On September 5th, Fur Affinity announced it will not be accepting art works that are generated by artificial intelligence programs. Recently computer algorithm generated artwork has come under much discussion as machine learning applications such as DALL-E have shown the ability to take obscure prompts and create art pieces based on them.

Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.

AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists' work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.

Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.

Dragoneer indicated in a Twitter statement on how blatant these programs are in assimilating the pieces of other artists as their own. He pointed to an example of a signature placed on a piece giving evidence of those that the program sampled from.

We made the decision to ban AI generated content on FA. I know a lot of people are asking, "but what about..."

Look, the AI-generated "art" is openly copying the signatures of the artists and teams it's sampling from. Maybe even from somebody you know. It's too much. - Dragoneer

[Back from Biggest Little Fur Con, and there’s still more to catch up with…] At the L.A. Times Festival of Books this year we discovered Creative Creature Catcher — an “augmented reality children’s book”, to use the publisher’s phrase for it. “Welcome to the Society of Creative Creature Catchers! Your mission is simple: Find and learn about a variety of fantastical animals who have ended up lost in our world and then it’s your job to send them home to their families! Some hide in the curtains. Others hide under the bed. Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you. They’re scared, and their parents are worried about them.” Sounds like an interesting story, but then it goes further… “But this is just half the story. Creative Creature Catcher isn’t just about reading. It’s about doing. Anyone can read about these unfortunate animals, but Malcolm will teach you how to get personally involved. Grab your Apple or Android device (phone or tablet), and even stubborn readers will want to know more about the shifty Grumbaloo or the quick-footed Eeking Sfifter as 3D characters leap to life with Augmented Reality.” Visit their official web site to see more of what they’re talking about.

Flayrah has migrated to new North American hosting, with WikiFur planned to join it by the end of the year.

The 'new' server is based on a quad-core Xeon-D 1521 with 32GB RAM and four 2TB HDDs - 2015-era hardware, but double the capacity of prior hosting provided by Timduru. Base software has been upgraded from PHP 5.6 (first released in 2014) to PHP 8.1, resulting in major performance improvements, along with recent releases of nginx, Debian and MariaDB.

Update (April 2024): Another move is due; to a cheaper, ~40% faster server with 64GB RAM, running a Xeon E5-1630 v3 @ 3.8Ghz. Some downtime is expected.

These features may be more important for WikiFur, which will be upgraded to a newer and more complex version of the MediaWiki software; with the intent to add Wikibase to process and visualize data about convention instances, as well as better-documenting "furspeech" words used within the fandom and languages such as Foxish, Lapine and Primal.

Flayrah is 20 years old as of January 2021! In that time we've published 5,000 stories, 181 polls and 5,200 Newsbytes.

To celebrate, and to aid readers, we've added a feature that wasn't ready in 2009, when Flayrah was rebuilt – faceted search!

You can narrow down to Pokémon reviews, work of the Furtean Times/WikiFur News era, Flayrah retrospectives, Fred Patten's 18 stories mentioning the word 'anthropomorphic' in September 2012, or fox stories by crossaffliction and his mild-mannered doppelgänger.

Can a computer dream of being a human? What if it dreamed of being a human who dreamed of being a talking animal? With the help of Janelle Shane, a research scientist in photonics, we may just find out what furry aliases such a machine would create.

Janelle has achieved fame for her humorous use of artificial intelligence to generate names for things such as pubs, diseases, beers, and My Little Ponies. She's also directed neural networks to create recipes and write Harry Potter fanfiction.

With GreenReaper's help, I extracted an undifferentiated list of ~11,000 names of furries who have pages on WikiFur. Dr. Shane used these as the basis for a neural network to invent more.

Fancy video chatting or recording a digital movie using an avatar of your fursona which mimics your facial expressions, powered by an ordinary webcam and a large-latte-priced software licence? Internet startup FaceRig aims to provide such a service; and ultimately affordable, studio-quality, immersive virtual reality.

The full version of what FaceRig describes as a Digital Alter-Ego Framework might be a long way off, but the initial webchat application is currently in development and seeking backers on crowdfunding site Indiegogo. Almost $200,000 has been raised to date, with 33 days to go.

Licences for home and commercial use will be available, with prices starting at $5 during the crowdfunding phase and a predicted eventual cost of less than $15 for home users. More heavyweight versions of the software will incur a greater cost. There are also plans for mobile versions on iOS and Android.

Some have called it "a beast that easily outruns the competition". It's smart, it's cute, it can fry two fish at once, and it's coming this summer – to your phone! [tip: diadexxus; best in HD]

The Snapdragon is an popular mobile system-on-chip designed for the ARM architecture. Many cell phones use one, including U.S. variants of the heavily-hyped Samsung Galaxy S4.

Related video: Even trolls need a break - See also: The 'making of' video

Following an unsuccessful campaign on Kickstarter (covered last month), Shota Ishiwatari has moved fundraising for Tailly, 'the tail that wags when you get excited', over to Indiegogo.

Tailly responds to the wearer's heartbeat, wagging fast when a raised heartbeat indicates high emotion and slowing with the pulse to a swing.

This time, the target amount is $50,000 – just over half the Kickstarter goal of £60,000 – which needs to be raised by March 7th, 2013 if the project is to be funded.

Shota Ishiwatari, who worked on prototypes of the necomimi brainwave-activated cat ears for Neurowear, has turned to Kickstarter to fund a new, independent project, Tailly.

Attached to a belt, Tailly responds to the wearer's heartbeat to produce a wagging motion when a raised heart rate indicates excitement, slowing to a swing as the heartbeat drops. The tail comes with a white furry cover as standard; black, brown and grey are available.

Update (29 Jan): The campaign failed, but it's been restarted on Indiegogo.

Furry art community Inkbunny has deployed a means for users to suggest and approve keywords. The long-anticipated feature was rolled out after several days of testing, leading to the addition of keyword history.

The feature had been requested by users wishing to improve the site experience for others, as keywords are used heavily by Inkbunny's search and blocking features:

While Inkbunny remains one of the most comprehensively tagged/keyworded archives among all the furry art sites, we believe this new feature will make immense improvements both to finding submissions by keywords you want to see, and blocking submissions with keywords you want to avoid.

As reported a year ago, "mind-controlled" cat ears are finally on the market. [CalistaF]

It's unclear whether the technology relies on brainwave analysis or muscular nerve inputs, and the promotional video shows movement to be limited. Still, they seem to be in demand.  

Few "furry" ads past muster with the fandom, but furs might make an exception for this one, featuring actual fursuiters Croc O'Dile and Twilight – and a monkey. [Spottacus]

Update: Croc O'Dile details the shooting experience

Neurowear is developing a pair of cat ears which respond to the brain activity of their wearer.

Called "necomimi", the ears are mounted on a headband containing sensors, which pick up brain activity and move the ears accordingly. As the wearer concentrates, the ears point upwards, and when they relax the ears flop down and forwards.

Arcade fans may enjoy Google's latest doodle.

Insert a coin or wait ten seconds, and you'll be rewarded with something better: a working version of Pac-Man, honouring the game's 30th anniversary. Did you find the Easter egg?

Web hosting vendor Topclasshost has suffered a disk failure, taking down fursuit.co.uk, furmeets.co.uk, Sythyry's Journal (lately mentioned) and various other sites.

It's suggested that Topclasshost might not have backups for this server, leaving everyone who didn't have files saved elsewhere out of luck.