Re: Urban Fantasy, I would like to recommend two series:
Jeff Somers' Ustari Cycle series. Set in a modern urban setting, where the dregs of society use blood magic to scam and con their way through life, while trying to retain the last shreds of their morality when their only opportunity to not starve or freeze to death is literal blood sacrifices. Book #1 is We Are Not Good People.
Charles Stross has a rather benignly named series know as the Laundry Files, that mix magic, demons, and Lovecraftian horrors with IT humour and white collar office antics. People summoning demons by computing forbidden mathematical algorithms, programming FPGA chips with offensive occult weaponry, and worst of all, having to deal with Internal Auditing. Book #1 is The Atrocity Archives.
For those who aren't familiar with the term bio-leninism, I highly recommend reading this series of 3 blog posts on the subject:
IIRC the studio that did The Crew 1 & 2 (Ivory Games) was founded by ex-Eden Games staff. Eden Games being the studio that did Test Drive Unlimited 1 & 2, both which were set on Oahu.
I'm a bit pessimistic about how well they would hold up today, but they were definitely fun games back in their day.
Ahhh, back to their roots of Test Drive Unlimited 1.
I just hope they make the cars the star of the show again, unlike whatever the hell they were doing in The Crew 2.
Don't you just hate it when you're trying to do deadlifts and then your brain stops you and forces you to vacuum an entire cake through your mouth?
I used to dabble in art in a previous lifetime, and I would have killed to have something as good as the current AI models that could help me draw things in my style for me to practice on.
Whether it was drawing a dozen rough poses for me to choose as a base, doing all the flat fill colours so I could skip straight to shading shading, or even just making me little exercises to practice drawing hands.
I think artists who familiarize themselves with AI and incorporate it it into their work appropriately will have an advantage.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. It's like turning your nose up at using software on a computer because being able to Undo/Redo, or having layers and alpha transparency at the click of a button isn't "in the true spirit of art".
I'm surprised that no one has used the "able-ism" card against them. AI art allows people who previously were disadvantaged physically to now join the community and create art. Why do they hate these "different-bodied people" so much? :^)
On a more serious note, the sheer iteration speed of AI models allows you to explore potentially interesting ideas that would have taken you months before. Case in point: the recent rise of "<franchise> in the style of a 80's horror movie" picture dumps/videos. It would have taken me months if not years to be able to draw anything in that style, only to discover that it wasn't what I actually wanted. Now the computer can spit out examples for my consideration faster than I can review them.
Edit: I actually popped back in at some of the old communities I used to frequent to see what the mood was like, and it was pretty much exactly as you'd expect. The only permitted stance you were allowed to have on AI art was zealous disgust. I have a feeling that if I were to broach the hypothetical scenario of training an AI on my own style to help with my work, I'd have been accused of being a cheater who was trying to avoid "putting in the work", so to say.
Just what we need.
It is the third year of our Clown Lords, and the degenerates have bandied together to create an automaton that creates more furry porn in an hour than all the humans united could create in a year.
It automatically uploads them to galleries for sale as NFTs, which are then purchased by humans using cryptocoins.
The cryptocoins are earned by them spending day and night in their new profession as human trainers, who use supervised learning to teach the AI model to draw more and more depraved and grotesque content.
So if I'm reading this correctly:
- The first clause just means you can't scrape all the content on their site into siterips and then make that siterip available for others to download (TOS 24(d)(9))
- The second clause means that if users tag their content with "NoAI", then Epic/ArtStation promises to not use that content in training their own AI models. (TOS 46 para 1, 2)
- The third clause means they (Epic/ArtStation) won't allow/license third parties to use your content (whether tagged as NoAI or not) in training the third party's AI models (TOS 46 para 3)
To my untrained eye, it looks like they are just covering themselves from the situation where someone rips the entire site's contents and feeds it into a model, and then the copyright owners of the ripped work, i.e. their users, complain that this was done without their consent. Interestingly enough they still allow themselves to create models using their users work unless the users explicitly opt-out.
Unless I'm missing something completely, this doesn't prohibit you from uploading AI generated works just because they are AI generated. However any copyright claims over having used someone else's works without their express permission would of course overrule that.
