I uh. I think the watermelon broke her 😂
NEW LORDS IN BLACK DESIGNS
That TGWDLM Remount got me thinking about Hatchetfield again, and so I impulsively reworked my old LiB designs.
I think something happened to my art style guys
Individuals:
in my opinion, the question isn't "Is RPF ethical?" but rather "Are you engaging with RPF ethically?" and even more importantly, "Are you being stupid about it?"
I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.
Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.
The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.
I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.
But just have some basic decency and do not involve the real people. Don't cross the line without caring how it affects them. This is basic fandom 101 and lately we have been flying too close to the damn sun! Everyone get more normal about RPF so major news outlets and magazines stop posting articles about "Is RPF ethical?" and blowing up our spot!
Universe Falls Chapter 55: Split Up
Story Summary: When Dipper and Mabel arrive in Gravity Falls to spend the summer with their Grunkle Stan, they aren't expecting much excitement. At least until they meet Steven Universe, his friend Connie, and the Crystal Gems. And once they come together, the kids realize they're in for a summer unlike any other.
Gravity Falls is a town full of strange secrets, from magical creatures to baffling mysteries around every turn. And that's not even mentioning all of the secrets the Gems and Stan are keeping about their own dark pasts, secrets that the kids are determined to uncover, no matter the cost. But for as many friends they may make along the way, there are plenty more enemies waiting in the wings, both from this dimension and beyond.
Find out what happens when Magic and Mystery meet in Universe Falls…
Chapter Summary: As everyone else sets off for a nigh of camping and bonding in the woods, Dipper and Mabel team up with Ruby and Sapphire to track a pair of tricky foes down.
“Tents?”
“Check!”
“Sleeping bags?”
“Check!”
“S’mores supplies?”
“Checkaroo!”
“Well, that’s everything on the list,” Steven concluded, grinning at the towering pile of supplies filling the shack’s foyer. “I’d say we’re just about ready to head out on our big camping trip tonight!”
“You better believe we are!” Mabel chimed in, excited. “We’ve been planning this trip for weeks now–I can’t believe it's finally here! Almost thought we’d never get to go on it with all the crazy stuff that’s been going on around here lately.”
“Hopefully this campout won’t be crazy,” Connie chuckled as she zipped up her backpack. “Then again, we are going out into the middle of the woods where all sorts of paranormal creatures live… Hm, you know, maybe we didn’t really think this through…”
Click the link to read more; all comments are appreciated!
Ultimately I suppose my take on "AI" is something like
- Anything branded "AI" is automatically grift-adjacent. "Artificial intelligence" is a non specific term which truly means nothing. It can apply to basic statistical models, massive natural language models, image processing models, to prediction or categorization or input-output models. It's just completely non specific in a way that makes it useless. If something is called "AI" the first question should be "No but what is it actually? What math are you actually doing?"
- Chatbot style input-output LLMs appear to be uniquely horrible for the human brain. We are very bad at interacting with something in natural language (even very broken natural language) and not projecting human intelligence on it. This is well know as the ELIZA effect and it appears to be pretty hard coded into human cognition. Humans have a strong tendency to hand over their critical thinking to these tools in a process known as cognitive offloading. This alone makes me believe that chat interfaces should be effectively banned from consumer facing products, and question if they have any use anywhere. It's unclear if this effect is unique to the chat interface or inherent to natural language models of all kinds, but regardless we should not be rolling these tools out in schools until we know.
- "AI" companies have essentially exclusively behaved badly. They kicked off their products with the largest scale theft of intellectual property in history, one that's unlikely to ever be prosecuted. They peddle their products as tools to help people cheat, lie, and grift. They openly valorize men who say truly despicable things (one, two, three to start). They're rotting the US economy and betting the entire house on rolling snake eyes. They're using underhanded tactics to get their products into businesses and schools, and to spam their polluting energy hungry data centers across the globe. They're categorically untrustworthy.
- Statistical modeling, in general, is fine. We need predictive algorithms to tell us how bad the next heat wave is going to be. Translation tools, in my opinion, are a net good for travellers and those living in foreign countries. Image detection algorithms have made huge strides in medicine. All of this is good. But "AI" companies are doing none of it, and they're making it harder by driving up the price of compute (because the price of compute is what their stock price is pegged to).