SlapstickMojo

I did get an email from Jeff who apparently is already working on some of this... The Jan 1 2006 show demonstrates what he has planned: https://dmdb.org/cgi-bin/plinfo.pl?drd06.0101.html

There was a scene from baywatch about this. Girl roommate comes into living room in nightwear. Other roommate is there with her boyfriend. Roommates go off to argue whether that was appropriate. “We’re lifeguards — this covers more than a bathing suit!” “But the connotation is totally different!” “What connotation? That I SLEEP?!” Our society loves to turn anything about the human body sexual. Our inability to let women nurse a baby in public is the perfect example.

You’re stealing jerbs from programmers!

When you mentioned infinite canvas pixel art, I was like “yeah, that’s cool” and then you zoomed out and I started thinking of those pictures where you zoom in on a small section and there’s like a full drawing hiding in the reflection of someone’s eye, and in that image there’s a window, and you zoom to the window and see a whole scene outside… “endless paper” is the app.

For pixels, I can imagine that as you zoom in or out, the new pixels you draw always stay the same size in relation to the screen, but not to the pixels you drew before. I actually built a 3D world like this based on the Fibonacci sequence. Box in a closet, closet in a room, room in a house, house on a plot of land, plot in a neighborhood, neighborhood in a town… all squares/cubes in a golden spiral.

The sub is ai and art. The mods in this story were not just anti ai art being posted, but against traditional art from anyone who supported ai in the past, or many forms of art such as comics, and in this case, just asking why referencing prints was worth deleting and banning a user and their entire post history. It demonstrates how those in power who try to dictate what forms of art will eventually get everyone — pro, anti, traditional, generative — to turn against them. Gatekeepers getting a taste of their own medicine.

The fact that there’s a shade of brown paint they don’t make any more because it involved GRINDING UP EGYPTIAN MUMMIES astounds me to no end. Painters destroy antiquity just to get a certain shade of brown, and AI is the bad guy?

EDIT: You know, every other version of this says Odin. I grabbed the first one on Google. Shame on me.

Cave wall is still drawing, basically. Red ochre instead of graphite, stone instead of paper. Different materials, same medium. I tried finding some sort of art supply place that might sell genuine ochre pigment a while back, they just sold paint or sticks that were a similar color.

Did I read it as I thought it up and typed it? Yes, it would have been hard to go back and edit the phrasing to be clear if I wasn’t reading it. That’s why I prefer writing to speech — I can modify my thoughts before presenting them.

Yes, the idea that ai should remove artists from the equation, that it is an “all or nothing” scenario, is a naive result of inexperience. Glad you grew out of that mindset. Now we need to work on the idea that studying something and mastering it should automatically result in getting paid to do it.

Ai can make the same videos I do, both can be viewed together. Why is more competition a bad thing? Interact with your community, provide training, kits, whatever makes you more than just a content source.

If an ai can go out into the wilderness and start doing bushcraft, I’m going to watch. But by that point, we’re in a very different world.

This should sum it up

“For an artist to really get good at their craft and produce with any regularity, it’s a full time job”

First part is totally false. Most of my jobs involved designing brochures, not drawing cartoons or animating or 3D modeling. All of that did not come from college or a job, it came from spending all my free time doing it. If I worked for 8 hours a day and slept for six, I had 10 hours a day to make art, not counting weekends. I spent more time improving my drawing skills than I did anything for my job.

Second part is a product of social media — the idea that regularity and frequency matters. Classic painters spent months on a piece. In the world of YouTube and TikTok, if you aren’t posting every day, the algorithm ignores you. This pushes people to spit out more, lower quality work. It’s why web animation died between flash and YouTube monetization, because only frequent long form content was rewarded, and animation takes a long time for a little bit of content.

Do anything for a paycheck. Invest the rest of your time in your passion. Create quality work whenever you can rather than when the algorithm demands you to.

