Train the AI on what glaze does and it'll eventually be able to deglaze. So glaze gets better and stops it for a bit and then the deglazer gets better and wins again. Repeat forever.
Well, it's certainly better than Instagram... Who knows, maybe Cara could federate with ActivityPub in the future... Not that I'll keep my hopes up for that.
I hate that Pixelfed isn't good enough to capture these users and I say this as someone who uses it over Instagram.
From the what I've seen (and I have been watching fairly closely), I think Pixelfed and the stretched-too-thin-can't-prioritize-and-somewhat-monarchial dev himself might just need more time to cook. I still have hope in him and his projects but I won't be holding my breath again. If good shit happens, it happens. And I do hope it happens because it should've been Pixelfed in this article like Mastodon was with Twitter or Lemmy with Reddit. Not whatever this new corp that came out of nowhere is.
Now might be a good time to start getting familiar with Krita and/or GIMP. They will have different workflows and might not fit well in every situation, but reducing reliance on user-hostile corporate terms and closed, poorly-defined file formats is likely to be worthwhile in the long run.
Yeah, say that to professionals whose workflow rely on the thight integration and features of Adobe's software. I'm sure migration to a piece of crap software with a S&M name that can't even do CMYK will work great.
Affinity is a good alternative still, at least until Canvas implement the subscription model (which I still believe they will do).
No, they are being snidely combative, both in tone and by disingenuously suggesting that their cherry-picked class of users somehow invalidates the fact that these other tools work very well for many people.
That is not being right. That is being a self-absorbed jerk.
Yes, I am being a jerk because GIMP gets routinely thrown around as a Photoshop alternative,which is not. You say I cherry picked a user base, but who are the people that actually pays to use Adobe Cloud? I assure you that they are mostly professionals, because the subscription is expensive.
Now, the "many people" don't need Photoshop. In fact, there's no reason they should even install it. But people say "Photoshop" and hear "GIMP" as alternative, and this should stop because the app is objectively bad. There's Krita, there's Photopea, there's Darkroom, there's myPaint, there's even Inkscape. Anything is light years ahead that thing, yet it's recommended again and again like a sad joke made to inflict pain on its users.
GIMP is not a good tool. Stop using, stop recommending it.
I only use Gimp for my image editing and I can literally do everything I ever attempt. I do stuff game modding and 3d model textures sometimes. Wtf else do people want in gimp, an automatic dick sucking machine?
I love GIMP and I will die on that hill (yes, fully aware of the things it lacks, thank you). But for those who use Adobe products, from what I can tell, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Adobe is just that ubiquitous in that industry that you either use it or you don't work in that profession.
With Adobe dipping into AI stuff, I have an underlying fear they're going to become as ubiquitous in that domain as well, that people trying to compete with them just won't be able to. And then we will have the same problem in AI with Adobe as we have with Digital Image Editors and Adobe.
The biggest problem GIMP has is the name. We need activists to decry the name as ableist or something. I’m sure it was a hilarious joke at the time, but anyone who had seen Pulp Fiction has a pretty strong mental image when they hear the name. They ought to just drop the P and call it GIM. Then it can be a fun play off GIF. Is it pronounce Ghim or Jim?
The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe's UX. I know there's tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I'm typing, it works like this... https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2f57b518-29cc-4fbb-8aaf-9849bb5e80d2.gif
I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn't apply to what I've typed or selected... and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.
Seriously, I've used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5... FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe's garbage malware tool.
That being said... the one important thing that GIMP is not... is Adobe garbage malware... GIMP just has a janky UX that no one's going to bother fixing b/c the tool is free so no complaining!
And in any case, just like with Blender coming on to the scene in earnest like a decade ago to end Autodesk's defacto monopoly with its $$$$ per year licensing scheme for proprietary 3D modelling tools... with Adobe rapidly getting worse, and just like with Unity's "pay us per install" debacle made people jump ship to Godot - never to look back... I'd bet that GIMP is going to begin accelerating its improvement... or that Krita will do the same and overtake it in popularity.
...And once that happens, Adobe is cooked. And it can't happen soon enough.
I have you beat then! My first experience with Photoshop was either 2 or 2.5 on my Mac IIci in 1992-93. All that means is that I’m likely older than you. We bought the Mac to run pagemaker after a failed attempt to use it on Windows 3. I started using Illustrator around the same time. I still use it, but mostly I’m throwing my money away on CC because I don’t have the skill necessary to care about AI stealing my work.
You have to opt-out. I got an email from meta with a link to the form. Doesn't seem to matter really what you write. It got approved in less than a minute for me. I think they purposfully made it look like it's more work than it's worth.
