grayestofghosts: (percy)
Watching Twitter go down the tubes is making me sad. Like the discourse of the people I'm adjacent to just keeps getting worse and worse and more and more frequent, it feels like and it's very unenjoyable to look at... but at the same time it's still the best source for artists I like because the artists haven't made the leap to another platform, it seems like.

I think the smart and sane thing to do is to try to set up an RSS feed for the artists accounts I like, but that's been mixed success, and nitter.net seems to be spotty right now as twitter falls apart. I am hoping eventually these artists make the leap to bluesky (or otherwise? I know bluesky is similar and has policies that allow NSFW, though it is very, very much so not a mature platform yet) or do... something. I just want other options and twitter just continues to deteriorate.

I'm very tired.
grayestofghosts: a shiba inu in a blanket (shibe)
My stupidest thought right now re:writing is that I should get a lined leucttrum notebook now and that would get me to write probably.

Keep in mind that I have 3 (!) not-lined leucttrum notebooks, including one still in the package, and lined not-leucttrums, and I’m moving soon and should NOT be buying more things, but… alas, the heart wants what it wants.
grayestofghosts: (percy)
Apparently there are new “temporary” limits on Twitter: max 6000 tweets viewed per day for verified (blue checkmark) and only 600 per day for non-verified, going all the way down to 300 if the account is new.

Which is, totally nuts, especially considering it’s a weekend that he’s implementing it. Also that he wants to get rid of blocklists, well, the site is quickly becoming completely unusable. It’s very strange to decide to limit impressions when the site is run on SELLING those impressions… or does he really think squeezing $8/month out of individual users is actually going to work?

It’s incredible, but also as the big draw to Twitter these days has been fanart, incredibly disappointing. Like a significant amount of art is just going to be straight-up lost the longer this goes on for.
grayestofghosts: Elliot Alderson with the word hackerman superimposed (hackerman)
There was a thread recently by the admin here on twitter about issues going on at AO3. From what I understand -- and I may be confused, here -- is that there were bad actors who were using AO3 as a service and sending CSEM to people with the intention of swatting those they sent the CSEM to. AO3 of course disabled the accounts but apparently there's an issue on AO3 where when they disable accounts they do not automatically hide that account's contents, but moderators have to go through the contents manually for some reason and this may have fucked up their legal liability. Because of this, if you have anything you have posted on AO3 or have any well-loved bookmarks on AO3, I would recommend downloading them for yourself on your local machine/drives. The great thing about AO3 is that it will generate epubs and other formats for you to keep on your own devices, at least, but I understand that's probably a LOT of bookmarks for some people...

I do not know all the details but the twitter thread is here. It looks like it has had a lot of updates since I last checked and I don't have time right now to go through all the addendums but the point is -- AO3's code and policies may not have been able to meet its US legal obligations to remove illegal material in a timely manner and that could be a legal issue, so back up your work and favorites in case anything happens to the site.

At this point on the internet if you see something you like you like it's hard to know if it will be on there for much longer so just take a copy anyway. You never know when your personal archive will be necessary.

grayestofghosts: (percy)
I get home from vacation and many larger subs of Reddit have gone dark, and all I hear about is how people can't search for normal how-tos because Reddit was the big repository for actual questions answered, especially now that Yahoo Answers is gone and almost all hobby forums are gone, disappeared into either Reddit, Discord, or otherwise.

Along with Twitter’s collapse in the last 6 months or so and ChatGPT clogging up SEO with garbage, all of this seems really... bad? Like it was bad enough before with the video takeover (especially because of my disability) but that was somewhat slow-moving and ongoing since about 2016. This is all happening in the matter of months. I know the reddit blackout is temporary but this all seems to bode ill generally with the reveal on how fragile this all is.

I would love it if forums came back, but I don't love that we will probably have to become much more desperate to make the jump back to them. Also a lot of things that made forums go round was free image hosting which is mostly gone outside of social media and let's be real everyone is on mobile devices which makes image upload extremely finnicky outside of apps specialized for it... and this isn't even getting into video.

All through this collapse I'm just watching and helpless. I mean maybe I could look into starting a forum, but what would it be about? I don't trust in my moderating abilities anyway...

I just. Don't like this. Don't like this at all.

grayestofghosts: (percy)
I keep seeing posts about people wanting Ao3 to be “more like TikTok”, and aside from how horrible that sounds it sounds like aside from the constant cries for censorship, people are very confused about Ao3’s “algorithm” and are either complaining about the one it “has” (it does not have one) or that t should get one.

I don’t navigate Ao3 terribly much but uh. It is an ARCHIVE, not a LIBRARY, and people don’t understand the difference, it seems like. 


Like, there’s this fantasy among people who love media of a “library of everything, wouldn’t that be cool”  and they have heart attacks when they see librarians throw out old books, but then they finally get to a place that, for a certain measure of ‘everything’ actually does have everything, and their puny minds have no way to deal with it. And like, fine! Yes, actually, everything is overwhelming and not useful! That is literally why libraries curate! We also need a place for everything, and that’s why we have archives, and why archives aren’t libraries!