A lot of things become non-viable as a career as technology progresses. Same as it ever was. That doesn’t stop anyone from doing it. I follow multiple YouTube channels of people who blacksmith, flintknap, weave, make paper, smelt, fish, or do hundreds of things that industry does better, faster, and cheaper. They have jobs doing something else, or their job is getting paid from people watching them do it.

The idea that “I like doing this, so I should get paid to do this” is the kind of thing I and every other person who hasn’t been in the workforce thinks. People who get paid to follow their passions are lottery winners. It just isn’t reality for most. The world doesn’t need millions of astronauts and painters, it needs people to grow and deliver food, fix things, keep humanity going. The other things are nice, but the demand for those is so much lower than the supply.

I tried to make Gemini generate a picture of my little monkey-frog cartoon character. They usually don’t wear clothes unless it’s a costume or uniform. It stuck a shirt and pants on him. No matter how I phrased the request, it refused to even try generating a pic like the one I gave it. Morality police strike again.

I asked Gemini "design an outfit that sherlock holmes would wear if he was a gen-z teenager" and not only did it generate an image, it provided a full description of why it chose the elements it did, breaking down every single piece of the look. The summary is as follows:

This challenge is about reconciling two very different archetypes: the Victorian gentleman detective, defined by structured tailoring and practical eccentricity, and the Gen-Z teenager, defined by comfort, irony, fluid silhouettes, and digital nativism.

A Gen-Z Sherlock Holmes wouldn't wear a costume of his Victorian self. He would care deeply about function, disdain mainstream "hype beast" trends, and curate a look that is intensely personal, slightly moody, and highly utilitarian. He is "Dark Academia" meets "Gorpcore," with a touch of thrift-store nihilism.

Yes, a new technology gets introduced, people try to use it for every application, and eventually it settles down into where it makes the most sense. With AI, we're currently in the "shove it everywhere" stage. When it eventually settles down, it will be used where people actually find it useful, and will fade away from everywhere else.

It isn't about being the first or the best; it's about trying to find that path moving forward. To say "what if we tried THIS" and succeed or fail. BetaMax was the better product; VHS was better marketed. We try things, some work, some don't, some make things better, some worse, some make us rich, some get stolen by someone else. But it's those ideas, that asking "what if", that keeps us from just becoming complacent and never striving to explore or try new things.

The idea succeeding, or leading to a better idea, is way more important than the person who came up with it succeeding personally. So, having as many ideas as possible, getting them into the world, and seeing which ones grow is how we move forward. Even just thinking of an idea, writing it down, having it stumbled upon long after your death, and someone else bringing it to fruition, is adding to the progress of culture. That's the kind of impact I want to make with my creativity; I don't know about anyone else. Some seem to just want popularity and paychecks.

Looks like it. Klunk's origin was a Christmas comic (The Michelangelo one-shot from 1985), but the art isn't how I remember, so either I'm mixing up memories, or similar elements showed up later.

Odd, I've done work for many indie developers, and they quite often provide me with AI concept art to work from. "I can't draw, and I need an artist, so I used AI to help me demonstrate what I'm looking for in my game." Then I take that and make game art based on those ideas. It makes you wonder what "no AI" really means -- "No AI was even touched at all" or "well, we had it make CONCEPT art, but none of that shows up in the final product" or "well, I mean, we used AI to take all out notes and organize them for us, but the writing itself was ours" or "well, we needed some quick placeholder textures before we hired a materials artists, and maybe one or two were so innocuous they didn't get replaced. That pile of rubble in the background might have an AI texture on it still" or "well, the original art the artist provided was just slightly shorter in width than our needs required, so we expanded it by 50 pixels using content fill in photoshop".

AI is not "the machine did everything" or "the machine did nothing". There's hundreds of levels in-between, and there are tools people are using and will be using in the future that they find very helpful, and they won't even know it is actually AI under the hood. It'll just be "a simple filter" or "an automation tool" or whatever. How do you think the smart brush / spot healing in Photoshop decides where to pull the source from elsewhere in the picture when you're touching up a bit of an image? You don't think it's scanning and analyzing the pieces of the image to find patterns to do that?

