gattsuru
21hr ago
I was curious how one does become AG in Virginia, so that we find ourselves in this unfortunate situation. Appointed by some evil corrupt Democratic governor? Or the coastal elites or Illuminati or Jews? Buying the post? Murdering the previous AG?
... this format is degrading to the discourse, the worst form of strawman, and completely ignores the objections other people are raising.
Beyond that, we have more than a single joke:
Coyner’s alarm at her former colleague’s violent rhetoric toward Gilbert prompted Jones to call her and explain his reasoning over the phone, a source familiar with the exchange told NR. According to the source, the Democratic former legislator doubled down on the call, saying the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim.
Then at one point, the source said, he suggested he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust. Afterward, Jones continued his barrage of text messages, saying he was just asking questions. Coyner dismissed his excuse via text and chastised Jones for “hopping [sic] Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die.”
Rather than deny that he had wished death on the children, Jones responded by saying, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Faced with more pushback from his frazzled former colleague, Jones somehow took the conversation a step further: “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes,” he wrote, referring to Gilbert’s wife and two young children.
Two Dem state senators responded to the scandal by claiming that "Jay Jones has demonstrated the character, compassion, and vision that the Office of Attorney General deserves". Which, you know, isn't wrong, from a certain point of view.
gattsuru
22hr ago
The land has pretty significant military relevance in a situation where the United States and Russia (or the United States and China) get any more unfriendly, military analysis looking at demographics expects any such efforts to happen in <20 years if it can happen, and there's a lot of benefits to making a war expensive even if you never intend to fight one for Schelling Reasons. Trying to work within Danish rule has caused friction points dating back to the 1960s, Euro and NATO unwillingness to shit or get off the pot in Ukraine has lead to much greater skepticism that this would change in response to external military force, and all the relevant countries are actively flirting with China even well before COVID.
It's not, say, Panama. But it's still pretty important.
Meanwhile, the dollar cost of the entire country's subsidies from Denmark, and a sizable incentive for every single person in the country, is dwarfed by a single (smaller!) state's hilarious set of fraud scandals, and is significantly dwarfed by what California has used to not build a train.
The goofy part's the military threats and not modeling why the entire process is pissing off the Danes. Maybe there's some 5D Chess, or anti-Trump groups (and Trump's natural inability to post in any way but the most Boomerish possible) are highlighting military options that aren't being seriously considered, or maybe it's just trying to Good Cop Insane Cop the negotiating table.
Eh... I've got much more mixed feelings.
It's hard to deny China's effectiveness. The success are somewhat overstated and the failures papered over, at times -- I think China's official numbers on COVID are jokes, and for a more sympathetic case I don't think the government wants to admit how badly they've been screwed over on a number of Belt and Road Initiative operations despite their good effects -- but they're outweighed by its successes, and it's hard to overstate how significant those successes are. China has lifted itself out of staggering poverty, and much of urban China now competes with, or sometimes beats, the quality of life of European countries. News media focuses, imo wrongly, on the flashy stuff like the trains and skyscrapers and chip fabrication, and many of those are especially noteworthy because they are hard, but it's the stuff that's 'easy' and too many countries can't do that's impacted every life on the continent for the better.
And there's a lot of sympathy to go around. Dotted lines and Taiwan aren't great for modern international diplomacy, but the Opium Wars were ethical abominations, and like everyone on that side of the world that wasn't Japan, China has a lot of very valid frustrations with historic Japanese international policy and the resurgence of Japanese hard-righters.
((And I'll skip the various Great Powers questions: international politics is a game where the only rule is that the strong do what they must, and the weak suffer what they will, yada yada.))
The problem's what it chooses to do. I won't blame the CCP for the One Child Policy, since a very specific group of Westerners promoted and drove the campaign. But those Westerners were incompetent gits; government officials acting on their behalf are what lead to a demographic tree that leaves sane people praying that the stats are fake. It's that sort of problem, writ large. Chinese fishing fleets are the best in the world at strip-mining wildcaught fish, Chinese construction companies are the best in the world at building skyscrapers no one lives in, everyone knows how much a critic I am of American academic fraud and Chinese diploma mills manage to beat them at their game. These are only a tiny portion of China's success stories, but they show a country that's able to compete with Elon Musk, and yet either doesn't want to limit its space program from dropping a Tianlong misfire into a town. A populated one! Yes, there's also the human rights abuses, like an incredibly effective organ donor program, or the giant panopticon, or the forced abortion, but they're honestly symptoms.
