probably not help them meet your specific educational benchmarks. So just like you wouldn't do a study on how "use of paper notebooks" affects student learning, you're not going to get meaningful results if you're looking at "exposure to gen AI" broadly instead of how people use it.
And the really frustrating thing--I'm sorry, I don't know how to gesture at this without probably coming off as snide--is that if you post about how gen AI is bad for critical thinking, and add a few links to papers you just googled up because they sound like they agree with you, without actually reading and synthesizing the information from them, that is exactly the same cognitive offloading and abdication of your powers of critical thinking that you are trying to warn against.
I dislike genAI quite a bit but it's impossible to talk about the real actual issues without wading into some kind of wanky bullshit. "AI destroys critical thinking" is "video games make people violent" is "television rots your brain" is "dungeons and dragons turns people into satanists" is "reading fiction is bad for women, it weakens their minds". Like can we focus here. Inventing 'fire is scary Thomas Edison was a witch' arguments is not helping. There's so much real actual shit to focus on. Half the AI arguments are just anti-AI people and AIbros both trying to make themselves feel smarter than the other side (who are either panicked philistines scared of new technology or soulless lazy babies unable to think without The Machine, depending on which side you're on) and that's. Just distracting bullshit.
#Okay that's a good point#However ai is bad for the environment#And overuse of ai is exacerbating that
And that has nothing at all to do with critical thinking. Like this is an entirely different thing. People who throw "it's killing our critical thinking skills!" into the mix because they protest the electricity consumption of AIs might as well be saying "driving a car gives you autism!" because of the massive environmental damage of widespread personal car ownership. If someone did that we'd be all like "what the flippety fuck are you talking about".
GenAI creates fast, sloppy autocomplete mashups of the average expected thing for the topic.
Ask it for an essay on road repair and you get a generic article that sounds like 500 bot-created ad farm blogs. Ask it for a picture of a woman holding a rose and you get something that looks like a romance book cover or a video game damsel in distress. Ask it for an outline of a mystery novel and you get something that could be used for Mystery Novel Writing 101 classes. Ask it for a list of halloween costume ideas and you get a slightly warped Spirit catalog.
There are cases where a fast sloppy average is useful. But it's very hard to get any education out of fast sloppy averages.
The problem with students using GenAI isn't that "the results are bad" but "the results are mediocre, boring, and don't teach anything new about the topic." (Also they can have horrific errors. But they're working on those; there's less of them now.) The problem isn't errors; it's that students don't learn if a machine does their homework. And they don't learn by reading the results because the results are boring mush. The problem is that GenAI homework looks almost exactly like the homework most students have produced for decades - a mashup of a mostly-correct thoughts, a handful of outlier inaccuracies, and an attempt to sound formal without understanding the actual underlying topic.
AI-produced factoids at the top of search engine results aren't rotting people's brains. The fact that those search engines no longer show the most useful results, rots people's brains.
People are relying on AI results because there's nothing else. The problem isn't AI; it's that reliable tools are being removed.
So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.
Pro GenAI websites/Programs:
Facebook
Instagram
X/Twitter (Remember, Grok gives people cancer)
Threads
Pro Writing Aid
Grammarly
Duolingo
Google Docs
Microsoft Word/all Microsoft products Takes from and will feed their machine.
Youtube (taking advantage of people who are hearing impaired. ==;;)
Adobe Products. All of them. If you HAVE to use them (Some businesses require it), save offline because there is a film of at least some privacy protections there, so if you have to sue, you can say it violates US privacy law. Remember, contracts do not circumvent US law.
Corel won't feed the machines, but still uses AI stolen from other artists. Which sucks since Corel Draw is the second best overall for vector programs. (Plus I love Painter, but I bought the offline version to avoid AI). (Canadian company)
Canva Takes and feeds their machine.
Deviant Art Not only supports AI, but put a tool in and said they are going to steal your work if you like it or not for their machine.
Sketchup went Pro-GenAI. The thing is that you can do the same thing in Blender these days with precise measurements.
Autodesk has stated they are Pro-Gen AI here. It is not clear if they will use your models to feed their machine. But be on guard. They make Maya and 3Dmax. You can replace it with Blender.
Neutral ground:
Tumblr (there is a way to opt out [Link] and they don't have an active AI machine.) https://www.tumblr.com/dookins/743519550598987776/heres-how-to-disable-third-parties-like-ai
Etsy allows GenAI, but still has some (minor) restrictions. I'd still be cautious. (Also be cautious of drop shippers). Complaints about too much AI and AI images+patterns made by Ai still exist on the website. They lean slightly more pro-AI, but still won't let it run completely amok, say like Facebook. They won't feed your work into a machine, but also don't ban it through robots.txt.
Bluesky They don't use an AI algorithm except for in the "Discover" section of their website, but while they are anti-GenAI strongly, they don't seem to block the Gen AI bots from entry, so you'd still have to use Nightshade or Glaze (links below). There is no opt-out because they don't need an opt out. (Leaning towards strong position on AI, but I wish they would block GenAI bots).
Searxng- If you super want to screw over Google, in general, and have some tech savvy, you can set up your own search engine through searxng. It's easier on Windows and Linux than it is on a Mac. (Mac you need Docker), but if you're determined on privacy, Searxng adds a layer of privacy. Some of it sometimes uses bits of AI, but most of it doesn't and you can fuss with the settings so it doesn't spit out AI results. At sheer minimum Google will stop spitting out weird videos on Youtube at you because in your private browsing, you searched for the origin of ball bearings while not logged in for a book and Google likes to break privacy laws.
Strong positions against AI:
Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.
LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)
Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.
yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.
Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.
Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.
Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.
Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.
Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.
Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.
Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.
Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)
Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.
Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.
Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)
Discover a world of creativity and craftsmanship through Handmade, an innovative platform connecting passionate artisans with discerning buy
Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.
But you need a pro website...
Look up robots.txt and AI bots: https://www.cyberciti.biz/web-developer/block-openai-bard-bing-ai-crawler-bots-using-robots-txt-file/
Use cloudflare:
Use Nightshade:
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
which will poison the algorithm
Use Glaze:
Take Away:
The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.
Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scrapi
And why not help that along?
I don't want to give cancer to poor people [Link] or make the planet burn faster [Link]. So GenAI collapse is everything I dream of. GenAI apocalypse is not.
