A reminder the RFF directory of artists lives on and continues to grow at https://indieart.support/

It is the biggest consented list of fedi present artists around. Discover music, writing, spoken, and visual artists and THEIR preferred support links.

While original scope was heavily music and fedi, that is expanding more and more.

Message @hello or e-mail to be added. It's not automated as #community care is taken to not platform those who punch down.

#music #art #writing #search #directory

I've been accused of trying to deliberately shock and offend, but honestly, some people can't handle the reality that gay people exist. Do you consider other people's feelings when you're writing? Is there a way to show representation that's not offensive?
#WritingCommunity#AmWriting #writing

The image would disappear before you could get a real look at it, and you'd have to wait for a whole minutes before it came back.

Eventually, you'd pick out her, looking like a shadow of her happy, cheerful self, as well as a dark-skinned boy with a hint of madness in his eyes, an earnest but terrified white hippie girl, and a big Asian boy with raggedy black hair.

2/2

#Writing#Writers#WritingCommunity#WritersOfMastodon#AmWriting#Scriberspace

URGENT boost_request $165/700 DUE TOMORROW

please help my friend albi! ey are a queer, agender, polyamorous blogger, streamer, & webringer. ey need to keep the insurance on eir car. ey've been struggling with eir payments after totaling eir old car. anything helps!

- CashApp: $LeeOfTheHedge
- https://ko-fi.com/leeofthehedge
- https://paypal.me/LeeOfTheHedge

@mutualaid @blackfedi#BlackMutualAid#QueerMutualAid#TransMutualAid#MutualAid #MutualAidRequest #queerCrowdfund#transCrowdfund #crowdfund #fundraiser #queer#LGBTQIA#LGBT#LGBTQ #agender #polyamory #webRing #blog#smallWeb #web #writing #web #web2 #webDev #blogging #neocities#koFi #twitch #peertube

My office is a part of our living room and my lovely partner, Tony has a habit of spotting me at my desk, forgetting that I'm working and wafting in to tell me science facts. (Usually about singularities, black holes and binary stars of late.) And while I love a good science fact, the primal roar that I emit when interrupted mid-sentence edit is apt to terrify the average science fact imparting bunny to a premature bunny death.

SO! This was Tony's solution. An autopilot caltrop! I love it.

It's sitting in the door of my office/our living room whenever I'm working and HE SHALL NOT PASS!

(If this doesn't work, we're going to have to hire a door dragon, who could also correct the spelling of lich, but hey, what's a board without a sneaky typo or two.)

#writing #writers

You're looking at a wooden framed sandwich-board blackboard, about a meter high and a foot wide. It's sitting on a wooden floor, and visible behind it are a comfy brown armchair, multiple plants, a window overlooking a mountain and hill view that just shows mainly green. There is also a ball of black wool sitting just underneath the armchair, but I'm not owning up to forgetting it was there and stomping around the house last night claiming it had run away. I deny everything! The blackboard has text written on it in alternating rainbow colours. It says, "And yeah, the litch queen proclaimed I am editing and the mortals quailed and chickened and cast ominous looks at her eldritch lair." Lich is spelled with a t, which wrong, but this particular lich queen can write on her new blackboard however she likes, and besides, what is some random writing on a board without a typo I ask you?
You're looking at a wooden framed sandwich-board blackboard, about a meter high and a foot wide. It's sitting on a wooden floor, and visible behind it are a comfy brown armchair, multiple plants, a window overlooking a mountain and hill view that just shows mainly green. There is also a ball of black wool sitting just underneath the armchair, but I'm not owning up to forgetting it was there and stomping around the house last night claiming it had run away. I deny everything! The blackboard has text written on it in alternating rainbow colours. It says, "And yeah, the litch queen proclaimed I am editing and the mortals quailed and chickened and cast ominous looks at her eldritch lair." Lich is spelled with a t, which wrong, but this particular lich queen can write on her new blackboard however she likes, and besides, what is some random writing on a board without a typo I ask you?
#PennedPossibilities 725: Do you have a favourite character in your current WIP?

Yes. The funny one who wants to be the hero. He's endlessly fascinating to me, and a real fan favourite, too (based on the few people who've read it).

#Writing#Writers#WritingCommunity#WritersOfMastodon#AmWriting#Scriberspace

A depressing fable about how ChatGPT is corroding trust in scholarship

In preparation for next week’s keynote on generative AI and the crisis of trust, I picked up a book about trust by a philosopher, who I’ve decided not to name, when I saw it in the Tate bookshop earlier today. It began with a quote from bell hooks which caught my attention:

Trust is both a personal and a political endeavour, an affirmation of our shared humanity and our collective potential for growth and transformation. By embracing trust, by fostering connections, grounded in love and compassion, we have the power to not only change our own lives but also to reshape the world around us…

I wanted to post it on my blog, so I immediately looked for a citation. I could find no result for the exact quote but Google returned this site at the top of the list, where I found nearly the same quote:

In the end, trust is both a personal and a political endeavor, an affirmation of our shared humanity and our collective potential for growth and transformation. By embracing trust, by fostering connections grounded in love and compassion, we have the power to not only change our own lives but also to reshape the world around us, one relationship at a time.

The problem is that this site hosts imagined responses by philosophers to the question ‘what is trust?’ produced by ChatGPT. These (genuinely quite interesting) LLM outputs were posted in April 2023, only to feature in a book published in 2024. I can find no other source for the quote the author includes, other than this nearly exact quote produced by ChatGPT.

The most obvious explanation here is that they decided they want to start the book with a quote from bell hooks. They then typed in ‘bell hooks and trust’ which returns the site above as its second result. They didn’t read the introduction which explains the exercise with the LLM and instead copy & pasted the ChatGPT output into his book, without checking for the source of the citation.

The irony being that I now don’t trust the rest of the book. A philosopher writing a book about trust begins the book with such lazy scholarship that I now struggle to trust them. I hope I’m wrong. But without wishing to personalise things, I’m tempted to use this an example in next week’s keynote. It illustrate how LLMs are contributing to an environment in which lazy scholarship, cherry picking a quote from a google search, becomes much riskier given the circulation of synthetic content.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #generativeAI #PascalGielen #scholarship #technology #trust #writing

Fighting the urge to describe every little action my characters perform. Like, this guy just found a thing hidden in a cardboard box in a drawer. He's got the thing.

I do not need to say that he re-closed the box, put it back in the drawer where he found it, and then closed the drawer.

Right? I mean, sure, the difference between someone who puts things back the way they found them vs. just leaving shit all over the place is important, but I don't need to say this. Right‽

#writing#AmWriting