((Indeed, a lot of great things from China occur where matters can slip through the cracks. Ghost shifts are embarrassing, but they've empowered a massive amount of Chinese and worldwide entrepreneurship. But it's not enough to point at an omelet and break eggs.))
I'll actually give the opposite criticism of Greer, here. Paeans to his specific form of anti-materialist and puritan morality have no sway on me. But where I agree with him solely that Xi's anti-corruption drives have had some beneficial effect, I can very easily see those powers being driven to more malicious ends, and likely to be so driven, and in many ways are already pushed in that sphere. That's more immediate and direct a concern from my perspective. I'm moderately aware, so far as Westerners can be aware, of how tolerance of homosexuality has ebbed from a conclusion that could credibly pretend to be more stable and family-oriented than Western celebrationism into one that's less plausibly keeping to its credo than 1990s DADT. Maybe it stops there. Maybe.
Maybe it dials back heavily on some of the bigger problems. Maybe there's one of a thousand other cultural or economic problems that it's doing great on that's next on the chopping block.
I'd argue that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, the level of cultural indoctrination that the Chinese government demands, but I could be persuaded I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just missing a lot of the cultural context behind scrubbing media of human bones, and the Germans do that too (how have things been working out for the Germans?). Maybe my country got lucky, and I'm vastly underestimating how many eggs you gotta break.
I know that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, to control the outcome of Hugo Awards, or whether a bike-sharing company CEO can fly business class, or RealSexyCyborg's tweets.
Pessimistically, this leaves the country far more fragile than it admits. If it needs these defenses against those things, it is, or believes it is vulnerable to them. Worse -- and given that over a billion people depend on them directly and closer to three billion do so indirectly, I don't just mean 'worse' for the CCP -- I'm not convinced anybody can continue that level of control permanently. AI helps a lot, but it doesn't help that much, and in many ways it's going to make the mid-term less stable.
The middle possibility holds that these are just another form of corruption, made invisible to China's internal controls because it's what those controls have been made to not recognize. So long as no one's getting too rich, a la Ma, or too conventionally powerful, it doesn't matter if they're getting the ability to enforce their will on the world writ large. And, to be fair, an unfeatherbedded bridge to nowhere is better way to enrich random blue collar types than Raytheon featherbedding a million dollars for a thirty-dollar bomb. But the NGOification of everything has more than its fair share of issues.
Optimistically, the greatest defense I can offer of that side of China is that it doesn't need nor want to do these things. They're simply easy to do, and options exist, and can be done, and thus must be done; like the United States, they are guided by the beauty of their weapons rather than the available information, and like the United States, they've poisoned the tools they could otherwise use to gather accurate information.
Which is its own damning critique.
gattsuru
1d ago
What do you normally teach, exactly?
Sorry, it's not a school program - I don't have the credentials or interest in dealing with the .edu sector in any more constant form - just a set of outreach programs I've helped with.
I've been doing about a lot of STEM outreach, typically one- or two-week programs focused for 'underprivileged' students, FIRST teams, and home school collectives. A good number of the students are just getting thrown into things as a glorified daycare, but you do get some that are interested despite themselves.
Topics cover a variety of materials in shallow entry-level, so we'll have a block for circuit design, a block for CAD (usually only at the TinkerCAD level), a block for programming, a block for hands-on fabrication, and a more general 'art'-ish one, centered around a main project. Done ESP32 wheeled robots, a line-follower robot, a sensor-driven infinity mirror, and a macropad.
Circuit design is just really a basics-of-electronics. We'll start with giving people a CR2022 and an LED, show how the LED works one way and not the other, and the move to a dual-AA and show what happens when too much current goes through electronics. Resistors to talk up how power can be limited and what the math behind that is, how multiple LEDs in parallel and series work, bring in quad-AA batteries to show what changing voltages do. Explain multimeters, and correct (and safe) use. Potentiometers as a way to control resistance directly, then capacitors as a well to store small amounts of power, then direct drive motors, then how and why BJT transistors were used to control motors through switches. Older students we'll try to get into more complicated circuits like a metastable circuits, inductors, or very basic op-amp usage, but it tends to be pretty hit or miss.
