KobaCumTribute

KobaCumTribute, 1 day ago

I’ve played around a fair bit with Stable Diffusion running locally on my PC and can confidently say it has an absurd potential as a streamlining tool for art because unlike the simple prompt remote tools you have tons of tools available to control composition, pose, details, etc instead of just giving a vague prompt and hitting “generate” over and over like it’s a slot machine and you’re addicted to the rush of seeing if the latest pull will be a winner or more garbage.

That said, if anyone’s actually using it well they’re keeping it to themselves: the hobbyist AI community itself is compromised of the most vapid, talentless dipshits you’ll ever see who want pats on the head for asking the inscrutable machine “pls give good image” while using something like A1111 or Forge because ComfyUI’s extremely simple flowchart UI is too hard for them and they want a single text box they can ask for their skinner box treats instead. And don’t even get me started on civitai, a site that I think I’ve actually gotten addicted to raging at, like I’ll check it multiple times a day just to kind-vladimir-ilyich about its userbase.

I’ve compared it to things like Poser or Daz3d before, which caused floods of absolute dogshit CGI content made with prefab assets that still haven’t completely subsided to this day, which is made all the funnier because of how many people seem to want a terrible faux CGI look out of image generators. That, the weird sort of soft-focus glossy style that makes me think of like sketchy airbrush art on cars for some reason, and the creepy grasping for photorealism are all weirdly popular with them and it’s all uniformly awful drek.

Still, I paradoxically think it has a ton of potential for more minimalist aesthetics where it can serve as a labor amplifier for an artist that can feed it a sketch with maybe some crude shading, and then fix up the output in short order, it can create out-of-focus filler for backgrounds, etc. I strongly believe that open source models should be embraced and exploited for that purpose by independent artists and the left in general, because the corporate use of proprietary models is not going to stop and we should adapt to the way that’s transforming the landscape and seize upon new capital to compete and survive. The only alternative would be adventure-time no-mouth-must-scream bazinga kind-vladimir-ilyich minecraft en masse, and there’s just not a militant anti-AI movement that could do that nor is one going to form because of how abstract and unemotional the problem is.

KobaCumTribute, 2 days ago

That arc sucked so much. Like even setting aside its core racism and liberal chauvinism where the Bad Countries responsible for the problem are silly revolutionaries who are dumb and silly and do dumb silly things and a racist caricature of the DPRK, it’s just a hundred episodes with as much total content and story progression as like, a really light, slow paced 12 episode series does now.

KobaCumTribute, 10 days ago

What is the ratio of meat parts to machine parts at which point “that chair you once sat on” or “the dust bunnies you haven’t swept up yet even though you keep meaning to” are no longer materially a part of you and you subsequently lose your self as a result?

If someone loses their leg and gets a prosthetic does this alienate them from the birds that woke them up last week?

KobaCumTribute, 10 days ago

neither do you

Sure I do: that ratio does not exist, and no you don’t get alienated from your material context if you have a prosthetic limb. We’re made up of parts that perform functions, and we can remain ourselves despite the loss of large chunks of those - so long as someone remains alive and the brain keeps working they’re still themself, they’re still in there.

If someone could keep the functions of the brain ongoing and operating on machine bits they’d still be in there. It may be a transformative and lossy process, it may be unpleasant and imperfect in execution, but the same criticism applies to existing in general: at any point you may be forced out of your normal material context by circumstance and this is traumatic, you may lose the healthy function of large swathes of your body and this is traumatic, you may suffer brain damage and this is traumatic, you’re constantly losing and overwriting memories and this can be normal or it can be traumatic, etc, but through it all you are you and you’re still in there because ontologically speaking you’re the ongoing continuation of yourself, distinct from all the component parts that you’re constantly losing and replacing.

KobaCumTribute, 10 days ago

I didn’t say “you are perfectly happy and have no material problems whatsoever dealing with a traumatic injury and imperfect replacement,” but rather that this doesn’t represent some sort of fundamental loss of self or unmooring from material contexts. People can lose so much, can be whittled away to almost nothing all the way up to the point where continued existence becomes materially impossible due to a loss of vital functions, but through that they still exist, they remain the same ongoing being even if they are transformed by the trauma and become unrecognizable to others in the process.

And would an upload be a person, legally speaking? Would your family consider the upload to be a person? That’s pretty alienating.

If you suffer a traumatic brain injury and lose a large chunk of your brain, that’s going to seriously affect you and how people perceive you, but you’re still legally the same person. If instead that lost chunk was instead replaced with a synthetic copy there may still be problems but less so than just losing it outright. So if that continues until you’re entirely running on the new synthetic replacement substrate, then you have continued to exist through the entire process just as you continue to exist through the natural death and replacement of neurons - for all we know copying and replacing may not even be necessary compared to just adding synthetic bits and letting them be integrated and subsumed into the brain by the same processes by which it grows and maintains itself.

A simple copy taken like a photograph and then spun up elsewhere would be something entirely distinct, no more oneself than a picture or a memoir.

