your favorite youtubers and content creators are about to be offered some tantalizing tv/streaming deals so we’re all about to find out who the real working class allys are
someone’s gonna get cancelled doing this and they’re gonna cry crocodile tears over how difficult it is to make a living as a content creator and i’m telling you right now we are NOT going to buy it, got it? scabs deserve no sympathy
on a serious note regarding the wga strike and (as of 1:50 AM PST 7/13) upcoming sag-aftra strike, dsa-la has a fundraiser called The Snacklist which provides snacks and water on the picket lines here in LA. right now the funds they have will not last through the end of the summer, especially given the current and upcoming heatwaves necessitating more supplies. if you have a couple of dollars to spare it’s a great way to directly support the writers (and potentially the actors) during this difficult time!
happy first sag-aftra strike in 60 years to all who celebrate.
if you are an enjoyer of media (which i will guess based on your presence on tumblr that you are) please consider donating to the snacklist (linked above) or to any of the following mutual aid funds that directly support striking actors/writers, IATSE and teamster union members who are also out of work and by and large refusing to cross the picket lines, and nonunion PAs and assistants (like yours truly) who are directly impacted by the work stoppage. everyone in this industry works unbelievably hard to bring you the shows, movies, webseries, and variety programs that you enjoy and every worker deserves a fair contract. any support you can give is extremely meaningful.
The Entertainment Community Fund provides emergency financial assistance to anyone in the entertainment industry who is unable to pay their immediate basic living expenses such as housing, food, bills, and healthcare.
The Union Solidarity Coalition has been formed by members of the wga, sag, and the dga to help cover the cost of healthcare for IATSE and teamsters who will not get enough work hours to qualify for their coverage this year due to their refusal to cross a picket line.
The Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund (also run by the Entertainment Community Fund but separate from the above link which supports all film and tv workers) offers assistance to tv and film support staff and assistants who are not protected by a union and have been displaced from low or entry level positions.
Drive 4 Solidarity is an IATSE organized event in August raising funds for all union and guild members. Tickets are available for those in socal but donations are being taken as well.
Strike is on. Actors will be joining the writers on the picket lines. This is the first strike in 60 years for SAG, and essentially shuts down the entire US film and television industry.
“i wish i could do something 😔 / i wish the wga had a kickstarter or a gofundme, i would throw money at it” good news! it’s amazing how you can literally go onto the wga strike website or the wgawest linktree from their twitter and find links to support writers and other workers affected by the strike
Don’t mind me, I’m just getting emotional about the way trans elder and renn faire musician Alexander James Adams conceptualizes his relationship to his pre-transition self, Heather Alexander:
“Heather was a changeling. In 2006 she was called back to faerieland and Alec, the child in whose place she had originally been left, was released after beating the faerie queen in a fiddling contest. Thus, Alec now carries on Heather’s musical legacy as her appointed heir.”
The website promises to make “men’s dreams come true.” Users upload a photo of a fully clothed woman of their choice, and in seconds, the site undresses them for free. With that one feature, it has exploded into one of the most popular “deepfake” tools ever created.
Far more advanced than the now-defunct “DeepNude” app that went viral in 2019, this new site has amassed more than 38 million hits since the start of this year, and has become an open secret in misogynist corners of the web. (HuffPost is not naming the site in order to avoid directing further traffic to it.) It went offline briefly Monday after HuffPost reached out to its original web host provider, IP Volume Inc., which quickly terminated its hosting services. But the site was back up less than a day later with a new host — as is often the case with abusive websites.
“Hany Farid, a computer scientist at UC-Berkeley who specializes in digital-image forensics and was not involved in the original pix2pix research, said the fake-nude system also highlights how the male homogeneity of AI research has often left women to deal with its darker side.
AI researchers, he said, have long embraced a naive techno-utopian worldview that is hard to justify anymore, by openly publishing unregulated tools without considering how they could be misused in the real world.
“It’s just another way people have found to weaponize technology against women. Once this stuff gets online, that’s it. Every potential boyfriend or girlfriend, your employer, your family, may end up seeing it,” Farid said. “It’s awful, and women are getting the brunt of it.
“Would a lab not dominated by men have been so cavalier and so careless about the risks?” he added. “Would [AI researchers] be so cavalier if that bad [stuff] was happening to them, as opposed to some woman down the street?””
a quick word about the writers guild strike, for those of you who currently AREN’T guild members but would like to be one day: the WGA has always strongly enforced its right to ban from future membership any non-member who crosses the picket line and engages in scab writing, aka writing for any of the struck companies during the WGA strike.
so if you’re seeing job openings for screenwriters at places like netflix, amazon, paramount, etc and you’re thinking “hey, maybe i’ll apply and get my foot in the door,” just know that you WILL be scabbing and you WILL be barred from ever obtaining WGA membership. permanently.
You know, every so often I think I should update my pirated copy of CS2.
Then I see things like this, and remember that I don’t need it more than I need it, you know?
Dated 3/22/23
Heads up, folks. I haven’t seen this going around tumblr yet, but it’s all over my twitter feed. If you’re using a current version of photoshop, make sure this is switched off - it’s opted in by default.
“…of course people put into a fictional circumstance are going to want to fight, because the idea of being able to express rage without consequence is such a cathartic thing for people who most often swallow rage.”
— Brennan Lee Mulligan, on having the fights in D&D that you don’t get to have in real life
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 onpainterly 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 replacedthe front-endcode 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/
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