Programming, start with computers versus microprocessors, how to compile and deploy code in Arduino, what the chips we're using even are, start with the simple blinking onboard LED and how to change time and pattern, add three or four breadboard LEDs, talk variables and types, the difference between assignment and comparison, and the fundamentals of flow control through if statements and for/while loops. Review what the arduino setup and loop functions are, why they exist, and introduce the idea of custom functions, move code from previous lessons into discrete functions for reuse and simplification. Move from standalone LEDs to a neopixel strip, introduce libraries, explain that Arduino is a library, explain that libraries can hold functions, review for loops and while loops in a neopixel context. Younger students tend to cap out there. Older or more dedicated ones, we'll get into the introduction of recursion, modulo, break/continue/return, switch/case, and enums.
So far we've mostly used C++ because it's the only really financially practical way to get the students something they can take home. Python's available, and been for a while, and I've got a stack of MicroBit's from a dry run, but just absolutely can't get people to handle the whitespace once you get to flow control. Been trying to get a Java or ROS option together, but cost per board was impractical even back pre-COVID and it's only gotten worse since.
Art side's been one of the weaker bits. Had a couple times where we had to fall back on papercraft and stickers stuff, but usually try to get some interface with manufacturing or less-traditionally-available stuff: older students got to go through simple woodworking to plotting out CAM for a CNC run, younger ones got to do powdercoating and lasercut, and this summer's program we'll looking at some sublimation prints on metal plate and mousepads if I can get signoffs on a safe process for it.
I also do lessons for FIRST FRC and FTC teams, but that tends to be more variable, and it's just the standard Basics Of Java / C++ / Python / LabView (bleh) mess.
gattsuru
1d ago
There's a handful of weird intermediate works: Spellsinger has a loser adult who doesn't die, but never returns and gets great powers; Magic Kingdom For Sale SOLD has a successful adult who could return but doesn't want to do so and is flakier on powers, Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure has a teenager with great powers who eventually has to force his way back into the alternate world, the main Barsroom stories have an adult getting superpowers in mere irreversible transportation but a couple characters eventually end up getting Truck-Kun'd into space.
But normally, yeah, there's a pretty clear division, and that's ossified a lot in the last two decades.
gattsuru
1d ago
Sorry about that. I should have mentioned NeoPixel (or DotStar) USB-level voltage strips as an option, so used to students starting a shopping list at Adafruit that didn't think to mention it. Voltage drop can be a problem with higher currents across thinner wires in surprisingly short distances, but if it makes it less bulky that's probably a fine tradeoff.
I will caution that mixing 5v LED drivers and 3.3v logic levels can be finicky. The WS2812s technically run on a percentage of input LED driver voltage. This usually works well enough anyway because the tolerances are so broad on newer chip production, but I have had benchtop setups stop working when moved to a longer data line, because the input battery was high one day and not the other, when in new locations, or even just because of temperature swings. By contrast, WS2815s regulate their logic-driver voltage down to 5v and specify 2.5v as logical 'high', so you have to be running a very long data line over thin wires before they start acting up, if it's possible at all.
I'm annoyed to be discovering this so late. They really should teach LEDs in school.
Agreed. I really wish science classes would have a short electrical engineering breadboard-style class. It's about a five-hour block to teach typical middle-school students batteries, capacitors, voltage, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and switches, and even for those who never touch electrical components again, the fundamentals of 'too much voltage burns things up' is literally a penny-a-student and extremely valuable to internalize. And just giving people a coin cell and an LED tells them a ton about voltage and electrical components having 'directions'.
LED drivers are more an early high-school thing, but they're just so much better at teaching for loops, modulo operators, and fundamentals of processor timing, to too many students that otherwise get bored out of their gourds dealing with Scratch.
gattsuru
2d ago
Good point. From my understanding, #25, #27-31, and #33-52, were ghostwritten, albeit with plot outlines and very heavy editing from Applegate. The ghostwritten works... vary heavily in quality. (skip 28).
Dahl's books struggle a lot with the limits of their medium, if you're looking for deep moral lessons. Matilda is supposed to have protected a bunch of fellow students from the Trenchbull, but there's good reason that most adaptations leave her with her powers and a general 'will try to help' personality at the end. The Witches and Big Friendly Giant are slightly better, albeit at the cost of being uncomfortable readers for adults.
I'll second erwgv3g34's list:
- Goosebumps is a long series of mostly unconnected horror novellas released under the name 'R.L. Stine'. They're usually don't end well for the protagonist, tend to lean into gross horror, and are pretty highly varied in quality, but they were really popular with kids in the 8-12 year old range.
- Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.
