EldritchFeminity

@EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

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Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools ( www.404media.co )

this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had...

EldritchFeminity ,

For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the "Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]" toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you'll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It's per blog and not account-wide.

EldritchFeminity ,

Pretty sure they just mean that it's not as easy as just converting former office buildings into livable space, and that developers are not going to want to pay the cost when it can be cheaper to demolish the building and build a brand new apartment building vs renovating the old office building. IMO, fuck what developers think about spending the upfront cost, we need housing 20 years ago now and the suburbs suck; but pointing it out to capitalists isn't gonna get it done.

EldritchFeminity ,

It can be cheaper to demolish an office buolding and build a brand new apartment building than to just convert the offices. From floor plan to ceiling height to water and electrical lines, offices have vastly different requirements compared to living space.

EldritchFeminity ,

Isn't there a rule about this in Christianity? Like, a command or something, of which there's ten? Something about not worshipping false idols and not having any gods before Him?

EldritchFeminity ,

Also true that many of these people calling themselves Christian are simply yet another group using religion as a justification for their hatred, as has happened so many times before and will continue to happen in the future.

EldritchFeminity ,

Don't forget suburbs and car-centric city planning isolating people by wealth and white collar vs. blue collar jobs by removing the places where those groups would normally intermingle. And by race. The suburbs also sorted people by race.

EldritchFeminity ,

Not a hot take, I think most people agree with that. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. In many cases, the cost of demolishing the building and building a brand new apartment building is cheaper than converting the current building. From floor plan to ceiling height to water and electrical lines, office buildings just aren't built to handle residential uses.

Shkshkshk , to 196
@Shkshkshk@dice.camp avatar

This is what its like working in childcare. Kids do stuff like this all the time.

@196

A child's coloring sheet, titled "Making Up", filled out by AIDEN. It provides a picture of a girl (Emma) holding a toy and crying, with a speech bubble above her saying "You broke my toy!". There is an empty speech bubble to her above right for the AIDEN's use. The instructions are as follows: "Imagine that you have broken Emma's toy. What can you say to make her feel better? Draw yourself in the box below. Then write what you would say in the speech bubble." AIDEN has chosen to write "Homander" in the speech bubble, being spoken by a crudely drawn but recognizable Homelander using his eye beams to blow Emma's brains out in a brown spray of gore. Emma is now on fire and bleeding from severe lacerations on her left arm, torso, thigh, and leg. She is also pissing herself, which AIDEN has helpfully labeled as "pee", and there is a green fart in the air next to her.
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    • EldritchFeminity ,

    I could see a kid drawing that, though I think the page has been...edited by somebody. There's a lot of erased text in that speech bubble, and the "homander" is written in a different hand compared to the rest of the text. It's too composed compared to the rest of the handwriting, sticks out like a sore thumb. I can read what looks like "shoom, eliminait...whatever the fuck I want" underneath it that looks closer to the rest of the text, but it's hard to say.

    I can't tell if somebody was okay with everything else but thought the F word was going too far, or what.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I've had a vasectomy and don't have any children, so it won't affect my life at all, fortunately.

    This is where people are taking issue with your comment. Because you're guilty of the same attitude that you're criticizing.

    As much as I want them to find out after all the fucking around they've done, we'll all be suffering right alongside them because not all of us are as privileged as you.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Personally, I'm thinking about sending my balls to live out the rest of their lives at a nice farm somewhere upstate.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Don't worry, that's what I was going for myself. 🔪🫒

    EldritchFeminity ,

    There used to be a big issue on Tumblr years ago with bots trolling for comments like that and then stealing whatever picture that comment was on to sell crappy t-shirts of it or whatever. People started fighting back by posting those comments specifically on Disney stuff.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    There's also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It's why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there's already 1,000+ comments there.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    As somebody whose dad was involved in getting 2 schools built while I was in school and was also president of the schoolboard for a time before that, I can confidently say that anybody who runs for a schoolboard position is doing so because they have an agenda.

