generative AI is rapidly becoming too good at what it does for humans to be able to tell it apart from humanoid work. too many innocent artists get caught in the crossfire as it is and that will only get worse. I don’t think that is good, but that being what it is, I continue to approach this as a competition. we cannot win against a machine at realism or at following the patterns of past stylistic conventions. my current mission is to write something so strange that no machine could have written it, so audacious no corporation would have allowed it. I suggest to all other artists to break every rule you can because the rigid mind of the machine will not follow us into uncharted territory. have we not always survived against mediocrity this way, long before slop was outsourced to machines? this changes little for us. go make art.

@winter *looks at entire oeuvre* yeah I guess I'm doing my part. but then the machines will attempt to suck it up like a sashimi. which why I only post where the scrapers will never find

@risperdoll I figure they will find my entire corpus of work one way or another, but it will be useless to them because all they will make from it is the equivalent of a 2010s hollywood adaptation of a classic cyberpunk anime starring scarlet johansen

@winter my work is extremely unhinged and unprofitable so I'm safe regardless I just don't want to be assimilated into the AI Tang cogputational mandatory voluntary polycule that is forming

@winter one time someone told me they thought a piece of art was ai and we looked closer and there were a lot of mistakes a human could make that an ai couldnt. thats one of the things that fucks with me abour "ai = slop" like . yea theres plenty of ways ai art gets things wrong and ruins the piece but people are starting to equate sloppiness with ai when like . ai's mistakes are never very human at all, and humans have been making their own slop without help forever. i really hate the idea that a less experienced artist's piece could be confused for ai bc i cant imagine how insanely discouraging that might be

@winter irrespective of the putative quality of the so-called generated art, the transformational effects these machines have on the humans using them is frankly disgusting. they turn their users into arrogant pushers entitled to their way in everything, and makes them less able to work with actual people. it's creepy.

@atax1a yeah though I do still continue to assert that we should be basing our arguments on things like that instead of on the perceived æsthetic quality of their output or what constitutes real art because that continues to harm artists more than it harms capitalism.

@winter yep yep we're in agreement on this point

@risperdoll @winter they will add a manic pixelated dream girl character

@SleepyCat @risperdoll what’s wrong with dissociative child abuse nightmare girl

@winter @SleepyCat focus audiences considered her "creepy," "not perky enough," "problematic because of her fear of her mother," "a misandrist bitch who hates her father," "pathetic," and, above all, "a tumblrina"

@winter @SleepyCat a statistically insignificant portion of the audience reacted extremely positively towards her. all of them have been safely confined and pumped full of risperdone for the safety of normies

@winter @risperdoll@social.xenofem.me Stardust (my work) has probably been already scraped as all of it is publicly accessible but, like, whatever? To an AI it's basically just dollar-store Mass Effect or dollar-store Star Trek.

@winter ...I have a very low opinion of my work I guess, to the point where I think I'm a worse writer than the average LLM. I dunno if it's healthy. Probably isn't. Maybe it's my depression talking.
I need a hug

@maxthefox that's such a writer thing to say, no bigger critic than ourselves

@winter never saw llms really doing anything good at writing ime

Even for busywork stuff that necessitates slop, it felt clearly bad and I just rewrote it myself

@winter I just don't think commercial generative models are that relevant to the art world. It's just money working as it always has. People have always thrown tons of money at bottom-of-the-barrel genre fiction and mall paintings, now those things are free and the stuff you like is higher-value in comparison--why would you not be overjoyed? What, were you surprised that everyone was really more interested in pretending to have good taste than actually being invested in alien forms of expression?

Oh, speaking of alien forms of expression, I might be doing some mischaracterization here but aren't you all like, posthuman body-modifying machine enjoyers? What's up with the indomitable human spirit posting? What are we actually doing here? Why is the play not "make our own machines that are capable of writing in never-before-seen ways, then smoke weed with them or some shit"? idk im rereading the xf manifesto rn and i never thought it said that much besides "use the tools you have" but you gotta start from there at least

@erin @winter The friction created when creativity bucks up against exploitation is increasing, and gen ai is the force responsible. If we look at the history of the wellbeing of those invested in making artworks, we see that our wellbeing along with every other toiler and mammal and sentient thing was never tied to the health of the market or of demand or of legitimacy but in unions, solidarity, community, blind dumb violent luck, privilege, mutual aid, and sometimes a speck of cleverness. The mostly posthumous exceptions notwithstanding, anyone setting herself up to be in a position to produce content that might be competing with the output of grok or whatever was never going to be creating anything worth creating to begin with - at least not if one's rubric for worthwhile is determined by the commercial viability of the content. Anyone out there who would have worked with or commissioned me who chose to type a prompt instead would not have actually supported me. Any company that avails itself of that to make a product to sell wouldn't have done anything but waste my time exploiting the fuck out of me when I could still be out here not even so much as scraping by, but on my own terms, making the concessions and taking the risks I've put myself in a position to be able to choose to make and take.

For example I'm finding myself right now re-entering the art world and working literally all day long on a wholly new set of terms that are being defined by the complexities of the presence of a strictly commercial alternative source of content. If I'm supported it's because of the actual process of creation, not the viability of the product. Of course I'm not thriving, and I will not be, and I don't aspire to, but I never was, and I was never going to. That's not new, tbh.

@erin yes we are post human body modifying machine enjoyers but hardly anyone is even trying to use this particular tech in any interesting way and few even have the processing power available to them to use it independently

meanwhile from a labor standpoint there is no question that we must oppose this trend, a human vs machine framing is a false dichotomy, it has always been about who owns the machine in question, nothing of artistic value can come from collaboration with sam altman or elon musk