Episode 677 - You can't spell "Fail" without "AI"
Mar 4, 2024
I remembered that a promised Quackcast was AI: slavery for artists and creators. This is an important subject to cover especially from this angle.
Topics and Show Notes
It's slavery because it uses our creative products as fuel for it's database training for free and then uses our work to make money for their creators, essentially exploiting us for free. This isn't just about the image generators, it includes crap like chat GPT too: that system steals and repackages the creations of others without credit, payment or any acknowledgment.
The use of all this sort of AI (except the ethical ones), is immoral, unethical and is a practice that basically endorses slavery.
People are moronically starry-eyed with the idea that it answers their silly queries like a knowledgeable human, not realising the obvious fact that all it can do is repackage other people's writing for them. The fact that they use chat GPT instead of googling the information themselves is an indictment of their own characters. And this is quite apart from the fake “creative” stuff that's generated.
How does it make money?
Currently most of the companies that developed these programs are offering the use of them openly in order to get free testing from the public and to increase their profiles in hopes of getting billions of dollars in investment from people like Google and Facebook, which is already happening. Already our creativity is making masses of money for a few people and we're not seeing any of it. In the future whoever runs these generative AIs will simply charge for their services if they're not incorporated into other services that we already pay for (either directly or indirectly through advertising).
The idea that it will always be the way it is now or that “the genie is out of the bottle” and “there's n going back” is childishly naive and completely ignores the way previous examples of “disruptive” tech are integrated into the commercial world. Great previous examples are the spread of free music, programs, games, and videos on file sharing services in the late 90s. We STILL happily have for all those things now and they're all still multi-billion dollar industries because things adapted and laws were changed.
The moral is: if you are an intelligent, moral, ethical person then do not use generative AI. And don't think that this is the Apocalypse and that it's all doom and gloom with no possible hope in sight. The industry will eventually correct itself and there will be a new balance, as there always is.
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by Sandra’s Day - A spicy little latin number Chassé’s in with some fancy footwork, does a clever spin, grabs a willing partner and twirls them around the dance floor before finishing up with a hard stomping finale, a crash and a grand exit!
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Adventures of Sena - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/feb/27/featured-comic-adventures-of-sena/
Featured music:
Sandra’s Day - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Sandras_Day/ - by Lionclaw, rated M.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - http://www.virtuallycomics.com
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Episode 663 - AI and The Duck
Nov 27, 2023
This Quackcast tackles the issue of AI comics on Drunk Duck. We're discussing either a ban or rules that would enable them to be posted under conditions. We also talk about AI generated imagery and the issues with it and well as its future and the relationship between it and artists. This is a very complicated and much misunderstood subject.
Episode 610 - Beauty!
Nov 21, 2022
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so the saying goes but it's absolutely true. There is a layered subjectivity to it based on personal preference, the cultural standards of your community, the ethnic traits of you and your peers, prevailing global fashions in appearance, the dominant archetypes in the media and so on. All these things combine to form our personal subjective ideas of beauty. You can see this yourself if you look at paintings, statues, masks, frescoes and other artifacts that have been produced by all the diverse cultures on earth over thousands of years: there IS no standard, eternal, objective of beauty.
Episode 553 - Out of date humour?
Oct 18, 2021
I was reading an article the other day about the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen and how that style of comedy is now out of date, along with The Hangover and Hot Tub Time Machine. The idea is that the day for this sort of masculine, bawdy, sleazy humour has been and gone and that we're more advanced, sophisticated and enlightened now. Personally I took issue with this, I think this style of comedy is extremely relatable and eternal because of it. You can see examples of it going back thousands of years across all cultures because many factors of it are universal to the human cultural experience.
Episode 493 - Use existing IP to explore new things?
Aug 24, 2020
First up… HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO TANTZ! This Quackcast is about the topic of whether it's right to change an established character just to fit with the ideas and styles of a new creator or change them in accordance with an idea or political position you want to explore, OR should you instead create a whole new character or story to do that with? Bane's newspost gave the example of the ersatz justice league created for The Boys, where Homelander =/= Superman. The series was made to look at the dark side of superheros, but it doesn't ruin established and much loved heroes to do that…
Episode 380 - Going back, retro style
Jun 25, 2018
Retro is GOOoooooooooood! Damn good. Don't underestimate the power of retro. Old material and the past is where pure gold hides. Mine that stuff for all it's worth! But it can be overdone and when it is it's like warmed over fish and chips, it becomes tired and stale… Lets not talk about that though. What we chatted about here was the idea of mining your old work for good stuff. What was great, showed cool promise, or was some awesome but forgotten thing from your old comic work? You are perfectly free to revisit it, shine it up and impress the world. Many of the great artists and musicians of the world made their mark with that. Sometimes the world is not ready for your good stuff at the time you publish it, so many you're later you can go back and re-release it to one that is! Bands you to do that ALL the time. The past is a great place to look for inspiration. This week Gunwallace has given us the theme to Redneck: Bluegrass dubstep! Fast tasty beats, lyrical guitar and a bass that drops right onto your head! Disturbing, unsettling and yet strangely compelling.
Episode 331 - Retconning your work
Jul 10, 2017
Starwars, Ender's game, Captain America… All these are great examples (or bad ones) of “retcons”. But what IS a “retcon”? What it means is that you go back and change an established work by adding new information that has the effect of changing it in a small or significant way. You might do it in your comic, or a director might do it to a movie series, like George Lucas did famously with Star Wars: introducing concepts like “midi-chlorians” as an explanation for the force, having Han shooting Greedo second, sticking Hayden Christiensen in Return of the Jedi, among other things. A lot of the time this has the effect of pissing off audiences who've consumed the story and enjoyed it because it alters or even destroys the understanding they've built up based on it and the relationship they have wit the work. Retcons happen frequently in the comic world because publishers have to keep their franchises interesting and saleable to audiences, so origin stories get updated all the time for example. A huge recent retcon was Captain America revealing he'd been a long time sleeper agent for Hydra, which has the effect of messing up stories going back over 50 years… The writer Orson Scott Card had a great deal of success with his novel “Ender's Game”, but for some reason he can't stop retconning it, going back and adding and editing new bits and re-publishing it every few years, and most egregiously penning prequels from another character's perspective that retcon the original story entirely. As web comic creators we have the role of god-author so we all have the temptation to retcon at one stage or another. Can it ever be a good thing? Is it worth pissing off readers who have an emotional investment? Gunwallace's theme for the week was for Optimum: the future is here and it’s in space! This tune is so upbeat, positive, fun and futuristic, it really exemplifies the cute colourful graphics of Skreem’s comic.