- Redwall is a set of anthropomorphic novels set in a medieval fantasy world with a very clear division between good ('goodbeasts') and evil ('vermin') with very few exceptions. (imo, the weakest part of the series is its manicheanism). Most of the books are independent or only solely tied to each other (Martin the Warrior is a prequel to Mossflower, Mattimeo a sequel to Redwall), but they share the same world and individual locations or roles show up repeatedly. Longer stories, but relatively easy reads: ability to focus tends to be more important than vocabulary.
That said, I'll caveat that they're older works: Redwall and Animorphs were very much 90s-00s phenomena, and while Goosebumps is still in print it's not nearly as high-ranking as before. Goosebumps is also generally not a very moral work. From that era, I'd also add in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (hidden world where select few can learn magic and must confront the Power of Entropy / Satan, heavily drenched in Christian religious theodicy), Dianna Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholme, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Terry Pratchett's entire output: Good Omens is the best-known because of the tv show and a joint work, and his last couple books went downhill, but I'd still give both The Witches and The Watch sides of the Discworld series as a good set of moral lessons. The Golden Compass is... worth being aware of, but messy: it's an aggressively anti-theist work by a bit of a prick and the denouement is trash, but it was very-well-known.
For recent phenomenon, your pickings are more mixed. A lot of stuff that's popular is just cruft: Captain Underpants was popular enough to get a movie, but I would consider it too simple for most 8-year-old readers. Dog Man is a little more advanced, but not much, and Percy Jackson is just a bastard child of Harry Potter and the paranormal detective world. There was a giant movement of Hunger Games-like slop in the late 2010s, and while they weren't necessarily all bad, none of them were really worth writing home about.
That said, I will point to the Erin Hunter group as somewhat interesting:
- Warrior Cats follows a set of 'tribes' of feral cats trying to survive in a world with very weak magic. These get very dark (a named character getting crushed by a car isn't even the bloodiest death of one single book), but they're also very strongly moral books.
- Wings of Fire is pretty similar but with dragons instead.
They're nothing terribly complicated, but they're decently written and have interesting takes.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yeah, that last bit is a more common point of confusion than you might expect for normies: Linux software supporting both AARCH64 and x86-64 took off for single-board computer support, and a surprising number of people saw AMD64 and thought it meant the former.
gattsuru
3d ago
Hm. Looks like my first CWR post was August 2016, though I'd posted on the SSC subreddit (and a little on the website, though seldom in the open threads) before then.
Churn in a community isn't unusual, though I'll admit the drivers of churn here are different than in other environments.
gattsuru
3d ago
I can do TIA 586B in my sleep (orange-white orange, green-white blue, blue-white green, brown-white brown), and only get TIA 586A right without looking it up 50% of the time. That's not a good combination.
Constantly get df and du commands mixed up. RAID 0 versus 1. Vi keyboard shortcuts.
For historical reasons, a lot of FAA regulations go by the name 'Part XXX'. I can tell you the differences between Part 61 and Part 141 flight schools at length, so long as you don't ask me which is which. Sometimes I'll even throw in Part 151, which isn't even a relevant thing. Likewise, tach time versus hobbs time drives me up the wall, and I have to derive tach->tachometer->turning->engine time every time.
Sin and cos. And I use them a lot.
gattsuru
3d ago
Mnemonic: thirty days have September, April, June, and November. And February is fucked. Have to really emphasize the rhyme, but it's the only way I've gotten it to stick.
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah. There's a mirror to the post here I wrote on tumblr, steelmanning the concerns with AI use for that audience, and it's... concerning how many are already applicable even if zero further progress with AI features and capabilities happen.
(And, uh, that I used AI-assisted doctors as an example, albeit of the form "Amazon-East goes down and suddenly your doctor doesn’t know how to check the side effects for a specific medicine.")
Very much agreed. It's probably useful to notice where the criticisms of AI output have moved from errors in basic functionality to lack of Vision or discernment of domain expertise, but it's not very comforting for someone without that vision themselves.
And then it becomes near-certain that progress isn't going to stop here.
gattsuru
5d ago
FFXIV does most of these, excluding the ungooglable and (arguably) group singing, and sometimes by accident (ie, penalties for poor selection are less because of ninjaing, but more because there are many ways to exploit groups to get a token or get a second chance at a loot roll which will cost that group a lot because of how the raid system gives out chests). It's pretty good community-wise, though I think there's as much coming from how damn long the main story quest is rather than what extent it's powered by Friendship, and the twitchiness makes it hard for most groups to have conversations while playing higher-rank content.
gattsuru
5d ago
For DeviantArt specifically, you had an environment where a sizable portion of site monetization came through sales of merch derived from uploaded content or subscriptions to access gated content, along with a discovery algorithm that largely favored the firehose view as much or more than word of mouth. This had its problems even before AI hit, both the obvious (commissions are much more favorable for newer artists and were badly supported), and the more subtle (minimum and maximum prices made more compliance sense than business sense), but AI gen drew the more serious contradictions to the fore.
