The Uerdinger And Karlsruher Lines.

You’re welcome.

Muse Delusion - a love story with a touch of Greek mythology. 

I was a beta reader so trust me this is a great book!

It's free for a limited time only so order now!

All art is derivative. Yes, there should be protections of the rights of artists that their work can't be used in databases of AI art without consent. And yes AI does not consciously create art. In that sense, it is a tool for creating art. I don't see why these things make AI art inherently wrong or anyone using them wrong. By the way, I have only ever shared AI art with a small number of friends and only from programs I trust to be using public domain datasets You shouldn't paint everyone using AI for art with the same brush.

AI Art and Why It Can Go Die In A Fire

Why am I opposed to Stable Diffusion and AI Art in its current incarnation:

Some people seem to believe AI can “learn” art. Like it learns the concepts of perspective, value, anatomy, colour etc. through images and then recreates art based on this knowledge.

This is a misconception.

An AI doesn’t “know” things. It has no concept for artistic fundamentals. It just learns associations based on the data it’s given in a way that’s completely , vastly different to the way a human brain does. An AI can only recreate based on known image data. Those recreations can be blended in a very complex way, but they will ALWAYS be derived directly from image data it’s trained on.

A human can take a paint-bucket, and throw it at a canvas, and then mush paint around with their fingers. An AI can’t do that;  it can only blend image data that best fits “canvas with messy splashed paint”. It will pull from all the image data it’s categorized with “canvas”, “splash”, “paint”, etc. and then blend them by placing datapoints next to other datapoints that it has “learned” will most suitably go next to each other.

Human learning creates complex conceptual structures. Our concept of an “apple” may contain many elements such as the colour red, how heavy it is, its overall form, how you hold it, and what it tastes like. An AI’s concept of an “apple” is whatever images it associates with the word “apple” based on text cues in its training.

When you tell it to paint “a hand holding an apple”, it will recreate and blend many images of hands with many images of apples in a way that best fit each other depending on weights defined by the data its analyzed.

Any presumption that AI can “learn” art theory and then make art through its knowledge of this is incorrect, and would require a level of general AI intelligence we are nowhere near capable of building yet, and we won’t with our current models because they are not creating actual epistemology, merely datapoint-based imitation without actual integration or understanding.

But the bottom line? All AI art is derivative and, unless it was trained exclusively on works in the public domain, there is definitely a case to argue that the companies creating these algorithms are violating the copyright of the artists whose works they are using without there first being a contract, agreement, or royalties (which is the thing these companies are trying to weasel out of by creating these AIs in the first place.) There is a reason why Clip Studio Paint, the latest of money-chasers jumping aboard the Stable Diffusion pony, issued out a warning that states, verbatim, “we cannot guarantee that images generated by the current model will not infringe on the rights of others.“

They know. They just don’t care- and everyone who ‘creates’ AI art is a willing participant in the infringing of copyright of millions of artists who never gave consent to have their works used in this fashion.

I feel like maybe starting a blog again I want to write in depth posts about topics with full html support And I also want to talk politics in a public space without all the problems of talking politics on social media. Especially I want to keep my tumblr account mostly non-political.

Also first time posting in months Again. Or even checking tumblr. But this is my only social network now (stopped using twitter even before the fiascos with Musk) and I kind of miss having that. But I also find myself with a lack of anything to share. Life has been pretty boring in most non-political regards.

House Martins on a Ledge. Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935)

via

It would be even weirder if it was also natural (it isn't, it was made in 1991)

Neitokainen is a body of water in Finland, which is shaped like Finland

@why-this-eurovision-mess requested alexander rybak!

can y'all send some asks that are like “thoughts on ______”

I'd like to add also that so many of those people who used to get antisemitism on the left and spoke out about it back in before October, even people who comforted me back in when Israel and Hamas were fighting in 2021 - they have now adopted the very tropes of left-wing antisemitism they used to condemn.

So a while back, a fairly left-wing friend of mine was shocked at the thought of Left-Wing Holocaust Denial, asking how it could even be possible, how can the Left even deny the Holocaust given everything (quote: “why would the LEFT be in denial? After you read Elie Wiesel, you can’t deny any of it. Same with Maus, Frieda Appleman-Jurman’s memoirs, and all that. Also, Lois Lowry won a Newberry medal for Number the Stars”). So I’ve been chewing on this for a while now.

First, Right-Wing Holocaust Denial is straight up “denial that the Holocaust happened”–often with an undertone of “But we wish that it had and it was a great idea”. They deny the number of deaths, or excuse the Nazis, or say that the Jews had it coming, or say that it didn’t happen at all, that sort of thing. It’s a very blunt, straightforward form of denial.

Comparatively, Left-Wing Holocaust Denial takes a different, more sophisticated form that functions on multiple levels–with an undertone of its own along the lines of “the Jews are exaggerating to try to portray themselves as victims”–and to talk about this form of denial, I have to explain what the Holocaust was.

So this gets a bit long, because what is being denied is long, but I will ask you to bear with me.

But, TL:DR:

Right Wing Holocaust Denial denies the body count and the atrocities…

Left Wing Holocaust Denial denies everything that built up to it, the centuries of Othering and murders, and the aftereffects.

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Map of New Zealand in Mario-ish style.

by TheGeographyPin