The Order of the Stick

It's both a Stylistic Self-Parody and a contemporary AI reference! Two jokes in one.

The latter one which might be lost to people reading it some years in the future.

I'm enthused about a Mimic mimicking a humanoid; that's my kind of thing.

I have an OC like that actually, although there the joke is she only knows to make humanoid parts as pseudopods and so her actual trunk has to be something else, so she's stuck Jack-in-the-Box-ing it.

I also find it interesting how Mimi can't speak and as I recall I'm the only one who noticed that was off beforehand. Mimics, in 3.5, can speak Common. But I think it's a super common idea that they can't? I wonder just why that is. Well, I say wonder, but I think it's almost certainly the way that people use mimics is as an ambush fight where 'dumb predator' is more straightforward and suitable than a person you can bargain with who just happens to have a really good furniture impression.

Maybe Mimi could learn sign language, though the extra fingers might complicate that.

I remember reading, I think in a Patreon Q&A, that the punchline is the last part of each strip’s writing process. Rich writes his story, chops it up into page-size scripts, then comes up with a joke he can use to transition from one to the next. Then he draws it.

And he puts up each strip when he finishes it, to motivate himself to do the next one. There’s no buffer or delay.

As for today’s punchline, I only sort of get it from y’all’s comments. Someone want to ruin the joke for me?

Edited by HeraldAlberich on May 15th 2023 at 5:16:38 AM

The joke has two aspects:

1. Stylistic Self-Parody; Order of the Stick is a Stick-Figure Comic and normally people are drawn with three fingers
2. A topical joke about AI image generators, which can create fairly realistic and detailed photos and drawings, but are really bad at getting the hands right, often adding or subtracting fingers but sometimes just mangling them completely

Thanks. I was almost all the way there, but I hadn't heard about the AI-ruins-hands thing specifically.

For another layer of Stylistic Self-Parody, in the Utterly Dwarfed bonus features, hands like that are shown off as one of the options for the Art Evolution, but were rejected as being a bridge too far from the previous black-stick hands.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on May 15th 2023 at 5:47:39 AM

Is there a reason why Bloodfeast is acting up?

He saw “Julia” turn back into Eugene.

Nevermind

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on May 15th 2023 at 6:30:45 AM

I didn't even cosnsider AI. I was thinking people generally have a hard time getting the hands right.

Seems strange that he'd have the intelligence to realize it was significant, though

Yeah, when people make fun of AI, they forget that human artists also have a lot of trouble with hands. The difference is that people can actually tell when there's something wrong with the hands, when an AI can't.

I always did find it pretty funny that everyone picked on AI for being bad at one of the widely-accepted hardest parts of human anatomy to draw. I mean, it definitely tends to screw them up in ways humans basically never would, but it's still a bit of a glass house situation. I mean, I know I'm not great at hands. (But then I also don't have any moral umbrage about AI art, maybe some spite is part of looking past that.)

I wouldn't worry about this joke aging poorly, since it's double-layered, with 'hands are hard to draw' as partial backup. If 'AI art sucks at hands' drifts out of popular knowledge, which I suppose it eventually must, it will only really ruin the joke of this strip's title, "But It Gets Better Every Generation".

Edited by RaichuKFM on May 15th 2023 at 11:08:27 AM

People make fun of it because it highlights the problem with AI "art". AI "artists" can only try to mimic images that already exist context-free. When AI screws up anatomy, they screw it up worse than any human artist, because it literally does not know what that thing is supposed to be. It's just parroting someone else's work (without credit or compensation, no less).

The AI "artist" cannot comprehend that the hands are drawn wrong because it does not know what a hand is. It's engaging in soulless content regurgitation, not actual art.

Edited by TobiasDrake on May 15th 2023 at 8:56:37 AM

It's not actually mimicry or parroting a specific other's work, really. I mean in an ethical sense I think someone could make that argument, especially with overtraining or things where one can reproduce a specific artist's style; but to be clear, the AI art program itself isn't really trying to mimic images. It can't. It doesn't have the images anymore. It doesn't know them. All it has is learned statistical relationships that it uses to turn input into some output data. The mimicry aspect is all baked in during training, in 'teaching' those aspects; in principle you could train a neural network in some way that wasn't mimicry-like at all, but of course why ever would you? That means the AI can apply those rules in ways not present in the training data, to interpolate between things, and extrapolate outside, not just lossily mimic the things it was trained on. You're giving it too much credit in terms of what it 'knows'. It doesn't have anything like a human understanding of images at all, not even like a human without any context on what the images represent. It's more abstract than that.