It's quite interesting as to where the line is.
The situation is much more nuanced than the old cases of artists literally tracing over someone else's linework versus merely using it as inspiration without mimicking everything down to the exact pose. Even if you were to liken the AI models to glorified autocomplete engines for linework that compares tens of thousands of images and then uses statistics to generate a new image using a small percentage weighting of each image, how does this compare to an artist whose works are the result of every other piece of art and media he has seen in his life? Someone might say it is the difference between a machine just adding up equations versus a human using "creativity" and "imagination", but how different is that really?
Why stop at online communication? Tie it in to Central Bank Digital Currencies and you won't be able to get a job claim your Universal Basic Income, and even if you did have money, you wouldn't be allowed to enter the grocery store.
I find it strange for an article to talk about incels and transitioning, and asking "Why?", without even touching on their challenges, frustrations, and coping mechanisms solutions when it comes to dating and finding romantic companionship.
If I were to just list them off the top of my head, I can think of at least 5 groups:
- Guys that transition to being a female so they can sneakily try and hook up with lesbians.
- Guys that transition then go after guys, because they don't want to be seen as gay.
- Guys becoming the thing that they value the most (see ForeignInvader's comments below).
- Guys that transition because they feel society treats even the worst transwomen better than they treat straight men who are "losers"
- The tiny minority present in any group of humans who act like creeps, and in this case, want free access to girls' bathrooms.
I honestly wonder how many guys just give up trying to compete in the traditional masculine competition area and abandon it all in favour of becoming effeminate or straight out feminine.
This is a very well-thought-out and well-written comment. +1
I have no opinions about the guy, but that's irrelevant — this entire spectacle is fishy as hell.
And if "they" can do this to some as rich as he is (read: can afford expensive lawyers), imagine what they'll do to you if you piss them off in the slightest.
This.
The people who don't like him, and the people who dislike the camwhore/ethot/OnlyFans industry, should be grateful that he's revealing how things actually work behind the scenes.
They've been doing this since the MFC days, and almost surely before that.
Pretty girl on the live feed will interact with the simps and get them to subscribe to their "exclusive private messages", after which the equivalent of Indian call center agents will LARP as thots in text messages, dropping in the occasional "For your eyes only 😉" selfie or video that the actual girl produces in advance and in bulk.
Jokes on them, half of our power grid is already down at any given time due to third world incompetence, corruption, and diversity!
The degeneracy part plays a big role.
I remember watching some interview with a detransitioner (female -> male -> female), and she spoke about the online groups she grew up with in her early teens (other 13yr old-ish girls) on Tumblr, and how being exposed not just to porn at an early age, but the sort of degenerate interracial gangbang simulated rape kind of porn, definitely played a big role in pushing a lot of those adolescent girls into not wanting to be straight or even female.
Laundromat of the year award?
Exposure therapy to humans in social situations will help me learn to get close enough that I can kill them? Where do I sign up? :^)
For that price it better be made out of only the finest free-range organic Hummingbirds, caught and hand plucked by nubile young maids in a remote rustic mountain village.
"It's no good producing an amazing picture of something people aren't currently interested in. It's far, far better for you produce a merely 'good' picture of what people are clamoring to see at that moment"
I feel that this needs repeating for good measure.
One is stuck between the advice of "draw what you want to draw, so that you don't burn out, and the advice of drawing whatever the latest flavour of the month fanart is, whether you like the franchise or not.
So many good artists out there who never get any discoverability because they spend all their effort into drawing, and none on playing popularity games.
Top ten anime redemption arcs
If I were an artist, I'd be insulted that the only way to get people to see my work is to create a special little box that only I'm allowed to post in, and force that box to the front of everyone's feed whether they want it or not.
Good sir, hat is an insult to hardworking AI that toils day and night to produce us funny pictures from drunken prompt writing!
Wait, isn't this the person that was:
- Manufacturing DIY hormones
- Providing medication to minors without a licence
- Distributing medication illegally via the postal service
How are they not in jail yet?
Thank you, I'll definitely check it out this weekend.