Out Of Mana

The sound of meowing 🐾

And what about Asian American movies too? are all Asian-Americans suddenly soulless by proxy of being American? Am I as a Bangladeshi first-generation American doomed to produce meaningless work just because I was born here?

Are Latin America / South America movies soulless as well? Because they're also American by the very nature of the word.

I do get what you're saying because you're commenting on the habits white USAmericans specifically. At least, I hope that's what you actually mean by that. Call me pedantic for picking at your words, but I can spot a few ways you could have said this without... you know... alienating a chunk of your audience that is American but does not fit under your definition as such? The brush you're casting is pretty wide.

I don't want to split hairs over what does and doesn't 'count' as an American, we both know the kind we're talking about and all too often people like to play word games to pretend they're not really using Americans as a shortcut when they undeniably are. It's interesting that you bring up Sinners, in fact. The much admired 'twins' digital effects they used to allow Michael B. Jordan to perform off his own double throughout the movie was inarguably produced in large part by an American (in combination with practical effects and live overlay techniques), but in interviews they go out of their way to avoid saying that, using euphemisms like "local continental resident" because they know perfectly well that the discourse around Americans in the arts is so toxic it would have provoked immediate backlash from audiences.

Also, I now know you mean white USAmerican specifically. Searching through your blog seems to imply that anyhow. (Which I don't think the average user is doing.) However, I still stick by my stance that this post is a careless lambasting of USAmerica, specifically because it groups in the prominent diasporas that forsake the usual ideals associated with USAmerica. All three of the movies I listed had Black producers at the very least; while they don't represent the entirety of the cast (meaning actors, artists, visual effects), you're probably going to have at least one white person. It's just improbable if I'm being blunt. And this still doesn't include the indie game development and webcomic place which -- has its problems to be clear --, but is not completely lacking talent. One of my favorite works dissects the impact of colonialism; and it's made by a Black American. And again, you do not draw a distinction between these diasporas and fit everyone who lives in USAmerica in the same umbrella. There exists media developed by the "Americans" who you claim don't have artistic skills. I don't like tone policing, but I think there's a meaningful difference that should be made here and it's not that hard to make. Plus, I remember a thing on Tumblr where when people were insulting Americans, they were more than willing to associate Black people with these negative stereotypes

Also sure; maybe Americans are involved in the assets. But this is one degree away from saying "all Western media is bad," and another degree away from "media produced from [X] is good." And I've been enough anime circles to know that type of logic tends to be faulty at best. Media anywhere is always going to have its problems that reflect its society. Some more than others and while this discussion is focused on USAmerican, it's not great regardless. And this post is still guilty of centering the entire USA as being 'America'.

"trained on a specific culture's stories"

"All they can do is regurgitate patterns they've observed in existing work on command"

"because art is the expression of human experience and human emotion"

"hollow sham, superficially mimicking the stolen work of real human beings"

"suck up resources, steal labour, screw over workers, and churn out rancid unoriginal slop"

"riddled with problematic biases as a result"

chatGPT was totally uninteresting to me because it has this dumb framing device where it uses "I" pronouns and frames its outputs like a person's speech. With InferKit, you would just type in whatever input, and it would spit out text that the model decided was the most likely to occur after that.

So if you formatted something like a list, the model would continue to produce a list of things.

I think the training data associated my inputs closely with lists of songs from black metal bands and similar, but also with transcripts of video or audio.

worth noting that when I did this I had "temperature" slider turned up usually to 1.1 - 1.2 (at 1.3 and above, the model's ability to spell words significantly deteriorated)

"temperature" slider controlled the "randomness" of what the model decided was the next chunk of letters in the output, essentially.

People had very strong feelings about Eliza.

I'd watch people engage with it for hours sometimes. One guy swore it was a living, thinking being and I had to stop the program and scroll through the BASIC code to show him how it worked. I'm not sure he was entirely convinced.

you just copy paste other’s

code and hope it works

earth, wind & fire: what?

me: just wondering if i could get some water

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity

Trying to parse whether this reblog is making:

An extremely inaccurate assumption about how widespread witch trials were in the early modern period

An extremely specific point about the prevalence of different execution methods (most accused witches in Britain were hanged, not burnt)