EldritchFemininity

That’s an issue with any form of information sharing, though. Your local library is full of false information as well, whether that’s because it’s outdated or because you live somewhere like the US where all school curriculum books have to be approved by a Texas based group per federal law.

Lies spread faster than the truth, and the internet is great at spreading information.

Sorry it took so long to get back to this, as they say, “Life, uh, gets in the way.”

I had to go and check the AI communities I have blocked because I could’ve sworn that I had multiple of different corporate GenAI blocked from DB0, but I stand corrected - I have only a handful of Stable Diffusion ones. Of course, I was also under the impression that Stable Diffusion is made by OpenAI or one of their competitors, so I blocked them instantly on that alone when I was largely blocking AI communities to clean up my homepage and to avoid the kinds of people those communities usually attract. There’s a certain kind of person with a “corporate fact cat/middle manager” attitude that can plague GenAI communities that drives me crazy because they think that generating an image takes as much skill and effort (or even more) than creating one by hand.

That definitely does change my opinion on Stable Diffusion, but it still comes down to a “it depends.” And as you so rightly put it, my problem is a capitalism issue, not a GenAI issue. My perspective is that not all of us are so lucky as to live in Ireland, which I believe has recently implemented a UBI specifically for artists, and so until capitalism is dealt with, any impacts of that take precedence - including those created as a consequence. Just because something is useful doesn’t mean we should be dumping it as fuel on to the fire of capitalism because capitalism is what’s actually burning us. Local models using images sourced with permission from the artists is a great thing. People getting paid to make things specifically to be used for training - awesome! A win in my book. In a world where artists have a guaranteed roof over their heads and food in their bellies, I do not care at all about whether or not their work is used to train AI. I bet artists can do some really cool stuff with GenAI as well - it’s basically a bigger, more advanced version of the same concept that makes the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop work.

This is why I’m also pro-piracy when it comes to corporations - you aren’t stealing from the workers, they got paid to make the thing, not when it gets sold - and why my opinion is “it depends.” I’m completely willing to go ahead and change my opinion once something stops hurting workers and becomes nothing but a benefit now that it’s out of the hands of the billionaires. There’s an interesting conversation to be had over the…I can’t think of a good word, ownership of identity maybe? Ownership of characters created to represent yourself at any rate (somebody coming along and saying “this is me” about a character you made as an avatar of yourself feels bad), and there’s a country in Europe that made an interesting choice in response to deep fakes, CSAM, and revenge porn created by AI by giving every citizen the copyright to their own face, body, and voice, but that’s a whole different conversation.

And this concept right here:

It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It’s an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.

Has a sense of capitalistic entitlement in it. You feel that you deserve the product of art but don’t respect the people who do put in the time and effort learning how to make it enough to properly compensate them for the time that they spent learning the profession. One, because they could have spent that time learning a different trade - programming, becoming an electrician or maybe an airplane mechanic or whatever - and two, because those who do art professionally almost universally talk about how they almost never have time to make art for themselves - stuff that they want to make just for them. And art (alongside the humanities) is a universally disrespected skill, with many commission based artists working for below minimum wage. It’s like arguing that because you don’t have the time or money to make a car, you deserve to be able to freely take cars from people’s driveways and use them as a form of public transit. In an ideal world where the US isn’t a car-centric hellscape and the trams always arrive on time, we wouldn’t even need for everybody to have their own personal car! But we don’t live in that world and hot-wiring somebody’s car to take for a joyride that makes them miss work isn’t cool. Just because I don’t have the genetics for it or the time to train to compete in the Olympics doesn’t grant me the right to free steroid injections.

And I use the word product up there very, very deliberately. Art is two things: the Product to be Consumed (and promptly discarded in this day and age of consumerism), which is what GenAI makes, and the Process, which is often what artists talk about as their favorite part of making art. But the end result - the Product - is just a small part of what Art is. Adam Savage said something along the lines of “I have no interest in AI art. One day, some college film student will do something amazing with AI - and Hollywood will milk it to death - but right now, I don’t see anything in AI that I care about. Because you don’t see anything of the artist in it, and that’s what I care about. Their intent, what they wanted to say with the piece, what they went through in making it and what they learned along the way, none of that exists in AI art.” I’m not religious, but as the saying goes: “God gave us grain but not bread so that we, too, could indulge in the joy of the act of creation.” Making something allows us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It’s why people desire GenAI. To create something that only exists in their imagination. It’s why Art Therapy exists. One time I heard a college student reflect that “art is how artists process the world around us” and I absolutely agree. Van Gogh died a pauper, having barely sold any of his works in his lifetime, only to become one of the most beloved painters long after his death for his loneliness and pain that he expressed in his brushwork. One thing that is guaranteed to make me cry is that scene from Dr Who where the museum curator talks about why Van Gogh is his favorite artist while Vincent breaks down crying behind him.

