AlexanderESmith

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

I have no problem with the notion that the book has some historical accuracy and some embellishment (and some outright fabrication).

What I have a problem with is people insisting that everything in the book is real and they'll kill you for sorting yourself into the wrong Hogwarts house.

Since they can't play nice with their fan-fiction, I'd prefer to shut the whole site down.

(sorry devolved into too many metaphors there)

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

Squirrels.

Grew up in Chicago, currently in Phoenix. I miss squirrels.

All the lizards are pretty cool though. They're like desert squirrels.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

I've been using a private domain for literally 100% of my logins for decades. Refuse to use SSO. Never had a service tell me that my email was invalid.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

I've known my best friend for 20.5 years. We're getting married in March (close to the 21 year mark).

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

Fuuuck.

It seems like just yesterday I was listening to Dana's comedy bits about Dex as a ~5 year old.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

Why the fuck would you pause it? They should lock an actual gag around his mouth and leave it there.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

@AlternatePersonMan

Because no one who can do anything about it gives a shit.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

Please swallow the entire galaxy... Just let this shit end already.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

@Track_Shovel

Looks like Carmen SanDiego's henchmen are at it again

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@mindbleach

That's a terrible take, my dude.

Also, no one is arguing against the technology existing, they're upset about how it's being trained. Two different things.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@fubo

It's been suggested that AI art created without human input cannot be receive copyrights;

https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

@burliman

You can prompt an image genrater to just spit out the original art it trained on.

Imagine I had been classically trained as a painter. I study works from various artists. I become so familiar with those works - and skilled as a renderer of art in my own right - that I can reproduce, say, the Mona Lisa from memory with exacting accuracy. Should I be allowed to claim it as my art? Sign my name to it? Sell it as my own?

Now lets say we compare the original and my work at the micron level. I'm human, there's no way I can match the original stroke for stroke, bristle to bristle. However small, there are differences. When does the work become transformative?

Let's switch to an image generator. I ask for a picture of a smiling woman, renaissance style. The model happens to be biased to DaVinci, and it spits out almost exactly the same work as the Mona Lisa. Let's say as a prompt engineer, I've never heard of or seen the Mona Lisa. I take the image, decide "meh, good enough for what I need right now", and use it in some commercial product (say, a t-shirt). Should I be able to do that? What if it's not the Mona Lisa, it's a work from a living artist?

What if it's not an image? Say I tell some model to make a song and it accidentally produces Greenday's Basketcase (which itself is basically just a modified Pachelbel's Canon), can I put that on a record and sell it? Who's responsibility is it to make sure that a model's output is unique or transformative? Shit, look at all the legal cases where musicians are suing other musicians because the chord progression is similar in two songs; What happens when it's exactly the same because the prompt engineer for a music generation model isn't paying attention?

You might have noticed that I haven't referred to this technology as AI. That's because it's not. It's Machine Learning. It has no intelligence. It neither seeks to create beautiful, original art, nor does it intend to rip someone off. It has no plans, no aspirations, no context, no whims. It's a parrot, spitting out copies of things we ask it for. In general, these outputs are mixtures of various things, but sometimes they aren't. They just output some of the training data, because that's the output that - statistically - was the best match for the prompt.

As an artist myself, I don't fear machine learned models. I fear that these greedy fuckin' companies will warehouse any and every bit of data they can get their hands on, train their models on other people's work, never pay them a dime, and rip off the essence of their art without any regard for what will happen to the original artists after some jackass execs tell all their advertising/webdesign/programming/scriptwriting/etc departments to just ask the "AI" to "design" everything.

You can already see this happening with game studios. Writers went on strike over it.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@admin

It was a hypothetical, I was just using myself as an example. Here's one that's not hypothetical:

I'm already a practiced in 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, lightning, rendering, compositing, etc. I could recreate a painting, pixel for pixel, in 3D space.

If I just hit render, is that my art now? It took a lot of research to learn how to do this, I should be able to make money on that effort, right?

I can do that millions of times and get the same result. I can set it on a loop and get as many as I want. It's the same as copying the first render's file, it just takes longer.

