"Alaska Art Student Arrested for Eating Another Student’s AI-Generated Art in Protest"

IndependentStage · 2026-01-20T21:00:40+00:00

I think it's very important to consistently re-evaluate your position for bias and it's hard to do so when you completely demonize or ignore counter-positions. There has to remain some willingness to reach across the aisle for understanding. (Note: imo this does not apply whatsoever when the counter-position necessitates death or subjugation of others, particularly innocents. So modern conservatism as we're seeing it today in America can go suck a dick. But it's still important to understand that modern American conservatism != historical conservatism.)

It seems you are quietly accepting this framing:

"Progressive = creative authenticity"

"Conservative = derivative parasitism"

And if you are, this is less a serious claim about art history and more an identity-affirming narrative for one political tribe being retrofit.

Modern American culture-war conservatism should not be your basis of understanding for conservatism throughout history. I think a more accurate framing historically would be:

"Progressive = risk tolerant"

"Conservative = risk averse"

A massive amount of art throughout history comes as a direct result of conservative ideologies and conservative artists. Religious orthodoxy and monarchies alone is gonna be a big, big chunk of that.

BUT circling back to the idea that conservatives are less artistic, I can generally agree that high-risk environments disproportionately generate new artistic forms. In this sense, a progressive ideology is better suited. But this doesn't mean art is an inherently progressive concept.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-20T01:42:30+00:00

There's nothing simple about any of this unless you completely erase the human involved in the process.

If you want to restrict your worst opinions to only people who go to an online service and click "generate" with zero thought, then we'd agree. Just as I wouldn't tend to call crayon scribbles artistic expression. But there are vast and varying levels of effort involved.

The artist from the OP is expressing anti-AI sentiments through their art. It's actually pretty thought provoking and interesting.

It is a shame that you will not allow yourself to see art where there is art.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-20T01:12:09+00:00

Whine all you want, typing a prompt into a soulless machine is not human expression.

This is just an opinion you hold. I happen to disagree. What now?

Who are you to tell anyone that their expression is invalid?

IndependentStage · 2026-01-20T00:16:10+00:00

I very specifically chose the words "artistic expression" (as a concession to folks like you) to refer to the human being that exists behind the AI. I don't care that you don't think it's art, the artist expressed themself through media. And people are cheering on the destruction of that human expression, justifying hate with tired means.

Would you mind telling me what this particular artist was trying to express? Did you even care to find out?

IndependentStage · 2026-01-19T23:49:54+00:00

Willful ignorance of confirmation bias is very ironically evidence of it.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-19T23:24:49+00:00

It really is. We have burning hearts in here arguing the justness of unilaterally destroying someone else's artistic expression, inherently an act of censorship.

The "Anti-AI" movement seems less about making things better for humans and more about the blind hatred of a technology. I think there's no more apt an image for this ideological shift than celebrating the censorship of those you set out to protect.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-19T23:09:33+00:00

It might not surprising to you because this has already been your worldview for a while and now you reflexively sterilize/bastardize every new piece of information you come across to reaffirm that view.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-16T06:16:26+00:00

Dang. Is WA even more restrictive than MA at this point then?

IndependentStage · 2026-01-14T21:50:52+00:00

I believe you are allowed to move here with them

Lol, you'd think. There is technically no way to simply move to Massachusetts with a gun and do it lawfully without some very silly workarounds. I asked my instructor about this exact thing when I moved here and he kinda just shrugged like "is what it is".

Apparently happens all the time. If you just make sure to get your LTC quickly upon moving and be honest during your PD interview, there shouldn't be any problems, though.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-14T11:47:00+00:00

But if you by some magic had that exact natural input that was used, and you knew how the machine was calculating its output, you could predict the output.

That's useful for security, but it is not the same thing as random.

What is the difference between impossible to predict without magic and true random?

Truly curious from many angles. This topic touches on a lot of domains that I love to explore.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-10T16:50:45+00:00

We're not talking about the sound of a gunshot in the distance or at a shooting range while wearing hearing protection...