With this in mind, and the fact that Ao3 is open-source, the most logical thing to do seems like it would be to build fic libraries that do this recommendation, maybe not by algorithm, but potentially by algorithm if you were clever enough to do so. And it is very weird to see so few attempts at this. Sometime in the last 10 years or so, any kind of halfway ambitious web project became the sole territory of a few megacorporations rather than dorks trying to glue together a website from free web space and twine. Everything has been so funneled into a few websites, and they all look the same and provide the same things. 

grayestofghosts: (percy)
A very interesting episode of the podcast Hooked On Pop came out last week called Invasion of the Vibesnatchers which seemed particularly relevant to my piece on AI art generators as potential IP laundering machines. It's a very, very interesting comparison on how two similar phenomena are being dealt with in two different mediums and how, with both of them, the artists seems to lose.

Most people are not familiar with how music credits and pay works. Various methods of what might be called 'collageing' have been used in popular recorded music since forever -- from literal clips being 'sampled' and used in a new way in a new song, or melodies repeated and reinterpreted and on and on. Also, in the United States, there's a very defined structure of who owns music, and therefore who gets money every time a song is played, so when pieces of a song are used in another song who gets a cut and how is very predetermined. Because of this structure of the business, nobody wants to step on anyone else's toes too badly, so often credit will be pre-emptively awarded before there's any kind of conflict leading to lawsuit if a company thinks there might be an issue. All of this is happening under the listener's nose unless they really look for these credits. Actual disputes like over Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" are not common and when they do happen they're usually settled pretty quickly.

Now, an "interpolation" isn't as straightforward a copy as a sampled clip or a repeated line of melody. The example analyzed at the beginning of the podcast showed that no individual piece of the song could be considered really copied directly from the old song being credited, but given that it has a a similar instrumentation, similar structure, etc and certain parts that are relatively unique, like a repetitive whistled melody, the old song is given credit, and with that credit the owners of the credited song get some small cut of the profit of the crediting song.

Later in the episode the host reveals that interpolation credits in popular music have increased from about 10% per year before 2017 to about 20% per year afterward, and the major reason cited why is that, well, the record companies that own songs are encouraging it. There's a definite profit motive here -- when someone uses a song they already own to make something new, they will get a cut of the profit from that song, and the more vague the definition of "use" becomes, the more credits they can have, and therefore the more money they will make without having to even acquire more songs.

Now, I can make an argument against this practice due to the "modern media companies encourage homogeneous sludge" argument, but the more important note is how different the music industry is treating music credits versus how visual art credits simply do not work and allow for AI art to sneak in. If you made an AI music generator instead, made it scan top 40 hits back decades for its learning set, and then started posting the music as your own creation or as a way to get "free music", the RIAA would have your ass on a platter in less than a week.

And I am not saying this because the RIAA is 'good' -- it's not like the record companies, once they get that interpolation credit, are actually distributing that cut of profit fairly. But it's so demonstrative of how, when it comes to who makes money on art, it's entirely down to might makes right, and the only reason AI art is allowed to exist as "free art generation" is because it is taking exploiting artists who have no legal or financial power to stop them.

grayestofghosts: (percy)
I keep reading doomsday declarations about what AI art will do to actual artists and their possibility of getting paid and at this point I’m convinced that everyone writing about this is missing the point. Artists have not been paid what they’re worth for a long time, either by exploitation or outright theft of their work. The homogenized, regurgitated slopification of art — no, I’m sorry, content — has been going on forever in the form of Save The Cat making all Hollywood movies the same, the MCU taking over cinema, the Penguin Random House/Simon and Schuster merger (including a hearing where they admitted they have no idea how books get popular), the insane scheduling requirements on Instagram to get any attention whatsoever, “crunch time” ruining game creators lives, all the way down to T-shirt bots trawling Twitter. If you read Little Women, Jo gets paid about the same amount in dollars for her short story during the Civil freaking War as a writer today would get upon winning a similar contest. I’m not saying it can’t get worse, but the idea that AI will change the fact that companies and unscrupulous individuals will do anything to avoid paying artists for their work, up to and including outright theft, by convincing them and everyone else that all “art” is essentially interchangeable, is nothing new, to the point that I wonder where the fuck anyone making these statements about AI art has been for the last ten years at least.
 
Art or “Art” is not the point here. The term "AI art generators" obfuscates what these programs are actually doing, and that's laundering intellectual property.
 
For AI to do anything it needs to be trained on a large data set. So, for an AI to make “art”, it needs to be trained with a large data set of “art”, which through “learning” it can then remix trends into the images it spits out. So, the biggest, most obvious question, then, is where is this “art” it is being trained on coming from? By the image sets DALL-E generates online, it's very obvious that the art it has used in its sample is not free, based on the fact that what it is best at creating is obviously someone else's intellectual property. It can generate very reliably images including "Pikachu" or "in the style of Frank Miller", meaning that the program must have analyzed tons of images of Pikachu and by Frank Miller, and not one article I've seen talking about art generators actually notes that to use these images, the user would have to actually pay whoever owned these images and properties to use them commercially, even if the final piece being used was generated by one of these AI programs.
 
