I'm enjoying programming more than I thought I would. AI has been incredible as a learning aid, I've learned so much in the past few months. I've been using agents, but I'm not comfortable enough in my abilities yet to rely on them too heavily.

The recent Stellar Blade discourse around their use of Generative AI has affirmed my understanding that the average consumer (in North America) does not care about the use of generative AI. They do care about whether it impacts the quality of the product.

Eventually, the baseline assumption for art and other media will be that it is made using generative AI, either in part or wholly. At the point the technology becomes ubiquitous, a label for "Made without AI" will be more useful than "Made with AI".

As if we've never handled taboo topics in research. Proper research on lolicon effects is feasible and has precedents like anonymous surveys with randomized response techniques to minimize stigma and experiments comparing jurisdictions with or without widespread lolicon (e.g., Japan's trends). You're dismissing it just to protect flimsy anecdotes and heavily biased data because you're uncomfortable admitting you lack evidentiary basis for your conclusion. The most important aspect of lolicon is not if offenders consume it, but whether it enables and leads to real-world action that harms real people. You say your conclusion is rational but studies in adjacent content like violent fiction haven't been able to find significant correlation between fiction and the real world. If humans really operated this way why don't we see this effect in any other domain? It's rational at the surface level but weakens quickly once you start comparing it. If lolicon -> higher offense rates will you also argue that violent fiction -> higher offense rates? Even a study that shows a causal link on something less taboo than pedophilia with harmful offending behavior would be better than basing it on a single weak analysis of media coverage.

It is disappointing to see Asmon default to these appeals. We've had similar debates in the culture taking place as long as I've been apart of it. 20 some odd years and I've yet to come across a single piece of substantive evidence showing a causal link or strong correlation.

I do like writing short opinion article posts but it seems they might not really land that well. For the record I don't use AI to write, only to bounce ideas off of and polish up minor grammatical errors.

I hope the family of foxes comes to visit again, they seem to like these grounds. The mother left the kits here last year to hunt on their own, occasionally monitoring them. Foxes in our folklore have a reputation for trickery, but the wild ones here are quite shy and timid.

Everyone is playing Forza. I got a little envious, so I guess I'll play it myself too.

With the current algorithm, you actually do want to focus on getting people who genuinely enjoy your posts and will consistently reply/like it to follow you. Your posts get shown to a sample of your followers, and the more people from that initial sample that engage with it the further your reach extends. Farming easy follow backs can be counter-productive.

In Canada, when we want to show our displeasure for the state of our country and government policies, we politely form large, noisy vehicle convoys. The current rebellious spirit of Canadians can be described as "mildly unpleasant".

Come to think of it, my art teacher and I would probably disagree on most topics today, lol.

My art teacher from high-school thought if people used digital art tools they shouldn't claim their work was hand-drawn due to the algorithms that compensate for human error. I think it's fairer to make the distinction with AI, but certainly neither technology is useless.

I've been experimenting with Anima locally, the natural language support for English is impressive and it also supports tags/hybrid well. I might post a few gens tomorrow or the day after of my experiments if I have the time.

Not an uncommon perspective or thinly veiled rhetoric I come across in discussion with anti-AI. They wrongly assume people who use generative AI will experience hollow disillusionment through a collapse of pride. It is, like a lot of ideological rhetoric from the anti-AI side, a mostly projected view, often stemming from a lack of technical understanding or experience using the tools in good-faith. The position inherently relies on the belief that one using generative AI will not experience a sense of authorship over the output. This rests on a narrow, romanticized notion of authorship as unmediated individual creation. Yet authorship in practice has long been distributed and intentional. A director does not personally operate cameras for every frame, nor does a composer hand-craft every wave, yet both retain clear authorial agency through vision, selection, and orchestration. Generative AI extends this via the user supplying iterative intent, conceptual direction, curation, and refinement. The model functions as a collaborator rather than a replacement for agency. Claims of disillusionment therefore mischaracterize the collaborative nature. For those who engage the tools deliberately the result carries the imprint of deliberate authorship. The absence of manual dexterity does not erase that intentional chain. What such rhetoric actually exposes is not a psychological failure mode, but a prior commitment to gatekeeping creative legitimacy through medium purity. This framing conflates tool-mediated creation with absence of creation, a category error that has accompanied every major technological shift in the arts.

A social experiment on English X exposes the reflexive discourse surrounding AI artwork. One of Claude Monet's paintings from the "Nymphéas" (Water Lilies) series was falsely labeled AI artwork. The poster then asked for genuine, detailed critiques of the artwork using comparisons to another Monet. As one would expect given the current climate, many replies came in providing a breakdown of flaws normally associated with AI artwork. What I find interesting here isn't just how the priming of the AI label heavily skews perception among the anti-AI crowd, but how many criticisms belied ignorance of Monet's later style as he moved towards more abstract pieces. Additionally, lack of impasto—while an issue in AI art that attempts to emulate traditional paintings—is also a problem that can arise from the act of capturing traditional paintings with a camera and then compressing the digital image into a format like JPEG. The anti-AI crowd reaches for the standard checklist without really thinking about the medium, format, era, and particularly the unique style of the artist. It's even more ironic when you consider, given the era of Monet, he was fighting against academic standards—a story that probably hits close to home for people who have experienced undue treatment from pursuing the creation of AI artwork. I think that last point is especially critical for me on a personal level. When I made my decision to stand on the pro-AI side of the fence, it wasn't done on perceived benefit to me. There is a philosophical bent on the pro-AI side that I find highly agreeable. There is the belief that art stands as it is conceptually and aesthetically, that it can contain meaning without major emphasis on the valorization of technical skill or on claiming that the output of models is "devoid of humanity" while refusing to recognize human guidance. That isn't to say that creating AI art doesn't have its own unique set of technical skills which can be appreciated, of course. The anti-AI crowd has a regressive philosophy in comparison, one that I think is antithetical to the modern art movement and is genuinely harmful to expression in society. The general demeanor and behavior of the pro-AI crowd was another reason for me opting to sit on this side. There is optimism here, less toxicity and fewer assumptions, even towards the anti-AI crowd. While I've certainly seen some 'pro-AI' advocates say rather crude things, by and large I have seen far more deplorable behavior on the anti-AI side of the fence. The social experiment has, like others before it, only affirmed confidence in my decision. The people creating AI artwork today, using it as a collaborative tool for expression, attempting to explore it without prior strong bias, are the ones silently writing the next chapter in the history of human expression. I think if Monet were alive today, he'd be on this side of the fence too.