KobaCumTribute, 10 days ago

“If shitty things happen to you, then you will not like that and it will suck,” still doesn’t break the continuity of self. Fundamentally that same exact thing can happen to the current flesh and blood you and it would be horrible and destructive: you can be disfigured through an accident or through someone’s cruelty, you can be locked in a cage and dehumanized on the whim of the state-sanctioned professional violence men and given a farce of a trial by the dysfunctional shitshow that is the legal system, etc, but no one is going to argue that shitty things happening to you ontologically unpersons you in some sort of mystical fashion.

You can be reduced, you can be transformed, but you continue existing for as long as vital functions do. Talk about someone becoming someone else, or dying in truth long before they died in body, those are just poetic attempts at articulating sorrow and loss.

KobaCumTribute, 18 days ago

Touchscreens are ludicrously dangerous interfaces for cars that have basically only proliferated because of techbro dipshits mucking about with things they don’t understand. Cars need fixed controls that provide physical feedback and which don’t require reading or light to operate. Like that’s not a matter of taste, that’s a basic “this is usable and safe” thing.

KobaCumTribute, 27 days ago

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/0147915c-09e6-49f3-ba56-f537cd74922f.png

KobaCumTribute, 1 month ago

It’s absurdly funny that a company literally tried to hire “uh yeah I just babble tags at the inscrutable machine and it makes neat looking little things don’t it” guys thinking that that’s an actual skill set. They didn’t even know how to use the tools that local AI generators have, they just gave it prompts lmao.

KobaCumTribute, 2 months ago

“People would be so mad if they knew how many mercenaries were thrown away into this meatgrinder in gormless human wave attacks, surely they would demand we start throwing even more lives away into the meatgrinder! Will we ask for public approval? No, we’re just gonna go with the tossing people into the meatgrinder idea, surely it’s what they want. Well it’s what we want, anyways, so that’s what they’re getting. Tossed into the meatgrinder for our vanity.”

Something something, the savage European peninsula where life is cheap, something something brainpans, something something bloodthirsty scions of Mars.

KobaCumTribute, 2 months ago

all-my-apes-gone stonks-down

KobaCumTribute, 3 months ago

downbear Generative AI is a labor issue, not a property issue, except as it pertains to the models themselves which as they seek to enclose all of human culture should themselves be public domain and owned by all.

The easiest way to prove this is this simple thought experiment: if a major corporation, say Disney, could have a model produced exclusively with material it owned or otherwise licensed for the explicit purpose of model training, would that it make it ok for that model to then be used in their animation studios or licensed out to other studios? And the answer is a resounding no: it doesn’t matter that they own the property involved, because the harm the model is doing is to skilled labor. So clearly the question of property is just a diversion that keeps the discourse within boundaries that are favorable to huge corporations who can easily own all they need.

That’s why my stance has been and remains that generative AI should be a copyright poison pill: the models should be public domain even if trained on licensed art, the direct outputs of them should be public domain, works that include them should be public domain including the parts that aren’t AI generated, and as an extra penalty all the IP within a work containing generative AI should become public domain as well. So if, say, Disney were to use some generative AI in a Star Wars movie, not only should that movie become public domain but the entire Star Wars IP should as well, along with all the Disney trademarks they toss in in splash screens at the front just because fuck them.

KobaCumTribute, 3 months ago

Lmao I think I got into it with that exact same dipshit on reddit before. The exact wording and grievances he’s rambling about give it away. He is extremely mad that the lemmy devs called him a racist for his racist takes and he’s been on a one man crusade against them ever since.

KobaCumTribute, 4 months ago

There are the super complex ComfyUI setups with conditioning and segmenting and other stuff I don’t understand

That reminds me I should try to get comfyui setup. I’ve just been using auto1111, although that still has weird stuff like cross-attention control which I haven’t even started to fuck with.

the new turbo models that can give you a new wacky image as fast as you can type

Yeah, SDXL Turbo is wild. I’ve heard it’s down to like .1 seconds per image on a high end consumer card, and on my (mid range AMD) card it’s a few seconds. The only downside is the comparative lack of community assets for it (for a variety of reasons), and the lower overall quality than SDXL or SD1.5. Well, that and the fact that SDXL Turbo is apparently proprietary and more strictly controlled than the older models. Still, the fact that a model can generate results as good as that with so few sampling passes is just absurd.

KobaCumTribute, 4 months ago

Replace it with “woke” when you see it and you’ll get it: it’s migrated from being a terminally online sectarian term to the new right wing slur for anyone who’s not racist enough for them.

KobaCumTribute, 5 months ago

Ngl I think “that time I got publicly embarrassed by Henry Kissinger and then weeks later thought up a snappy comeback and told myself the story where I was smart and witty so many times I replaced all my memories of the actual event with the new synthetic ones” is the kind of thing that’d stick with you even as you start to forget where you are, what’s going on, or how to draw a clock. It’s gotta be one of those high-emotion and often revisited old peaks that becomes practically impossible to lose even as everything else goes.

KobaCumTribute, 7 months ago

Probably something like the daughter being abused for being straight, or something really brainwormed like the book being a bible and she’s some weirdo evangelical convert in an atheist house as if people naturally gravitate towards repressive cults without being groomed into it.