( Illa sat with one of his vampire romances (of course he'd packed some) )
( The next day, Mickey's friends were meant to come visit. )
( The debriefing was lengthy, but the results were acceptable. )
( Mickey perched on the bed in the would-be prison room where they'd stashed Eric. )
( The ward on the door changed color--someone had keyed it. )
( Illa's guard closed the prison room door behind them. )
( It's not a person. )
( Godfather. )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anke ! This one's a fairy-tale-like story that reunites a pair of long-lost fiancées.( Illa followed Thairn to the classroom. )
( If Xavier expected to follow Mickey and Thairn into Mickey's bedroom... )
( Eric and Gabriel never had figured out how much Greta knew. )
( Illa woke to darkness, unfamiliar and unsettling. )
Full gallery of character portraits is kept on Ko-Fi.
Midjourney has never disclosed where they get their training sets, how (or whether) they ensure they have rights to use those images, and have not publicized any filtering process they might use to ensure these don't include leaked private photos, etc. The one thing I do know is that Midjourney is now partnering with Stable Diffusion, which uses a LAION data set.
Recent news coverage indicates people searching LAION have found private medical images (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-finds-private-medical-record-photos-in-popular-ai-training-data-set/), ISIS executions and nonconsensual pornography (https://www.vice.com/en/article/93ad75/isis-executions-and-non-consensual-porn-are-powering-ai-art?utm_source=motherboard_twitter) in this dataset. (Vice is not a reliable news source--however, in this instance, they specifically said which searches they conducted on the dataset, so it seems believable in this instance.)
I used https://haveibeentrained.com/ to check whether photographs of my top surgery, which I publicized for educational purposes (I will not link here), ended up in the training set. Thankfully, they did not. However, a lot of other top surgery photos are in there. I don't know if anyone consented to that, but I find it unlikely. And just because some of these photos were publicly accessible enough for the scraper to catch them doesn't make it okay to use them. In fact, when it specifically comes to the trans community, there is a huge issue right now where we want to convey information to one another about procedures, including through photographs, but malicious actors have scraped, brigaded and attacked those same photographs and engaged in harassment campaigns against the posters.
For pictures I've already generated with Midjourney, I'm going to go ahead and continue with posting them. I've otherwise cancelled my Midjourney subscription. I plan to use free stock art (like I did for last week's thumbnail) and self-generated work going forward, plus commissions if the Ko-Fi reaches its commission goal. And fanart, with permission, if y'all would like to share some.
Anyway, this week's thumbnail will be something I painted myself. ^.^
Stay safe, y'all.
timeasmymeasure