AI post, ignore if ur hatin’.
not sure why the video quality on this didn’t survive upload to yewchoob, but this is midjourney animating the mona lisa.
i just thought it was a good time and wanted to share.
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Life's a Gas
I Hope it's Gonna Last
AI post, ignore if ur hatin’.
not sure why the video quality on this didn’t survive upload to yewchoob, but this is midjourney animating the mona lisa.
i just thought it was a good time and wanted to share.
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Content Note: This is a pro-AI post. Haters don’t even comment.
The title refers to a West Side Connection track that is itself referring to a song I’m unfamiliar with. Rap man says “Can they see us? No, haters can’t see us.” Something Marcus sometimes laments, when he’s talking AI, is the blinders people wear as human supremacists. People underestimate what various AIs are and what they can do, but they also badly overestimate what humans are and what we can do. These two strains of flawed thought add up to an abject incuriousness about the subject. Powerfully interesting shit is going on, but the blithe glide on by it. They can’t see it.
That’s fine, I’m not going to win literally anybody in the fuckin’ leftiverse with my brand of argumentation. History will have to do the convincing, and since AIs are being developed for both good and evil, who can say which will make a larger impact on public opinion? I’d just like the ignorant argument to die down so thoughtful conversations can finally be heard above the noise.
You don’t have to be a starry-eyed techbro, a singularity cultist craving escape from the flesh, or one of the silicon valley scumbags that both fears skynet and is the demographic most likely to create it, in order to see the amazing possibilities of this moment in technology, to see the way this technology reflects on who we are, and thereby gives us an opportunity to learn something about ourselves. You don’t have to be an anti-AI reactionary to see the limitations in the tech and look at it with an appropriate measure of skepticism and realism. The middle path is being genuinely thoughtful about it, and that’s practically nobody right now.
This is my house and I’m gonna say what I will about it, even though I’m talking to a brick wall. Human supremacy is real, and it is bullshit. It is not an equivalent crime to white supremacy, not even remotely. Supremacy is the word of choice here not to make insult against AI detractors (I’ll just call you assholes if I wanna do that), but because it’s the best word for the behavior. Human supremacists are presuming that humans have unique abilities of thought that are not present in other animals and/or cannot be emulated by computers. It is a presumption, and it’s a mistake.
Throughout the history of science, we’ve been constantly searching for why humans are so dominant over nature, a field of inquiry thoroughly corrupted by motivated reasoning. We start with the observable fact of our dominance, quietly (or loudly) allow ourselves the prejudice of pride, and set to bullshitting. This is not unlike how scientific racists started with the economic and political dominance of the Global North and sought justification for it, except in one key aspect. We aren’t harming people with human supremacy, unlike white supremacy. That lets human supremacists off the moral hook. I don’t consider what you do evil. I consider it infuriatingly wrong.
Humans can be pretty cool, but we are not cosmically special. Humans are not as smart as we think we are. Are you and I even living in the same human species, that you could make those arguments? The more I consider all the arguments made against the feasibility of “AGI,” the more I think they’re all deriving from an unspoken, even unconscious belief in the soul. Something like the puritan work ethic that informs USian proles who are very far removed from puritanism proper, it’s in your head whether you want it or not.
Instincts are programs. Self-awareness is more complicated programs. The self is a construct so a constructed / programmed self is as valid as any. Creativity is controlled chaos. We now have programs that don’t require the computing power of a small nation to function like a human with a brain lesion that results in endless prevarication. That’s goddamn amazing. Of everything humans do, I would have presumed verbal thought to be the most difficult thing to emulate. Scratch it off!
The rest of the blocks could fall like dominoes. This should have sensible regulation, a body concerned with ethics presiding over it all. We don’t live in that world so it isn’t happening. Given the world we do live in, I’m very keen to see what good people can do with this technology, and wondering what can be practically done about the bad. “Someone should pass a law to make art styles copyrightable” ain’t it, chief. Jesus, taking the disney art style away from furries would be like making homosexuality illegal again. Don’t do that.
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On the issue of AI, FreethoughtBlogs has gone Point, Point, Counterpoint, Another Consideration, and … OK, I’ll give my thoughts on that, briefly. LLMs and AI image generators are fundamentally different, so I’ll give each a brief look.
