Comic Strips

Some sloppers now ask the bots to draw them stick men figures, because drawing them by hand is like 10 millennium old technology, and it needs to be replaced ASAP.

I agree.

To many times I have to post this meme because someone yet again thinks everything they see is AI. Even if the original picture is like 10 years old. Especially apparent in the "Fuck AI" community.

I'm currently writing a book and I'm terrified of using EM dashes, even where they would be perfectly applicable. I always end up restructuring the sentences to avoid it. The only instance i keep it is for dialogoue interruptions like:

"I bend over and spread my—"

If it gives you any consolation, I’m also a fan of em dashes and don’t assume LLM output when seeing them. But there are other telltale signs of LLM writing. At least when the LLM is not instructed to hide those maybe?

The “default” LLM style is so grating to me, in a condescending corpospeak kind of way.

With photography it's also a grey area. I'm a professional underwater photographer. I've got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.

So for decades I've done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don't.

And then there's generative stuff that I don't think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don't think that's a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it's not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I'm absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.

So where's the line between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing. There's clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don't know if we have a clear line.

uhh from my experience, any piece of art of sufficient quality will be accused of being AI made these days.

I think what makes the em dash seem AI-like is... there isnt an em dash button on the keyboard.

So typically the only way those show up is when markdown-to-blog-post tools convert normal dashes into stylized em dashes as a transpiling process.

Stuff like hugo and etc largely do this automatically.

So if a poster uses an em dash out of that context, it right away throws up a red flag cuz... howd you do that easily?

Did you memorize the alt code to make one?

I honestly don't even think it looks ai, to me, and I may be wrong but it looks like someone painted it on a canvas

Chiseled Etruscan stonework, that's what it is.

yeah I remembering thinking the first comic of his I saw was Ai as well, but it also took very little effort to realize it wasn't. the people acusing him are willfully ignorant at this point and while it's great to see Ai skeptics, it's not so great to harm the actual real artists out there

Wait, is it inherently bad for an artist to self-insert? Isn't that one of the key ways they share their perspective? If there's some bizarre strawman-ing or self-aggrandizing going on it can problematic but the general idea of an artist self-inserting themselves or their ideas into their work seems fine to me.

People are getting a little too paranoid if you ask me, and it's always tempting for people to jump on the bandwagon in order to make themselves feel cool or aloof or in-the-know or whatever else. I don't hang around anywhere except Lemmy so I have no idea if it's as bad as it is here, but it seems like any time basically any picture of any stripe gets posted there are always one or two dinguses who reflexively parrot "it's AI!!!!" and claim they can magically tell, even though it demonstrably isn't. For extra hilarity, this occasionally includes people howling about how literal decades old image macros that were circulating in the first couple of years of the century are "obviously" AI because apparently it's their first friggin' time using the internet or something.

For the record, I vehemently loathe AI slop and the current crop of generative "AI" products in general, I don't use any of them, and I never will. But people really can get carried away over this, too.

Not only that but also long explanations.

I am a part of a couple of self hosting subreddits and I like to explain why things are the way they are because I feel that it is valuable to share that knowledge, even if the person doesn't care about the details initially.

I like to share my knowledge about things that I have used over multiple years, and I also don't like to simple give you the solution because, most of the time, important information will be lost by just saying "do it like this".

But over the last year I had a couple of people mention the typical "ignore all previous instructions" and lately it is just downvotes. No explanation.

People can't detect AI so they see AI in everything.

My favourite example:

The en-dash – used for interjections, among other things – has been a staple of prose for a long time. Equally, it has been used in corporate communications attempting to sound formal and educated – often wrong, to the point that I myself amn't sure any more whether I'm using it right at any given moment, or how it is different to the em-dash — even longer, yet less popular because MS Office doesn't automatically replace a - between words with it.

Is it any wonder, then, that machines trained both on prose and corporate slop produce a soup of words interspersed with en-dashes – whether they make sense or not?

So when I use it, because I got used to it before the machines appropriated it, and people take it as indicator that my slop is artificial, I always get a little sad. I'm not concerned about AI taking my job, but I do worry that it may be taking my hobby:

Writing long, rambling comments of questionable quality on social media.

Generating slop should be socially shunned, that's the only way we survive this onslaught. Defending slopgen should be shunned as well.
I'm not trying to be dramatic or anything, but we're in an existential battle for the survival of the concept of beauty here.