an anti-curse or even a blessing

the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired

Sarah Michelle Gellar photographed by Taylor Patrick Kenny for L’Officiel Fashion Book Monte Carlo (June 2023)

all the frothing-at-the-mouth posts about how "don't you dare put a fic writer's work into chatGPT or an artist's work into stable diffusion" are. frustrating

that isn't how big models are made. it takes an absurd amount of compute power and coordination between many GPUs to re-train a model with billions of parameters. they are not dynamically crunching up anything you put into a web interface.

chances are, if you have something published on a fanfic site, or your art is on deviantart or any publicly available repository, it's already in the enormous datasets that they are using to train. and if it isn't in now, it will be in future: the increases in performance from GPT 2 to 3 to 4 were not gained through novel machine-learning architectures or anything but by ramping up the amount of data they used to train by orders of magnitude. if it can be scraped, just assume it will be. you can prevent your stuff from being used with Glaze, if you're an artist, but for the written word there's nothing you can do.

not to be cynical but the genie is already far more out of the bottle than most anti-AI people realize, i think. there is nothing you can do to stop these models from being made and getting more powerful. only the organizing power of labor has a shot at mitigating some of the effects we're all worried about

this post had over 10k notes and lots of people in replies getting very angry and panicky and threatening imaginary bad actors and begging people not to put their fics into chatgpt. the reply is authoritatively saying "anything that is given to AI it can use it later to draw from." no source! like - i don't know if they save your prompts. they probably do for some other nefarious purposes. but:

these are the size of the training sets used to train gpt-3. as a rule of thumb in natural language processing, one word is on average two tokens. the common crawl dataset alone is around 205 billion words; for gpt-3 they don't even manage to use all of it. this is the scale of the data they need. they are not re-training their model with the little prompts you put in, and even if they did, it's like... a drop of water in the ocean. it's not gonna have an effect on how the model behaves. i think people are, on a gut level, still understanding these models as "collage machines." they're not. they are not borg-assimilating all your best ideas from your fics to frankenstein them back together. they are statistical models. they are compressing gargantuan amounts of data down into smaller (still huge, but much smaller) models of that data by looking at trends and likelihoods and repetitions. i'm not saying you're a great person if you use gpt to autocomplete old fics but even if they were for some reason adding your prompts to their datasets, it's not gonna have an effect. the culture on here about anti-ai stuff has approached, like, mythology - making up shit about what they can do, talking about how scary they are, ghost stories, moral panic. this wild overstatement about what they can do only benefits the companies selling them, and those trying to use them as pretense to undermine labor.

Jewelle Gomez in Pride episode 3 (2021) dir. Cheryl Dunye

dmv: can i have you birth certificate

me: i dont have it but you can trust! 😁✌️

dmv: ok! 😁✌️here is your license

me: its so small and cute! 😳

dmv: just like you! ☺️

mr president there appears to be some dark souls 3 type shit happening in the northeast

Former Museum of Archaeology, now abandoned.

Kodak Ektar 100.

Tbilisi, Georgia.

July, 2016.

ohhhh my god

I am working on creating a mad liberation/anti-psychiatry forum to allow for discussion about theory, experiences, connection etc + hopefully contribute to the development of some really incredible thought + advocacy, as well as create a safe space to discuss anti-psychiatry through an explicitly radical lens.

I have created a google form to gather input on ppl's preferences for hosting, content, + most importantly, moderation structure. The form is anonymous, each question is optional, + primarily composed of hypothetical moderation scenarios which you could weigh in on. This will help me form a picture of what kind of community ppl are searching for + what I should expect out of moderation duties/needs.

Please note: while it is anonymous, I believe it may share your email with me if you are logged into gmail at the time. While I will of course not collect or use your emails without explicit permission, please log out before completing the form if anonymity is a concern.

Second round of questions regarding moderation structure!

if i were on the board of home depot id suggest opening a lesbian bar in the gardening section

I think part of why I'm so skeeved out by the way people on here treat various words as inherently bad or inherently good is that I paid close attention when everyone was being like here's how to phrase your arguments to appeal to liberals here's how to phrase them to appeal to conservatives and like ultimately I gave up on the idea of trying to change conservatives' minds with rhetoric but along the way I became painfully aware of how easy it is to sell leftist progressive people on deeply reactionary ideas provided you phrase it in vocabulary they consider trustworthy

The thing is nobody at pride is evaluating you to determine if you’re queer enough to be there because they’re too busy thinking “it’s so hot out” and “why is this lemonade 12 dollars?”