They have their own society… Now. All the wizards are dead. They’re living in a post-apocalyptic world being overrun by magic, carnivorous weeds (because the wizards aren’t around to get rid of them e.g. with fireballs).

The wizards made the kads (that’s their species name) dance automatically because it was both cute and a control measure: They gave the kads powerful magic and were worried that they could rebel some day. So if any ever misbehaved or rebelled they could just play music and… Deal with them while they were entranced.

Hah! I can relate to this. I’m writing a story that includes a species of sapient magical sugar gliders that were genetically modified by wizards to be the ultimate pets.

• They live forever (not immortal, just stop aging at adulthood).
• They have useful magical abilities that would be useful to a wizard (locating things, cartography, memory enhancement, etc).
• They cannot resist dancing if there’s a good music playing and they completely lose control and go crazy dancing if there’s fancy lighting (e.g. rave/RGB).
• They can live in a wizard’s pocket and they’re super cute.
• They have fantastic hearing/danger sense and and are master hunters of bugs. If a wizard has one on their shoulder, no bug will ever be able to reach the wizard’s head 😁

That sounds… hot.

What would happen if bedbugs went extinct? Other than mass celebrations, I mean.

That’s a good point. Many do seem to worship the holy blunt 🤔

I believe the lesson here is that marijuana just isn’t toxic enough to kill anyone.

“So beautiful. So white and pure.”

There’s obviously something fowl going on in the Whitehouse.

What are you talking about? Jesus helps people cross the border all the time!

Him and his cousin, Jose.

I’m surprised Trump and Musk aren’t up in arms about the “car body count”. “Won’t somebody think of the children… We want to put to work–on overnight shifts, on school nights–making cars like this!”

It’s his own fault. He should’ve brought a switch and started whipping people whilst turning over a few tables.

His behavior wasn’t Christ-like enough.

Generative AI is theft in the same way that cars stole the livelihoods away from farriers.

Actually, it’s not quite that bad because it just makes existing jobs more efficient. “Big AI” thinks that it will keep evolving at the same pace as Moore’s Law but there’s currently no evidence to suggest that’s true.

It’ll get faster, for sure but that won’t make it better. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone’s still complaining about AI hallucinating things 50 years from now. It’ll just be quicker and easier to re-do the output when it does.

Here’s my realistic predictions, based on everything I’ve actually used and studied about AI (I follow it very closely):

• Every photographer and everyone else who edits photos will be using AI like they currently use photo editing tools. It’ll become just another tool in the toolbox. I wouldn’t be surprised if GIMP and Krita add a whole menu just for AI actions. In fact, many professionals are already using AI every day.
• 3D artists will also adopt AI to make their workflows faster (god knows they could use it! 3D modeling is tedious AF). AI will be used to rig up models and even to create starter models from 2D images (it’ll be a long time before the AI is making decent models though… That are suitable for rigging).
• Animators will be able to work much more efficiently by training AIs with their characters and telling the AI to put those characters in whatever clothes or positions they want. Then they’ll use AI to animate the difference between those states. Character positions will become standardized prompts and new animators will have to learn the new “prompt lingo”.
• Voice actors will use AI to take on more roles. Instead of being typecast into specific roles based on the sound of their voice(s) they’ll be able to change their voice however they want to fit the role.
• Writers will use AI to improve their writing… A lot. There’s an unfathomable number of people that have great stories to tell but aren’t that great at writing. With LLMs they’ll be able to write out the draft of their story and use the AI to make the language flow better. It’ll also fix their idiotic spelling and grammar mistakes (that I find in ebooks all the fucking time and it pisses me off! Paste your stuff into ChatGPT and tell it, Please check the grammar! It costs nothing but a few minutes of your time! Seriously: It’s a free service. Use it!).

What do all of these things have in common? They’re not taking people’s jobs.

It’s just like any automation that humans have adopted since the industrial revolution. Sure, a company may require fewer workers to perform a task but at the same time that creates new jobs that didn’t exist before.

It’s the natural evolution of work: As time goes on jobs become more specialized and old jobs go away. It’s been like that for a long time now.

Is AI going to accelerate that trend? Yeah probably. But only in the short term. Long term, it will result in more jobs and more productivity.

Aside: I’d like to point out that the rich getting richer is an orthogonal concept to productivity. That’s a function of government/economic systems. Not automation or scientific advancement.

On the contrary, AI enables voice actors to change their voice in ways that biology won’t let them. If a voice actor can act, AI will give them the power to play more parts than they would have been able to previously.

It’s just a tool. It’s not the magic, “replace humans” thing people think it is.

Here I was, thinking that the first AI-generated anime was Ave Mujica. Because it’s that bad.

• The script sounds like it was written by AI.
• The animation in half the scenes is like 12 FPS (because they couldn’t be bothered to wait for a full render).
• The characters lips move like goldfish eating flakes whenever they speak/sing.
• They appear to have used stock mocap for the characters playing instruments and couldn’t be bothered to match up their movements to the music.

By all accounts, it’s like AI did 90% of the work and then they handed it off to some intern for finishing.

So not only are we looking for aliens and their signals we’re also looking for their memes.

I look forward to seeing these images that exist out in space 👍

You inadvertently answered a different question I wondered about: I’m on a Lemmy instance and your post is on a kbin instance. Now I know what happens when a non-link, self-post (whatever that’s called) with image gets posted to a kbin instance and I see its preview from a Lemmy client.

I think I remember the images not previewing properly in the past but I got a preview just fine in Jerboa 👍

Did they ever find out just how dangerous you are?

If you wanted stability you shouldn’t have backed Trump!

Did they learn nothing from his last term in office? Actually, we know the answer to that (no, they did not).

Now I’m beginning to wonder if big, evil corp executives are just as gullible as the rest of the MAGA crowd that regularly vote against their own interests 🤔

They created golems powered by compressed air instead of magic.

Definitely marking this down in my mental, “in case of Isekai” notes.

The correct response is to do as he asks… Respectfully remove the painting.

Then replace it with a picture of an orange baby and put his name on the plaque.