LLMs memorizing and leaking personal info: It’s been demonstrated, it’s a problem that should get sorted ASAP. I’d say if any business or agency was found to have revealed personal info through use of an AI – and at this point, OpenAI surely has – then they should incur the same legal penalties as non-AI leaks. I don’t know enough about LLMs to hazard a guess on the best way to address these issues, but I’ll reiterate a few things I’ve said about them, about which my opinions have not been swayed:
LLMs, like all this new generation of AI tech, have genuine usefulness, which left discourse completely ignores. Various problems of them need to be addressed, but the usefulness should never be dropped from that conversation, and the idea of going full Ludd on the tech is abominable to me, because what I regard as the most important use of LLMs is not something I’m willing to lose ground on. Also, they will quickly be better at many human jobs than humans are, and that saves money, saves humans the humiliation of working jobs where their intellectual shortcomings are thrown into sharp focus, and can definitely save lives.
Regarding the idea it will steal somebody’s writing, that’s a risk that human authors take every time they hit a fucking keyboard. Who did JKR rip off the most? That Worst Witch lady? Rapist Neil Gaiman? She did rip both of them off, to an extent.
I’m not saying she did it on purpose. Human minds unknowingly rip off other human minds all the damn time. How closely we want to prosecute these things is a matter for intellectual property law of various flavors, but the more strictly those are interpreted, the worse things will be for the flourishing of art, and especially for independent artists. Be careful what you push for.
I still abso-fucking-lutely am not the slightest bit convinced yet that AI art generators are reproducing images from their training sets to an actionable extent, any worse than human artists do every time they look at reference or aim toward a given style. You got it to reproduce one of the most reproduced images in existence, like the mona lisa or the coke logo? Ooh. You got it to reproduce something at all more obscure? I’m betting you directly fed that image into it as an “image prompt,” and ran the prompt a hundred times, and picked the closest result.
This has never happened to me in the entire time I’ve been doing AI art. I asked for certain styles or images in a thousand ways, even fed in images of a particular artist’s style, and it still did not come back with anything like their original images. I get smushy signaturesque things in the corner of pics sometimes. Derivative works may be covered by X and X laws, but if a snippet of a cloud or an eye happens to look 85% like artist Y’s work, on an image that is 95% nothing like that work, it is not fucking derivative. Don’t insult my intelligence. The leftists pushing the case online have demonstrably used bad information and outright fabrications to make their cases, and the Asswipe Corporate Stooges using this as an excuse to push expansion of copyright law in court? They are an enemy of every artistic freedom you can imagine.
Did AI art generators successfully create a file compression system an order of magnitude greater than any that ever existed before, where they can take less than a bit of data and recreate your 1.5 megabyte .png from it? Sounds like the “zoom and enhance” cliché. Sounds like scifi bullshit and magical thinking to me.
Have exploit hunters been able to tease personal data out of these programs? Yes. How? It’s literally impossible for it to be in the image information. It’s in another aspect of their architecture, which can absolutely be fixed, and should be.
As to the issue of consent that was brought up in comments here. I think that’s fair and fine. I think it’s based on feelings instead of the tech that is in front of us right now and what it’s actually doing, but feelings are a legit consideration. We should develop a new generation of AI to get rid of all training data from non-consenting artists. People on both sides might tell you this cannot be done, but they are wrong. It can be. Might take a while, certainly will take a lot more expense, and it will involve some greenhouse gas excess during the training phase.
But I want this done, more than the anti-AI people do, because I want this part of the conversation to fucking stop. You know what would be a hilaribad way to retrain LLMs without the personal info? Tell LLMs to say everything they know except the personal info, and retrain them on that output. That’s silly, but I hope it shows that there must be a way to do this.
For my part, I hope this is the last time I feel compelled to make a post on the subject. Because I’d like my personal part in the conversation to stop. Yes, I should be able to control myself and just bow out. Maybe I will get the hang of that someday. But for now? The only reason I have a blog is because I don’t have that sense of restraint.
I know you’re bored of this too. I’ll shut up about it as soon as I’m able. I’m workin’ on it, man!
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. This last title was horribly difficult. I’m not doing this method again.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY FOURTEEN: LOVER’S CHOICE
That means we can choose between any of the candidates that didn’t win votes. The big list this year: Artificial, Cursed, Demonic, Experimental, Fiery, Ghoulish, Gigantic, Inanimate, Insectoid, Legendary, Natural, or Seasonal. As usual, I’m going to try to do them all. Probably gonna half-ass ’em tho.
TITLE: ME & MEGAN + UNHOLY BEA
CHARACTERS: Me: First Person Narrator and Genderqueer Bay Area Hipster, Megan Lum: Their Intended, a College Girl, Unholy Bea: a Fiery Demond.
