I’ve just done something… I’m not sure what to call it. Terrible? Wonderful? Should have happened months ago? I deleted a project on my hard drive, in fact the biggest project, all 415 gigabytes of it. My writing only amasses all of 25 megabytes, or about four million words, not counting any of the social networking I’ve wasted my time on over the past 36 years– and it has been 36 years, stretching all the way back to 1989 and my first encounter with Usenet in 1989.
The project’s name, which was so big, overwhelming, and so in need of isolation that it had its own username and local account, was stable.
It was just an experiment with stable diffusion. It grew into an obsession. I realized the other day that I was wasting hours on the damned thing, tweaking to find one more perfect image in a sea of six-fingered, three-armed men, women, furries, and monsters. I told myself that it was merely a recreation, a form of leisure. Over the course of
To be “ethical” leisure, a hobby needs: (1) perseverance, (2) stages of achievement and advancement, (3) significant personal effort to acquire skills and knowledge, (4) broad and durable benefits, and (5) a special social world with a unique ethos that is deemed valuable both by the participants and by observers. Stable Diffusion utterly fails at 4 and 5.
And I’m supposed to be an expert at this stuff.
the past 2½ years I generated upwards of a million images, and still had about 100,000 of those on my hard drive, just taking up space. Not to mention the models themselves, some of them LORA files that simply cannot be found anywhere else for love or money, jealously hoarded by aficionados because they were created before April of 2024, when the big boys decided no more LORAs that allowed you to generate pictures with “absurdly large breasts” or “being caressed by lots of tentacles” when they also tried to sneak underage girls into the data stream, and which you could then generate if you knew the right keywords, the which were frequently embedded in the
All gone now. Poof. Even the backups have been destroyed. Going cold turkey on day one.
And when I say “wasting hours” I mean it truly; it was as bad as two or three hours every day. I had stopped reading. I had stopped coding for fun, although that may be more an artifact of how well my brain works after that nasty COVID bout and the ravages of turning, well, 59.
I never posted anything that I generated because I recognize the ethical problems in image generation “AIs.” It’s funny how many of the people deep into this, er, hobby, recognize that this isn’t AI at all and simply call them “diffusion models” of one sort or another. I don’t want to take money out of artists’ hands; I want more artists making more art, not less. The number of story ideas I extracted out of these, good grief, thousands of hours I soaked into that thing over the past 30 months I can number on one hand, because it’s literally 5. Out of the million images I generated, I kept five.
There are artists on Twitter who have given me more good story ideas in an hour than the estimated nine man-months of my life I put into what is probably the most useless skill I shall ever have acquired.
There’s no reason I couldn’t rebuild most of it; after all, it’s just downloading software, and this time I have more skill in handling LLMs in local space, since, again, I had no desire to share either my skills or my products with a commercial image producer.
I also deleted a lot of tools that I had developed along the way. I wrote my own little programming language: Loopy. The Loopy interpreter was written in Python and allowed me to do all sorts of peculiar tweaks to the prompts and the various strengths and timings of components of the prompt in mid-process, just so I could do odd and silly things with wildcards above and beyond what Stable Forge was capable of processing, and could do it hands-off, without the browser running. I could “do multiples runs of five of this prompt, using the same seed for each run, only using these six different LORAs in succession,” or “Do the multiple runs, use the same seed each time, but progressively increase the influence of the LORA,” so I could do some empirical analysis on just how much of one LORA or another I needed to get whatever the LORA promised to do to look “exactly right.” I could even go to one of several image galleries on-line, such as CivitAI’s “Furries” gallery, pick as many images as I liked from the gallery and open them in tabs, and the Loopy would download the generation data for each image and attempt to reproduce them locally, with whatever tweaks I wanted that day to make them more interesting to me.
And despite all of this, despite generating at least a million pictures, I found five I wanted to keep.
That’s an obsession. Despite my own observation that AI exploits a critical vulnerability in the human brain, I succumbed to it. I drowned in drab beauty, like a certain billionaire obsessed with making everything look like the inside of a 1950s “historical fantasy” titillation film, regional car dealership rococo slop. It’s ironic, I suppose, having seen what the Pixiv “artist” AIBot could do with it, and understanding exactly how habit-forming it could be, that I wanted to be able to do what AIBot did, and better. And, I suppose, I did to better; much better. Read thousands of prompts and you’ll develop the skill too, it just won’t be a very useful skill.
Anyway, all gone now. I hope. As I said, I could put it back, minus some “classic” LORAs for a variety of, well, mostly breast sizes (always a hard thing to get right with the early generation, and I never graduated beyond Stable Diffusion 1.5), but I deliberately made even that difficult: I deleted the Loopy toolkit repository. I don’t want that temptation.
