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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

1y ago

Rotating banners on /r/piracy

Hey mates, recently I've developed a tool to use the GenerativeAI on the AI Horde to created random avatars and banners on lemmy. To keep things spicy, I wanted to deploy to rotate the /c/piracy banner daily, as I've done in a bunch of other communities like [email protected] and the lemmy.dbzer0.com.

So now this is now active!

Here's some sample images that will be created

If you have improvements you want to see on the prompt, do let me know in the comments. In the future I'm having thoughts of allowing the community here to automatically send adjustments ideas to the prompt for funsies.

125 comments

Phenomenal work as always!
My suggestion is mood and topic based prompts derived from the current trajectory of the sub, for example:
Always compared to the day before
more swearwords = stormy weather
more anti corporate speak = more punky/anarchist pictures
more friendly words = sunny weather
more people joining = more ships in the background
more posts = more loot/gold in the background
This is pretty complex but would give it a unique adaptive vibe instead of randomness alone.
Just an idea. Thanks for reading. :)
- Oh that's a great idea! I'll see if I can utilize this somehow. Feel free to share code as well ;)
  
  Thanks! Will try if I can come up with something.
  
  You might be able to adapt code that's used to analyze text to form word clouds in order to pull that off
  No idea where exactly to look but the concepts seem pretty much identical, just change the output

Yo db dont let these haters get you down. I think it looks like a really cool project and love the idea of a shifting banner than anyone can contribute prompts to. I also love the idea of backgroud details being influenced by various metrics of the community.
AI is a tool (just like photoshop, electric lawn mowers, and combustion engines). Anyone who thinks its replacing artists are really underestimating the editing needed to produce something good from AI generators. And this is comming from a writer who loves how much AI has helped with various parts of the process.
- AI is a tool that is fundamentally based on the concept of theft and plagiarism. The LLM training data comes from artists and creators that did not consent to their work being plagiarized by a hallucinating machine.
  
  Man, I love a person on u/piracy arguing we can't do something because it's theft and plagiarism.
  Keelhauling is too good for them.
  
  You are in a piracy community
  
  So is art itself. I might not name things the same as my inspirations or create anything identical, but I haven't written a single thing that wasn't based on something else.
  I don't want the AI being trained on my work either, but that's because I oppose "automated mass slavery"
  "Oh, you don't want to be a slave in return for only the most basic of food and shelter? Sure, see if there are any jobs out there anymore, now that robots can do all of it for rich arrogant god complex sufferers like me. Lets lay the new ground rules... You're DISPOSABLE to me. Beg and worship or die." - A designated slaveowner's thought process, 2084.
  Stop thinking like a capitalist and start thinking like you're an angry drunk if you really believe LLM should be outlawed. Envy is not a flattering look on anyone, you included. At least protests and riots get shit done, even if that means sacrificing a lifestyle you're clearly only enjoying thanks to being self-centered in your artistic pursuits.

While this is very cool, and a nice idea. I have to vote aginst it. AI art is just so uncanny and soulless.
In my opinion it'd be way better to have human-drawn art as the banner. For starters AI generated "art" can't really even be called art. "Art" implies that it has some meaning, value, message, or a memory even. AI can make art tho, when you mastered it and use it the same as painter uses a brush. I don't think a daily random gen in compatible with putting care into what you create. If we switch the banner every day with another auto generated picture, it'll be just that; a cool picture. But if we maybe switch it up every year (for it to not be stale) with an art competition it'll have love in it at least, with possibilty for all kind of valuables, such as refrences or a unique style.
You could get around this issue with an avatar. A mascot (of the community) if you will. After having the mascot fed to an AI it can generate it in any position doing anything with any background, allowing us to not waste the idea of another commenter (haui), who suggested that it should be dynamic, that it should change depending on what happened the previous day. It could be refreshed daily, it could be made dynamic, and it'll have soul.
I can't draw. But I think I speak for others when I say that I wouldn't mind drawing a character for a community that I can thank thousands of dollars to.
- For starters AI generated "art" can't really even be called art.
  You called it art. Zer0 said images, and its just that.
  I'm old enough to recall when people said electronica and sampling wasn't music. Since then, we have Hip Hop, Daft Punk, Crystal Method, Deadmau5, and hundreds of others wasting their time with music and Grammy nominations and wins.
  No reason to take such a strong stance against a daily banner that combines OP's interests. It's their instance, after all.
  Generative imagery puts creativity in the hands of many more than are artistically or dexterously gifted enough to communicate artistically. It takes nothing away from the community, and if you prefer not to look at it, its as simple as averting your eyeballs a few degrees.
  