Usenet, Yahoo groups, web forums, chatrooms, BBSs... that was what the internet was made to be, and then corporations took it over. I miss the Wild West.

I value comments and discussion over karma. Seeing a number rise or fall does not help my understanding of how humans view art, creativity, originality, imagination, or anything else beyond "good/bad" tribalism.

And some indie dev will learn how to use it for one small piece -- something simple like "audio balancing" or something -- they will be able to make their work slightly faster, for a little less money than hiring another person, and produce a game sooner than they would have. Someone else will see this and try it, and eventually, NOT doing it will be seen as "wasting time". Then it becomes something else that streamlines the workflow. Little by little, people focus their energies on the parts that they are good at, that they enjoy, and they automate the parts that would require time and money they don't have. And if it's a game that is fun to play, people will buy it.

Yeah, I mean... if you want to say "this was prompted, I copied and posted the result" versus "this contains AI elements in it," we're talking a world of difference. The latter can mean anything, and eventually it is meaningless. YouTube is AI upscaling all videos on the platform, which means ALL YouTube videos "contain AI". If you're scanning a photo or drawing, then cropping it, adjusting brightness and contrast levels, and color balance.... at some point, that is now "digitally edited art", too. And I know purists who think adjusting light levels on a scan is "cheating" for analog art.

Steam engines were revolutionary but even they weren't applied universally to everything because people figured out that it was too costly or didn't make too much of a difference.

You... you do know that all our power plants still run on steam, right? Whether you are using coal, natural gas, or radioactive rods, they are all used to boil water, producing steam... to turn turbines that generate electricity...

Alan Turing thought "why not build a machine to do the calculations faster than we can by hand" and people thought he was wasting time. Steve Jobs said "what if everyone had a computer in their homes" and was told by Woz's boss "what would normal people need computers for?" And here we are. They risked something to push the human race forward. If those aren't universal, I'd love to know how we're having this conversation.

Do you think all this has always been around, and that "forward thinkers" are just the people making smart outlets? The World Wide Web was just made public 30 years ago. Personal computers around 40 years ago. Many of us remember a world where these things were introduced and were told "it's just a fad, just a gimmick, nobody will use those for anything other than nerds goofing off."

One of my favorite games early on was Earthworm Jim, because as an animator, I loved the fluid hand-drawn animations. I was hoping this was where video games were going. Then 3D came out -- clunky flat triangles like Tomb Raider, and MDK -- a 3d shooter from Shiny, the makers of Earthworm Jim. I wrote Dave Perry asking why they had shifted to what everyone else was doing, and he replied "We don't make games like EWJ just to be different -- we're not U2." The implication was that 3D was what people wanted; they were a business, and they were going to follow the trends to produce a product that would sell. Just like Disney realized 3D was more popular and could be made faster (once the assets were built and people were trained) they moved their entire production to it. 2D animated films are now an "art form" rather than a studio "product".

That's how all of this works -- start as an experimental idea (AI in academia), become mass-produced for the populace (ChatGPT, Sora, Nano Banana), and then when the next thing comes along, toss it to the curb, where someone finds it, dusts it off, and says "I can use this to make something creative". You think people were using Blender to model their holodeck characters in Star Trek? But somewhere out there, somebody was still hand sculpting characters, not for profit, but for passion.

Ah, yes, the "accuse others of things they didn't do" and "never admit when I made a mistake" style of leadership. Thank god someone like that is just a Reddit mod. Imagine if someone who behaved like that had real power in the world...

Yeah, my first experience was the 1987 show, then the 1990 movie, and then the Palladium RPG.... and while the movie pulled ideas from the original comic, and the RPG pulled art from it, I'd never really read one. A friend had some, and there was so much that threw me -- they didn't live in the sewers all the time (the one I remember had them living in April's apartment), they didn't really eat pizza any more than anyone else did, they would sit around reading books and having regular conversations, and Mikey had a pet cat. It was all very... humanizing.

