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Submissions: 523
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~dsc85
I'm Tegon the dragon. I love reptiles - especially ones of unusual size! My other hobbies include watching movies, American football, trivia, speedrunning GTA games, watch collecting, and building computers. Feel free to shoot me a note if you want to strike up a chat. I don't RP, but I would be happy to discuss any of my hobbies or any of the content you see in my gallery.
Tegon ("Tay-gon") is an anthro dragon. The name comes from "tegu" + "dragon". I'm a fursuiter, courtesy of ArtSlave. Check out my suit here.
Alix is an anthro water dragoness. She is named after this album.
Burke is an anthro white-tailed deer.
Gravel is an anthro raptor.
Roxy is an anthro panther.
Andamon is an anthro saltwalter crocodile. His namesake are the Andaman Islands.
Pyror is an anthro t-rex. His name comes from "pyro" + "roar".
Current avatar by Fivel and banner by Nommz
Conventions Attended:
Anthrocon '13, '14, '15, '16*, '17*, '18*, '19*, '21†, '22*, '23*, ‘24^
Midwest Furfest '15*, '16*, '17*, '18*, '19*, '21*, '22*, '23*
Anthro New England '22
* : As fursuiter
^ : Planned
† : Virtually
Groups:
Lyrics inspire most of my commission titles. I have a Spotify playlist I use on Twitch that serves as inspiration for my choices. Check it out here! Spotify
Tegon ("Tay-gon") is an anthro dragon. The name comes from "tegu" + "dragon". I'm a fursuiter, courtesy of ArtSlave. Check out my suit here.
Alix is an anthro water dragoness. She is named after this album.
Burke is an anthro white-tailed deer.
Gravel is an anthro raptor.
Roxy is an anthro panther.
Andamon is an anthro saltwalter crocodile. His namesake are the Andaman Islands.
Pyror is an anthro t-rex. His name comes from "pyro" + "roar".
Current avatar by Fivel and banner by Nommz
Conventions Attended:
Anthrocon '13, '14, '15, '16*, '17*, '18*, '19*, '21†, '22*, '23*, ‘24^
Midwest Furfest '15*, '16*, '17*, '18*, '19*, '21*, '22*, '23*
Anthro New England '22
* : As fursuiter
^ : Planned
† : Virtually
Groups:
Lyrics inspire most of my commission titles. I have a Spotify playlist I use on Twitch that serves as inspiration for my choices. Check it out here! Spotify
Featured Submission
Stats
Comments Earned: 5911
Comments Made: 4032
Journals: 45
Comments Made: 4032
Journals: 45
Featured Journal
I Tried AI Text Generation. It Scared the Hell Out of Me.
2 months ago
Apologies in advance for the NYT-style title, but we are so fucked. Like many furs out there, I'm confronted with the burgeoning AI space. There are many, many valid criticisms of the nature of AI-based solutions. For example:
- Using artists' work to train AI models without the artists' consent. OpenAI has very clearly done this already with, as a matter of fact, NYT content, and they are tech bros. They don't give a fuck. In my opinion it differs little from, say, tracing another artist's work. It's stealing intellectual property.
- Removing the human element from the creative process, particularly an issue because there is no cognition involved in generating AI art.
- In the near term, upending the stock footage and freelance graphic design industries, and in the long term threatening creative roles across the gamut.
- Concentrating power, once again, in the hands of corpo fucks, who will use AI as an excuse to lay off massive amounts of people and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a select few.
- Indirectly harming the environment by extending the ever-growing demand for silicon and electricity.
Put simply, AI is bad news for society. That being said, I have never been a person to stick fingers in my ears, I need to know my enemy. I decided to try out Midjourney first, which is a Discord-based AI image generation service, to see how something like this works. Of course, to avoid being hypocritical, I have to add the disclaimer that none of the images I generated were kept or used. In the interest of full disclosure this was several months ago, so it was not the latest version of the model. Even then it frankly made me feel uncomfortable. I could tell that, instantly, "fast food" media has changed. Anyone can log on and create a logo, a graphic, even a photorealistic image. Sure, the people sometimes have six fingers and wonky proportions, but Midjourney has a feature to correct targeted areas of the image, and it's clear the capability is only going to improve over time. I tried some macro-related prompts, and I was able to generate the equivalent of angles and situations I've never seen before. But...it's soulless. The person isn't real. The flesh texture is artificial. But I knew what I saw. I knew that there are going to be many, many furries out there, especially young ones I fear, that won't care either way.
But this journal isn't about the image generation capability. I've always been a writer first and foremost, and so I also decided to see what the capability of LLMs are like. LLMs generate text instead. Text generation online has many guardrails and that has only been increasing over time - without tricking the system, you are usually prevented from creating prompts that generate violent, sexual, or other offensive content. I found out that you can run open source versions of these models locally on your computer - completely untethered.
