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It's Way Too Early For This

@tiredangelaziegler / tiredangelaziegler.tumblr.com

Khiera, 30, Black, PA. I cry alot and love so many, many things. Welcome to Hell! Header and Sidebar art by Pugcrumbs
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As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

That’s… not how class works

OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.

She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).

He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).

And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!

Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.

Probably especially rich ones.

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roach-works

people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"

like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."

like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.

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bramblepatch

This is also why means testing is bullshit, especially in education, especially in higher education. The child of a rich person attending a public university on public money is less likely to be a spoiled elite taking advantage of resources they don't need, and more likely to be a young person who has finally gotten out from under the thumb of an abusive and exploitative authority figure and is taking steps to build a life that isn't dependent on agreeing with their family's politics.

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People who love you shouldn't make you feel ashamed of your interests and hobbies. What you enjoy is wonderful, even if it's uncommon, complicated, stereotypical, etc. Please keep sharing your lovely energy with the world.

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tropics777

And in these next 50 years you will eat so many delicious meals, laugh so many times with so many people you love, shout and scream and sing and cry and smile so hard your face hurts. And you will see such beautiful sunsets and feel fresh cold air on your face and feel warm and safe wrapped up in your favourite winter coat.

I wrap this blessing around you like a shroud, so that no ill can find you, and every warmth is held close

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had a dream last night that the new tumblr discourse was whether or not people deserved their urls and people were getting callouts and anon hate like "I can't believe you have x in your url when I never see you actually post about them it's pretty messed up that you're taking that url away from other people who actually deserve it :/"

This was genuine discourse in 2012 you guys need to remember your history

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Begging people to stop reblogging this AI trash from “The Phantom Painter” on Instagram (instagram.com/phantom.painting). I’ve been seeing it on my dash more and more often from people who are otherwise anti-AI and either can’t tell it’s AI or don’t care because it looks cool.

This is the kind of shit that is VERY CLEARLY trained on the works of existing talented artists’ with distinct styles and this asshole is selling prints and making a profit off of stealing other people’s hard work.

Don’t give people like this money or attention and they will go away.

Please, if you’re going to buy art prints, buy them from an actual artist.

@thegnat That’s the problem, it’s getting really hard to tell what’s AI and what isn’t. This phantom painter person at least says on each post on Instagram that it was created with AI, but when people re-post it on tumblr, it isn’t specified, and people end up reblogging it.

It’s not reasonable to think everyone should be vetting every single art they reblog to make sure it isn’t AI, which is why I made this post to let people know this artist specifically is AI, and I see it reblogged a ton.

While we’re at it

and so is everything by that person, xis.lanyx on Instagram. They also sell prints of their “original images”

That last one is for the people saying “you can always tell by the hands.” You cannot. The whole point is that it’s getting better and better at it. That’s what it does.

As an art curator on tumblr I now have to spend a considerable amount of time trying to decipher whether or not the art I want to share is AI or not and I still sometimes get it wrong.

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owlpellet

To actually answer the question of how one can determine something is AI, particularly as it grows more sophisticated with anatomy: you have to train yourself to recognize artifacts.

There is no one single unifying giveaway beyond a strange sense of uncanny that you will eventually begin to recognize the better you attune yourself, and certain models have their own unique “styles” you can begin to recognize (midjourney and stablediffusion produce very different looks, for example). There are however a few things on which one can tend to focus.

  • Edges: AI, as of this post, still struggles with distinct edges of objects and figures and has a tendency to blend details together. Look for hair, ribbons, and other flowy details if present. Do they fade into other details? Look at how the hair fuses with the smoke:
  • Edges 2: Sometimes they will also have the edges completely avoid each other, with a foreground figure slightly warping along the edges in a way that matches the background edges, like repelling magnets:
  • Patterns: AI, as of this post, still struggles with patterns. Filigrees, mandalas, brickwork, scales, anything that involves a high level of intricate detail tends to get blurred together. This can be a tricky one, because a lot of artists will also fudge pattern details in looser renders, but usually in a way that makes sense as an impression and not…. this:
  • Architecture: Are there buildings present in the image? AI has a tendency to make Escher-esque nonsense structures, with pillars in places they don’t belong, arches that go nowhere, bricks that don’t align, and support beams that start on one plane and connect to another. It also struggles with perspective, but, so do many humans so I would not consider it evidence alone. Check out the placement of this pillar, and also the detail on the… window? Candle cage?? Thing?
  • Resolution and quality: AI cannot make high-resolution images. It just cannot. While most artists aren’t posting their full resolutions, generative images can’t be enhanced, and the “artist” will not be able to provide proof of work. You should be able to zoom into work by an artist and admire their strokes, relate to their errors, and appreciate their process at every skill level– zooming into generative images somehow makes them even less clear, a mess of pixels that are somehow both blurry and also look like they have been run through a sharpen filter:
  • Text and signatures: AI struggles with legible characters in any language, and the result is a simlish-looking approximation of characters at worst, and hilariously misspelled words at best. Since these models are trained off real artists, they will also often have artifacts of a signature that oopsed its way into the image. These signatures are always illegible or, if “legible”, are not actually the names of real accounts.

Things like this can be tough to spot at a glance if you’re not actively keyed into looking for them, but they’re the type of uncanny stuff that once you see it will start gnawing at the back of your mind. You’ll be scrolling your feed and suddenly take -1 psychic damage and you have to scroll back up to see why. Stuff that goes beyond inconsistent lightsources and bad anatomy.

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