  Generative imagery puts creativity in the hands of many more than are artistically or dexterously gifted enough to communicate artistically. It takes nothing away from the community, and if you prefer not to look at it, its as simple as averting your eyeballs a few degrees.
  You're acting as if making art is an ability you're born with and you can't make art if you weren't gifted with it at birth. The beautiful thing about art is the skill and dedication put into the piece.
  One of the main things that make humans human, is our creativity, why would we give that up?
  Making art with electronics is very different to having "art" made by electronics.
  
  For starters AI generated "art" can't really even be called art.
  You called it art. Zer0 said images, and its just that.
  I think I would argue that this immediate jump to "AI is NOT Art" that a lot of these commenters are making could be considered strawman arguments exactly for that reason. db0 and others have not and are not claiming that it is or isn't art, this is just an announcement that we have an image generator to randomize banners and also sharing the code so those that want it can integrate it in their instance.
  
  I'm not going to cut throats over banners, chill out. And also it'd seem I wasn't clear with my points. I understand that AI can still produce art. My point was that if AI is used to make art it's used the same way as any other tool, but randomly generating pictures is an edge case.
  One could argue that this is just natural evolution. Before, when you made a nice picture (let's say on a canvas) it was one-of-a-kind, and that made it more special, more art-y. But, if you'd have used AI instead, you could have gotten an infinite number pictures all with similar artistic values. However, I'd say that this isn't true, because afaik sometimes what the machine gives back to you is very bad (by means of not achieving the goals of the artist), and you have to regenerate it. This means that you can't call "all" AI generated images art even if it was made with care.
  Compared to your music example, I agree. But, I believe you haven't considered the fact that it is still one-of-a-kind. No matter the instrument (because the new electronic sounds are just that basically).
  Picture the scenario where somebody (A nobody with no goals, motives, or deep thoughts) just press a couple of buttons and some toon starts playing. "It's pleasing ig" is the only feeling you get from it. Or get someone, with passion and a dream, to use the same method, but instead of stopping at the first toon, they continue to improve it, to refine it, to redo it as many times as it takes for it to be perfect. Imo I'd consider scenario A's result and B's failed attempts to not be art, B's result however is art.
- We had an AI banner for months. You could have offered these suggestion any time before now. Anyway, the idea of a reusing a recognisable mascot in the GenAI art isn't bad
  
  Well, I wasn't active before now :p
  just wanted to put my two cents out there

Hello! The idea is phenomenal, although I feel that some or most of the genAI images look uncanny usually. I would honestly prefer human made arts, but those could be really costly, so that's totally understandable. I'm impartial on this decision tho, do anything you like! ^^
Also we can lengthen the rotation process tho. A weekly or monthly change would be plenty sufficient, but it's just a small preference.

I really don't have a say as a user on another server, but I'd think you should do what you want because a pirate is free.
Plaster AI generated images everywhere on the background.
Change the webui font to Comic Sans except set the letter h as Times New Roman.
Make everything pink, yellow and bright green so that copyright trolls manually viewing the site can't see anything without being attacked by awful colours.
Do what your heart desires, db0. Embrace chaos, or don't.
Not sure why people are surprised about AI images. You and this server have been using them for a while now. And many of your tools (e.g. Overseer) imo are great uses of AI.

The fingers on that mug, which also doesn't have a handle, lmao
- Do you feel like a clever boy now?
  
  Always.

Also wanted to drop a comment that this is awesome and a fantastic use of AI!

Hey, this is awesome! I might have to set this up to change the banner on my own instance daily. I’ve written a decent amount of python in my time so maybe I can take a look at the code too.
- Fluxa Avataria is linked on the top. PRs or suggestions welcome.

i dont like them. They look like the millionth ai-art-post and i am sick of this. I would prefer some ascii/ansi art - its more nerdy and fits more to the releases we consume.

Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights
Captain be taking his motto onto other levels

Dropping by to say I'm against the AI banners. The various reasons have been laid out and bickered about plenty already, just throwing my opinion in the ring. I think it'd be cooler to put a call out to the community for artists to whip up some banners with their tag for promotion and cycle through those, but that's just me.
I'm not here to die on a hill and argue so don't @ me if you're just tryna fight.

They turned out pretty nice! My only suggestion isn't really AI related, but regarding the logo over it
The white border helps the black logo stand out, though maybe having an additional drop shadow could help it pop out a bit more, though that might be unnecessary. Just something I like to do when Photoshopping, but it's purely personal preference! It certainly looks good, even without it.
- My gimp skills are almost non existent. But I can sent you the files and see of you can improve them
  
  Of course! I can help try my hand at it

Very neat 👌🎉🎉
On a separate note, last one is probably a swordmaster with those 6 fingers lol
- damned six fingered man who killed inigo's dad.

It would be much cooler to use some actual user submitted art instead of AI generated ... stuff.

Thanks for teaching some new techniques with SD prompting. I had no idea prompts could be done that way. Could try playing around with some negative prompting to steer it away from things at random… cartoon or plastic etc. I’d like to see a mix of more realistic looking banners, some orc pirates, maybe tiny fairy pirates.

