Good News, Fellow Artists! Nightshade Has Finally Been Released By The UChicago Team! If You Aren't Aware

Good news, fellow artists! Nightshade has finally been released by the UChicago team! If you aren't aware of what Nightshade is, it's a tool that helps poison AI datasets so that the model "sees" something different from what an image actually depicts. It's the same team that released Glaze, which helps protect art against style mimicry (aka those finetuned models that try to rip off a specific artist). As they show in their paper, even a hundred poisoned concepts make a huge difference.

(Reminder that glazing your art is more important than nighshading it, as they mention in their tweets above, so when you're uploading your art, try to glaze it at the very least.)

kids & their creatures

This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer

hbomberguy’s latest video on plagiarism has made me completely rethink literature and writing. I have never once so much as considered intentionally plagiarizing anyone or anything, but I there’s something more that has come out of this and it’s the names of the people who created the works Somerton (and others) ripped off.

Plagiarism isn’t just bad because it is lazy and disrespectful, it’s bad because it buries the truth. If you can’t find a source, the conversation is over. Somerton’s sources are fairly easy to find by simply searching his plagiarized lines, but that isn’t true in most cases. Most of the time, the line is a lot less clear.

Today, I was writing a report on English Ivy, which is an invasive species here in the US. I wanted to know when it was introduced and I at last found a source claiming it was introduced to the US “as early as 1727” on a .net website that seems quite reputable (it has multiple major universities credited in its home page), but there is no citation for where this date came from. I dug deeper and found a pamphlet created by a city government in Virginia that made the same claim, only to discover the first source linked in their bibliography. Another website (a botanical garden’s page) gave the same date with the same source hyperlinked. Of course, I have classes to attend and things to do and probably not enough time to follow the lines back to where this 1727 date came from, but if I had not just watched this video, I wouldn’t have given that date a second thought.

Of course, it doesn’t matter in the long run exactly what year hedera helix was introduced to the US, but it makes you wonder how many facts have been so vaguely attributed that it becomes completely impossible to figure out where they originated (and further, whether or not they’re true at all).

glad that im not popular enough to have an evil shadow version of my blog that exists just to make contradictions on my posts

Hey be sure to go to your blog settings, head down to visibility and turn on this little button that prevents Tumblr from stealing your posts and using it to train AI learning models. Good job, fuckheads, great update.