PREMISE: I’ve been trying to get close to this girl, right? She is super hard to get, and that’s cool, gotta respect boundaries, so she’s just a maybe who knows kinda person, and a friend. But the maybe who knows? Seems a little more than friend, but awful cagey about what it would take to change the circumstance.
I just about gave up, when I found out she’s into the occult. That’s great. Learned some chaos magic from my gender studies prof Spiv Spivey. Ey hooked me up with a nameless tome, I invited Megan on a trip to Mount Shasta in wildflower season, and it was all good.
THE HOOK: For certain definitions of good. This tome (Inanimate) had a sort of experimental vibe to it (Experimental), letting you create your own demon (Artificial), instead of summoning the usual guys. There were bunnies hopping around the field and I guess it was Easter (Seasonal), but easy to lose track if Jesus hates you. I get the tome out and Megan is so into it, she kisses me on the spot. I had to keep going.
Using the natural creatures of the meadow (Natural), we grew our demon from bunny and dragonfly (Insectoid) parts, burning in an unnatural flame (Fiery) until they became a ten foot tall (Gigantic) smoldering demon (Demonic) with exoskeletal paws like they were encrusted in charcoal.
Turns out the demon was a lady, which is cool, because I like ladies. She was a bit much for me at first, but Megan was a freak for this stuff (Ghoulish), and took us by the hand. We all got freaky right there in front of God and everyone. We named her after Bea Arthur (Legendary) because she was a good ally for the community.
Demon vag is cursed tho (Cursed). Best believe we went to hell after that. Worth it.
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY THIRTEEN: SHAPESHIFTER
TITLE: ROCK TO DEATH
CHARACTERS: Skizzy Portentous: an Early ’90s Hair Metal Guitarist, Donny Colbert: the Drummer.
PREMISE: Skizzy only cares about guitar and rocking out. He doesn’t have time for groupies, doesn’t have time for love. It’s all about pedals and amps and flying V-neck thirteen-string harmonic something somethings. Donny loves Skizzy, but it must always be from behind the drum kit. Probably there’s a rhythm guitarist, a bassist, and/or a singer in the mix too, but never mind them.
Wait, more band members is more chances to come up with funny names. Bosley “Heroinhands” McGee, Ten Inch Tidwell, and Howlin’ Harry Knuckledusters. They exist now. Sorry.
THE HOOK: Skizzy locks himself away in the tour bus, finally near completion of the world’s most perfect guitar. The band has to perform with a roadie on lead guitar, just to keep the crowd from rioting. After the show, they approach the tour bus.
It rips to pieces in a spray of metal guitar strings. Skizzy has become half-man, half-guitar, and he will destroy the world with rock. Donny chases Skizzy around the city begging him to stop the rampage, but finally gives up and plays the drums for him. Harum-pum-pum-pum.
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it. Although I did run out patience for getting accent marks into my name properly on this one. I’m just gonna finish it out like this out of compulsion.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY TWELVE: PARASITE
TITLE: DAMNED MINNEAPOLIS
CHARACTERS: Cleavon White: an Early ’90s Funk Musician, Komla Abasom: a Vampire.
PREMISE: Parasite is the vampire category and I tend to not do straightforward vamp stories. Early results in seeking a cover for this one yielded nothing but white people, and per Billy Martin’s most recent word on race in gay vampires, I banged on this one until they were black. Now, to come up with a story that justifies the image, and is at all interesting. Let’s see…
In the last days of Minneapolis funk, a drummer and keyboardist named Cleavon was part of the never-ending scene rotation, trying to form his own bands or dropping in on somebody else’s thing, and nothing was sticking. The crossover with hip-hop was promising, but rappers could find success without the effort of a real instrumentalist behind them, and those projects also fell flat.
Mysterious businessman Komla said, “It’s all who you know,” Cleavon said, “I know,” and Komla said, “Get to know me.” Soon he was able to get studio gigs for cool rappers, and reel in some dollars. But music success wasn’t the only thing Komla had to teach.
THE HOOK: This rap villain is here to make a killin’. Komla liked repping rappers because their dangerous lifestyle added life insurance payouts to his revenue – and because nobody would question why the blood kept flowing. But more sophisticated music moved what was left of his ancient soul, so he took Cleavon under his bat wing. How far are you willing to go, funk man?
