unreal is an anagram for lauren

Berlin, Germany (by Moises Gonzales)

Legendary horror manga artist Junji Ito loved the Barbie movie (x)

@shark-in-a-whale-costume

we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think "at least 3" is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are

wait it gets better

i think the most wholesome prank i ever pulled was with a friend who had a polaroid camera and we were out one evening walking around the neighbourhood and this one neighbour had a garden gnome and we kidnapped him for the evening and took a bunch of polaroids of his wild night out: gnome on the swing set, gnome climbing a tree, gnome laying down next to an empty bottle of vodka, gnome just causing an absolute ruckus and then we took all the pictures and put them in a little see-through food storage bag to keep them dry and put them under the gnome who we left on the doorstep of the house we got him from 

anyway a few nights later we walked past again and wondered if the photos had been found and what the person must have thought and then we saw the gnome in pride of place balanced on the window ledge, and stuck to the inside of the window behind him were the polaroids with a sign saying “The Boy On Tour” 

Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

This has been making the rounds, and it's great, and I wanted to mention a thought I had:

Glaze is not "poisoning the data set." The data set is "art what people post on the internet" and Glaze is part of that, along with animated gifs, patchwork mosaic pictures, badly-photoshopped memes, and so on. Putting a filter on artwork before publishing it is not new - and yet nobody is complaining about "this photo was taken in the daytime but you put a blue filter on it to look like night! How dare!"

Now, if the AI art folks had asked permission to use an archive that sad "Best Fantasy Book Cover Settings," and then the artists started using Glaze, the AI pushers might have a point. What the AI generates based on the pictures won't look like fantasy book cover settings; what they agreed to and what they received were different.

But if they're just scraping deviant and tumblr and individual art sites... the data isn't "poisoned" because it contains data not visible to the human eye. If the artists all start using steganography to put hidden messages in the pictures, like in The Martian... that is not poisoning anyone's data. Not the artist's fault if the data includes parts you didn't notice at first view.

The AI bots were not promised access to artwork that would look similar to the original after the AI bot analyzed it. No data is being poisoned; it's just changed to adapt to a new environment.

CONGRATS AI BOTS! You have spawned your very own Human Consensus Construct that is reacting to changes in the community! The AI bots are being treated like people - like hostile or at least annoying people - and communities are taking the kind of actions they always take against unwanted encroachment.

They make their resources harder to access. In this case, the resources aren't "art" which is sticking around but "pictures that both machines and humans recognize as matching a particular set of keywords."

And no. They weren't promised machine-readable art that could be twisted around into slightly different pics that humans would still recognize.

If anyone says the "data is being poisoned" ask them which data pool they were talking about. Because "art posted on the internet" hasn't gone anywhere. I still see plenty of it.

Bullying RLHF to generate some pokemon from the Roman Empire be like:

barbie in disco elysium

I kind of love that one of Jane Austen's biggest fans was the Prince Regent (later George IV). She didn't think very well of the nobility in general, but she motherfucking hated him, a wastrel who very flagrantly cheated on his wife.

But he loved her writing, was the first recorded purchaser of Sense and Sensibility, and kept copies of her books in all his residences. She never made enough from her writing to live on during her lifetime, so this wasn't support she could casually toss aside. His librarian kept suggesting ideas for new books to her, which she turned down with exquisite politeness. Much to her aggravation, she found herself obliged to dedicate Emma to the man.

Local Novelist Is So Talented She Can't Beat Royal Patron Off With A Stick

You can read more about this here

I've thought about it and this is so funny because a moral novelist having to civilly endure being patronized by a dissolute nobleman who loves but also totally doesn't get her books is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in a Jane Austen novel.

WAIT NOW HOLD ON A SECOND THERE BUCKO

I love how Arakawa clearly wrote detailed backstories for her characters and just like… never elaborates on them. I found an old interview where she was asked why she didn’t include a resolution for Hawkeye and Mustangs goals and her response was essentially “cause this story is about Ed :)”

She’s my biggest inspiration.

The Tiger Poem in Classical Maya!

Literal translation:

Transliteration:

Character Transliteration (ALL CAPS are characters that stand for full words, lower case are syllabic):

No fucking way. I have been informed this isn’t an edit

this is a joke right? this is photoshopped. it looks so fucking goofy there’s no way this actually appeared in a serious high-budget movie, right?

The only way for me to prove this isn’t a joke is to watch it myself and I refuse to do that. I simply have it on good authority it is real.