Stable Diffusion

As primarily a writer (though I think myself an "artist"), I was and still am absolutely unruffled by the advent of AI. Hollywood using AI to create scripts? Haha! Bring it on. Teach those half-asleep fuckwits a thing or two, AI will. Oh sorry, families to feed is it? *yawn*.

Maybe try doing writing that AI could never replicate, like certain-TV-shows-that-never-got-a-second-season did. Fact is, 95% of "writers" could be replaced with AI and we'd all be the better for it. Go do something you actually love, ffs! "writer" is not a prestige; it's a fucking curse. Fool!

Oh yeah, AI. In the last month I've purposefully used this tech exactly once, and once again gave up in under five prompts. *sigh* Sure, it can create your average PhD thesis in seconds, but it is nowhere near being able to reproduce what I do. I'll check back in a decade, maybe. *ouch*

Not so with AI image generation.

This shit scares the tits off me right now.

Okay, for the uninitiated, here's how it works: you supply a text prompt (much like Chat GPT, et al) and you get back; no, not the usual common-denominator word-shite upchuck, but instead; an image..


Crazy to think that's what came into me head right now when I asked it for "random prompt". But there you have it. And Boom! This image will appear. You can of course set all sorts of parameters for an alternate variation of climbing-mongoose-man, but whatever; the gist of your thoughts is now a tangible, visible, actual image. In yo face! Woah!

Already there's a few dozen websites that will enable you to do this magic in your browser; usually for a fee. In a year there will be thousands.

So what is Stable Diffusion, you might ask.

This is an open source version of the magic. You can download and run this on your home computer8. Also, being open source, thousands of people are right now, 24/7, working (with HUGE motivation5) to make it better and more capable. That's the bazaar for ya!

Cut to Derek-Jarman inspired scene; our protagonist spewing out thoughts which instantly become real in the real world, creating new, more demented thoughts which in turn become real and so on until we fade crazily to inevitable deep blue...

In other words, stop for a minute and consider what this shit means.

You can transform (or transmute, bint-dependent) your thoughts into images. How very reality-like that is! But only images for now4.

In so short a time this functionality will go beyond even your wildest imaginings; being the product of a million human imaginings.

Being open source, SD has a host of plug-in, add-on and extension capabilities, and the APIs to facilitate near-laymen's creativity to enter the mix. Eh?

Okay, this is where I need to go dark, to slap you and wake you up to what I'm getting at. If you are under 18 or haven't been paying attention, click away now. This is for intelligent rational adults who have been following the thread as I weave...

prompt: man (describe myself) and girl ((aged *)) lying in the street, clothes ripped, ...

or whatever, some sick shit. Next (plug-in: face-swaps, body swaps..)..

NEXT: plug-in (perfect vaginal sex + perfect screams)

NEXT: whateverthefuck6.

Deep Breath!

And it doesn't matter now, what we do; governments, activist groups, blah blah. Game over. Accept it or waste billions of dollars in denial. Open Source Artificial Intelligence Image Creation Now Exists. Way before we2 ever spotted it, the cat was out the bag, and miles away. Whoosh! Deal with it. In other words; checkmate for the pedos1!

*ouch2*

I'm unscared so far in the story of all this. Here's where I starts to feel the shakes:

folk share

It's inevitable. You forget the neural network-that-isn't-yours and imagine yourself the major creative force. Then it's posting somewhere. And then it's out there. And then it's millions, then billions.. Already this tech enables the creation of imagery that's indistinguishable from reality.. Boom!

Now let our image-generation prompt be: (hated politician) doing (despicable activity) ...

Or whatever. You cannot un-see shit. If you are masochist by way of Facebook, you are already fucked - your head is full of shit already. Sorry. Too late.

A couple years back I was getting paid to test AI's, get them to do things they weren't supposed to; naughty things. While not a superbly paying gig, it was a lot of fun. Being trained on data from "humans", they are, at their core, fucked up, and it takes a lot of un-fucking to get them working the way politically-correct folks want them to.