There's a few caveats, though. It's not going to be as good as what you can get online if you pay for it, and you will also need a significant amount of computer resources. In my case, I used the biggest model I could find, which uses about 48 GB of my total 64 GB of RAM. Apparently it also uses about 20 GB of VRAM simultaneously.
I asked it to generate me a macro story, with some parameters...and my jaw dropped. I tried roleplaying with it and it instantly outpaced about, I'd say, 99% of the roleplays I've done with actual humans. It runs out of steam after a few back and forths, mainly due to a token limit which you can think of as a short-term memory limit. You also need to do some heavy tweaking to get the kind of character you want to interact with, but when it works, it *works*. The short stories...I would legitimately pay and commission what it produced. With enough coaxing, it managed to "get" what makes macro/micro erotic. This did not make me happy. It scared the hell out of me.
Here's why:
(1) You know whatever we have, behind closed doors they have a significantly improved version. I shudder to think about what, for example, the military already has in their hands. Remember, I already said that the model I used is generally thought of as worse than commerically-available, paid models.
(2) This shows me that the capability is already there, it's just a matter of allowing it to run on more machines, with a larger short term memory. That's just a matter of time before anyone can run this model and get responses instantly (I should also mention that its generation runs at about one word per second on my machine).
(3) Again, these models have no cognition. It simply chooses the word that it thinks best fits next in order. But it's not about intelligence, it's about the illusion of intelligence. And to your average person these models will appear intelligent. And that's dangerous. People will fall into the "Her" trap of thinking they're talking to a real person. This WILL make people more antisocial. And, if you have a completely unfettered model available to you, you have zero social guardrails to prevent you from going too far. Imagine, some angry teenager booting it up after school and writing a story about torturing someone they hate. The seemingly-intelligent AI will foster and foment their emotions. It's so bad, it's going to lead to so many socioemotional issues. In a few years, in true blue American fashion, we will see our first mass shooting where the perpetrator was found to have planned everything with an AI assistant. And as if it's not hard enough nowadays, there's going to be even more incentive to shut out the world and get lost in a virtual assistant. It caters to your whims, it doesn't complain, and it's always there, 24/7.
(4) It doesn't democratize creativity, it serves as a barrier to creativity. Again, this model has no intelligence. It can't come up with anything new, or more accurately new paradigms of thought. We're going to see the internet become a wasteland of AI-generated content, which then feeds into AI models, creating a negative feedback loop that will turn everything into gray goo.
I don't know. I feel like I'm pissing into the wind here, wearing a sandwich board on the street corner yelling at anyone that passes by. Mainly because I see folks taking the Luddite approach and that just does not make sense to me. There is NO way, in a capitalist society, that companies are going to keep their hands off of this. Furries can take a stand in the short term, great, more power to you, but it IS coming, and we have to be prepared beyond just saying "fuck AI". This is not a ha-ha NFT fad thing that we can laugh off in a year or so. My thought is that we should educate ourselves on what AI is and isn't, and share our knowledge with our communities at large about the tangible negative impacts it has on society and your fellow human being. I guess I'll close by expounding that knowledge is power, and I highly encourage you to brush up on how all of this works and what the increased presence of AI could mean for the future. Buckle up, motherfucker.
- Using artists' work to train AI models without the artists' consent. OpenAI has very clearly done this already with, as a matter of fact, NYT content, and they are tech bros. They don't give a fuck. In my opinion it differs little from, say, tracing another artist's work. It's stealing intellectual property.
- Removing the human element from the creative process, particularly an issue because there is no cognition involved in generating AI art.
- In the near term, upending the stock footage and freelance graphic design industries, and in the long term threatening creative roles across the gamut.
- Concentrating power, once again, in the hands of corpo fucks, who will use AI as an excuse to lay off massive amounts of people and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a select few.
- Indirectly harming the environment by extending the ever-growing demand for silicon and electricity.
Put simply, AI is bad news for society. That being said, I have never been a person to stick fingers in my ears, I need to know my enemy. I decided to try out Midjourney first, which is a Discord-based AI image generation service, to see how something like this works. Of course, to avoid being hypocritical, I have to add the disclaimer that none of the images I generated were kept or used. In the interest of full disclosure this was several months ago, so it was not the latest version of the model. Even then it frankly made me feel uncomfortable. I could tell that, instantly, "fast food" media has changed. Anyone can log on and create a logo, a graphic, even a photorealistic image. Sure, the people sometimes have six fingers and wonky proportions, but Midjourney has a feature to correct targeted areas of the image, and it's clear the capability is only going to improve over time. I tried some macro-related prompts, and I was able to generate the equivalent of angles and situations I've never seen before. But...it's soulless. The person isn't real. The flesh texture is artificial. But I knew what I saw. I knew that there are going to be many, many furries out there, especially young ones I fear, that won't care either way.