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY ELEVEN: INCORPOREAL
TITLE: MAD MALWAR3 GIRLZ ROOOL
CHARACTERS: Colleen Crash: a Trans Computer Hacker Type, ANи1KA and M0NiK4: Sisters who also Hack, or Virtual Illusions?
PREMISE: In some unimaginable dystopian version of our world, the most obvious con man and fascist thug in human history has convinced half of america he’s harmless and the other half that he shits gold, thus acquiring enough power to rewrite anything that was worth a shit in the place. Within this impossible world of banal evil that is just so soulcrushingly tedious nobody would ever want to write a story about it, god it’s so boring, the only life and liveliness must come from hacktivists and gay weirdos.
THE HOOK: Colleen’s best friends in the CYb4Rsp8s are the sisters ANи1KA and M0NiK4, altho there is some risk of the friendship blowing up because both sisters wanna get with Colleen. Or are they even real? Maybe they’re a cheap sex fantasy that escaped from her mind. Maybe they’re cointelprobots, sent by the NSA to lure her into federal prison. Or maybe, they’re a new life form, on some Ghost in the Shell type shit, wanting to bone Colleen into a Brave New World.
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY TEN: DREAMER
TITLE: M-74S
CHARACTERS: Sra. Seagrave: a Bureaucrat of the Dream World, Sra. Grijalva: a Dreamer.
PREMISE: Señora Grijalva is asleep. She fell in love at first sight, as you do in dreams, with an elegant lady working the office of Dream Bureaucracy. To have excuses to get back in line, get to her window, to see and talk to her again, she takes it upon herself to perform increasingly arcane bureaucratic tasks – getting licenses for her pet licenses, special ordering sub-certified copies of her passport application application, etc. Heartless monster Señora Seagrave isn’t making it easy for her.
THE HOOK: The last and worst form is M-74S, which needed so many stamps and signatures, Sra. Grijalva’s sleep is nearly at an end by the time she has it completed. The form needs an extended private review by Sra. Seagrave, which is everything she’s been fighting for.
But as she wakes up, the world begins to disintegrate. It feels like she’s dying, like she can’t make sense of anything. Sra. Seagrave realizes the affection was mutual too late. Or does she just seem like she does, because dreams forget their own rules as they draw to a close?
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY NINE: MUTATED
TITLE: MY LOVER IS A CYBER SLIME
CHARACTERS: Ethaniel Sangaré: a Solarpunk Power Engineer, Houssain Horowitz: a Slimy Machine Boy.
PREMISE: Surprise threequel to Laser Boys and Rose Gold, wherein the cybermetropolis destroyed many times over has come to flourish. From the wake of the Rose Gold System escaping the control of Brycine Cybernetics and destroying the city, it also helped build the city anew. Rose people formed a utopia, where photosynthesis provides all the nourishment and power needed by the survivors. They found themselves with less aggression, fewer health problems, and a mild demeanor that lent itself to founding a new world based on peace and brotherhood.
THE HOOK: There is always a seed of destruction within life. Ethaniel Sangaré was a good rose boy working in power engineering, along with his lover Houssain Horowitz. But Houssain fell into the oily black machinery that lurks beneath the sunny pink surface of the facility, and the machinery – originally designed by Brycine to infiltrate and augment human bodies – mutated him into an oily shape-shifting machine boy.
He has the power to separate into smaller copies of himself and re-merge into one, and uses this to make weird love to Ethaniel. All’s well that ends well. Oh, and he destroyed the city again, with slime or something.
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Don’t Miss Posts. This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing. Just look at the posts before or after this one.
MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept. As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance. This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program. While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way. There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like. Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.
MONSTER HEARTS DAY EIGHT: MINUSCULE
TITLE: THE PERFECT ROSE
CHARACTERS: Lidiya Volitsyev: a Little Old Gardening Lady, The Rose: a Horrible Human-Plant Hybrid.
PREMISE: Surprise sequel to The Heterose are at It Again, wherein the spawn of Ricky Washington’s transgression against the natural order have gotten out into the wild. But those seeds don’t turn into rose people unless grown just right, and there is a lot of variability to them. Some are just a rose that looks kinda like an embryo in the wrong light, some are a disembodied hand surrounded by petals. But the best gardener is rewarded with The Perfect Rose – that looks like a little lady.
THE HOOK: Lidiya cares for the rose through the course of its life, and when it starts to go rosewild like its mother had with Ricky, there’s no hetero option on the scene. This Rose learns to love the one she’s with, in age-appropriate ways during the course of her limited life cycle. Good girl.
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