One thing that people caught up in the GenAI arguments often miss is that artists (any worth listening to at least) aren’t gatekeeping art at all. Go watch a video on color theory, perspective, or additive and subtractive palettes. Artists love sharing information, and art is a conversation itself. I’m sure you can see it in the GenAI communities on your instance as well, people love to make things and be a part of a community with a shared passion. Artists don’t care if you aren’t an expert or anything, so I encourage anybody reading this to pick up a pencil, make something, and just share it with the world. I’ve talked to artists who say that their favorite commissioners are those who send them drawings to help interpret their vision - even if it’s just doodles of stick figures on a napkin or something. There used to be a tiny subreddit called r/Mona_Leslie, and it was one of my favorite places on Reddit because the whole idea of it was to professionally critique random people’s stuff as if it were in a museum gallery. People praising the brushstrokes of little kids’ fingerpaint art, the line work of stick figure drawings, whatever, it was just such a great vibe. In fact, I challenge anybody who uses GenAI regularly to take an image they generated and like, bring it into an image editor, create a new layer, and just start drawing over it. You can probably make it fit your original vision even more than the AI could with enough effort. Even if you just do a half hour a couple of times a week or something, what you learn simply from doing it will expand the horizons of your creativity.

TL;DR: You’re absolutely right that it’s a problem with capitalism, not with GenAI itself. But until such a time as capitalism no longer creates a problem from GenAI, I am firmly in the camp of putting a leash on what can and can’t be done with AI (largely on corporate AI) to minimize the harm as much as we can. Just because overfishing is a larger issue caused by capitalism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work on limiting the amount of micro plastics that end up in the ocean - especially now that supposedly something like 5-10% of the fish we eat is plastic.

Quick question: Are you a cis, white, heterosexual male with Christian/agnostic beliefs? Or at the very least, could you be mistaken for somebody like that? And do you live in an urban area, or a suburban or rural area?

Because as a bi trans woman who grew up in a relatively red part of one of the deepest blue states in the country and spent a LONG time being able to hide as a cis white male, it is two very different experiences of life in the US before and after transitioning and what kind of area that I’ve lived in. Cities are natural melting pots of diversity and run very liberal/leftist as a result, suburbs can be a mixed bag depending on where they are (though like often follows like and you tend to get concentrations of similar beliefs close together due to socio-economic factors), and rural areas are often very group-think oriented and form cliques like it’s highschool. I also spent a lot of time listening to what conservatives say when they think they’re in like company. And it’s very political.

You know how people say that the two things you should never bring up at work are politics and religion? Every place that I’ve worked, the people who cannot stop talking about politics have always been conservatives. From hating on immigrants or trans people to the guy yesterday who went on and on about how people only hate Teslas because they’re liberals who hate Elon and how great Teslas are while we all side-eyed each other (somebody said that the cyber truck is dangerous and looks ugly), they are constantly either trying to convince you that they’re right or just assume that you agree with them in the first place. I had a “both sides” so-called “centrist” trap me and another coworker in a conversation about another one of our coworkers after he found out that they were a trans man and just kept going on and on about how they had trans friends but our coworker would never be a “real man,” just like his trans friend would never be a “real woman.” Didn’t stop talking about it for over an hour, just talking in circles with barely a moment to take a breathe before he started talking again. I would’ve thought he was gonna pass out if I didn’t already know that he’s one of those people who would probably die if they ever stopped talking. He would also go on and on about the “violent left” but would get oddly quiet whenever a right-winger or MAGA voter would shoot up a place or something. Despite the fact that the US accounts for something like 95% of all school shootings in the world, and all but a couple of those have been committed by white men who either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in a conservative household, and that in the past 10 years something like 80% of mass shooting victims were shot by people (most often men, and usually white men) who also either traditionally voted for Republicans or grew up in conservative households

It’s only been in about the past 6 months that I’ve mostly stopped seeing MAGA flags outside people’s houses or on people’s trucks. Though there is one pickup at work that the owner stuck a “MAGA Edition” label onto just above the branding, and there is one guy who up until recently would wear a Trump 2024 shirt occasionally. He might still, but I haven’t seen it in awhile.

There are now about 20 states where it is either unsafe for me to travel due to state laws or where my existence is outright illegal in some way. Trans people were having their passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and other forms of identification confiscated by the DMV after the election but before Trump even entered office. A law in Utah banning trans girls from school sports got overturned because it affected a total of 3 girls in the state and it was therefore considered a law targeting specific individuals, which is illegal. You can make it illegal to turn right on a red light at a particular street corner, but you can’t make it illegal for Tom, Larry, and Diane to turn right on a red light.

