hello, im rory, an aspiring paleoartist and avid worldbuilding/spec evo fan.
tags: #rorys art
other blogs: @bonestrewncrest (tes), @hydrachop (mc), @facivermis (shitpost paleo), @skirls (spec evo project)
🌵 carrd
🌵 shop (coming sometime soon)
art examples:
It’s always been odd to me that there are not any ocean scavengers equipped to take optimal advantage of large carcasses.
Like…. in prehistoric times, the oceans were full of huge animals… was this a problem back then too?
That was a twist I was not expecting.
So I have worked on whale breakdown teams before and it is dirty exhausting work. Even a small dolphin takes multiple people working the entire day just to do one.
So I would assume that if a team of mermaids were to break down a whale, this would be a dedicated team maybe working on rotation for for a couple of months. And maybe even up to 5 to 6 months for a large sperm whale. So most likely from they would be contracted for a certain period of time. Maybe they’re only paid a lump sum after the whole contract is complete. Don’t know anything about mermaid economy or employment practices. But it seems efficient from a employment perspective.
I’ve only broken down whales on land, so you are either on a beach or in a lab setting. But I would assume that mermaids would be stationed on the drifting whale and working on it until the job is done. Maybe attaching some platforms are scaffolding to rest after work or take breaks.
Whale break down is also mostly manual labor. It is dirty exhausting work and I can see maybe young mermaids being conscripted for something like this, especially if they are poor and lack employment options or as part of punishment as a form of community service or terms of parole. The drifting carcass essentially functioning as a labor camp and the workers stigmatized by their role. Is there a such a thing as mermaid labor law? Perhaps the shifts are long, rations are tiny and working conditions poor. Got a typhoon heading in with rough seas? Suck it up. Gotta keep cutting. Blubber ain’t going to harvest itself.
Like I can easily see this as a premise for a young mermaid to try to join up with a passing human ship in search of something better. Maybe a young mermaid from poor family and a minor criminal record with nothing to look forward to other than whale salvage, joins up with a questionable human operation such as a drugs smuggling ship or some pirates or a slave ship or Royal Caribbean cruise line, you get the gist. Adventures ensue….etc
Spreading the love: At first, no one believed the researchers. How could marine animals pollinate plants under the surface, like bees do above? It happens—and it has likely been happening for tens of millions of years, biologist Zong-Xin Ren tells Nat Geo. “We know so little about our world,” Ren says. (Pictured above, an isopod covered in the germ cells of red algae.)
PHOTOGRAPH BY SEBASTIEN COLIN
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
ALTArt thieves already hate it:
Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.
The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222
As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:
&
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
reblogging this every fucking time it comes across my dash
THDI IS FUCKING KILLING MEEEE
Genuinely why aren’t mudskippers one of the most famous memetic animals in all of human society? What did sloths and even now tardigrades really do to be more famous and more talked about than a fish with the dumbest face in the world that also walks out of the water and also it’s a tiny ferocious predator. I bet people wouldn't overlook them if they were big enough to eat us too. People won't when I make it happen. youll see