Are you sure it won't create problems?
User and community profiles are updated at most every 24 hours...
Source
Perhaps there could be some skips since both happen every 24 hours.
I don't understand the federation enough, so I'd personally bumb it to every 26 hours. Not for any particular reason except that it's the next whole even number. Or maybe 30 when rounded to 10 which is nice. But I don't like the 3 so perhaps 40.
Although 250 hours also sounds good as it's even, a quarter of 1,000 and it's 900,000 seconds and not some odd number. But that's so close 1M...
Nevermind, I am just overthinking it. But perhaps a bit over 24 hours might be a good idea. I don't know, perhaps it's a stupid thought.

Very neat idea, though I do have a question, are these banners set to upload to the pictrs database or are they set to upload to a fixed location with the pointer in the community set to that location, it might be a better idea to do that i.e. community banner set to i.e. https://dbzer0.com/images/piracybanner/banner.png and have it overwrite that image when replacing without changing the hardcoded link in the communities. I've done this on my other profiles, using a hard-coded link to another site and changing the images there without uploading a new one.
A reason why that could be worth it is because on pictrs the old ones aren't normally deleted and they can accumulate fast. Of course you could also set up automated deletion of the old one on pictrs which would accomplish the same thing but could be a bit more challenging since I've heard pictrs management is a pain on Lemmy in its current state.
- It's on pictrs with automated deletion of the old one every time
  
  I see, that's good. I know that pictrs uploads can get very messy if not immediately handled.

db0, can I write prompts like that for the image generators on AI hoard? Would it select one of the random choices within the brackets to use like your banner does? I think that could be fun.
- Yes and yes. This is using the AI Horde already.

I can't see any banners in sync for lemmy :(

I wonder if I can set up an image AI that only takes images from big company copyrights (with some weighting), also advertising
- Why ^^ You can train a lora/checkpoint on those indeed

Are "multiple people, duo, cleavage, bitcoin" the negative prompt?
- correct. I'm trying the wide resolution makes SDXL try to add more people, so I'm attempting to lead it away from it
  
  Seems like it understands it in its own way. There's the same person twice now.

I would remove the watermark and also add a way for people to submit banners. Im also on photn and cant see it.

Fwiw this looks pretty cool to me

My vote is no. While piracy is used to store and preserve media, at least for me. This directly deprives artists, something I can't support.
Ai in all its generative forms is bad for everyone and I do not support it or your use of it.
- Artists are deprived residuals because of your "preservation" piracy. Stop splitting hairs.
  In for a penny, in for a pound. They're pirates. We're pirates.

Just to make sure I understood things on my research correctly, AI Horde utilizes Stable Diffusion which is already trained with LAION dataset, is that correct?
I am just an user and not even part of your instance, but I think it would feel nicer to have a member of the community creating the images and the commissions being paid through community funds but well, since this is a piracy community this might not be a shared sentiment.
- Lol we're not getting enough donations to even pay the server costs
  
  This is really unfortunate considering how popular the community is. I honestly assumed your instance was doing fine with donations, so maybe a lot of people might do it as well. Having the donation goal on the side bar could help, maybe? This community has helped me and my spouse a lot so we will be definitely be donating in the next few days.

This is the kind of wasteful BS that will make me unsubscribe from a whole instance.
I'm here for piracy news, not bad art. Who is this supposed to appeal to?
- My brother in christ, you have a banner either way. What exactly is bothering you?
  
  I understand the commenters point, even though I find it poorly conveyed. Some may find this a cool AI-generation project. Does it have anything to do with piracy, the point of this community? Barely if at all. So while it may be foolish and silly to berate the owner of the system, I think this is not the right place to publish about this project.
  And I really don't think people can be blamed either for bringing out this issue.
  Please consider my message in good faith.
  
  I have problems with so-called "AI" image generators at every level. Economic, ecological, functional, artistic, and moral.
  Do you want an essay or just the bullet points?
- I’m here for piracy news, not bad art. Who is this supposed to appeal to?
  hi it's me. i'm here for both. :)
- Instance owner: does something they thought would be cool and was likely interesting to implement
  Weird lemmy users: tHiS iS wAsTeFuL bS
  You being butt hurt about something INCREDIBLY inconsequential like AI art isn't going to make it go away.
- Keep in mind the instance itself hosts generative AI communities, it is even mentioned in the sidebar of https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/
  as well as the instance's local communities list
  https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/communities
  Anyways this all seems like a non-issue IMO, most people don't even see the community homepage and would hardly ever see the banner pic. And db0 isn't talking about flooding /c/piracy with AI art posts, just updating the community banner... though this instance does have a local community [email protected] if you're interested in seeing AI art posts.
- it's just banners dude, you won't even see them unless you navigate to community.

125 comments