With Stable Diffusion, it was possible to just flood thousands of images a week, covering a variety of different common tags, per account, and spammers could make a lot of accounts. Only a couple results would ever break out, and maybe a handful would make any sales period, but that's all it really took for some scammers to find it worthwhile. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think that a majority of submissions were AIgen, even at the height of the initial rush, but a large enough portion were that the firehose view was pretty regularly blasted with repeated pages of AIgen. Worse, there was a lot of suspicion that works not tagged as AI were AI, and the more paranoid were sure >25% were AIgen.
DeviantArt had anti-flooding rules, but were slow to bring enforcement against anything but the clearest spammer. Presumably this had some impact on how much payout the scammers could get, and maybe discouraged some of them, but it left the enforcement invisible and didn't solve the firehose interference problem.
I think the death of the platform is overstated, but it's definitely not favored in the way it was at the start of the COVID era. Some of that's downstream of other related issues: DeviantArt integrated an AIgen capability called DreamUp, and while there's probably some way they could have sold it without optimizing for pissing off anti-AI artists (such as helping fit creator artwork to specific merch categories, having automatic eligibility disabled). They definitely didn't, so now it's mostly known as a way that DeviantArt has promoted some really slop-focused artists like Isaris-AI (not linking because it stretches the definition of 'bikini', >15 submissions/day) or mikonotai (cw: tits in not very convincing armor, >7 submissions/day).
I don't have much idea of what happened at Literotica.
gattsuru
5d ago
An AI that can accurately identify and dismiss slop is 90% of the way towards producing quality content, since you could just build the generative AI with that skill built in (and train them on it).
Maybe? Or it might be easier to do as a separate model. Hell, it's possible even dumber solutions might be more readily made.
gattsuru
5d ago
That's fair, although I'll caveat that assuming university degrees are good designation of skill and that a skilled user with AI ends up "roughly the equivalent of a third year university student", that's still praising with faint damns.
That's a very interesting paper to read, I'll admit, though.
gattsuru
5d ago
Yeah, Nano Banana (and Whisk) are stupidly powerful, and don't really seem to have a local or open-source competitor yet. Qwen Image /Image Edit can kinda work on similar principles, and can do some level of scene composition or pose transfer, but it's limited and gets pretty ugly. A number of furry diffusion users start from Nano Banana prompting, then do the final work with a local image model (whether for upscaling, changes in content, or NSFW).
I dunno that I'd call ControlNet obsolete, but that may reflect my own unfamiliarity with Nano Banana (and not using the paid version) as much as anything deeper.
gattsuru
5d ago
In addition to many spammers putting AI-gen up on websites that specifically prohibit AI-gen, or putting AI-gen up on websites that require disclosing AI-gen without doing so, there's a very annoying gimmick where people will claim to either have produced something themselves or (more rarely) by AIgen, and then running scraped works through just enough of an img2img process to beat anti-duplication algorithms.
This isn't a counterfeit of this in the sense that a fake dollar is a counterfeit of a real one, but it's closer to counterfeit in the sense that a book getting cloned by a scummy print-on-demand shop is counterfeit, and even closer to a book on bookbinding from a scummy print-on-demand shop. Even though it's advertised as AIgen you could produce with the tools on that site, it's still making promises it couldn't cash out: you couldn't make this sort of image using the tool they presented as part of their site capabilities, because it didn't support img2img.
(It's also substandard, but if you could imagine a non-crap output...)
[cw: lots of furry images. nothing involving nudity in any sense but the Donald Duck or swimsuit sense, but probably not something you'd want to explain to your boss]
It depends a lot on what you're aiming for. It's possible to get text-only prompts that retain fairly good consistency of a character. Some of that's because the character itself is pretty 'standard', although they also have a number of potential faults (eg, border collie with a floppy ear and a spot around one eye seems easy, but a lot of models struggle with the "my left or your left" problem). And these can require pretty serious levels of detail and description, much of which wouldn't be obvious to non-artists.
