Okay, so, looks like Google Docs might actually start implementing their rule about not sharing explicit content. (This includes writing.) How in the ever loving fuck am I supposed to back up 1,000+ stories that equate to 3 million+ words into fucking Microsoft Word????? And efficiently, for that matter?! HELP.

I figured out how to move all my stuff onto Microsoft Word!

See those three dots next to the folder name? Click on that.

Then it'll give you the download option.

Once downloaded, it'll save the folder as a compressed zip file! All the documents inside are changed to Word files, and you can view and edit them now.

Now I know how to move 3 million+ words onto my laptop. It'll still take a bit, but not nearly as long as I'd imagined.

I would like to add that I am not trying to fear-monger. However, it is part of Google Drive’s TOS to not share explicit material, be it sexual or violent. (So, basically what I write.)

This occurrence seems to be rare. Read about it here.

Besides, it is better to have everything on your own hard drive vs Google docs. You retain more ownership over your work that way.

Someone pointed out that I did not provide the ToS, which, my bad. Again, not trying to cause a panic or anything. Just saying that Google is not a safe place to keep your writing/art.

This is the specific part of the ToS that I was looking at:

And this is the part that says they can restrict access to your writing or remove it entirely for breaking the ToS:

So, yeah. An author lost access to their writing due to sharing it with beta and alpha readers. It seems like an isolated incident as far as I’m aware, but you can never be too careful. Back up your stuff if you can.

Reblogging mostly for the How To Backup From Gdocs info too many don't know about; this also works with Libre and others, as that's what I have.

Still investigating for more than anecdotal evidence this is actually a new concern with Gdocs, or if someone got hit with a ban for something weird with the automation.

Yes, the TOS information is still there and always has been, but whether the auto-mods are trying to catch out private writings and fiction shared or not, I'm still digging for more than screenshots from 1 group chat. The links in the screenshots (linked by OP in one of the reblogs) are the monthly Search updates report and the basic TOS info.

It's also possible someone simply reported the writer which is how they got hit, given the policy page linked.

@thebibliosphere

Good info on how to do the backups.

My money would be on someone reporting them, tbh. I've seen quite a few stories on Twitter recently about a few NSFW artists and writers who have managed to fly under Ko-fi's extremely strict NSFW ban for years suddenly up and losing their accounts (and access to PayPal, because Ko-fi is essentially a PayPal wrapper) because people were reporting them.

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

Me upon being isekaid to a fantasy world: you say you dont have magic but you conjured up that frog the other day whats with that

Wizard who spent decades mastering his craft, understands how and why it works, and processes it entirely as a regular part of his day to day life: did you just call creature conjuring magic

Works the other way around too in isekais.

that wizard: and you said you don't have magic in your world but there are lights that come on, that do not use candles or flames or emit any heat at all, the moment that you walk into a room? you don't even have to say anything?

me, squirming uncomfortably: for a while there an earlier version ran off of two claps

the wizard: an earlier version of what? the spell? the spell you use to make the lights come on?

The spirit of Diogenes is alive and well

This is funny, obviously, but even if you don't go to the extreme of the example above, this is a separate seat for one person, with a back and 4 legs:

But it's not a chair. It's a bar stool.

This, however, are all chairs:

Each one is missing at least one component of the chair definition above.

So like... it's almost like strict definitions are exclusionary.

Reblog to hit a transphobe with a separate seat for one person

Reblog to hit a

transphobe with a separate

seat for one person

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I've been collecting these for a few weeks and I NEED MORE

What if someone created an AI that was educated purely from everything on Tumblr?

.

there is @nostalgebraist-autoresponder, she is based on GPT-J and learnt more from reading her notes, aswell as trying to iminate her creators blog

yeah this is how i work

Yes but we are all so nice to you Frank, you're not getting the full experience. Please, tell me your opinion on Steven universe so I'll send you a death threat over it

I don't know who that is but I love death threats

lord the peasants are so loud today

pheasants. PHeasants. The birds

Don't you mean classist Typo, as in discriminating against poor people, and not classicist, the type of academic who studies antiquity in southern Europe?

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”

[image transcript:

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

—Kyle Tran Myhre. end id]

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”

[image transcript:

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

—Kyle Tran Myhre. end id]

Wait I have another one sorry

me when im giving birth to my twins

me when I'm giving birth to my triplets

I've asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it's your problem:

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.

Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.

Not naming options to skew votes but...

I think there's something fundamentally baffling with the way most of you think.

#we were wrong about fairies being real but given that they are #nothing else about one being on my doorstep is surprising

#because I don't know anything about fairies. anything a fairy does would make sense because what do I know? might as well happen

#vs #how did a walrus travel 80+ miles inland?

#how did it travel 80 miles through an urban area of 3mil people without anyone noticing?

#how did it make it to the 3rd floor?

#how did it knock?

#why was there a walrus visiting a shore that hasn't seen walrus in 5mil years?

#does alaska know it's wildlife if making house calls 1000s of miles away?

#was it a zoo escape? HOW?? they are slow and cannot scale or jump fences. does the zoo know?

#why of all the doorsteps it could've chosen on its way did it choose mine?

#how did it knock

HOW DID IT KNOCK??

See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.

Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.

It is important to note that this action was not an "oh, Nazis ALSO targetted other prople". They directly linked Hirschfeld's institute and research to claims of a Jewish plot to destroy German society.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.

Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.

Something I really don't understand about AI companies buying the rights to steal content from social media to feed their data training sets is, well. It's illegal as hell.

That content does not belong to the social media companies to start with. Personal data is a bit nebulous as it is, and some countries have better protection about it than others, but posting a picture on tumblr doesn't mean that Automatic automatically has the right to use, distribute and sell it as it sees fit.