    Oftentimes, that agenda is "I want our schools to be better for our kids," but not always. Sometimes, people run because they have differing opinions on what making schools better means, but sometimes (and rather often right now, it seems) you get somebody whose only goal is to burn it to the ground. Those are the kinds of people who care about political parties in schoolboards - because they're so obsessed with the us vs. them of their politics that it shapes the rest of their lives.

    Local politics can be a cutthroat and dirty game. I'll always remember my dad telling me about how he was walking out of a town meeting one time when he saw an old lady point to him and loudly say to her friends, "That's him! That's the enemy!"

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Only one of these two has promised "to be a dictator from day one." I'll give you a hint. It's the same one who said that he'll encourage Russia to attack NATO countries if he feels that they're not pulling their weight. It's the same one whose party released a more than 900 page manifesto last year that included the total destruction of state's rights so that the federal government can punish state employees who don't uphold the federal "Don't Say Gay" law also included in the manifesto, as well as a list of 50,000 federal workers to be replaced with party loyalists.

    That's not the same as not doing enough to fight climate change, not forgiving all student loans, and not having strong enough sanctions against Israel. Oh yeah, the other one opposes doing all 3 of those things at all and, in fact, wants to loosen restrictions on fossil fuel companies and increase the use of oil and coal while decreasing the use of green energy.

    I hope Russia pays you well, at least.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Oops, my bad. I misread that as saying it actually is a false dichotomy.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    This is why you don't read social media until you've had breakfast. Otherwise, you make mistakes like that. 😟

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I hear .223 is a great caliber for healing injections. He might want to try a few to make sure they stick.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Right, because the massacre of Ughir in China, genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and attempted genocide of rural Burmese in Myanmar are all such good things. I also remember hearing that North Korea has finally locked down to the point where escape has been deemed impossible, and I don't know what's happening in South America or Africa currently, but I'm sure it isn't all sunshine and roses there too. Oh yeah, isn't South Korea having major societal issues right now as well? Something to do with women's rights, if I remember correctly?

    EldritchFeminity ,

    You're only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you've said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There's plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you've got serious financial backing, it's not worth trying to compete.

    Even speaking of just the indie scene, don't go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There's those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don't even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    As they say, there's a sucker born every minute. The mobile market is gigantic. Like, bigger than the rest of the gaming industry combined big. Activision-Blizzard-King makes more off the mobile company part, King, than they do from both Blizzard and Activision. That's more from mobile games than from CoD and WoW combined, two of the most golden of geese in gaming history. I think there's just too many people in the mobile market to have any noticeable impact on the customers of your specific games.

    There might be a case to be made for long-term damage across the market, but even then, you're talking easily a billion users with more joining all the time.

    I think a good comparison would be to Amazon and those drop-shipping sites that sell cheap junk from China. For every one customer burned, there's probably a dozen more gobbling up the low prices and "sales."

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Absolutely, I hate it, too. It's like how the more I learn about advertising, the more disgusted I become as I discover that it's all just malicious psychology to push the buttons in your brain to get you to do what they want, but it's still brilliant psychology that they've honed after more than a century of practice. I hate it, but I can't deny it works.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There's also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that's not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.

    The indie scene today is the strongest it's ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can't think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.

    It's frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Was gonna say the same, as I remember reading a study a few years back that came to this conclusion. They found no direct correlation between age and shifting political opinions, but that as people accumulated wealth, they were more likely to become more conservative.

    Basically, when people start benefitting from the system, they stop wanting that system to change.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    We're no strangers to it in the US as well, but what AirBnB has allowed is an industry of landlords that have strangled the housing stock in a number of places. It's not the people renting a room in their house that are the issue, it's the people buying apartments and houses specifically as rental property. I remember seeing a photo of LA that had AirBnB properties marked, and it was estimated at around 45% of all housing as being short-term-only rentals.