DALL-E is able to exist and pull from these images probably because it's assuming that the use of copyrighted images and properties would be protected under fair use, with the argument that it's not for commercial use and the demonstration with these commercial properties is a part of the educational or scientific value of the generated pieces. However, I could imagine a large company like Disney deciding that it did not like users creating images of Mickey Mouse at strip clubs and send a cease and desist request that all Disney properties be taken out of the learning set, which would leave users suddenly unable to make images of Darth Vader making the first pitch in Dodger Stadium or courtroom sketches of Sora being tried for manslaughter.
 
But Disney is Disney. What about everyone else? I am not a lawyer, but I think this gets both easier and harder. As long as we're discussing fair use of images, Mickey Mouse at a strip club could be argued to be a parody or criticism somehow, while, say, if a drawing I made of a flower I found in my backyard was added to the data set, it would be really hard to argue anything made with it would be parody or criticism of the original work because I'm a nobody. There would be nothing specific in that image to parody or criticize because I am not known enough to parody or criticize. The use of my artwork in the dataset would strictly be used in a straightforward, instrumental fashion, and there would be no reason for them to not use any other picture of a flower. An AI using my random artistic renderings would very likely be a violation of fair use, but because of the way AI generate their images, it may be very hard to prove that my image was used unless the AI hiccupped and left my watermark in the generated image -- thus the intellectual property laundering potential of these programs.
 
The legal issues in using an AI art generator to make commercial art would have to be argued in court. Is an image created by an AI art generator transformative or derivative? This would likely have to be argued on a case by case basis. The real meat here would be, would the individual responsible for compiling the data set for the AI also be responsible for getting permissions from artists when their art is added to the generator, because the art generated may not be sufficiently transformative? Must Disney allow Mickey Mouse to be used in the generator because of the likelihood of the generated work being parody, or can it disallow Mickey's addition to these data sets outright? What are the implications of this for other artists? Etc.
 
Honestly I think the misunderstanding of the actual problems with these AI art generators is not because people don't understand how AI works (even though they don't), but because they don't understand how copyright and intellectual property work. While the DMCA has changed this slightly, it's still very rare for randos on the internet to get smacked for misusing or stealing art they find online while the legal system has been coping with integrating new technology doing copyright infringement since copyright has existed. The people freaking out definitely seem like they have never had to deal with purchasing a stock image or getting permission for music sampling.
 
The idea that there's no humans involved with creating AI art beyond the user typing input is just demonstrably false. If I type in Frank Miller into a generator and it creates something Frank Miller-esque, then Frank Miller was involved with the creation of it. If these generators have not already paid the artists for the data they've trained their AI on, then it's extremely likely we have another Napster on our hands. I don't think comparing AI generated art to music streaming is actually a bad comparison -- it could be very bad for artists in the end, but in a totally different way than the initial doomsayers claimed. It's easy to imagine people who were already stealing art putting the art through an AI to tweak it to make it more difficult for artists to find and send them a DMCA takedown. It's easy to imagine AI generated art replacing stock images in many cases, and the artists that produce stock getting a smaller and smaller cut because, while their images are being used, they're only being used "in part" so the companies facilitating this decide they deserve less money for it. I can even imagine a far future where the final product of art is so untouched by human hands because all human-made art goes into the art-slush and what is wanted by the consumer is pulled out as needed, but the original human-made art was still necessary. It's hard for me to imagine AI generated art replacing huge swaths of the art market with "free" art where it wasn't before, because the US government has prevented that from happening repeatedly -- from photocopiers, to VCRs, to Napster, ad nauseum. The toes being stepped on by these generators are too big to ignore.
grayestofghosts: (Viktor)
I am definitely feeling some kind of way and am not sure why, but alas, I think that is part of the human experience.

The more I learn about traditional publishing the more I feel like it's not for me. It was a dream I had since I was a kid but the world has changed to the point that I am unsure what publishers are for. They do not publicize, which should have been their main function, as that's increasingly being outsourced to authors on social media, and they don't protect the writers from their own mistakes and the public, which seems to be an increasingly necessary part of publication that they're also outsourcing to the writers. Reaching a wide audience as a trans person... no longer feels like my goal. Moreover it does not feel safe. I have thought about locking down my twitter now that it's reached a certain number of followers that's too high for my liking. I studiously block a lot of users on sight but I know it's impossible to do so fast enough. I wish DW was a bit more active because I do appreciate its slower pace. While my Tumblr is far more curated there's still the possibility that my posts will leave their intended orbit and that's... not great.

Anyway that's depressing and I've been having more depressing thoughts but then, there's the matter of what that means, which may be good. I'd like to... actually post some of my writing online, if I don't have to jealously guard first publication rights for a traditional publisher. Maybe even... here? That would be something. Though, honestly, I have not written anything besides essays for a while. I could post about ideas I have been working on, though that's a little sparse in my head right now too. But I feel like maybe I could be more open, in this little corner, where I don't have much of an audience, even if it's technically public. Because I would like to share these things, and I've been told to just sit on them for the past fifteen years for what I've learned is no good reason... and I am tired.

I understand that probably no one will read this here, but, Hell. Maybe.


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