Kale Good morning folks
I feel infinitely sorry for anyone called Sarah, Mia, Silas, Jax or Elara
'cause any time someone reads those names now, it's gonna be very 'not sure if AI?'
There is clearly some shit going on, over at Epic:
https://x.com/FortniteStatus/status/2036451164347109440
(TL;DR twitter - #Fortnite Rocket racing and Ballistic are getting canned, one game mode of Fortnite Festival is getting shelved as well)
Combined with this:
www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1s2nb6q/epic_has_fired_their_lead_environment_artist/
TL;DR - Epic dropped the lead #Fortnite Environment artist (island design, basically) who did the VERY popular Simpsons island, Sout Park collab, etc - AND (in the comments)... the lead writer for Save the World mode and Battle Royale (who apparently had been on the job for TEN YEARS)
Some folks are gonna say 'well, AI'
I... don't think this is the case.
I think this is some serious bloodletting, especially since they jacked the price of vbucks and dropped the amount paid out by Fortnite Crew, etc.
I think it's easy to point at current-age redundancies and say 'because AI', but... companies have been purging down a LOT over the last few years.
A friend of mine, in an engineering firm? Redundancies seem to now be YEARLY events. Just a constant 'actually, no, we don't need this many people'
(and every fucking SINGLE ONE has been followed by 'OH SHIT, get some of them back!' three weeks later)
Back on #Fortnite, tho - the 'battle' game mode of the Festival gameset was... silly.
I never saw it as an option come up (god, Fortnite's fucking map selection is a MESS, it's horrible, even to find any of the six maps I play regularly!) - but to try and say 'let's get four teams of four players to ALL play the same song!' is... not gonna happen.
No, no, you do not have the numbers for that.
Hell, I will say this out loud: Considering that the #Fortnite lobby screen claims tens of thousands of people are playing <game mode>, is it not WEIRD that I keep running into the same players, over and over?
Yeah, ok, you have 10k global, but there cannot just be 20 actual people playing on a Friday night in Australia.
(and 'surely there are other lobbies, though?' falls over if you have a five min. lobby time - TWELVE for ranked zero build)
Without a doubt, #Fortnite is like #Minecraft - a game that slugs right into the brain of a generation (a more recent one than mine, but sure).
The ones who did the Floss at their prom/graduation/whatever.
... and they come back to it, regularly, sure.
But I don't think they're playing it very much these days, no matter what Epic claims with those numbers on the map tiles.
Anyway, now's a good time to throw up the 'If it's not on your computer, you don't own it' sign.
>Can we all agree that If AI was removed from earth right now, we may get genuine news from X, no more brain rot, attention span would increase.
This fucker is 1000% in a fucking dreamland.
Twitter was RED HOT STEAMING SHIT for 'news' before AI was around, and I have no idea why anyone would think that - in its current, owned by Elon state - it would be any good now, even without Grok/whatever
This is straight up like people saying 'if we banned Tiktok, everyone would have a GREAT attention span, like BEFORE' - utterly ignoring that Vine was around, and people once made shitty noise about the idea of 'Gifs with sound' on imgur
[HUGE disclaimer: no, this is not YOU, people I know]
There's 1000% a group of folks out there who've made 'hates AI, doesn't actually know anything about it' their entire fucking personality.
The uncritical thought that 'if we just did/didn't do <one thing>, the world would be GREAT' is fucking strong with some folks.
This, by the way, was a comment on an 'AI IS DEAD' thread... because, somehow, people think OpenAI vaulting ONE generation option (Sora), which wasn't doing numbers, is 'the death of AI'
Begging people, in the year of our <whatever>, 2026, to at least *know* your enemy before you declare them dead? Maybe? As a treat?
*glances at ebook*
'This may not be used to train AI'
Cool enough.
*notices encoding of text file changes several times in random places, mid-paragraph, main character named Lily, use of the word 'unvarnished', main character named 'Thorne'...*
I... seeeeeeee.
I know I say 'you can't tell if shit's AI', a lot - and, as you know, there's nuance to that.