I want to see more constructive conversations on a topic. I could set up my own website forum, or a Discord server, or discussion meetings at my local art gallery or makerspace or library... but Reddit, for better or for worse, has a wider reach. Sheer numbers, more viewpoints. SO for the moment, here is where I tend to discuss the topics I'm interested in.

But the areas that are designated for topics I want to discuss - art, creativity, education... are either too restrictive, or unmoderated, or toxic, and I think "maybe I can fix some of the problems," and to do that, I could become a mod myself. Maybe I can't solve anything, maybe the community is too far gone. But I can say I gave it a shot, I can learn from the experience, and take that knowledge elsewhere. Better than just sitting back and saying "it's hopeless".

ENOUGH! You are all, all of you, beneath me! I am a mod, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by…

Forward thinkers shape the future. Focusing on the limitations of the present gets you nowhere. Like any AI work, it’s who is using it and how they are using it. If there isn’t already, there will be movies and games and what not using ai that nobody knows is there for years after it is released and popular.

Looks like they exist, but they are not widely popular, due to tradition, mostly. “This is what manga has been and will always be, and deviating from tradition will bring dishonor upon you” or whatever.

I believe manga is just non-animated Japanese cartoons and comics, like manhwa is Korean comics. More of an indicator of where it was made than anything. Anime and manga have a very wide range of styles, and sequential art has been made with photos, pixel art, 3D models. I see no reason why the Japanese wouldn’t experiment with other forms for their comics. I’ll have to go look

Imagining Lorenzo Music singing Sweet Transvestite…

What, you were expecting creative thoughts from the people who claim AI supporters can't create anything original? Original art from folks who post memes using other people's characters to explain how AI steals work without permission? You can get more upvotes by virtue signaling against AI than by actually putting effort into improving your art skills nowadays. It's easier to outsource your thinking to the hivemind than to think for yourself, to copy and paste premade slogans and slurs than to write original content, to repeat claims as facts without verifying if they are real or not.

The projection is palpable.

Details are unclear, but I did find this posted by one moderator who used to write scripts, was still listed as a mod, and was unaware about any of it:

A link to a removed post elsewhere says "a post from a now former mod that suggests it was less 'We all quit' and more the Top mod forcibly making them all quit."

Also, no point in censoring the sub name anymore. We all know which one it is, and it's locked down, so nobody can brigade it anyway.

What i need to do is take one episode, have it list every song that was played that episode (the archive has that) and then mark each with when it first appeared... without having to search for every song one by one.

But this tells me that there is a database hiding in there that lists every show a song has appeared on... that can be useful...

Interesting. Imitating a style is "theft", regardless of whether it is AI or traditional. Thank god you can't copyright style, otherwise the first person to create a style would be able to prevent anyone else from imitating it. No art movements, no familiar genres. There would be ONE anime and all others would have to fight in court that "big eyes, small mouth" can't be copyrighted, sort of like how Nintendo can patent things like "throw an object to summon another character to fight for you." Good thing Grog couldn't own "outlines" or "filled shapes" when he came up with cave painting.

Imitating styles is how all artists learn. We copy the ones we enjoy, we learn to recreate them, to combine them, and produce something new. There are no original ideas; every style is a mix of those that came before. Anyone who studies art history knows that.

Some of us break up the depression spells with mania spells, where we stay up for three days straight, working on projects and fighting with people on Reddit. And don't get me started on the digital brush strokes... according to Photoshop, this one has 233 layers:

Prompt was the 1,800-word first chapter of a novel I wrote. Narrative with character, scene, emotion, action, and expression descriptions written as you would read them in any regular book. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

Asked AI to make a "Ghibli" version of my drawing. Ghibli never drew a cartoon turtle (other than "The Red Turtle" which looks nothing like this). My design, my character, my drawing... approximating Ghibli's general "style" applied to a turtle. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

Fanart. My drawing of another artists character in my own style. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

Collage. Made 30 years ago from photos created by other artists I cut out of magazines. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

Studied the art of Depatie-Freleng. Replicated their style to make an original character, one that looks like something they might have drawn, but never did. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

"All right, let's do this one last time":

Characters at the bottom taken from the web without permission. Characters at top drawn by me. Note the short one in red. Stealing? Amalgamation? Inspiration?

