Censorship Line?: Ants Packing Groceries.
I promise you, the subject will make sense soon.
Here at Blessington, we use Securus JP6s tablets for communication, learning, and entertainment. I'm communicating with my circle of friends, the folks I care about, and learning about the advances in artificial intelligence since I've come to prison.
One friend has kindly used their token credits in a couple of these models to generate a few things upon request, namely to get me what we were aiming to have as workplace-safe references to creatures in a series of stories I've been writing in my head. I use the term 'creatures' simply because they are not humans, but bear humanoid characteristics. As result, I've ended up with several examples of people populating one world, all of which arrived in my inbox safely, sometimes with less than a two-day delay.
I learned that the AI model gets a little weird when you ask for a prosthetic lower leg on one person: it wants to give him mechanised prostheses for every limb. I am amused in that the story is written in a future scope, on a different world, but this does tell me that human interaction within the scope of AI is still sorely needed: like humans, AI gets details wrong.
So, these other creatures come through just fine.
In a mailed letter, I made a joke about a cute ant grandma as a character this friend could just drop into the background of something that they are working on. The idea tickled me, because I have this kinda cartoony picture of a little ant in my head, proudly carrying a whole noodle back to the colony ("I did the thing!" owo) by herself. So in a subsequent reply, I asked for...
{I am looking for a drawing of a grandmotherly anthropomorphic ant, bagging her groceries in reusable canvas bags at a grocery store. Held gently in her mandibles is a box of elbow macaroni. She wears a loose-fitting green dress. An egg carton-like container on the counter in front of her is labeled "Aphids, Half-Dozen"; she is reaching for it with a left hand.}
This friend works with a couple of AI models to generate a few ant grandmas for me, and sends them in a message explaining what each model did with the prompt. I get the explanations, but not the ants!
I got a secondary message from Jpay telling me the attachment had been discarded. No reason, just gone.
Editors Note: The above described images for context
So, quick, four word biology lesson, right?
- Ants are not mammals.
The likelihood that the ant had a buxom figure is basically zero. She's also not wasp-waisted: she's ant-waisted. :')
I can't think of anything that would be sexualized or imply impending sex in a picture of someone packing noodles and aphids into a grocery bag, so sexualization can't be the reason for the deletion.
Maybe her antennae were wiggling 'south of bouncyball pole colony repres-ant'? But that implies that humans understand ants; humans barely understand humans. So representing some security threat group can't be it.
Her mandibles could not be used as a depiction of how to make a tattooing gun or anything like that, so that's not it...
She's wearing a dress, ostensibly because it's the easiest way to denote that this is a lady ant. She's still not a mammal, so there's no swooping décolletage related issues. If the AI did justice to the number of limbs, the sides of the dress might open further to expose additional limbs, but that still doesn't sexualize the image.
...
I got it.
My censor got bit on the [censored] by an ant in the past, so they squashed her on 'principle' even though she was at the grocery store, bagging up her own purchased food and minding her own business!
Securus?
You owe us a book of stamps.
Hey.
Go do the world a favor:
Make compost somewhere.
Fruit and vegetable scraps (no meat: keeps critters away), leaves and branches (avoid black walnut for the juglone content, which is bad), grass clippings, wood ashes from the barbecue (make sure they're extinguished), old newspaper (not the glossy ad circulars), hair clippings are all fair game in composting.
Avoid fats and oils in your compost pile (no cheese from your leftover pizza that went to waste somehow -- scrape that off; sauce and dough are okay).
Your local earthworm cooperative will thank you for it in their way. :)
You don't need a huge pile to begin: why not start with a 3'×3' area, or a tomato cage sleeved in burlap, touching the ground? Be aware that the grass underneath your compost will be forfeit, but look, you can reseed that easily next spring: your grass is already eager to seed everywhere anyway.
Y <- Grass going to seed sprouts those little Y shapes that a lot of us liked to pull off as kids if we lived anywhere with grass.
Some people like to cover their compost with plastic to let it cook. That's a you-and-the-plastics choice. Research the ups and downs of doing that. :)
(p.s.: areas under compost piles become much easier to shovel in a couple of weeks as the materials on top start to break down, especially if you gently mist the pile every few days to help the bacteria... bacteriate? you know, do bacteria things like decompose that leftover iceberg salad you pitched a week ago.)
Give your pile an occasional stir to get it mixed, expose new surfaces for breaking down, add new stuff to it to make more compost. You're going to end up with loam, the soil of champions in a while. Absolutely worth its weight in golden tomatillos.