Dragon Age Fix

in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.

*Nüwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.

thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.

any time someone is in any kind of crisis or upheaval, offer to feed them. tell them they don't have to choose what it is if they can't make decisions, just ask about allergies and preferences and tell them you're just gonna make food happen at their house.

friend having a baby? delivery gift certificate to order food to the hospital after the kid shows up.

someone's relative passes away? offer to make them dinner.

buddy gets laid off? ask if you can order them lunch.

pal stuck in a depressive episode? offer to drive them to fucking mcdonalds, if that's what they want.

people in crisis are tired and sad and angry and the last thing most of them are doing is thinking about feeding themselves. so if you have the ability or time or money, providing that is always, always a good move.

Someone reblogged my Mass Effect planet posters. They clearly liked them enough to put them on their blog. No drama, no disclaimers, just: “I want this on my page.”

Then, later, they get an anon:

“hii just so you know those mass effect planet posters are ai generated :-(”

And the reply?

“Ooooo thank you for the heads up! I didn't read all of the tags. Yucky yucky”

Nothing about the image changed in those few minutes. The colors didn’t rot, the composition didn’t fall apart, the mood didn’t evaporate. The only thing that changed was a label: “AI generated”.

Before the label, the reaction was: “I like this enough to show it to other people.”

After the label, the reaction had to be retrofitted to match the approved script: “Oh no, actually this is gross. Yucky. My bad for enjoying it.”

And this is why I roll my eyes when people say “AI art isn’t real communication.”

Communication happened. Very clearly.

I had a specific memory and emotion tied to a tiny shard of Mass Effect.

I built images around that feeling and threw them into the void.

Someone on the other end felt something strong enough to reblog them. That’s the basic loop of art: one brain reaching another.

What also happened was something different: a little piece of social hygiene theatre.

An anon rushed in to police taste. And the blogger immediately performed the ritual of purity.

This isn’t about whether AI can carry meaning. The meaning was already there, received and acknowledged, before the disclosure.

This is about the fact that a lot of people would rather betray their own sensory experience than risk being seen enjoying the “wrong” kind of art.

They didn’t discover that the posters were empty. They discovered that their social circle told them they’re not allowed to like them.

If your ethics require you to pretend you never felt what you felt five minutes ago, that’s just peer pressure in a cosplay wig.

There have been no reports of anybody losing power due to datacenters, and datacenters run the whole internet, not just AI/LLMs.

There have also been no water shortages due to datacenters, most articles about datacenters affecting water quality have been sensational headlines with nothingburger actual content, and the original article estimating the water consumption of datacenters had a mistranslation that overestimated water consumption by an order of magnitude. If such an error had come from AI use, you'd be crucifying the article writers over it. AI uses far less water than agriculture.

I encourage people to make their own art; however, using an image generator can be part of the artistic process. It's not necessarily the end of the artistic process. People who use other media than digital drawings will certainly not be displaced by other people using image generators.

1. There have been lawsuits. Art and writing have, in fact, been stolen to be fed into AI. People get this sort of education/library for a large amount of money. Billionaires steal it for reasons of their own and feed it into AI. Search term Anthropic is a good one.

2. People have recently been asked to stop running their ac in the Southern US so that nearby data centers can keep running.

People's utility bills have gone up where there are AI data centers. In my state, if you can't pay your utility bills, you lose power. (Except in winter for heat, last I heard.) That won't hit the news, but it will be more common.

Data centers for the internet are a fraction of the size of data centers for AI. Headlines that AI data centers need more power have been frequent.

3. Check again on water shortages. The southwestern US would like word. Pheonix jumps to mind, but I would need to double-check.

4. I don't actually mind this part. I personally don't want to be beholden to billionaires for my process - I art in physical media and I recently switched to LibreOffice - and also I understand why people do, and are.

And also, one of the most rewarding things about doing art is learning art. The pressure and motion and eye and memory all coordinating to finally make something beautiful, after hours of practice. Looking over my work to see my growth. I love it. But, yeah. ymmv and that's okay.

5. I invite you to consider why you respect me, as your friend. Perhaps I have applied those aspects of myself to this, too.

When I first encountered AI art, my "knee-jerk reaction" was, hey, cool! Look what they can get computers to do now! The art was weird in a cool way. I used some art in others' writing games. Until I learned how they were trained and how many resources they take. I was sorely disappointed, and also I let it go.

Someone reblogged my Mass Effect planet posters. They clearly liked them enough to put them on their blog. No drama, no disclaimers, just: “I want this on my page.”

Then, later, they get an anon:

“hii just so you know those mass effect planet posters are ai generated :-(”

And the reply?

“Ooooo thank you for the heads up! I didn't read all of the tags. Yucky yucky”

Nothing about the image changed in those few minutes. The colors didn’t rot, the composition didn’t fall apart, the mood didn’t evaporate. The only thing that changed was a label: “AI generated”.

Before the label, the reaction was: “I like this enough to show it to other people.”

After the label, the reaction had to be retrofitted to match the approved script: “Oh no, actually this is gross. Yucky. My bad for enjoying it.”

And this is why I roll my eyes when people say “AI art isn’t real communication.”

Communication happened. Very clearly.

I had a specific memory and emotion tied to a tiny shard of Mass Effect.

I built images around that feeling and threw them into the void.

Someone on the other end felt something strong enough to reblog them. That’s the basic loop of art: one brain reaching another.

What also happened was something different: a little piece of social hygiene theatre.

An anon rushed in to police taste. And the blogger immediately performed the ritual of purity.

This isn’t about whether AI can carry meaning. The meaning was already there, received and acknowledged, before the disclosure.

This is about the fact that a lot of people would rather betray their own sensory experience than risk being seen enjoying the “wrong” kind of art.

They didn’t discover that the posters were empty. They discovered that their social circle told them they’re not allowed to like them.

If your ethics require you to pretend you never felt what you felt five minutes ago, that’s just peer pressure in a cosplay wig.

So walk me through the crime scene: which person's electricity am I stealing when I pay my own bill for my own machine in my own apartment? Whose water is being redirected when my cooling setup runs dry and I foot that cost too?

And this “theft of money” you’re worried about — whose money, exactly, and if I supposedly stole it, where is it?

You can't gesture at "resources that should go to people who need them" and then refuse to specify the person, the meter, the pipe. That's not an ethical claim, that's a mood wearing an ethics costume.

And the "stealing work/legacy" argument doesn't fare better once you ask it to generalize, which is the whole point of a principle. Your washing machine put laundresses out of a job. Your vacuum did the same to house cleaners. Your dishwasher, the same to dishwashers. Where's the anon rushing with "hii just so you know those dishes were machine-washed, not hand-washed by a real person :-("? Nobody's performing purity rituals over appliances, because appliances didn't threaten anyone's self-image as a person who Makes Things.

That's the tell. The outrage isn't tracking actual resource theft or actual labor displacement, because if it were, it would show up consistently across every labor-saving device in the house. It shows up exactly once, aimed at the one technology that makes "I could've made that too, but faster" uncomfortably close to true.

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