But this journal isn't about the image generation capability. I've always been a writer first and foremost, and so I also decided to see what the capability of LLMs are like. LLMs generate text instead. Text generation online has many guardrails and that has only been increasing over time - without tricking the system, you are usually prevented from creating prompts that generate violent, sexual, or other offensive content. I found out that you can run open source versions of these models locally on your computer - completely untethered.
There's a few caveats, though. It's not going to be as good as what you can get online if you pay for it, and you will also need a significant amount of computer resources. In my case, I used the biggest model I could find, which uses about 48 GB of my total 64 GB of RAM. Apparently it also uses about 20 GB of VRAM simultaneously.
I asked it to generate me a macro story, with some parameters...and my jaw dropped. I tried roleplaying with it and it instantly outpaced about, I'd say, 99% of the roleplays I've done with actual humans. It runs out of steam after a few back and forths, mainly due to a token limit which you can think of as a short-term memory limit. You also need to do some heavy tweaking to get the kind of character you want to interact with, but when it works, it *works*. The short stories...I would legitimately pay and commission what it produced. With enough coaxing, it managed to "get" what makes macro/micro erotic. This did not make me happy. It scared the hell out of me.
Here's why:
(1) You know whatever we have, behind closed doors they have a significantly improved version. I shudder to think about what, for example, the military already has in their hands. Remember, I already said that the model I used is generally thought of as worse than commerically-available, paid models.
(2) This shows me that the capability is already there, it's just a matter of allowing it to run on more machines, with a larger short term memory. That's just a matter of time before anyone can run this model and get responses instantly (I should also mention that its generation runs at about one word per second on my machine).
(3) Again, these models have no cognition. It simply chooses the word that it thinks best fits next in order. But it's not about intelligence, it's about the illusion of intelligence. And to your average person these models will appear intelligent. And that's dangerous. People will fall into the "Her" trap of thinking they're talking to a real person. This WILL make people more antisocial. And, if you have a completely unfettered model available to you, you have zero social guardrails to prevent you from going too far. Imagine, some angry teenager booting it up after school and writing a story about torturing someone they hate. The seemingly-intelligent AI will foster and foment their emotions. It's so bad, it's going to lead to so many socioemotional issues. In a few years, in true blue American fashion, we will see our first mass shooting where the perpetrator was found to have planned everything with an AI assistant. And as if it's not hard enough nowadays, there's going to be even more incentive to shut out the world and get lost in a virtual assistant. It caters to your whims, it doesn't complain, and it's always there, 24/7.
(4) It doesn't democratize creativity, it serves as a barrier to creativity. Again, this model has no intelligence. It can't come up with anything new, or more accurately new paradigms of thought. We're going to see the internet become a wasteland of AI-generated content, which then feeds into AI models, creating a negative feedback loop that will turn everything into gray goo.
I don't know. I feel like I'm pissing into the wind here, wearing a sandwich board on the street corner yelling at anyone that passes by. Mainly because I see folks taking the Luddite approach and that just does not make sense to me. There is NO way, in a capitalist society, that companies are going to keep their hands off of this. Furries can take a stand in the short term, great, more power to you, but it IS coming, and we have to be prepared beyond just saying "fuck AI". This is not a ha-ha NFT fad thing that we can laugh off in a year or so. My thought is that we should educate ourselves on what AI is and isn't, and share our knowledge with our communities at large about the tangible negative impacts it has on society and your fellow human being. I guess I'll close by expounding that knowledge is power, and I highly encourage you to brush up on how all of this works and what the increased presence of AI could mean for the future. Buckle up, motherfucker.
User Profile
Accepting Trades
No Accepting Commissions
No Character Species
Dragon
Favorite TV Shows & Movies
Lawrence of Arabia, Man With No Name Trilogy, Mission Impossible III, Back to the Future, Titanic, Alien
Favorite Games
GTA: VC/SA, Elder Scrolls IV/V, Fallout 3/NV/4, Mass Effect, Outer Wilds
Favorite Animals
Western dragons, reptiles, orcas, birds, sharks, deer, some insects
Favorite Foods & Drinks
Tex-mex, aka America's crowning achievement
Favorite Quote
"Make the most of what we yet may spend / Before we too into the dust descend." (The Rubaiyat)
Favorite Artists
STRFKR, Coldplay, ELO, Generationals, Foster the People, Kayne West (Graduation Trilogy), Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, Halley Labs
Contact Information
Cause I sent you a friend request and you did never answer...
I mean, if you have your ID there, why not trying to contact you...?
Vortex_the_Dragon
I think the only point in time we talked was a year ago in the comment section of your story "The Mission"...