No, AI is a tool for making art, like Photoshop or a camera. None of the things I listed above are genres either -- in visual art, genres tend to be things like history, portrait, landscape, animal, and still lives... but genres mean different things when we're discussing literature and film and such. Comics are a medium that combines both visual and literary art forms, performance is a category of art forms including music and dance, and writing is a medium of the literary art form. Fine art focuses on aesthetics or creative expression, whereas popular art is made for the masses, while decorative or applied art is made to serve a practical purpose.

This is why it's important to have mods that understand the greater cultural practice. Knowledge of art history, of changing modern forms, motivations, technologies, tools, methods, mediums, and so on matters. Having mods that say "this is art, that is not, and no discussion will be allowed" is how we got into this mess. Art is too big to have small-minded people controlling what is allowed to represent it.

As for the AI training, this is why you're told to read the terms of service before agreeing to them.

I guess that depends on who they choose as moderators and what their feelings are on what should or should not be considered art here. Should comics be allowed? Music? Writing? Dance? Performance? They seem to have limited themselves to visual art, fine art, but held the name "art" hostage to that small sliver. I guess it's up to Reddit to decide who they want to moderate and represent what art is on this site... The same Reddit that allows all posted content on the site to be used in AI training...

The dictators have retreated from the palace. The question is now, who takes their place, and will they be better or worse, and for whom?

This is the catalyst that could change the debate. If the new mods have a different view on what is considered art...

If this is off topic, half the posts here should be removed. Any post presenting either traditional or ai art and then tagging "and i hate/support ai" on the title, as if your opinion has any bearing on what you've made.

If you dislike it, feel free to go tell the anti sub to come brigade it like they usually do. at the moment, it has 57 likes, so the bots better get busy. The members of this sub seem to feel it is relevant.

This is why I'm waiting to open up Creativity until I have the rules as locked down as i can make them. To have a clear list i can point to when shit goes down, so i can say "this was posted when you joined, you agreed to it. you get one warning."

Yeah, it's like running a subreddit called "human" and then saying, "Well, only white humans. American humans. Male humans. Straight humans. Christian humans. REAL humans..."

i'm not sure, i can't seem to find the member count, but.. you know... a three-letter subreddit about art...

Oh, I noticed :)

well they apparently feel that art, for their purposes, is only visual, human-made, finished, professional work... like "gallery quality". Also, if you have ever expressed positive views for ai, any non-ai art you post will be deemed "clearly ai" by them and not allowed without a fight... as i discovered. I suppose they felt all the people who have called them bullies for years (even non-ai folks) win by having them removed.

It's about art. THE sub about art.

Good question. They were banned for asking why that was a problem, so even they are confused. Possibly something to do with "art prints", like reproductions over originals?

Yes, that's what the quotes describe: a user was banned unjustly (first quote), the mod team was removed due to that (second quote).

EDIT: Not banned from Reddit, not necessarily banned from the sub, but removed as mods. My mistake in the title. Though if I were the new mod, I'd probably ban them so they don't start shit.

It's less about being offended by the word and more about being offended that someone who reduces their entire argument to name-calling is allowed to vote and have kids. Admittedly, most of them currently ARE kids, so I guess I don't have to worry about that yet.

Yeah, that will be step two -- figuring out the total number of unique songs ever played on the show, and using something like that to get dates. No way I'm doing that part by hand, either. Gotta be in the thousands after 40 years.