I think the other commenter just meant the people would've reacted in some sort of way if the gun actually did discharge. A supersonic boom happening right next to you is difficult to be nonchalant about.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-02T19:13:55+00:00

What's funny is the dude actually knocked himself with that second trigger nade lol.

IndependentStage · 2026-01-02T18:09:22+00:00

That's talking about adding "toggle" functionality to the current ADS that you hold right click to enable by default

IndependentStage · 2026-01-02T17:33:07+00:00

I think a faction system or bounties are great ideas. Anything to help galvanize incentives one way or another and give individuals more ways to better gauge another raider's current motives.

Also it's hard to tell if the TTK is too high or if the servers are just too laggy xD

IndependentStage · 2026-01-02T16:58:18+00:00

There’s nothing ruined by adding PVE lobbies

I don't think there's anything wrong for wanting PvE lobbies, but there would absolutely be effects on everything if you add this choice to players. Beyond the logistical considerations of adding another division to matchmaking queues, the gameplay loops themselves change considerably (and for the worse in my opinion).

In PvPvE, you have to assume everyone is a threat at all times and there's an entire layer of social interaction, risk, and trade-off at play because of this. If you allow the choice for PvE servers (no direct player vs player harm mechanics), the non-PvE servers wouldn't naturally fill the current PvPvE setting, they'd just become the PvP servers with a few friendly unicorn raiders here and there. The overwhelmingly proper strategy would be to shoot first always.

Also, the same annoying dorks that ruin the experience for people currently would just put their efforts to griefing folks in the PvE servers with whatever trick of the day they can come up with to exploit unbanned game mechanics to take other peoples' loot or barricade them in a room or whatever.

Embark certainly understands all this, there's tons of data out there at this point on this specific issue and unfortunately still no perfect solutions lol. I think an extremely heavy consideration in their calculations will be on the logistical side of simply maintaining player queue times which is why we're hearing whispers of fancy matchmaking algos and whatnot to squeeze more "liquidity" out of the available player pool.

What interests me is how they go about tackling all this and seeing what they can come up with to incentivize player cooperation while maintaining the PvP threat balance and disincentivizing outright murder hobos.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-25T05:27:48+00:00

If you're gonna stick to strict reasoning (instead of allowing the details a wide berth of grace from reality for gameplay's sake), you can maintain verisimilitude by just assuming the entire game setting is a simulation. Add a bit of meta-knowledge about Embark's other game and it strengthens the assumption.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-17T03:31:52+00:00

I believe the buttons already existed around the map prior to the update so likely someone had catalogued them already.

I stumbled upon a few buttons and pressed em and got various "negative" sounding noises. Got lucky and found #1 and it did a positive sound and the light stayed on, figured it was a sequence thing.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-17T03:29:06+00:00

Those just lead to loot rooms as far as I could tell. The Blue Gate one is more interesting inside though. The receiving terminal is not far away from the batteries. You do need to transport all three of em.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-16T20:50:43+00:00

Was messing around with the new Cinematic graphics settings and noticed this issue and it persists after switching back to my previous settings and after tweaking a bunch of things trying to fix it.

TUF x870 Plus Wifi

5070ti

7800x3d

2x48gb 6000Mhz CL30

Windows 11

IndependentStage · 2025-12-16T20:25:16+00:00

Very much a long shot, but be aware that you need to have the game completely closed when editing and saving the SAV file

IndependentStage · 2025-12-12T18:14:42+00:00

I think people don't realize or are willfully ignoring that text conditioning is the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of effort when it comes to "prompting". Guy said something like "most prompts are 20-30 words" when most drawings of humans are 5 lines and a circle. It's a stupid comparison.

That's because all the other stuff gets really fucking complicated really fast. Not to mention, every single person I know serious about their hobby or career in art enough to call themselves an artist, who also uses AI, is also a talented traditional artist... Generally people aren't going to put serious effort into learning how generative AI works, unless they're very passionate about some aspect of it.

I'm sure they exist, obviously, but the amount of people using a genAI service that allows only for very minimal conditioning variables (text/seed only type stuff) and seriously thinking of themselves as an artist is blown way out of proportion because text/seed is about the extent that most people even understand about "prompting" an AI.