People talking about pixelfed are missing a key point: Cara is super easy to find and join. You go, type your email or login with your google account and that's it. You don't even have to remember a password. Nobody wants to find a server, apply to join, hope to get accepted, then somehow find all other artists like you.
Also, it looks good. Like, really good. That's a thing that grab the attention of artists.
Open app and get asked which instance i want to join. There are no suggestions.
Do a search for instances and pick one, go to the website and register with email and password. Requires email confirmation. Still waiting on the email confirmation link, 4 hrs later and 2 resends.
Literally haven't been able to sign up yet.
Even if it had worked, the workflow would have been to change back to the app, type out the instance then re-login.
I'm not sure how anyone expects anyone other than the most hardcore to sign up for these services. Maybe that's the point but if the point is to grow the user sign up process to significant overall
Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:
The app I wanted to use didn't even recognize the instance I signed up for and...
I had to wait nearly a month and a half before being able to actuallyuse my account and access Mastodon because I joined an instance where they review people signing up or something similar.
I definitely see the appeal of a find the site, sign up, and you're done services over the fediverse join an instance and pray service.
Thats not fair, since everyone says the main app suck and you'll have a better experience with Moshidon. This is true if you're already there, but the comment makes it clear that it still lacks for newbies.
Never heard of Moshidon, so clearly not everyone.
Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me. Some apps are better than others, but always start with the official one and then, if it lacks something, look for something else. This applies not only for mastodon, but for everything. Basic stuff...
And then that growth promptly blew its budget because it's using expensive cloud AI services from Vercel and it has no means of monetization whatsoever to bring money in.
People can do whatever they want, of course. But they have to pay for the resources they consume while doing that, and it seems Cara didn't really consider that aspect of this.
I get the sense that a federated image hosting/sharing system would be counter to their goals, that being to lock away their art from AI trainers. An AI trainer could just federate with them and they'd be sending their images over on a silver platter.
Of course, any site that's visible to humans is also visible to AIs in training, so it's not really any worse than their current arrangement. But I don't think they want to hear that either.
Glaze attempts to "poison" AI training by using adversarial noise to trick AIs into perceiving it as something that it's not, so that when a description is generated for the image it'll be incorrect and the AI will be trained wrong. There are a couple of problems with this, though. The adversarial noise is tailored to specific image recognition AIs, so it's not future-proof. It also isn't going to have an impact on the AI unless a large portion of the training images are "poisoned", which isn't the case for typical training runs with billions of images. And it's relatively fragile against post-processing, such as rescaling the image, which is commonly done as an automatic part of preparing data for training. It also adds noticeable artefacts to the image, making it look a bit worse to the human eye as well.
There's a more recent algorithm called Nightshade, but I'm less familiar with its details since it got a lot less attention that Glaze and IIRC the authors tried keeping some of its details secret so that AI trainers couldn't develop countermeasures. There was a lot of debate over whether it even worked in the first place, since it's not easy to test something like this when there's little information about how it functions and training a model just to see if it breaks is expensive. Given that these algorithms have been available for a while now but image AIs keep getting better I think that shows that whatever the details it's not having the desired effect.
Part of the reason why Cara's probably facing such financial hurdles is that it's computationally expensive to apply these things. They were also automatically running "AI detectors" on images, which are expensive and unreliable. It's an inherently expensive site to run even if they were doing it efficiently.
IMO they would have been much better served just adding "No AI-generated images allowed" to their ToS and relying on their users to police themselves and each other. Though given the witch-hunts I've seen and the increasing quality of AI art itself I don't think that would really work for very long either.
I think it would be great for new social things like this to just speak ActivityPub. They can build up their own user experience and culture while joining a larger network. I don't have a problem with the software itself being non-free if the protocols are and they commit to supporting account migration.
You understand that search results are different for different people, right? I've been a dev for... an embarrassingly long time, I've never heard "libreware" outside of specifically the libreoffice suite. Sorry I'm not as in-tune with the slang as you are or whatever.
They're using loaded language to say that without access to the source code and the ability to modify it, Cara could start behaving in a way you don't like and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
I can't stand "a16z" type abbreviations. "a11y" for accessibility is ironically inaccessible unless you already know. I hate having to search these terms just to figure out what they're talking about. "a16z" is apparently Andreessen Horowitz. How is that intuitive or accessible?
They’re shorthand for long words you don’t want to type. You keep the first and last letter and replace the rest of the word with the number of characters you removed.
Yeah they should just give him some stupid nickname.. like meatball Ron, space Karen.. etc.. etc.... making fun of these jokers should become the norm.
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