unbanshee @ unbanshee @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts

3

Comments

44

Joined

8 mo. ago

I switched a few months ago, and I've honestly been so impressed with how far Blender has come since the last time I tried it (more than 10 years ago, probably).

I don't work in creative industry anymore and I haven't had a ton of time to noodle around and actually try out the tools I've seen demo'd, but it was mindblowing discovering how many different software suites I had used to do stuff that Blender has been incorporating into their one package.

Maya? Obviously does most of that. ZBrush? Yep, pretty comparable. Marvelous Designer? Holy shit, yep. ToonBoom? Also that.

By far the worst part has just been trying to retrain hotkey muscle memory and learn minor (but fundamental) differences, and that's not as small a thing as a lot of people make it out to be - it does add a lot of cognitive noise and you really can't just hop in and flow right from the get go (depending on what you're doing).

Absolutely worth it to get away from Adobe though, and not having to bounce between programs while working on a model is very, very pleasant.

Don't worry, I'm pretty sure that appeasement has historically gone really well.

Mine's a cabinet minister 🤢

Like I'm emailing anyway but it's gonna be swiftly ignored.

I know this is an anarchist instance. It's part of the reason I assumed that anti-capitalism would be a given and I didn't need to bang the drum about it before stating my arguments. I am anti-capitalist.

It seems like your faith is much higher than mine that people are vetting the AI tools they use, or that they exclusively use their own works as training material.

From what I can tell, our stable diffusion art communities make no distinction between training sets, nor do they require that shared images be trained on public-domain or user-owned data only. Given that, I don't think it's completely unreasonable that people are equating stable diffusion users with users generating their content on the big models that were indiscriminately fed the entire internet. There's no way to easily tell.

And outside of capitalism and industry, there are interesting philosophical discussions that need to be had around generative AI that I don't see enough. Here are a few of the topics I think need to be examined more, both by human society at large, and by AI-art communities especially:

• What does "good artists borrow, great artists steal" mean when the artist in question is modulating their output by inhuman means - parsing millions of images in ways that are physical impossibility? I think that's worth interrogating.
• What say do living artists get in who uses their work in training sets, and how should that be respected? Is ignorance of publicly-stated wishes an acceptable excuse? How should this be moderated?
• How do we assign value (cultural, economic, personal, sentimental, or any other) to creative works? I think arguably that both human-created and generative AI art are the product of thousands of years of human creative output, but they're vastly different in terms of the skill, types of knowledge, and time required to create one piece.

And it worries me that a lot of people seem pretty inclined to dismiss criticism of AI use as frivolous or reactionary, or couch it as a base refusal to adapt or learn new technologies. Especially when the people driving policy around the largest implementations of that technology are the ones who are the least principled in its deployment.

I know that this is a small community. I know that the proportion of people here who use custom stable diffusion models is almost definitely much higher than many other forums on the internet.

But I worry that if we don't have this kind of discussion here, where people are (maybe, optimistically/flatteringly) more judicious in their use of AI than elsewhere - if we don't have clear, principled guidelines, then the prevailing attitudes are ultimately going to wind up being those of Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, or fucking Grok.

For now though, unless I know that someone is using models trained on their own work, or at least public-domain works, I feel like I'm crossing a picket line, and I don't like that.

Sorry, what exactly do I need to tone down?

Pretty sure this is the first time I've ever commented on the issue here or elsewhere on Lemmy.

I see anti-AI sentiment all over the fediverse, but nothing in the original post that would indicate that these users are exclusively targeting db0 communities, just that the admins here have chosen to address it; and I agree it's a good way to handle the situation.

I think there are good and valuable use cases for AI, including generative AI.

But I also think a lot of the costs are hidden because the tools are free and easy to access, and because those coats often pretty abstract and wide-ranging so as to be difficult to observe, quantify, and attribute to an emerging technology. So I think there are a lot of really valid reasons to question casual use of those tools because they do not exist outside of capitalism.

The point of my earlier post wasn't meant to be that all use of AI is bad or that somebody using it to make a meme or art of their big-titty anime waifu is directly putting artists out of work, but I also don't think that those things are entirely separable, either.

And since I was replying to a user whose comment made a blanket claim implying that casual use of generative AI is trivial, well... no, I don't think it is.

I've done all sorts of art in my life. Sometimes as a job. And it's personally pretty disheartening to see comments like "it just looks like AI, human-made art doesn't look like that" because yes, it sometimes does, even if the poster has never seen human-made art like that.

But I've also spent the last few years watching dozens of friends and former coworkers lose their careers and their livelihoods en masse for no reason other than naked greed.

I think that making art more accessible through AI can be a really cool and pretty liberating thing for a lot of people, but as it's being employed by the big corporate players, it does have big serious negative externalities for working artists and for cultural products writ large, and I think that's worth bringing up.

I mean...

I can imagine how artists struggling to make ends meet might be angry that work they'd spent years learning and honing their skills to produce was and is being crawled by tools made by a bunch of silver-spoon-chomping techbros who are marketing their products to businesses who employ artists as a way to employ less artists, and pay peanuts to those they do hire to wrangle prompts and fix AI mistakes instead of actually getting to make art.

