The Framing Of Generative Ai As "theft" In Popular Discourse Has Really Set Us Back So Far Like Not Only

He tried his best

waiter waiter 2 🥩🥗 please thank you

his tuoy

i love you visible brushstrokes. i love you glue warped scrapbook pages. i love you awkward poems. i love you junk journal with faded receipts. i love you poorly composed journal layout. I love you unintentionally blurry photographs. i love you asymmetrical beading. i love you curling freeform crochet. i love you fingerprints on pottery. i love you reused materials. i love you improvised instruments. i love you mistakes. i love you bravery to make it anyway. i love you creativity that hasn't been wiped clean of every drop of humanity and sanitized and commodified.

really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.

what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.

i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.

what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.

fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.

also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.

We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

The most frustrating part of being trans is that you can't win.

My uni has quite a few all-gender washrooms. (Specifically all-gender, cis people are absolutely encouraged to use them). And despite the fact that there are womens washrooms everywhere on campus as well, I've had cis women treat me with borderline disgust when I use the all-gender bathroom. I've had people tell me that "sure, its all genders, but when a cis man uses it its just weird".

And like. Thats the point! Even IF a cishet man using a washroom he is specifically allowed in was weird. Even then. You have to understand that no trans or nonbinary person can safely use an all-genders washroom if using it means they are either trans or female.

Like to be very clear- I am a cis-passing trans man. There are so many reasons I feel more comfortable in a non-gendered washroom. Even if I was cis I woild likely want to, because I am gnc and don't always feel safe in purely male spaces. And even if I was the cissest, hetesst, most gender conforming man on the planet, I might still want to use it because its closer to my classes.

And really, this all comes back to this deeply transmisoginistic idea that Men Are A Threat to Women in Womens Washrooms,, which. If I have to explain to you why this is purely a propagandistic falsehood I really think you need to do a gender 101 course.

Gender neutral washrooms cannot be "women Lite washrooms". In order to protect trans people, at all stages of coming out and transition and of all presentations, for the love of god stop dictating who can use all-gender washrooms.

Malwarebytes

All Gmail users at risk from clever replay attack

All Google accounts could end up compromised by a clever replay attack on Gmail users abusing Google infrastructure.

Cybercriminals are abusing Google’s infrastructure, creating emails that appear to come from Google in order to persuade people into handing over their Google account credentials. This attack, first flagged by Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a blockchain equivalent of the popular internet naming convention known as the Domain Name System (DNS). Nick received a very official looking security alert about a subpoena allegedly issued to Google by law enforcement to information contained in Nick’s Google account. A URL in the email pointed Nick to a sites.google.com page that looked like an exact copy of the official Google support portal.

As a computer savvy person, Nick spotted that the official site should have been hosted on accounts.google.com and not sites.google.com. The difference is that anyone with a Google account can create a website on sites.google.com. And that is exactly what the cybercriminals did. Attackers increasingly use Google Sites to host phishing pages because the domain appears trustworthy to most users and can bypass many security filters. One of those filters is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), an email authentication protocol that allows the sending server to attach a digital signature to an email. If the target clicked either “Upload additional documents” or “View case”, they were redirected to an exact copy of the Google sign-in page designed to steal their login credentials. Your Google credentials are coveted prey, because they give access to core Google services like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube, but also any third-party apps and services you have chosen to log in with your Google account. The signs to recognize this scam are the pages hosted at sites.google.com which should have been support.google.com and accounts.google.com and the sender address in the email header. Although it was signed by accounts.google.com, it was emailed by another address. If a person had all these accounts compromised in one go, this could easily lead to identity theft.

How to avoid scams like this

Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails or on unexpected websites.

Carefully look at the email headers when you receive an unexpected mail.

Verify the legitimacy of such emails through another, independent method.

Don’t use your Google account (or Facebook for that matter) to log in at other sites and services. Instead create an account on the service itself.

Technical details Analyzing the URL used in the attack on Nick, (https://sites.google.com[/]u/17918456/d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/edit) where /u/17918456/ is a user or account identifier and /d/1W4M_jFajsC8YKeRJn6tt_b1Ja9Puh6_v/ identifies the exact page, the /edit part stands out like a sore thumb. DKIM-signed messages keep the signature during replays as long as the body remains unchanged. So if a malicious actor gets access to a previously legitimate DKIM-signed email, they can resend that exact message at any time, and it will still pass authentication. So, what the cybercriminals did was: Set up a Gmail account starting with me@ so the visible email would look as if it was addressed to “me.” Register an OAuth app and set the app name to match the phishing link Grant the OAuth app access to their Google account which triggers a legitimate security warning from no-reply@accounts.google.com This alert has a valid DKIM signature, with the content of the phishing email embedded in the body as the app name. Forward the message untouched which keeps the DKIM signature valid. Creating the application containing the entire text of the phishing message for its name, and preparing the landing page and fake login site may seem a lot of work. But once the criminals have completed the initial work, the procedure is easy enough to repeat once a page gets reported, which is not easy on sites.google.com. Nick submitted a bug report to Google about this. Google originally closed the report as ‘Working as Intended,’ but later Google got back to him and said it had reconsidered the matter and it will fix the OAuth bug.

a fun thing about elytras is they give me a genuine reason to draw speedrunners with wings