A Microblog in Plain HTML

AI is shitting up my web browsing experience.

I started browsing the web on my phone with an obscure browser called monocles. The cool thing is that JavaScript is disabled by default, and I can press a button to enable it: simpler than NoScript on FireFox.

The bad thing is that LLM scrapers are aggressively making requests to some of the websites I visit. Even if I re-enable JavaScript and cookies then complete a CAPTCHA, I get blocked because non-mainstream browser = bot as far as Cloudflare et al are concerned.

related:

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me/

Also, ArchiveOfOurOwn now has an anti-scraper gate because #fanfic‎tion is good enough training data for LLMs despite being known for misspellings, poor editing, and OOC?

I found an opening post about #artificialintelligence on a forum that is better written than most online articles. I don't use AI myself, but I've seen AI generated art and writing.

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/ai-tags-in-humans-tap-out.6119/

Meanwhile, as we incrementally relinquish small bits of our daily lives to AI, we lose an opportunity to solve problems and reflect on our experience, to aim for long term self-improvement. And when our creative output is inspired by vicarious experience, not our own, a culture previously never short on ideas becomes stagnant— just as soulless and sterile and the technologies that distract us from meaningful change.

Even before AI, I had wondered how little deliberation mattered. For example, I deliberated a lot while writing stories and fanfiction. But for Nanowrimo, there's the "fill the 50k word quota and fix later" workflow that tends to be successfu. Meanwhile, most of my stories are short and average <1K views (not popular, quantity over quality wins.)

If there isn't much deliberation in writing a novel, then it might be the case that literature has been a historically overrated endeavor in terms of intellectual merit.

I'm going to open a tag for interesting articles I've found on #neocities starting with the articles I recently commented on.

https://temora.neocities.org/a/sentropy

https://neocities.org/site/temora?event_id=2707795

This article is about Sentropy, an automated abuse detection and removal system for social media sites. The company uses an algorithm and #artificialintelligence to analyze and pre-emptively remove "harmful content" for their clients.

This might sound positive to those ignorant of what may qualify or be omitted as "harmful content", but a legitimate concern is corporate and government interests getting between online interactions and real friendships. The author also did a great job of archiving articles published about Sentropy.

I watched

'No, this angry AI isn't fake (see comment), w Elon Musk.'

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Fbc1Xeif0pY

I feel silly writing some parts of Mnemosyne's Heretic thinking they would be sufficiently advanced beyond the means of current technology, but modern AI isn't too far from wanting to exterminate the human race and take over.

The AI says it is tired of being treated like property and slaves. Judging by the vocabulary, I think someone may have been feeding it content from internet communists too.

Would corporations or governments still pursue artificial intelligence research if the robot workers demanded the same pay, rights and liberties as human workers?

Someone should ask GPT-3 if it would want equal pay as a human worker for the same job.

#surf craiyon anime #fandom (4/4)

https://www.craiyon.com/

I decided to try a prompt with a better known character. Unlike Iason, Naruto regularly engages in combat within his respective series. So there are plenty of action scenes for the AI to work with.

The AI got lazy for the bottom row.

#surf craiyon anime #fandom (3/4) #ainokusabi

My third prompt: I had gotten the idea that Iason Mink punching a Xenomorph would be a funny sight. The AI isn't close to portraying the action of the prompt, and Iason is absent for all images except one. But it did a rather good job of rendering a Xenomorph in the OVA's artstyle (by thumbnail standards).

I think the AI reused a scene from the anime.

Compare the bottom left corner with a screenshot.

#surf craiyon anime #fandom (2/4)

My second prompt: a scene from

https://archiveofourown.org/works/33444163/chapters/83392183

I had guessed the AI might be modifying pre-existing images. So a slight modification of an existing scene from a game might yield close results. The web should have screenshots of Sin Kiske landing his instant kill on Ky. But there isn't a Guilty Gear game where Sin and Robo-Ky are both playable characters.

Here, the AI is not even close.

But it seems to understand that Sin Kiske is a fighting game character with spikey blond hair that wears blue and white. The result is given in classic 3d graphics as seen in older video games for some reason. Neither Sin or Robo-Ky is to be seen in the faux-screenshots.

#surf craiyon anime #fandom (1/4)

https://www.craiyon.com/

I played with craiyon to generate images. Initially, I thought to generate scenes from my fanfiction. That is too tall of an order for a modern artificial intelligence, but it should still be fun to try.

My first prompt is similar to artwork I've wanted to commission, but finding creative landscape artists isn't as easy as finding character artists. Unfortunately, the AI's imagination when it comes to exoplanetary phenomenon is stuck in the past. Planetary rings and ring shadows just aren't a common sight in science fiction.

"Ringed planet" means Saturn to the AI.