• Members of the previous forum can retrieve their temporary password here, (login and check your PM).

Return of rotating banners?

FlagellaStink

FlagellaStink

Established member
The Nexian e-zine
This might be sort of trivial, but since migrating to the new forum the Nexus banner at the top has remained the same. My memory might be wrong, but wouldn't the banner on the old forum change each time you'd load the website? Was there a reason this wasn't carried over?

I wasn't a member for long before the switch, so i might be making this up, but I personally really liked the shifting artworks.
 

Attachments

  • DMT-Nexus font.zip
    19.7 KB · Views: 2
Last edited by a moderator:
Upvote 1 Downvote
Nydex said:
This is by no means a request or a plea, but: how do we feel about allowing only non-AI-generated art as banners for the forum? I don't know why, but I get a feeling of wrongness about having the face of the forum be tangled with this artificial form of art.
Click to expand...
Just to give people an example (I did not yet add the letters to it, much more extra work that I have no time for now), but do you really think this image would not be fit for use as a banner on our platform?


1755184483628.png



Nydex said:
Those are very fair points. I know a lot of technical work can go into creating a decent piece of art using these models, but that wasn't my consideration. My idea wasn't to reflect on the perceived level of effort that went into a piece of art, but rather to take a look at the whole idea from a moral standpoint. And yeah, I know morality is a very grey area whose very essence is based on nuance and perspective, yet I feel like it has become a well-established fact that virtually all of these models are trained on illegally sourced artwork whose rights have been violated without any formal request or respective reimbursement of the authors.
Click to expand...
Well, here is the strange part for me, before the kapitalist for-profit 'copyright' organizations came along: music, writing, theater, paintings and all sorts of art were continuously covered or used as inspiration to create new work based on it. Once in a while something became even so good at it that they became the new standard, this was done for a way much longer period of time, than before people got to jail for having shared an mp3 (or even committed suicide due to the public humiliation).

So somehow over time, it suddenly became normalized that 'copyright' was the holy grail, that none was allowed anymore to touch someone elses art, no more improvements were allowed without heavy fees. Just look at books for example: currently only 70 years after the author has passed away, their work becomes part of the public domain. To me that is way more insane than people being offended that A.I. 'stole' their art.

One more example: if you go to to a museum of a famous painter, and you are quite a good painter yourself, NOTHING prohibits you from just copying and altering that art, as long as it is old enough, so outside that sudden new 'copyright' for-profit organizations reach.

With A.I. you can say that this proces democratized an easy way for all to better express themselves (I see much better compiled emails since the rise of A.I. for example). I myself do a lot of work with A.I. art and I can tell you that there is a HUGE difference between famously great A.I. art work and A.I. 'art' that is just your basic slop made by people with no talent, who also would not be able to create a piece of artwork without those same A.I. tools.

So to conclude my stance on this part : For me A.I. is just another tool, just like a hammer, with a hammer you can state it is unfair that you can build a wooden house much faster than someone without a hammer. I'm not trying to make a strawman of this, though to me it just seems so strange that suddenly in the 90's and further on there was suddenly such heavy enforcement of art 'copyright', while just the decades before, nobody would even blink an eye or found it strange to tape a good song from the radio. Heck, we even made double tape decks for copying tapes the standard at that time (high speed dubbing anyone?)!


1755185092828.png



Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
Voidmatrix said:
While it's possible to create art with effort and time with AI, most people aren't doing that. It's the nature of shortcuts, which is what AI is.

My opinion somewhat doesn't matter cuz it ain't my house, but I'd prefer sans AI banners.

One love

Ps. I am simply glad to have them back.❤️
Click to expand...
For this we can simply make a poll for each banner, if we should add that to the banner list or not, both for human and human plus A.I. hybrids forms (maybe even animals can make great banners!).


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
Last edited:
The Traveler said:
Just to give people an example (I did not yet add the letters to it, much more extra work that I have no time for now), but do you really think this image would not be fit for use as a banner on our platform?


View attachment 104600




Well, here is the strange part for me, before the kapitalist for-profit 'copyright' organizations came along: music, writing, theater, paintings and all sorts of art were continuously covered or used as inspiration to create new work based on it. Once in a while something became even so good at it that they became the new standard, this was done for a way much longer period of time, than before people got to jail for having shared an mp3 (or even committed suicide due to the public humiliation).

So somehow over time, it suddenly became normalized that 'copyright' was the holy grail, that none was allowed anymore to touch someone elses art, no more improvements were allowed without heavy fees. Just look at books for example: currently only 70 years after the author has passed away, their work becomes part of the public domain. To me that is way more insane than people being offended that A.I. 'stole' their art.

One more example: if you go to to a museum of a famous painter, and you are quite a good painter yourself, NOTHING prohibits you from just copying and altering that art, as long as it is old enough, so outside that sudden new 'copyright' for-profit organizations reach.

