u/Delicious-Gap-6678

A few years ago, I found early AI art fascinating. The odd perspective, the weirdly similar faces, the apparent misunderstanding about physics and how humans work. Men who are part sausage making sausage. And the very surreal nature of it seemed to have promise. But somewhere in the past year or two, AI art seemed to take a bad turn. The first sign was the proliferation of garbage political memes, mostly from the right at first. But then I started to run into AI infiltration. AI being intentionally passed off as real historical photos, for example. Or historical photos being manipulated by AI and then fed back into history groups on FB. Almost like someone was testing us. The posters would never fess up or respond. Then I started seeing more and more slop videos on youtube, often knockoffs of successful human channels. For example, I used to be able to use history channels on YT for homeschooling. Now? It's almost all slop, and will just throw up random garbled nonsense. Then I started seeing slop products wash through Amazon and etsy, washing over the actual artists like a tsunami. And I'm not trying to attack legitimate AI users. I'm not talking about using AI to draft out ideas. I'm talking about *TRUE SLOP*. Most of us can recognize it and see that it has no creative value whatsoever. It's churned out. Do a search for America 250 merch and you'll see what I mean. If there are artists using AI tools, this slop swallows them up as well. And this is aside from the horrific financial shenanigans of the dinglewads running the AI sector and ramming it down everyone's throat in business. And I haven't even gotten into the horror show of spammed AI music.

All of this has made me angry, but I'm also aware that my anger swept more broadly than it should. There's no denying that LLM AI offers some very powerful creative tools. I don't think this should or needs to be pro or anti AI. I think it's a matter of putting workers, consumers and creators first. Because none of us should be suffering because of this stuff. None of us need to be. Of all the many, many lies spewed out about new AI systems, the idea that humans have to yield jobs, creativity and maybe even our lives to this stuff is the biggest and worst. It is, in the end, just a fricking TOOL. One we have to BUY. So we should be in charge of it.

TLDR: A last alliance of men and elves?

I just wanted to let folks know that, over the past few decades, there's been a growing interest in reviving old sword-fighting techniques. It's broadly known as HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) and it includes a very wide range of systems, all based on surviving manuals. For the 17th and 18th we've got a ton of surviving material on a wide range of swords from basket hilted broadswords to smallswords. These later period manuals tend to be a lot easier to approach than the medieval stuff, and there's a lot of on-line instructional material as well as modern sparring-safe simulators in production. While there's not much specifically naval until the 19th century, the methods apply pretty broadly within a specific time period. I'd recommend Roworth as a general introduction.

The idea of making fun of pretentious dojos and grifters trying to make money off people once had some merit to it. But looking at this place now, there is post after post of regular people filming themselves solely for their own training. Or even worse some yinyang secretly filming them screwing up. These are just ordinary people trying things. Not fraudsters. Not "masters" abusing students. Just regular people who are trying to improve themselves or try new concepts. And the grifters have moved to THIS side of the fence, where they troll and farm with whatever backyard practice video they can steal. It's vile. Anyone here who's actually practiced real martial arts or contact sports has sucked at some point. Some of us have been fat or out of condition. All this place is doing now is making it less likely that people will be willing to improve themselves, for fear of some secret camera at the gym ready to mock them as "cringe."

While I hated the "AI" plotlines of Picard, it may have been accidentally prescient. I have a deep and growing suspicion that the new illustrious leader of Paramount, David Ellison, will use this beleaguered franchise as the testing ground for a new AI "enhanced" mainstream TV show. He's the son of Oracle founder Larry, of course, and he's been humping the leg of AI for years now. With the failure of nutrek, I fear him and his AI assistants are going to conclude this is a great time to unleash the full power of slop on us. I mean, why the hell wouldn't he? The more he can say Paramount is on the AI rocketship, the more the stock goes to the moon. The recent gains are all fueled by expectations for "AI cost savings." Which means slop. This would explain why actors, producers, etc. aren't hearing anything about what they're planning. Because it doesn't involve any of them. It's already been written by chatbots and they're playing with prompts to get something to carpet bomb us with.