    I live in a condo complex of duplexes in a summer vacation spot that has a limit on the number of units that can be rented out specifically to avoid this kind of problem - they want affordable housing for people who are actually living here, and not properties that are going to sit empty 8 months of the year. They don't care if you rent out a single room or something, but we have a lady who owns a building who doesn't even live in the same state. She has to drive like 4 hours to get here.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I assume some form of ink-wash and sponging to create texture, too, as well as whiteout for the highlights.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I've been thinking about this in the context of the reaction to MLK at the time and how we look at it today compared to the many protests of recent years, and my conclusion from people talking in here is that we are still falling for the white-washed narrative of what protesting is supposed to look like.

    The short of my thoughts is that a demonstration and a protest accomplish two entirely different goals and therefore are to be used in entirely different circumstances. A demonstration may inconvenience people, but it is ultimately about bringing eyes onto the issue and gathering support for your cause. A protest, on the other hand, is to be used after you already have the support of the people. It's the union strike after negotiations have broken down. It's a show of force meant to shock and awe the people in power.

    We look today at the sit-ins and marches of the Civil Rights movement, and Rosa Parks refusing to change her seat, and say, "This is how you protest. You are polite and don't upset the populace at large." But, here's the thing: they were already breaking the law by doing these things, and anything more could've seen them killed by cops. And the general populace said the same things then as we are today about the protests. That they were being too disruptive and were driving support away.

    Here's what the general public thought of MLK and his "protests" at the time:

    https://pictrs.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/988a8527-385b-4e75-9448-180337f86a1b.jpeg

    Let's take a look in comparison to Greta Thunberg, the Boston I-93 protest, the Million Man March in Washington, and the recent protests in Germany, as the first two were already mentioned in here and make great examples. Greta is a perfect example of a demonstration rather than a protest in my eyes. Brings awareness to the issue, and as others said, is laser focused on causing disruption to the target to bring said awareness without alienating people at large. People know exactly who to blame here, and it isn't Greta. The issue, though, is that this ultimately doesn't create change on its own. The Million Man March, by comparison, was a protest. They shut down an entire city. It was a threat that made white people all over the country afraid. White people thought to themselves, "If they can gather a million people to march in one city, what else can they do."

    The recent protests in Germany are another example of a protest used well. The biggest issue with the I-93 stunt was that it was the wrong strategy at the wrong time. It didn't already have the backing of a large portion of the population, and didn't do enough to shake the powers that be. This is the same issue that BLM had in general. It was too disorganized and needed a unified strategy that wouldn't allow the government and corporations to simply wait it out and sweep it under the rug. If you look at the German protests and the Million Man March, both caused far more inconvenience, shutting down sections of cities if not the entirety of the cities themselves, but were much more effective because they had the impetus of the massive support behind them and the size of the crowds they gathered for the protests. They sent a clear message to those in power that the people were upset, and they weren't going to simply let it go. Mere days after the protests, action is already being taken in Germany. It took nearly a decade of demonstrations and protests to get the public support behind the Civil Rights Movement, but it wasn't until after MLK was assassinated that the Civil Rights Act was passed. Years of demonstrations and protests, and 3 full days of burning cities and black people rioting in the streets. The Civil Rights Act was drafted, passed, and signed into law within a week.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I just saw the other month that only like 46% of Millennials own a house, compared to the 65% average of other generations. And of those who don't, 52% of them aren't saving for a down payment, often because of how shitty wages and even finding a job are. On top of that, only 20% of houses are currently affordable for the average American worker, down from 60% in 2016. And people wonder why we have no faith in the system.

    Gen Z saw what happened to Gen X and to us Millennials, and don't expect it to get any better for them either.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    You're falling for that propaganda too, a little bit; as are we all. We don't need to be productive every moment of the day - hell, studies have shown that humans are only really productive about 4 hours out of the day. If you work a 9-5 style job, 4 hours of every day is spent doing things other than being productive. So don't feel guilty for doing things just because they make you happy. Play video games, make Warhammer models, do silly little drawings that only you will ever see, whatever makes you happy, simply because that's what life is about: doing things that make us happy. Time spent doing that is never time wasted, and screw the people that tried to convince entire generations that we only have worth as a person if we're being "productive."