I expect I’ll be grumpy about this for a week or so; a habit, even a bad habit, puts the victim through an extinction burst when your brain realizes that that particular source of dopamine is no longer operant. But I suspect I’ll also get over it; I wonder what I’ll do with all the extra time. I should plan on finding something better to do with all that brain power.
The project’s name, which was so big, overwhelming, and so in need of isolation that it had its own username and local account, was stable.
It was just an experiment with stable diffusion. It grew into an obsession. I realized the other day that I was wasting hours on the damned thing, tweaking to find one more perfect image in a sea of six-fingered, three-armed men, women, furries, and monsters. I told myself that it was merely a recreation, a form of leisure. Over the course of
To be “ethical” leisure, a hobby needs: (1) perseverance, (2) stages of achievement and advancement, (3) significant personal effort to acquire skills and knowledge, (4) broad and durable benefits, and (5) a special social world with a unique ethos that is deemed valuable both by the participants and by observers. Stable Diffusion utterly fails at 4 and 5.
And I’m supposed to be an expert at this stuff.
the past 2½ years I generated upwards of a million images, and still had about 100,000 of those on my hard drive, just taking up space. Not to mention the models themselves, some of them LORA files that simply cannot be found anywhere else for love or money, jealously hoarded by aficionados because they were created before April of 2024, when the big boys decided no more LORAs that allowed you to generate pictures with “absurdly large breasts” or “being caressed by lots of tentacles” when they also tried to sneak underage girls into the data stream, and which you could then generate if you knew the right keywords, the which were frequently embedded in the
keyword_frequency key embedded in the metadata block.All gone now. Poof. Even the backups have been destroyed. Going cold turkey on day one.
And when I say “wasting hours” I mean it truly; it was as bad as two or three hours every day. I had stopped reading. I had stopped coding for fun, although that may be more an artifact of how well my brain works after that nasty COVID bout and the ravages of turning, well, 59.
I never posted anything that I generated because I recognize the ethical problems in image generation “AIs.” It’s funny how many of the people deep into this, er, hobby, recognize that this isn’t AI at all and simply call them “diffusion models” of one sort or another. I don’t want to take money out of artists’ hands; I want more artists making more art, not less. The number of story ideas I extracted out of these, good grief, thousands of hours I soaked into that thing over the past 30 months I can number on one hand, because it’s literally 5. Out of the million images I generated, I kept five.
There are artists on Twitter who have given me more good story ideas in an hour than the estimated nine man-months of my life I put into what is probably the most useless skill I shall ever have acquired.
There’s no reason I couldn’t rebuild most of it; after all, it’s just downloading software, and this time I have more skill in handling LLMs in local space, since, again, I had no desire to share either my skills or my products with a commercial image producer.
I also deleted a lot of tools that I had developed along the way. I wrote my own little programming language: Loopy. The Loopy interpreter was written in Python and allowed me to do all sorts of peculiar tweaks to the prompts and the various strengths and timings of components of the prompt in mid-process, just so I could do odd and silly things with wildcards above and beyond what Stable Forge was capable of processing, and could do it hands-off, without the browser running. I could “do multiples runs of five of this prompt, using the same seed for each run, only using these six different LORAs in succession,” or “Do the multiple runs, use the same seed each time, but progressively increase the influence of the LORA,” so I could do some empirical analysis on just how much of one LORA or another I needed to get whatever the LORA promised to do to look “exactly right.” I could even go to one of several image galleries on-line, such as CivitAI’s “Furries” gallery, pick as many images as I liked from the gallery and open them in tabs, and the Loopy would download the generation data for each image and attempt to reproduce them locally, with whatever tweaks I wanted that day to make them more interesting to me.
And despite all of this, despite generating at least a million pictures, I found five I wanted to keep.
That’s an obsession. Despite my own observation that AI exploits a critical vulnerability in the human brain, I succumbed to it. I drowned in drab beauty, like a certain billionaire obsessed with making everything look like the inside of a 1950s “historical fantasy” titillation film, regional car dealership rococo slop. It’s ironic, I suppose, having seen what the Pixiv “artist” AIBot could do with it, and understanding exactly how habit-forming it could be, that I wanted to be able to do what AIBot did, and better. And, I suppose, I did to better; much better. Read thousands of prompts and you’ll develop the skill too, it just won’t be a very useful skill.
Anyway, all gone now. I hope. As I said, I could put it back, minus some “classic” LORAs for a variety of, well, mostly breast sizes (always a hard thing to get right with the early generation, and I never graduated beyond Stable Diffusion 1.5), but I deliberately made even that difficult: I deleted the Loopy toolkit repository. I don’t want that temptation.
I expect I’ll be grumpy about this for a week or so; a habit, even a bad habit, puts the victim through an extinction burst when your brain realizes that that particular source of dopamine is no longer operant. But I suspect I’ll also get over it; I wonder what I’ll do with all the extra time. I should plan on finding something better to do with all that brain power.
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