Also the 'artist' in "AI artist" is a person using an AI art program, not the program itself, that's... not how people talk.

As for if it's art... Plenty of people have given the results of nonvolitional processes status as art sometimes for, like, forever? Beautiful scenery, for instance, or mathematical structure, a pretty accident, biology and anatomy, et cetera. It's fine if you don't think it's art, but some people do define art as being anything with aesthetic value, you aren't somehow righter than them. Nobody's right. It's the definition of art. I thought the idea that there is a single objective definition of art was rightly laughed at. Am I supposed to be conveniently forgetting that?

For the record before someone jumps to conclusions, I don't do AI art, I think there are fair reasons to dislike it, I'm sympathetic to people worried about it (though I think the fears it will displace artists are misplaced), it's just these arguments are silly. Like, obviously silly.

But if you think it's bad and not art and the way it fucks up hands is thus extra laughable because of that, sure, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I just think of all the things AI tends to fuck up, picking on hands is ironic because people also fuck them up, all the time. It's silly.

Now can we maybe not derail with this stuff?

No offense, but posting that and THEN telling people not to derail is not a good look.

It smacks of just wanting to get the last word in.

That last sentence would have sufficed.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 15th 2023 at 8:35:29 PM

Sorry, I just feel awkward every time I post something off-topic and I already used up my actually topical thing to say in the last post. Still, I should have said "I'm not going to continue arguing on this after this post" instead of something that, you're right, sounds like I'm trying to get the last word in. That's my bad.

I was also, in retrospect, reading Tobias's post as specifically directed at me more than it may have been, considering Discar's post's point kinda leads into it, too. Which was why I gave a reply beyond saying we weren't on topic.

Edited by RaichuKFM on May 15th 2023 at 2:44:43 PM

I'm in the middle ground here. I don't consider using AI to make art an inherently evil thing. But I saw AI-generated images on Deviantart that are just uploaded verbatim with all those weird errors. They are also usually easy to recognize as being AI-generated, especially if they are supposed to look photo-realistic, even if there are no obvious errors. That I don't consider a form of art, that's just lazyness. If you really want to do something worthwhile with AI, you need to work with it. You need to iterate and Photoshop it until it looks good, and you also need some artistic talent to actually be able to guide the AI in the right directions. These can have some really good result, and yes, if done right, I would really call it artistic.

TL;DR: the computer is not an artist, the person using the computer might be. Whether you use Photoshop or Stable Diffusion, or possibly the combination of both, won't change it.

I wonder if Mimics being a stand in for AI art stretches further than this as a joke in this setting. Like do painters literally just grab a mimic and then ask it to turn into a completed painting and then pass off the living mimic as their own work?

More like a sculpture, but I think no, it was just a one-off joke.

How AI art screws up hands can be a fun one. Sometimes it does it in the completely normal way! Or it just does usual Off-Model weirdness.

Still, that's just part of the process used. You can only get so much similarity if you want to try and recreate any particular thing, and hands take up a very small portion of any given image (generally), so the details don't contribute that much to the overall correctness of what it's aiming for. And it's much more important to get faces looking more correct than hands.

Yes and no. Any detail that looks off will immediately set off uncanny valley alarms.

Hands can be much more easily hidden, cropped, or generally edited in such a way as to not be an issue. Faces are a pretty big part of images and the first thing you're probably going to look at. So...

I still find it a bit fascinating that AI renders text the same way as it tends to show up in dreams, vaguely plausible glyphs, like a The Sims fraternity.

"Living art installation" would probably be a pretty cushy job, for a Mimic, actually. It's like being an ambush predator but even easier; don't need to stay constantly alert for opportunities, feeding is nice and regular, and even the feeding would be nice and not take much energy, free time after hours to relax or stretch pseudopods without risking missing a meal. And an art museum is probably a less boring environment to hang around in (literally, if doing a painting) than most dungeon caves. It could work.

But I get the feeling that in the OotS 'verse, "Cooperate with Mimics" isn't a very common idea in the first place.