Multifandom works roundup, 2/20 (Moon Knight, MCU, Othello, webcomics)

Feb21

Moon Knight/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Cover of Knight, chapters 29-30 (fic | Steven, Marc, Jake, Wade/Vanessa, Shuri | T)

Othello
Yes and No (art | Yaya, Nana | worksafe)

This Week in But I’m A Cat Person:
Happy 12th anniversary to BICP!

This Week in Leif & Thorn:
Tansy tries to make a new FWB, but has a rocky time. And not just because they’re at a geology conference.

Works roundup, 2/13 (Moon Knight, MCU, Othello)

Feb13

Moon Knight/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Cover of Knight, chapter 29-30 (fic | Steven, Marc, Jake, Wade/Vanessa, Shuri | T)

Othello
Yes and No (art | Yaya, Nana | worksafe)

This Week in But I’m A Cat Person:
Annotated re-release is about halfway through: chapter 15 just wrapped!

This Week in Leif & Thorn:
After the chaos of his health scare, Torsten has been sent to a farm up north…

Good news, we have successfully taught the AIs to play Mad Libs

Feb7

Artwork by neural nets:

“New hot meme for webcomic artists: upload one of your comic pages to Have I Been Trained, link to the first 4 webcomics (not drawn by you) that AI registers as similar to yours!” (Can I make this a thing? I’m gonna try.)

“I read 19 comics with AI-generated artwork, all of which I downloaded or read for free online. In addition to the question of quality, I wanted to answer a few other questions: Do these comics share common characteristics? How about the creators? Are traditional comic creators getting something valuable from these tools?” A cool, thoughtful article about what people can produce using AI as a tool (and what limits they have to work around).

“Here is where it gets interesting. If I use the same prompt and add “Amazing awesome and epic”, the picture gets noticeably better. “Oh,” goes the neural net, “you wanted a GOOD picture”.” Rebloggable-on-Tumblr version of that AI art post from July 2021.

Writing by neural nets:

“I pulled a letter from the Savage Love inbox—something, low, slow, and over-the-plate—went to the ChatGPT website (www.openai.com), and asked ChatGPT to “answer this question in the style of Dan Savage’s advice column.” So, can the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot really do a better job giving sex advice than I do? We’re about to find out.” [archive link]

My favorite part of that one: the AI gives basically the same answer to both questions. It registers “this is a relationship help question,” and then it outputs Generic Relationship Advice — with a few brief details of the specific question pasted in, Mad Libs style — for both.

“A close examination of the work produced by CNET‘s AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.” Computers are great at taking an existing sentence and automatically replacing some of the words with synonyms. But you need a human to come up with the sentence first.

These AIs are trained with text auto-scraped from all over the internet…so, how can you keep it from presenting unsuspecting users with the find-and-replaced version of, oh let’s say, somebody’s graphic noncon Joker/Robin fanfic? Pay a bunch of humans in Kenya less than $2/hour to manually flag all the noncon Joker/Robin fanfic, obviously.

All these tech people boasting they’ve developed an AI that can replace human creatives (or are on the verge of developing one, please give them millions of dollars to finish the job) — dig a little deeper and you’ll find they’re just reinventing the Mechanical Turk with extra layers.

Lyrics: Orleans – In My Dream (from the album Dancin’ In The Moonlight)

Jan30

All right, Google swears to me that the lyrics to this song aren’t transcribed anywhere on the entire internet, so I’m writing them up myself.

(Yes, it’s for Moon Knight reasons. Shhh.)

Orleans – In My Dream

Once again my dream’s begun
The one where you admire what I become
Like a star in the distance you see me
I’m the one you wish upon

But the real world is far from a dream
You don’t see me, or so it seems
It’s just my fantasy

And it’s only in my dream world
That you wish upon my starlight
But the fantasy will come to life in my dream tonight

I see you nearly every day
Never knowing what to say
And there’s always this distance between us
But in my dream it’s not that way

You’re the Earth and I’m the sun
Each attracts the other one
And though there’s millions of miles between us
That won’t keep you from me for long

Irresistibly drawn to me
Overpowered by gravity
You eventually fall for me

But it’s only in my dream world (only in my dream)
And it can’t survive the daylight (only in my dream)
Still the fantasy will come to life in my dream tonight

Just imagine if this were reality

But it’s only in my dream world (only in my dream)
That you wish upon my starlight (only in my dream)
And it can’t survive the daylight (only in my dream)
And so I keep it on the inside (keep it in my dream)
And the fantasy will come to life in my dream tonight

Works roundup, 1/30 (Moon Knight + webcomics)

Jan30

Leif & Thorn
Over the Moon (art | Leif/Thorn | worksafe)

But I’m A Cat Person
Fox, Before and After (sketch | Fox | worksafe)

General/Miscellaneous
Attack Velin (reward art, worksafe)

This Week in But I’m A Cat Person:
Annotated pages from the “good thing Jany isn’t the kind of person to write 5000-word Tumblr callouts” scene.

This Week in Leif & Thorn:
One of the servants is in the hospital, and it’s up to our favorite bilingual translator to help…

Humanist+Humorist

The works, writing, & webcomics of Erin Ptah