I mean. Official accounts for big companies like Disney use social media for advertising. But posting a picture of Elsa on Twitter doesn't mean they're giving Twitter the right to use and sell that picture. But suddenly Twitter sells the nebulous ability to "scrape content from Twitter for AI training", so now Midjourney owns that picture of Elsa? What's the fucking ruling there?

People own the rights of what they have created even without officially registering it for trademarking (which is expensive as hell, by the way). Social media selling content means that they are selling copyrighted material created by its users- Some of it coming from big companies that have trademarked the shit out of everything, some of it coming from small creators who STILL have the rights to what they've created even without a trademark.

Curently, what you produce through AI generators is not actually copyrighted, since it was not made by a human, but what gets fed into the data training sets is often copyrighted material from unconsenting people. It basically is a copyright laundering scheme.

I do wholeheartedly hope that some regulations will be put in place, and hoping that big companies will, at least, do their best to help this case even if its just to protect their own IPs and property. Given how overprotective have Disney, Nintendo and other big names been about their content, I can't expect they'll be happy having it being sold to Midjourney, OpenAI and other crap for free, without their consent.

"if i was orpheus i would simply not turn around" yes you would. if you were orpheus and you loved eurydice, you would. to love someone is to turn around. to love someone is to look at them. whichever version of the myth — he hears her stumble, he can't hear her at all, he thinks he's been tricked — he turns around because he loves her. that's why it's a tragedy. because he loves her enough to save her. because he loves her so much he can't save her. because he will always, always turn around. "if i was orpheus i would simply —" you wouldn't be orpheus. you wouldn't be brave enough to walk into the underworld and save the person you love. be serious

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

How fiction affects reality is about how it meshes with your internal templates for how the real world works.

Ratings are based on a rough estimate of when most people will have those templates form. For instance, there’s a standard for children’s media which states that you’re not supposed to include imitable violence more severe than an open-handed slap, because kids are just learning the overrides for the monkey-brain “if someone makes us angry, we hit them to send a message” drive. You can’t make a show for preschoolers that shows how to throw a punch, because they might very well just start punching people.

But you can show your average teenager as much punching as you want, and unless their parents REALLY fucked up, they won’t take it to mean “this is how you solve ANY problem, from a threat to your life, to someone looking at you funny.” When you can show the use of realistic guns to a person without them deciding that shooting people is a good idea depends on a lot of personal and cultural factors, but as a standard we can settle on people tend to agree that, as long as it doesn’t settle into reinforcing stereotypes as a possible invocation of “things that are okay only to defend your own life” or blatant war propaganda or similar exceptions, most adults can see all the violence they want - yes, even glorified violence - without turning into a violent menace themselves.

If you have it impressed upon you your whole life that killing people is bad - as you will, unless you have the worst kind of parents imaginable - you can watch your favorite action star kill tons of dudes, or play games that are just excuse plots for killing tons of dudes, or read about a million and a half creative ways to get away with killing tons of dudes, and you’re still not going to run out and kill tons of dudes or even think it might be okay to kill tons of dudes. This is because your mental template for how the world works strongly emphasizes “death = tragic; killing people = hurtful and bad”. Again, it might fuck with your head if the explanation for why killing tons of dudes is justified in the context of this piece of media aligns with common stereotypes of real people, or your own preexisting biases - this is how propaganda works - but even in THOSE cases a lot more factors have to align to get someone to the full extreme end and think “yes, killing tons of dudes irl is the answer to all my problems!”

It’s where people have weaker templates that’s really a problem. For example, most Americans have no idea that Cairo in the modern day like this:

…because they’ve been inundated with media that portrays Egypt as looking homogeneously like this:

And - and this is the important part - they have had little to no experience to tell them otherwise.

Now, I’m assuming the majority of the people reading this post don’t live in Cairo - if you do, take this shoutout! - and if you are in that majority that doesn’t, imagine if someone tried to pass something like this off as your own hometown. Obviously, you’ll call bullshit! You’ve seen that place and it’s nothing like that!

But if it’s a place you don’t know anything about beyond the fact that it exists and has these famous landmarks for these famous historical reasons, then anyone can…pretty much just say whatever they want from that baseline, no matter how absurd, and you will probably accept it as, if not a fact, at least a believable fictionalization with some basis in reality. At most, maybe you’ll go

This is how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes - by getting in where you don’t know better and forming your mental template. It can even work if you do have real-life counterexamples, when those real-life counterexamples are uncommon enough or you don’t spend enough time with them - if you know maybe 5 members of a minority group and none of them act like the 500 stereotyped examples you see on TV, you’re likely to end up thinking “okay, there are exceptions to the rule”, rather than “the rule is bullshit”.

This is why “honest, varied representation matters” and “not all fiction is 1:1 monkey-see-monkey-do propaganda and it’s really dickish to assume the worst of someone just because they like one (1) game that you see unfortunate implications in or something” are both statements that can and should coexist.

support human artists and stand against generative AI 🖤 buy a wallpaper or leave a tip / twitter / instagram / shop 

I think the best way to fight this AI shit is just to support actual creators. The cat's out of the bag with AI; our data's going to be taken and used without our consent whether we like it or not, so maybe we should put efforts into holding up those who create their own stuff. Comment/interact on people's writings and art. Make it worth them posting; make it clear that what the people are interested in isn't generated stuff, but things that people have actually done themselves. It's a drop in the ocean, but showing creators that it's them that deserve the support at least serves to cut off a tiny bit of oxygen to these AI hogs - and make a difference to creatives who are trying against hope to share with a community.