    EldritchFeminity ,

    In my experience, small businesses can be even worse, because they're run by the kind of middle management that everybody hates in a big company. Except now they're the boss and have final say over everything that happens in the company.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    The 401k replaced the pension. It used to be that a company would pay for your retirement, now you pay for your own by being forced to pay into the stock market, and it doesn't go nearly as far as the pensions used to. People are working well into their 60s or older, because 401k's often don't pay out enough to live on. It's another way that companies have figured out to avoid having to pay their employees while pumping up the value of the stock market at the same time.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Yep, worked for a small business as a teen. My experience was that the boss was decent at giving us raises every year, but got pissed when people gave us tips, never had enough people on hand to account for kids going on vacation or getting sick, and, as my buddy would say, "he's the first person to tell you that there's more than one way to skin a cat - but his way is the right way." Dude couldn't understand why kids on their summer vacation wouldn't want to work 45 hours a week.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    If they can't afford to do it, then you're relegating creativity to only those wealthy enough to be able to afford to do it.

    The vast majority of art throughout human history was paid for by somebody, or sold by the artist. Van Gogh dies a poor man because people didn't want to buy his paintings when he was alive. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned by a Pope. Just because you think your have an intrinsic right to the work of somebody else doesn't mean you do.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Copyright should absolutely include analyzing when you're talking about AI, and for one simple reason: companies are profiting off of the work of artists without compensating them. People want the rewards of work without having to do the work. AI has the potential to be incredibly useful for artists and non artists alike, but these kinds of people are ruining it for everybody.

    What artists are asking for is ethical sourcing for AI datasets. We're talking paying a licensing fee or using free art that's opt-in. Right now, artists have no choice in the matter - their rights to their works are being violated by corporations. Already the music industry has made it illegal to use songs in AI without the artist's permission. You can't just take songs and make your own synthesizer out of them, then sell it. If you want music for something you're making, you either pay a licensing fee of some kind (like paying for a service) or use free-use songs. That's what artists want.

    When an artist, who does art for a living, posts something online, it's an ad for their skills. People want to use AI to take the artist out of the equation. And doing so will result in creativity only being possible for people wealthy enough to pay for it. Much of the art you see online, and almost all the art you see in a museum, was paid for by somebody. Van Gogh died a poor man because people didn't want to buy his art. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned by a Pope. You take the artist out of the equation and what's left? Just AI art made as a derivative of AI art that was made as a derivative of other art.

    https://64.media.tumblr.com/1b3d5df1b26e9e86235b0b04d519dd80/58959199633e4619-52/s1280x1920/b5f726cd9b99024521bc55d5d4fae65bda736cde.jpg

    https://64.media.tumblr.com/59c836bdbaca344e152b7aedd7e1dea3/91d428c66fc78bd7-19/s1280x1920/ef5fe1186b68ff62fb47ebbc1f7784e9fd90ba66.jpg

    https://64.media.tumblr.com/a13f42ab5de7f7fa8a88daaca00c9b74/91d428c66fc78bd7-24/s1280x1920/eed42e3c85367a374e87a4e9b1e711df15dcddec.jpg

    https://64.media.tumblr.com/63d5c6a819922f275080fe8beb13bd03/884bf56921a9a09b-d2/s1280x1920/dafee1633c6c966b0ff1fe9df1fe5dea3391ae96.jpg

    EldritchFeminity ,

    It absolutely is true. If people can't afford the time to create, what you'll see is a hyper-accelerated version of the fine art world, with AI art for the masses, and human-made art for the wealthy either by commission or by those wealthy enough to spend the time learning to create their own, never to be seen by anyone else. And since AI work is a derivative of the work in its data set, it will degrade in quality over time as those data sets become filled with AI generated work. We're already seeing this with stuff like ChatGPT.