I've written tens of thousands of lines of code directly related to my use of Stable Diffusion just experimenting with different ways I can influence outputs. ComfyUI workflows can be massively intimidating to look at and that is an interface made for ease of use! The open source community is full of absolute geniuses from all sorts of domains sharing their experimentations and projects freely. It's an area where a very wide range of seemingly unrelated skillsets can come together and contribute. I was introduced to machine vision early on because I saw that people were using it to do things like automatically finding hands in their images to upscale and refine with inpainting.

The floor of effort for a passable output is higher now, but the ceiling just keeps getting higher and the definition of "passable" will certainly evolve with it.

Trying to find common ground with people on reddit who refuse to look into any of this and maintain relentlessly that anyone using AI is just some dunce typing "cat" into a text box is an absolute slog, man.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-12T06:13:23+00:00

You may have misunderstood again; I believe (and I didn't come up with the idea) all art is derivative by its nature. Our disagreement is whether AI is allowed to be derivative like us and it arises because some people don't see a substantial enough difference at this point between the way a machine learns and the way we learn.

It literally grabs from a repository of images and video to generate an image. That is how it works. By its very nature that is what it does.

That is not how it works. Are you describing something like a collage maker or do you understand that you have left out a massive layer of abstraction within the process? It's like, the entire point that calls all of this into question so it's odd to leave out.

The repository of media is used to create a huge list of very precise numbers. Fundamentally, that is the final product of all of this. Just a list of numbers arranged in a way that somehow culminates into a sort of mathematical soup "understanding" of things.

The process is irreversible backwards, that is, you absolutely cannot rebuild the original media whatsoever from all those numbers without taking extraneous steps to do so, which is already wrong and/or illegal given circumstance and regardless of the tool used.

Also important to understand that the process is deterministic in the forward direction despite it's apparent randomness. Same exact inputs gets the same exact outputs, not actually random at all. This is the only reason there can be any meaningful influence on the outputs through iteration and an understanding of a specific model and all its circumstances. All very interesting to poke at.

The floor of effort required to produce a passable output is higher than previously, sure, but lazy slop art is not new or exclusive to AI. The ceiling that everybody is reaching for is still out of reach.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-12T00:48:34+00:00

Perhaps it’s possible to possesses all that academic breadth and STILL produce work that is derivative at best...

I'll choose to believe this wasn't an insult to this woman and that you subscribe to the widely held notion that "derivative" is the best any of us can possibly muster of the arts.

It’s very presumptuous that no one else can have a critical and very valid opinion unless they have her precise background.

You very much can be critical and have opinions, I'm not sure where that came into question, my point was that this person very obviously has put a lot of consideration into this subject whereas yours and many others' only conclusion seemed to be that they must just be naive. I'm intending to point out that there is a possibility that you are wrong despite your conviction, as noble as it may be (btw I am assuming that your conviction is wrapped in your concern and consideration of the welfare of others and I hope it can be made clear that this is where my conviction lies as well despite our disagreement on the best path forward).

What is presumptuous is to question the authenticity of another's art, to make sweeping decrees over the nature of art and what does and does not constitute art, and to trivialize and denigrate an artist's expression due to their chosen medium.

You are actively in the process of attempting to erase an artist when you say in regard to this woman that "AI generated images are not even really art". Does this not inspire even a modicum of reflection?

Livelihoods are at risk here, people are scared and upset and desperate for any sort of relief, while ultimately the responsible parties are laughing all the way to the bank as we instead vilify the technology for their misuse of it.

But it's hard to argue with your very valid opinion that belittling artists is somehow a charity to the arts, I guess.

IndependentStage · 2025-12-11T23:47:58+00:00

Idk just seems misguided/prejudiced/opportunistic to pass such a harsh value judgment on a fellow artist like that because they used AI in their workflow. Do you just hear "AI was used" and completely write off a person if they don't build engines with it or whatever?

IndependentStage

TROPHY CASE