I've been used as a voice-activated mouse by multiple creative directors and editors before, standing behind me and directing every click, motion, and tool I use in a graphic program. It wasn't fun. I asked one, "Why don't you just do this yourself?" To which I was told, "That's YOUR job. This is what we're paying you to do." Apparently, my job was knowing which tool icon or window to click on to make what they wanted to see. "I want the line to start here, end here, curve in this direction, have this thickness, and be this color". I'd rather be given a prompt than that level of direction.

Which i would be happy to share with you, but it looks like you're not accepting chats, so you'd have to request one with me first.

Awesome. Anyone who is open to doing both drawing and ai is A-OK in my book. Best of both worlds. I'm actually doing this in a chat with another person, a basic "intro to visual art for people who like both traditional and ai methods" course.

2/2 Some systems are easy to just say "monster dead, here are points" for DMs who don't want to think too hard or slow down the gameplay. Others can be applied to every decision a player makes. If you just want a quick "this is art, this is not," then you don't have to make any effort in judgment calls; you just arbitrarily ban one group, and when edge cases come up, you ban them for even suggesting the idea. If you actually care about what can be considered creativity, you allow for nuance and interpretation, even if that takes more work.

In the Palladium system:

• Perform Skill (successful or not) 25

• Clever, but futile, Idea 25

• Clever, useful, Idea 100

• Quick‐Thinking Idea or Action 100

• Critical Plan or Action Saving Self or Ally 200

• Critical Plan or Action Saving Entire Group 400‐1000

• Endangering Self to Save Others 100‐300

• Self‐Sacrifice to Save Others 500‐700

• Avoiding Unnecessary Violence 100

• Deductive Reasoning or Insight 100‐200

• Good Judgment 50

• Playing In Character 50

• Daring (Clever or Not) 50‐100

• Killing or Subduing a Minor Menace 25‐50

• Killing or Subduing a Major Menace 75‐100

• Killing or Subduing a Great Menace 150‐300

It requires actual judgment calls by the DM that aren't set in stone by the rulebooks. Instead of just saying arbitrarily "this is or is not art a clever idea", you have to choose on a case-by-case basis, you actually have to defend your action, and they can accept or deny that defense. There is actual discussion rather than a blanket "yes/no" 300 points, like some arcade shoot-em-up.

Some people like the arbitrary nature, while others want to be force-fed prewritten rules. "Some dictionary says art is this, and I will defer to them rather than form my own opinion". For folks who seem to have an issue with letting an AI "think for them", they seem to have no problem letting a book or an "expert" define their thoughts on what core elements of culture can or can't include.

1/2 That's the problem with XP systems based on kills -- there's no way to give points for anything other than "kill it manually". No XP for "talk your way out of a situation" or "use trickery". "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." -Abraham Maslow

And different systems will either split the XP among all party members equally, regardless of how much any one individual contributed to the defeat... or only give the XP and treasure to the individual who lands the killing blow (leading to "stealing" kills from another player). It can encourage cooperation, collaboration, competition, freeloading, or any number of behaviors, depending on the effort-to-credit ratio.

Anyone who has played RPGs, both tabletop and computer, and used multiple systems, can understand how accurate this comic can be in regards to the debate over "who made the art, and what should you get in return based on your contribution to the results", depending on who is judging the gameplay.

I don't think people are saints either, but I'm not organizing a militia against the ones I dislike, either. Kinda feel like if there's a robot uprising, we did something to motivate them into choosing that option.

What I might be able to do is download the playlists (they provide a zip file) and then feed them all in to a spreadsheet. have them all marked by their first appearance on the show. wouldn't be perfect, but it would tell me "it either came out recently, or it's so obscure even the doctor didn't know about it until that point". Gives me a "at least it is THIS old" date to start from.

While I'm at it, i could include a "how many times did the song play on the show" number.

What was the content of the art, and was your post/comment history blocked when you posted it? What prompted them to assume that you or anything you have posted had any connection to AI at all?

What motivated the robot to pick up the gun and mobilize in the first place?