And I can imagine how frustrating it is to see people minimize that struggle when it often benefits oligarchs and C-suite ghouls.

The Migrant Rights Network is currently hosting a petition drive against this bill, you can find it here: https://migrantrights.ca/equalitynotexclusion/

I took two years of Norwegian in university, and in my first-ever class, tthe prof, a lovely woman originally from Sweden, brought us cookies.

One girl didn't make it to the second class because sis could literally not say 'småkaker' without bursting into laughter.

I'm not gonna engage with you beyond this since you're obviously uninterested in opinions other than your own, otherwise you might have looked at any of the studies I linked investigating weight-related stigma, which is related to others' kindness or lack thereof.

You're not fighting societal acceptance of obesity, you're just lazily perpetuating harmful social stigmas to justify your own discomfort with fat people.

You say it's not "normal" to be fat, but if a condition is considered epidemic, it's not really abnormal anymore, is it.

You don't know what that person eats. You don't know if that person has a medical disorder. You don't know if that person is disabled and unable to prepare healthy food for themselves. You don't know if that person has an eating disorder that they can't afford treatment for. You don't know if that person is on medications that affect their weight. You don't know if that's even a real person or an AI-generated image.

But you're real quick to diagnose the cause of their obesity as exclusively their personal failure for not eating the correct amount of the correct food.

It takes minutes to see what researchers are saying about this stuff.

Historically, the central dogma of the science of obesity has been that it is simply an energy balance disorder: calories in, calories out. If this energy-based model (EBM) of obesity, was true, then essentially exercising more and eating less should work for everyone. However, this is not the case. Many researchers believe that the pathophysiology of obesity is more complex.

While both social–environmental factors and genetic preposition have been recognized to play important roles in obesity epidemic, Gao et al. (2021) present evidence showing that epigenetic changes may be a key factor to explain interindividual differences in obesity.

Honestly there have been a few times recently where I've seen fat people doing or saying interesting things online, and half the fucking comments are vitriol about their weight and how it reflects on their character, as though that overshadows and invalidates anything they're doing. And sometimes I see other commenters challenging these views, and sometimes the hate commenters will backpedal of they realize that the person they're discussing has what the consider to be a valid medical excuse.

I'm autistic and ADHD, and to me, that kind of behaviour is a reflection of what goes on in places like fakedisordercringe, where they claim to respect people with official diagnoses but never bother to actually see which of their targets has an official diagnosis, or consider that the absence of a formal diagnosis doesn't mean the absence of the condition. And that's because it's not actually about the underlying reasons for the behavior they're mocking, because they don't care about those reasons. They'd rather not know if there's a diagnosis that would exclude their target from mockery because how their target is acting makes them uncomfortable.

It's a way of enforcing conformity through cruelty, just like bullying fat people.

And I've read stuff like this piece, with the line "I wish I didn’t have to justify myself, or base my worth on proving that I’m trying.", and I see myself in that. I've burned myself out multiple times and seriously damaged my physical and mental health as a result of trying to act like I'm neurotypical.

I'm fucking tired of seeing anybody get judged as moral deficients online by people who know nothing about them or their histories.

I mean, that's nice for you, but the difference is that that teasing was coming from the friends, and not internet randos who neither know nor care about you.

Next to nobody who sees that screenshot knows the person in the photo, or whether they're even able to lose weight by "putting in the work".

Also, there's a preponderance of evidence that your case is an outlier, and "teasing" does not improve the lives of its targets.

You never know what somebody is going through, and it costs nothing to be kind.

That's not all it eats, either.

Elections Canada is responsible for recruiting, organizing, and training volunteers, aren't they?

Assuming so, they should know where there are staffing shoftfalls and address them accordingly.

Our democracy is already under threat and not particularly robust in terms of representation. It is absolutely critical to keep people from being further disenfranchised.

It's the errors like the hand that give it away. I don't accept that the style is a giveaway.

The models are trained on work done by human artists and the style was dictated by a human entering specific prompts.

Certain art styles may be more popular with people who are using generators to make images, but that in and of itself is not an indicator of AI slop.

Seems like it would definitely not have a 0 in red?

But it was a great read and I'm glad you posted it.

Edit: lol I dumb

The Liberals say that transfers to provinces and individuals would be off limits, but they aim to save $28 billion over three years by cutting "wasteful" spending and making changes to the government's internal operations, including a cap on the size of the public service.

The dairy and beef lobbies would like to have a word with you, if you'll please just step a little to the right?

Also, the shifty-looking cow in Mass Effect that would pickpocket your credits if you turned your back on it after interacting with it.

✊

Yessss.

My first year of university, I lived in residence and the cafeteria had a nugget ice machine. Every day before class I'd swing through and fill my water bottle to the brim with ice and top if off with water. I'd have enough ice to crunch until my classes were done (not in class, I'm not a monster).

I miss it so much.

Also, a post-mix bar gun. Mostly just for carbonated water, because I'm also a fizz addict and those things are just fun.

I'm happy to heap scorn on my province's weenie premier for his constant folding to regressive bullies and wealthy lobbies, but I gotta admit that he's got nothing on Smith, Legault, Moe, Ford, or Houston.

This country's had some real shithead premiers in its history but it really does feel like a race to the bottom these days.