thereallinebyline

So DA is getting sued, along with other repackagers of the Stable Diffusion art-theft-laundering tool. I don't think class-action lawsuits ever really amount to much, but at least it's something. Which is more than ArtStation is doing and the polar opposite of what DA is doing by continuing to run its own white-label version of Stable Diffusion.

What's cool about this page is the explanation of how Stable Diffusion works.

Now, the lawyer may be overstating his case a bit, or perhaps he's just leaving out a detail that he's considered and didn't think important enough for the summary: If the portion of each of those 5 billion stolen works used in a given output is small enough, then derivative works wouldn't be infringing. Same logic behind sampling in music. I think the term is de minimis but I'm not going to swear to it.

However, due to the black-box nature of these generative AIs, there's no way to know that DreamOn or MindJammer or Wall-E or whatever isn't spitting out something that incorporates enough of a given work to be infringing. Well, not unless you are familiar with the entire training dataset.

Which, now that I think about it, would be feasible to automate, albeit resource-intensive. Detecting similarities between images is easier than generating them; you'd just have to run every generated image against the billions of training images. But actually doing that would keep people from formulating their prompts to generate deliberate knockoffs, which would cut into profits, so obviously it isn't going to happen.

I was very mad about the whole dreamUp AI "art" thing and now I don't have the energy to be mad anymore. I'm just tired. I was going to do a whole blog post but... ehh. I'm not leaving dA yet,but I'm gonna give it a break for a while and see if staff (are allowed to) come to their senses or if Wix pulls an Elon.

In the mean time, you can find my work on the art gallery section of my personal site where I tend to post longer descriptions/musings than I do here. I also have an art tag on my blog on that same site.

I'm also posting all my art to my new Mastodon account at bytetower.social. I know at least some of the artists I follow have Mastodon accounts:

• @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org

• @drachenmagier@mastodon.art

• @Eskiworks@mastodon.art

• @silasagnostos@mastodon.art

• @Yacrical@mastodon.art

If you don't want to sign up for Mastodon (which can be a headache because you have to choose an instance), you can also subscribe to anyone on Mastodon via the RSS feed by adding ".rss" to the end of their URL. For instance, mine is https://bytetower.social/@linebyline.rss.

I just posted a blog post beginning a reread of the Animorphs series, covering the first two books. It's a follow-up to a post about whether the series finale works as an anti-war war story. So if you want to see me rant about a book series I enjoyed as a preteen, you can head over to my personal blog.

Also worth your time if you haven't already seen it: Lord Ravenscraft's Animorphs video essay (and follow-up, and second follow-up about the TV show).

I've been making pretty slow progress on the next page of the comic, and I've been fairly quiet about it because I don't want to spam everyone with incremental updates. But I just encountered a not-insignificant setback, so I think now's a good time for a progress report.

Back when I finished the thumbnails, you may recall, I said:

Once I stitched all my "final" thumbnails together and read through them as a single comic, it dawned on me that the reader doesn't get a good look at the sorceress—the ostensible main character—until halfway through the comic. In a very early draft, I had intentionally not shown her face until even later, but I feel like that signals to readers that she's not the main character, except in the same sense as the title "characters" of movies like Twister, Volcano, and Jaws. I don't want anyone to feel cheated when it shifts to her POV. So I redrew the beginning of page 2 to give her a nice medium shot establishing what she looks like.

So here's the problem: When I started working on the layout for page 2, I used the old thumbnail instead of the re-drawn one, and didn't notice until long after I'd started work on the pencils. In fact, the only reason I caught the error at all is that I was going back through my blog working on layout updates. I saw the part quoted above and realized that the page I was drawing did not begin with a medium shot of Viola. In the first row of panels, all you can see is her hand:

So I now have to replace those two panels with these three from the revised thumbnail:

Losing panel 2 is no big deal, since I never really was quite happy with the magic effect and I'm pretty sure the blade is way out of proportion to her hand.

I'm a little sadder about panel 1, since it was the most complete panel so far. I was pretty proud of that hand, too. I'm hoping I can salvage part of the angry sword man, though obviously he needs some work too. I guess I'll find out, but the change has to be made either way. No point crying over spilled milk.

As a bonus, here's my first attempt at drawing his face in a later panel. It's not too bad, but the expression is completely wrong. Drawing expressions is hard.

So how's the rest of the page going? Well, I'm spinning my wheels trying to get a grass-dirt transition looking passable and I'm about halfway done with a figure in panel four (soon to be five) but there's not a single background that's done yet. Overall, I'd say I had penciled about 32% of what the page would have looked like based on the earlier thumbnail. With re-drawing the top row, I'm maybe 11 or 12% done with the final page, not counting the extra work of combining the two sheets of paper into a single page somehow.

I'm always nervous about writing about politics and current events, partly because it's a good way to attract all the wrong kinds of attention, and, for my DeviantArt journal at least, because it's not what I want this platform to be about. But I did just make a post to my personal blog about the ongoing impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, and I figured I should probably mention it here. I keep hearing that the whole thing is a waste of time for various reasons, and I can't let that slide.

I'm not going to cross-post the whole thing here. You can read it in full on my personal blog if you want. I'll just summarize.

I hear people say that it doesn't matter because Trump is already out of office. However, not only is Trump still perfectly able to run for a second term (unless the Senate convicts him and then votes to bar him from holding office) but it's also important for Congress to make clear that similar behavior won't be tolerated from any future president.

It's argued that it's unconstitutional to try the impeachment now that Trump is out of office, but it wasn't unconstitutional when they did it to William Blount or William W. Belknap, so if it is unconstitutional, that means there's a Nixonian "When the President does something" exception. Besides, the Senate already voted to dismiss the constitutional question, not that this has deterred Trump's lawyers from continuing to press that issue today.

I've been told repeatedly that the whole thing is just a waste of time and resources. Setting aside that I didn't hear that said nearly as often about Trump's election lawsuits, I think answering the question of whether a president committed sedition and incited a violent attack on the Capitol, and if so whether he can be held accountable for it, is a worthwhile expenditure of time and money.

Then there's the big one: People say it doesn't matter because Trump didn't do what he's accused of. In the blog post, I have a recap with a lot of links, but I'll just quote my summary:

So let me put that another way: Trump spent months doing his best to convince his followers that the system was rigged against him—and, by extension, them. He filed several lawsuits that were quickly dismissed or withdrawn. He had a huge crowd of people at the Capitol who believed their last hope for letting the system do its job was for Pence to overturn the results himself, and then that didn't happen. He told this crowd to march down to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” And then they did. As they stormed the Capitol, he dragged his feet, made only token efforts to control the situation, made at least one statement attacking someone the mob was targeting, and capped it all off by telling the attackers how special they were.

Finally, I address the argument that the rioters who stormed the Capitol weren't Trump supporters (thus he couldn't have incited them) but Antifa and anarchists taking advantage of a "peaceful" protest by "real" Trump supporters. The reason I don't buy that is because even the ones who didn't go in were still there because they wanted Congress and the then-Vice President to refuse to certify the results of a system that gave their side every opportunity to prove its case, because they didn't get the result they wanted.

So here's my bottom line, verbatim from the full post:

This is not just about punishing Trump, making sure he can never run again, or even making sure no future politician can do what he did. It is about those things, and they're all important, but it is also—even more importantly—about sending a message to Trump's supporters: This behavior will not be tolerated. Freedom of speech may protect the right to demand that an election be overturned, but those demands must fall on deaf ears. Calling for violence, let alone actually committing it, is not protected and will not be tolerated—from anyone. What happened at the Capitol on January 6th can never happen again. They will not get their way.