    It's only been in the past 50-100 years that your average person has been able to buy art. Before then, art was relegated to the wealthy. Artists had patrons, people with more money than sense who were willing to pay the artist enough that they could spend their time making art instead of working, or they made commissioned pieces for the wealthy: private art for their homes, public statues and pieces for temples venerating the person who had it commissioned, stuff like that.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    https://64.media.tumblr.com/404fd275779c7511de3194dcc840915c/91d428c66fc78bd7-96/s1280x1920/b2dcd997a6674f49e776f16f4c16ca869b99c380.jpg

    MidJourney is already storing pre-rendered images made from and mimicking around 4,000 artists' work. The derivative works infringement is already happening right out in the open.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I actually did read it, that's why I specifically called out MidJourney here, as they're one I have specific problems with. MidJourney is currently caught up in a lawsuit partly because the devs were caught talking about how they launder artists' works through a dataset to then create prompts specifically for reproducing art that appears to be made by a specific artist of your choosing. You enter an artist's name as part of the generating parameters and you get a piece trained on their art. Essentially using LLM to run an art-tracing scheme while skirting copyright violations.

    I wanna make it clear that I'm not on the "AI evilllll!!!1!!" train. My stance is specifically about ethical sourcing for AI datasets. In short, I believe that AI specifically should have an opt-in requirement rather than an opt-out requirement or no choice at all. Essentially creative commons licensing for works used in data sets, to ensure that artists are duly compensated for their works being used. This would allow artists to license out their portfolios for use with a fee or make them openly available for use, however they see fit, while still ensuring that they still have the ability to protect their job as an artist from stuff like what MidJourney is doing.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don't have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they're not hanging out online, then they're probably at somebody's house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there's no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don't want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I completely agree, as I'm pretty sure it was a line fed to Americans by the government and car companies as part of selling the suburban American Dream to them while they bulldozed entire neighborhoods to put up a highway overpass.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Definitely the second one mixed with the specifics of the time period and the fact that nobody knew where this would lead combined with corporate greed. This was a time when we didn't even know that putting lead in gasoline was a bad idea and having a TV in your house was a futuristic idea. Before the TV became common, they barely had a way to know what was happening across the country, and they definitely had no idea what would happen to end up where we are today.

    The suburbs and cars were sold to the post WW2 American public as these symbols of the burgeoning wealth of the new middle class (plus the suburbs meant that white people didn't have to look at black and poor people). The idea that everybody could own their own house and drive across the entire country on the newly created international highway system (just ignore all the stuff paved over to make it happen, it was mostly just poor people's houses anyways). They were sold the dream that you didn't have to live within walking distance of the factory anymore, you could live in a nice house with a white picket fence, and drive to your fancy office job in a skyscraper.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    In the US, the way it works is that the cash part never makes it onto the report, though more commonly this happens when the police do a "no knock raid" on "the wrong house" and then empty the family safe. The contents of the safe simply never get reported as evidence or mysteriously disappear from the evidence room without being reported as missing, like a fairly decent portion of the drugs taken as evidence every year does.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    Yeah, after making that comment I realized the whole "customs gives you a receipt" thing, whereas the scenario I was talking about basically comes down to your word vs theirs, and what they write in their report. It's a scenario with a lot less accountability than customs has.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I made it racist because you bodyshamed her, called her a freak, and then said she deserves to be silenced, kidnapped, possibly killed along with her girlfriend, and whatever other horrible things the Chinese government can come up with. All because you don't like her. I fail to see the difference between racism and what you said. Which was my point in going that route.

    I'm a trans woman in the US. My life expectancy is 30 years due to suicide rates and how commonly we end up murdered. My colors are supporting minorities against oppression, regardless of whether or not I like them or agree with them.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    No, I fail to see the difference between hating someone for being born and supporting the actions of a genocidal regime against a person because you don't like them.

    EldritchFeminity ,

    I don't know if it's in that video or a separate video, but she did talk about it in a specific video, and the short of it is, she was raised as a boy by her family and it messed her up for many years. Like, to the point where the trans community has adopted her to some degree for having had a similar experience to their experiences with gender dysphoria and other related psychological issues. So her dressing and looking like that is in part her embracing her feminity and the fact that she's a woman. Kinda like that stereotype of the gay guy who comes out of the closet and starts acting "fruity" or whatever the term is. Or the trans woman who has a pigtails and overalls phase like having the childhood they never got to experience the first time.

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