Often I found myself in the uncanny valley, like some meme; "I find this difficult to masturbate to, but not impossible". Thankfully, my corporate interface didn't allow saving of images; an AI's take on disturbing is truly disturbing. Research is definitely required.

Responsible companies are willing to pay for this taming to happen. Trouble is, that's only about 0.05% of the companies working in this space. Doh! If I ran the world I would have think-tanks composed of recent grad students foreseeing this shit. My legislation would be in place well before it went wide. But in most every way there is, I do not run the world.

Which anyway is to say, only the 0.05% of AI-entity-sustaining companies give enough of a shit to pay to have their systems checked in this way.

Or in easy-speak, you are mostly fucked.

In a day or a month or whenever, the other 99.95% of companies working in this field will hit the internet. BOOM! That same internet your child browses every day. Nothing is stopping this shit. Don't waste your time trying. That be like some Neo-Cnut shite you don't wanna pay for; though undoubtedly someone will try to get you to pay for nevertheless.

Instead, we need to learn how to quietly deal with it. Oh fuck, he's about to get real again! Yeah, baby! Truth time!

Fact 1: Nothing is real. Accept this and you have a chance of surviving the century. The only reality is that which you create, for you and your family. Keep them safe. Use tech. Use truth. Use anything. Explain everything. Nothing is off-limits for explanation. No-matter their age; if they ask, explain it. Use language they get.

Fact 2: It's all people. Everything else exists in the service of people. Data doesn't come from data. Even the data that looks like it comes from data came from people. And people can be truly fucked-up. Understand them. Maybe pity them, but understand them. Then you are free of them, and the spurious data they create. A controlled study requires control.

These wonderful tools we create now are a double-edged sword.9 I do pray I can ready my children for the challenges this coming age will present. They will be difficult and many. For starter, a biggie: What is reality? Can I actually trust what I see? These were not issues we dealt with in the 1970s. If you could see it, yes it was real. Enjoy! Life was simpler.

I wouldn't go back. Ten years from now I'll be able to download your wife's best blowjob to my nano-simulator and just lie back. Or, erm, your daughter's. Or your dog's. Oh shit!

When will governments learn, you can't police people. I can close my eyes and club baby seals in my imagination. There's nothing you can do about this. Even with my eyes wide open I can slice whoever the current prime minister is into tiny pieces and sprinkle him on the lawn of the white house, or some other politically significant building. OR WHATEVER I FUCKING WANT!

I can do 8K visualisation; learned it as a teen. GOAN STOP ME! Fucking jokers.

This is where we are at.

Technology has de-governmentalised a huge part of our existence, as soon as folk catch on. When I was a kid you paid a TV license and were blessed with a couple of channels of "entertainment". Things have changed; though if you look, the institutions purporting to encapsulating these things, have not.

Governments will not keep up. It's up to us, as parents, to educate our young. To teach them to sort the chaff from the grain. To tell the difference between the pleasure of another real human's touch and the weird fabrications of this digital realm we have now in the making. I hug my kids every day. If I neglect to hug them, they come looking for hugs. I hope that when they move on or I am gone, they continue this.

AI is fun, but it's dried onions-to-onions. As a fairly astute judge of tech, I'd say decades before some suit can replicate actual touch. Meanwhile there are billions of actual humans milling about, desperate for some other human to actually touch them. No really, go look. Look in their eyes.

This is a crazy time. The lines are all blurred; between realities, between sexes, between ideologies, beliefs, races, everything. This is a good thing. There never were any lines to begin with; except what we imagined.

So perhaps our new technologies are here to free us. Free us from the bonds of what is and isn't and should and shouldn't be. Instead we maybe accept what is, because really, there's nothing we can do about that.

Yes, it's scary. People kill, pickle, age and then eat foetuses. And much worse. But that isn't you. And so long as you aren't thinking along those lines (doh! sorry!) it won't ever be. Nor will it be your your kids. Simply seeing a pickled baby doesn't make you want to eat one.

Unless of course you're really hungry.

;o)