Now I decide to change the camera angle. Almost the entire image is technically different now, but the composition is the same. The colors, the subjects, relative placement in the scene, all the same, but it's not really the same image anymore. Is it mine yet?

I can set the camera to a random X,Y,Z position, and have it point at a random object in the scene (so it never points off into blank space). Are those images mine? It's never the same twice, but it still has the original artist's style of subjects and lighting. I can even randomize each subjects position, size, hue, direction, add a modifier that distorts them to be wobbly or cubic... I can start generating random objects and throwing them in too, let's call those "hallucinations", thats a fun word...

At what specific point in this madness does the imagery go from someone else's work to mine?

I absolutely can generate millions of unique images all day. Without using machine learning, based on work I recreated with my own human hands, and code I write uniquely from my experience and abilities. None of the work - artistically - is mine. I made no decisions on composition, style, meaning, mood, color theory, etc.

You may want to try to write these questions off, but I can tell you with certainty that other artists won't.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@TokenBoomer

If you think you can reduce the solution to this problem (or even a proper description of the problem itself) into a quick reply on a web forum, you're part of the problem.

Honestly, everyone I've seen weigh in on this has fucked it up, on all sides, at all times, going all the way back.

Maybe a bunch of armchair geniuses should stay out of it, unless they're willing to drop what they're doing and go over there to help. Meddling from external parties is part of how this got so fucked up (over and over and over).

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@TokenBoomer

Well done; you missed the point entirely, slung some useless mud, and figured out a way to turn it into self- praise. You should run for office.

Everyone stop what you're doing at look over here at... "TokenBoomer"... they'll get to the bottom of this, on a web forum, deep in a thread with... Hey! 5 boosts! We're almost there, I can feel it.

Like and subscribe, thoughts and prayers.

AlexanderESmith, 6 months ago

@Reality_Suit

I agree, I was being sardonic/sarcastic :p

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@ShitOnABrick

I've been using nVidia cards on laptops with Ubuntu much exclusively for ~15 years . Only problem I've ever had was once when I accidentally uninstalled something using apt-get and it took the nvidia drivers with it (because I'm was stupid).

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

@Macaroni9538

I've been using Clevo laptops for years. Large user base, lots of great Linux support. I just run Ubuntu, haven't had many issues (and no critical issues).

They usually get rebranded, and I've gotten them through IBuyPower, Origin, and... can't remember the other one. My most recent one was just straight up marketed as a Clevo, got it on Amazon.

You might have one or two odd issues (like having to install custom code to configure the RGB key backlights), but there are plenty of users to ask for assistance on various forums and repos.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

Sure, I'm not doing anything next week.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

I mean, who hasn't made that mistake?

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

https://xkcd.com/386/

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

To be fair; Some people just have shitty friends.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

I 100% agree. Right now, people are just kind of mildly irritated. My irritation is more than mild, hence my leaving entirely.

I'm just speculating now, but it's possible that the Google anti-trust might result in YouTube spinning off again. If they also see that coming, they might be trying to backstop it while they still have time and resources to try things (cutting off adblockers, increasing premium fees, they already changed how rev-sharing eligibility and payouts work, etc).

There's a high chance that they're going to make the wrong move and piss everyone off, or people will just stop putting up with 2 minutes of unskippable ads before, then again during, then after each video. Content will start getting pirated en masse, advertiserzers will drop (or pay less, or force even more ads to compensate, which is what already happened), and the cycle will continue and get worse until the service just collapses under it's own weight.

Something will take it's place. Probably multiple things. I just hope federated services are among them. Hell, people adopted Crypto ferociously, which was extremely expensive and completely useless. Even if federated video is expensive, at least it does something.

AlexanderESmith, 7 months ago

That's one of the use-cases I've had in mind. You have your site, you have a video. If you posted your video to your site though PeerTube (or really any implementation of ActivityPub), both your direct site viewers AND anyone searching PeerTube (et al) would see it.

If lots of people did that, you have a basis for a version of distributed YouTube. Small creators' (or people just messing around) videos might load slower or only have lower bandwidth options (resolution), but larger, focused creators (CorridorCrew, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, etc) would have more options through viewer support and collaborations.