+ art by mikorinye + mikorinye instagram site supporters + skelecopter + smudgebap + dead_heather + emcaveeeee other writing + game impressions/reviews + video game TV/movies + opinion pieces + the webmasters diary page support me! + + + help me get things to cover + my playasia affiliate link! + sign my guestbook! song used + musashi samurai legend OST: silent dialogue Layout Credits Layout by: Lovely Designs Brushes: [1] [2] Image: Hyung Taekim

picmix's AI issues i miss blingee, for a variety of reasons really, i miss the vibe and the look and that blingee watermark that has come to become an icon almost on certain parts of the net, but what i miss most of all was the creativity, the look and the effort put into this new form of collage, weather it was pink and black monster energy scene posts, or gangsta spongebob with a gun, it was a whole new style of art and it was seriously inspirational to me and how i do what i do, my wallpaper on my phone is a blingee, i make them and even my profile pictures are usually blingee on the messaging apps i use, it's a culture and a style that means a lot to me. when the site all but died last year i was devastated, granted, for a long time you couldn't even make a new account to use the site, but seeing it go like that hurt and it left us with only one other option for our easy to use net collages, picmix, and this is..... not ideal. sure picmix is usable, even pleasant sometimes, I'm able to make use of it for my work, there are some great assets on there and there's for sure a decent variety of them, plus you can use your own if you want, so it's not all bad, i can make some great things on there and i see other people make even better works than mine all the time, but this is very much not the whole experience with the site and the sites issues can all be summed up with one acronym, A.I, generative AI specifically. now that's not to say the company itself is largely pro A.I, it might be, I'm not sure, but it's more an issue with the users and she sheer fucking absurd oversaturation in AI made creations on the site, to the point where it has begun to largely outnumber and overrun real human made works, this really fucking sucks and it's starting to drive people away from the site, it sure is making me hesitant to use it and it sure seems like picmix themselves are doing nothing to fix it, in some ways they might even be encouraging it. (pic unrelated) the new creations section of the site is *flooded* with poorly made ai images at all hours of the day, go there at any point in time and at least half of the images will be full of ai garbage, noticeably bad ai garbage at that, the kind of thing you don't even need any particularly good sense of ai to spot, even your grandparents would take one look at these and notice it's slop, this is bad because it naturally makes it pointless to even search the site, you'll see so few with real care and love put into them and it tanks discoverability, plus it's just annoying, nobody wants to see this crap. the site has done nothing to fix this since it's only gotten worse in the months since i started making images here, if anything them letting ai assets into the maker itself, a separate issue I'll talk about has just made it from a minor issue to a borderline site killing flaw, something has to be done here or this entire chunk of site functionality will be all but lost, after all why would i waste my time searching for things to rate and like when most of what i find is time wasting, ugly machine gruel. now the site image maker itself is not much better, it didn't used to be so bad a few months back, most results were still human made and the ai ones were obvious but few, but now? type in anything not super specific and you're bound to be inundated with the actual worst garbage, especially if you want some kind of landscape, cityscape or anything involving animals or flowers, just, fields and fields and pages and pages of the worst slop you will ever see, generic and poorly lit and textured, characters that look wrong and don't even fit the style you're looking for, flowers that look nothing like what they're supposed to..... it's a lot and it's only getting worse, i used to be able to make things very well with what was there but these days i find myself using more and more of my own things i find, renders or official images i source things from, you can still make some good things with what's there, but its so much effort and you have to wade through so much garbage to get there that you're honestly better off just using your own images and at that point why even use picmix to begin with. so what can be done, easy, ideally you'd ban all ai content but i know that's probably not going to happen, the slop makes too much money and its too easy to slip in, barring this there is a shockingly easy fix that would sort out everything, don't put slop in the maker itself, curate and clean it up, if it's ai toss it out, let people put in their own slop in their own images if they want, but don't force that on everyone, it'll clean up the homepage on its own and make the maker so much easier to navigate and use, it really is a win/win in all ways, there's no reason not to do it beyond making aibros mad, but that's a feature, not a bug, if you ask me. i think if nothing is done then this will damage the site in the long term, I've been considering miving away from it and finding my own ways to make collages and if blingee comes back without these issues? it's all over for them, so i hope something is done before that ends up happening, because if that does happen then I'll be jumping ship in seconds, I'll be lining up for that lifeboat first thing and pushing everyone else out of the way, until then i will still use them for at least another while, and i would encourage others to, even if not use picmix themselves, pick up digital collages as a form of art and expression, it's been really healthy for me and it's super easy to get into, give it a try sometime and show the world something real and honest and yours, something that sets itself apart from all the slop slowly taking over the net.