What I'm mostly saying, is 'AI can be a LOT better (at task X) than you think, and humans can be a LOT worse than you hope (at task X)', and normally I'll point and say 'well, listen, the name Lily comes up a lot in AI output because it's quite popular in fiction...' (in the same way there's RIDICULOUS number of erotica authors 'named' Lexi)
... but, there's also 'ok, yeah, no one can really mistake THIS' type stuff.
... I think that line is a lot blurrier than some folks think (just in the same way that you need a bin a smart bear can't open but a dumb human can, and BOY is there overlap), but sometimes.
Hoooo, boy.
I will give a smidge of 'but, actually...'
Having your document switch text encodings to fuck with LLM scrapers is... kinda interesting.
This:
e
is not the same as this:
e
... but MOST readers will render it the same.
(not sure what it'd do to a screen-reader - maybe it'd be ok? but not every bit of software likes having encoding schemas changed mid-document, etc, blah)
Mind you, a scraper would normalise the shit out of this, so that's not super useful.
Alternative thought: anti-plagiarism detection, or a third thought: Each marketplace gets a version of the file with slightly different words with diff. encodings so if it gets pirated you know where it got leaked out of?
Not super useful unless you're doing it for EVERY sold copy, or whatever. In which case? Just watermark like drivethrurpg does?
It COULD just be bad OCR.
But it's from 2026 and originally an epub, so I kinda doubt that?
Like, going from PDF -> other formats can do this, because sometimes, you're running OCR over EVERYTHING, which is fucking awful.
But, as I said: I don't THINK that's the case here.
As an alternative, alternative, alternative thought:
#ChatGPT is sneaking in random Bengali for some reason?
Edit: the top line is persian? Gonna mainline with you here, languages are NOT my big point drop.
See, problem is.
When people said to young Kale 'when you're older, you can set your own bed time', I was like 'absolutely, good, yes, I fucking will.'
'but if you go to bed early, you will be happy tomorrow' - sure, not debating that, but I am happy now, too.
Like, I don't need to bargain with my future self? I know that works for some people, but the only Kale is current Kale, all future Kales are just *gestures*
Charnock@DarkestKale My photomontages get flagged as AI an awful lot. I think if you use a lot of cloning brush and repeat patterns it sets something off. Layering then flattening creates another pixel effect that those "Is it ai" websites notice.
@Printdevil Further: depending on your software, the 'brush' tool might be using AI under the hood.
@DarkestKale I think Photoshop has gone down the route of not putting Ai into the conventional tools, but really really really amping up the Ai tools so that you have to go looking for the conventional tools now. Like the Fill in with GenAi box follows you around like fucking clippy.
@Printdevil I would trust Adobe... not even half a billionth of an inch on any topic :D
@DarkestKale Fair point but I know how their engineering works on Photoshop. They always build "on top of" rather than integrate into, that's why Photoshop is such a pointless edifice of lumpy dog plops. Their whole Ai integration is like someone was putting on wallpaper paste on everything else.
@DarkestKale As an adjunct mind you, I wouldn't put it beyond adobe to tag images with steganographic pixels or something as you work with them, that are instant triggers.
@DarkestKale Most professional ai art is completely invisible to the common user who are used to noticing stuff on Midjourney or in youtube videos. The amount of it being used in tonal shifts in photographs, textures, and specular lighting and stuff is insane, but that isn't what people are looking for. They're looking for em-dashes, six fingers and no bridge to the chorus.
@Printdevil Yup, absolutely. A friend pointed out that one silent usage no one discusses is in home decorating photos, etc.
Aliexpress has a LOT of it in product imagery for 'X but yellow' for model kits, etc. Like, yeah, you get your yellow model kit, but there's no way that photo is of THIS kit.
@DarkestKale It is creeping in a lot in mockups but they are usually more easy to spot, than say ai shifting of the lighting tone in an existing picture, but that's pretty commonplace now. Photoshop in particular has become very agentic. If you go looking to brighten up the curves or play with the gamut, there are immediate "do you want to brighten up this picture?" type hinties all over the place.
commonst@DarkestKale Picasso and Dali enter the chat.
Jack Latetide@DarkestKale was it Gorbachev?