With A.I. you can say that this proces democratized an easy way for all to better express themselves (I see much better compiled emails since the rise of A.I. for example). I myself do a lot of work with A.I. art and I can tell you that there is a HUGE difference between famously great A.I. art work and A.I. 'art' that is just your basic slop made by people with no talent, who also would not be able to create a piece of artwork without those same A.I. tools.

So to conclude my stance on this part : For me A.I. is just another tool, just like a hammer, with a hammer you can state it is unfair that you can build a wooden house much faster than someone without a hammer. I'm not trying to make a strawman of this, though to me it just seems so strange that suddenly in the 90's and further on there was suddenly such heavy enforcement of art 'copyright', while just the decades before, nobody would even blink an eye or found it strange to tape a good song from the radio. Heck, we even made double tape decks for copying tapes the standard at that time (high speed dubbing anyone?)!


View attachment 104601



Kind regards,

The Traveler
Click to expand...
As I said, I will respect your choice either way and will hold no judgement. I just wanted to put my own stance on this out there, not start some heated argument yet again :)
 
Nydex said:
As I said, I will respect your choice either way and will hold no judgement. I just wanted to put my own stance on this out there, not start some heated argument yet again :)
Click to expand...
It's very good that you brought up this point. In the past it could happen that something suddenly was there, while that made people who were unaware about it quite upset.

I think there were great points made about why we can allow a certain form of it, or not. We just look at a banner and say "yeah, I like that one" or "dear me, what in the name of barfs sake is that???!?!?" 😂


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
I think the point could be more about "blatantly obvious AI art" (i.e. low effort generation). If there's no way to tell I don't see a problem. But like @Nydex I also would prefer to not allow those cases where it's obvious.

It's not too different from not allowing a (hypothetical) banner that I made by poorly scribbling something on a notebook and then taking a picture of it with a dirty lens. But a large amount of people seem oblivious to the AI-assisted equivalent of that.
 
blig-blug said:
I think the point could be more about "blatantly obvious AI art" (i.e. low effort generation). If there's no way to tell I don't see a problem. But like @Nydex I also would prefer to not allow those cases where it's obvious.

It's not too different from not allowing a (hypothetical) banner that I made by poorly scribbling something on a notebook and then taking a picture of it with a dirty lens. But a large amount of people seem oblivious to the AI-assisted equivalent of that.
Click to expand...
Many 'old' banners were made by copy-pasting from known art and then typing the text over it in the given font, so not that much difference in that regards. The only difference I see with A.I. is that it has an even lower threshold to just try something and then shamelessly post it here. ;)

Most current banners are pretty awesome btw, not wanting to play that down! We already had several banners that never made the grade, so there was already some shifting and filtering in place.

And I totally agree that any low-effort material should not make it to the list, A.I. generated or not.



So, lets vote on the first new banner:

1755203468920.png


😁



Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
The Traveler said:
Many 'old' banners were made by copy-pasting from known art and then typing the text over it in the given font, so not that much difference in the regards. The only difference I see with A.I. is that it has an even lower threshold to just try something and then shamelessly post it here. ;)

Most current banners are pretty awesome btw, not wanting to play that down! We already had several banners that never made the grade, so there was already some shifting and filtering in place.

And I totally agree that any low-effort material should not make it to the list, A.I. generated or not.



So, lets vote on the first new banner:

View attachment 104605


😁



Kind regards,

The Traveler
Click to expand...
What if we revive the troll cage and cram a shitload of banners like this one on rotation to be seen only by those in the cage? :ROFLMAO:
 
Haha that 69Ron one is great.

I was going to comment that some banners look blurry due to being originally meant to be displayed smaller, and I was trying some scaling and sharpening with ffmpeg. But they don't look blurry to me anymore, have you changed the display size?
 
blig-blug said:
Haha that 69Ron one is great.

I was going to comment that some banners look blurry due to being originally meant to be displayed smaller, and I was trying some scaling and sharpening with ffmpeg. But they don't look blurry to me anymore, have you changed the display size?
Click to expand...
I automatically resize each image to 1380x138 pixels and then convert to WEBP with: Quality = 80, and allowing near-lossless compression. With WEBP this usually looks much better than any jpg image while at the same time being smaller in size.

Also many old banners were originally not made in the right resolution from the start, and certain people did not have the skills to perfect their images that much, they just wanted to contribute and help out. <3


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
Nydex said:
Mayhaps you have just sobered up? :ROFLMAO:
Click to expand...
Lol! I think it's from looking at the ffmpeg outputs for a while. They only varied very slightly so I guess I got used to the appearance. I could have sworn that the images were displayed wider before (no margin), but I must be imagining it...

Edit: it's definitely that because now, after not looking at them for a while, I see some of them slightly blurry again. Maybe it depends on the specific ones. But it would make sense because they're displayed wider than on the old forum.
 
The Traveler said:
do you really think this image would not be fit for use as a banner on our platform?
Click to expand...
Don't get me started on critiquing the finer points of that image, however pleasing to the eye it may appear at first glance. That would better be done in its own thread :p
(apols for lateness of reply, I've been at the beach 🏖️ )
 
Back
Top Bottom