If you've already got a single piece with the character and want a second one in an entirely different context, tools with more semantic understanding focused around transfer like Qwen Image Edit, Nano Banana, and Whisk can do that surprisingly well (albeit generally on the cloud and censored: afaik, only Qwen Image Edit has a local mode). I'd expect some multimodal LLMs could do something similar, but I've only really tried GLM-4.6V for local multimode and never got anything particularly exciting from it.
For one-offs with more specific or complex markings or fur patterns, especially around the face or hands/paws, you're usually going to see a lot of inpainting. The threshold where that becomes necessary can be surprisingly low: this guy seems trivial at first glance, but since it's not supposed to have a few tells from real maned wolves that's often something he had to tweak aggressively, and the four markings on the forehead are really not something most AIgen wants to do as part of a facial structure, so he'd often be loading up krita to help do inpainting. It's still not 'real' artwork, but it can get fuzzier on the edges.
If you plan to reuse the character, doing a few works with inpainting, traditional media, 3d modeling software, or some combination of the above, then building a LoRA tends to be the most effective. A good LoRA takes a lot of effort, but it can be done with a surprisingly small number of reference images and maintain a lot of detail or handle very strange layouts.
For an example, I'll use uverage. He's an avali-wolf hybrid, so he's got a lot of unusual features (the four ears are intentional, the ring marks around the ears and thighs are not standard, and his tail is probably derived from another VRchat species) and while avali are popular enough (6k e621 images) as fictional species go enough he's probably not the first avali-wolf, there's not exactly a surfeit of non-AI training data that matches what conclusion this particular aiGenner came up with. Yet the LoRA can carry markings and physical characteristics across styles, perceived 'medium', or even transfer markings to gender or to other species.
It's far from perfect. Notably, the arm feathers and crest tend to come and go randomly, and the LoRA seems to be messing with the finger-and-toes count. That might be an intentional stylistic decision, but probably not. And LoRAs do have costs: poorly trained LoRA can degrade image quality, and they seldom scale above three or four LoRA in one generation (either text2img or inpainting) before the models tend to just go nuts. But it's the sort of thing that's practically doable at small scales by individuals without too autistic a level of focus.
That said, I will caveat that enough furries are faceblind enough, or otherwise tend to identify characters more by mood, dress (as little as that might be), and large high-contrast markings. I don't know how well the same approach would transfer to realistic or even anime-like humans, especially for an audience with better perception about microexpression or sensitivity to smaller errors; the few examples I'm familiar with tend to be side characters in content I'm not gonna link here.
That's fair. There are some models that allow more specific control prompt-only of multicharacter composition, like Whisk, Nano Banana, and Qwen, but they have tradeoffs and tend to give 'worse' output quality if used as the only or final part of a workflow. In-painting can give phenomenal amounts of control for very complex character layouts (or background layouts), but at the cost of a lot of tedious work (cw: 9mb video file). There's been similar efforts using related technologies for comics, loresheets, game environments, and ultra-complex characters (in the furry fandom, usually things like cyborgs and complex hybrids).
Which does give more space for self-expression, but it's not going to have the volume to be visible in a DeviantArt firehose view.
gattsuru
6d ago
This... varies pretty heavily by area and focus. The Furry Diffusion discord has some anti-spamming measures and a general ethos focused toward quality, and as a result it's able to keep the 'floor' pretty high and higher-upvoted images are generally pretty high-quality too. They're not all good, and even the greats aren't perfect, but the degree of intentionality that can be brought forward is far greater than most people expect.
That depends on both moderation that may scale in the face of a genuinely infinite slop machine and relatively low stakes (and, frankly, monomania), but it's at least pointing to ways AI creators can operate outside of full spam mode.
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah, it's a hard topic, and a scary one. I was considering linking this post from tumblr:
recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.
And in some ways, it's a funny and illustrative story, and if AI freezes at exactly this state, I'd expect that we'll see a bunch of people very proud of their predictive prowess. And then it's also a funny and illustrative story, because 'can compete with you for every skill but your one or two specific areas of focus' describes the entire process of employing skilled labor everywhere.
Some of the problem's like the reason I didn't discuss Wolford's oral arguments, yesterday. They exist, they have meaning, they don't need any sort of logical acrobatics, and it's pretty easy to understand what their meanings are (Justice Jackson's embarrassments included despite her best efforts), but there's not much to discuss. They're just anti-scissors: even when people disagree, there's nothing to argue about.
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