I'm Sure It Was Because Of Volcano Activity, People Saw Fire Emerging From The Earth And So Always Had

It's a strange spectacle to see how much the community around skeptical inquirer cares about issues of little relevance to culture or power structures

Some people defend this kind of rationalist ideology by talking about, say, anti-superstition activists in India, but those people are admirable for the specific reason that they are undermining hierarchical power structures

A Western skeptic getting angry about Americans venerating ghosts with offerings --- that's not subversive, and it's worthy of contempt!

Nightmarish

Wikipedia: Gheorghe Chițu

attr. Sang Schichuan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor

The idea that gameplay is all that matters for games has been a disease on our aesthetic worldview. Mixed media is undervalued and infinitely powerful. The full potential of video games is to create maximalist sensory-rich stories and world. Please continue to make long cutscenes.

this makes me want to play the game more actually

by Hiroshige III (a student of the more famous Hiroshige).

It's extra Dai-Nippon Gothich because it's an ad for a circus performing on the grounds of the Yasukuni shrine.

It's really hard to understand what is and isn't bodily autonomy when it comes to social pressures. Do people want to alter their bodies or are they being pressured into it... but really, there is no such thing as an authentic individual self that can make these decisions free of pressure. We are social pressure, it's part of us just like our bodies

what if it's not a guy at all up close. I'm thinking of the "kunekune" urban legend

This scene in the game makes me laugh...why is that dude falling forever...why can I make out that it's a tiny stick figure...

people who try to turn being 'weird' into just another way of being virtuous don't really understand what they're doing. Being a social outcast will always mean being in a category that includes perpetrators of evil.

good dissection

"Among the loose social crowd of online artists and creative hustlers, the reaction to this new technology has been short-sighted at best. While there are legitimate grounds to criticize the way this technology fits into systems of exploitation, the arguments from the self-identified artists tend to follow a few distinct lines of thinking:

the ontological difference of human creativity / the artist's superior mind (the mild version of this take compares it to "the stupid machine", the explicitly exceptionalist and dehumanizing version compares it to other, less intelligent/imaginative humans and lazy parasites)

An ideology of arts that posits artists as uniquely more human than the masses; or that posits "creativity" as a universal right but doesn't stop to ask why only some people are allowed to make it their life's purpose, as opposed to a hobby they have limited time for.

the unalienable right for the artist to hold onto their creative output as private property, to be protected from "theft" (which in the case of AI art becomes even prospective theft, like an extension of protections against plagiarism shifting into an unconditional protection against replacement by other artists with more productive tools)

An ideology of arts that relies on the frameworks of private property and copyright, without a clear understanding of how these frameworks came to be and how much of a danger they are to both individual artists themselves and culture at large.

the displacement by more efficient AI methods of the artists' conditions of economic existence; the erosion of their market share, client pool, contract opportunities, etc. This argument is legitimate, but answers to it tend to fall back into the above reactionary pitfalls that will eventually turn against the artists that promote them, as we'll get into.

These criticisms focus entirely on the effect of the AI image generators on artists and don't really understand how they work, which is why they focus on the AI models' output and gathering of images and not on the more seedy aspects of the whole deal, which concern the labelling of the massive amounts of data they require."