You can have reasonable discussions with conservatives, but because conservatism largely consists of the belief that there are groups that the law should protect but not bind, and groups that the law should bind but not protect, it can very quickly fall into arguing what kind of people do or don’t deserve to be treated like humans. Very often with them, respect means “respect my authority or else I won’t treat you like a person.” Back before 2001 and the rise of right-wing extremism these past 20 or so years, there were much more mild discussions between Democrats and Republicans, but that’s because the US largely has no true leftist institutions. The Democrats are largely a moderate conservative to left-leaning centrist party with a few moderate leftists thrown in (who are unpopular with the party leadership but usually popular with voters). So debates were largely about whether or not the tax break for corporations should be 5% or 7% higher than last year. Both parties largely agreed on policy.

In the US, there are two genders: Man and “political.” Two races: White and “political.” Two sexualities: Straight and “political.” Two religions: Christian and “political” (and which flavor of Christian you are can be considered “political” based on the region of the country that you’re in). If you can fake being in the former group in any way, you’ll have a very different experience living in the US than you would otherwise.

And yet, again, the instance has communities for every single big tech genAI model. That’s definitely not anti-corporate. Using those models both contributes to their shareholder value/profits and the theft of wages from workers.

And where do they get the training data for AI Horde? From scraping the web and all the freelance artists on there, like all of the big corporate models? Because then they’re just justifying exploitation of workers as benefiting everybody when what they really mean is benefiting themselves.

It’s like the argument pro ChatGPT airheads use constantly about how genAI “democratized” art. You know what “democratized” art and made it freely accessible to everybody? The pencil. It’s just making up excuses for wanting the product of skill without putting in the effort to learn the skill or pay appropriate compensation to somebody with the skill to give you the product that you want. It’s upper management thinking.

And this is why I say that it depends. Horde AI could be great - so long as the people whose work is being used to allow others access to skilled labor that they don’t want to do themselves are being properly compensated for their work. Otherwise, it’s no different from the corporations. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that nobody is going hungry as a result of it. Unless it’s trained exclusively on products from big corporations. Those artists got paid when they did the work, so nobody gets hurt there except in the theoretical sense of freelance artists potentially losing customers down the line to “good enough and cheap” genAI from people with the above upper management mindset.

How long did it take before you bought acrylics and a pad of watercolor paper to replace it?

Just my personal take, but my opinion basically boils down to “they can be.”

It’s all about how ethically they’re handled, and that can be good or bad at any scale. Take your very own instance, for example. Not that it’s hosting a local LLM (maybe they are, IDK), but the instance openly supports GenAI and has instances for all the major GenAI companies/models. GenAI without ethical sourcing - which none of these companies do - is one of the most blatant examples of a corporation using technology to steal the skilled labor of workers to avoid having to pay them what they’re owed for that skill. So your own instance is pro-corporatism, so long as they’re benefiting from stealing from workers. Not very anarchist if you ask me.

On the other hand, there’s a company that I believe partnered with Affinity a few years back that is a website design company that was hiring artists to create UI pieces for a training set for their LLM that they were going to use to create website templates for customers as part of their service (and I think they were also guaranteeing royalties for those who contributed as well?).

An estimated 20% of women will be sexually assaulted in their life. Half of those will happen by the time that they’re 16. 40% of trans women will be sexually assaulted.

This isn’t about your feelings being hurt.

The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it’s been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

We’ve seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like “pedestrian fatalities” - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they’re moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn’t interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.

If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!

Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?

Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.

It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.

Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.

This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.

They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.

Because the most common people complaining about Bluesky fall into 1 of 2 groups:

People upset that Bluesky isn’t tolerating their behavior (mostly Nazis and transphobes angry about the community not letting it become Truth Social 2 or allowing transphobes to harass users, but also certain leftist groups, much like the tankies here on Lemmy)

People upset that the infrastructure isn’t FOSS or some similar complaint about it not being enough (purity test behavior like in every comment section on Lemmy)

And people saying that Bluesky is an echo chamber tend to fall very heavily into group 1.

Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?

Wrong, the purpose is to prevent people from not buying from a corporation - guns and otherwise. You can buy polymer guns right from the store.

Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.

All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.

Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.

What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.

The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.

The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.

You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.

You’re laboring under the impression that consumer protection laws mean anything in the US. They don’t. Unless it’s something absolutely egregious, then maybe they might get a slap on the wrist. Maybe.

Another perfect example is my buddy who was looking at digital watches yesterday. The same watch was $100 more expensive on Amazon than at Walmart, and Prime prices are often higher than if you don’t have Prime. I’ve also had Amazon completely lie to me about an item being on sale, claiming that it was 50% off on a Prime day sale, and then when I went and checked it the day after it turned out that it had been more like $5 off than the several hundred they claimed the sale would’ve saved. They marked it up wildly just to pretend that it was on sale. And they’re not the only ones to have been caught doing that. Plenty of other places have been caught doing the same thing, but since they’re big companies, unless you can get a settlement from a class action suit, nobody cares.

These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don’t matter. It’s kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.

I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.

The one thing that I disagree with is that most people don’t care about AI being shoved into everything. Studies are consistently showing that the vast majority of people don’t use/hate AI being shoved into everything. 80% of phones users in one study, 90% on another study for DuckDuckGo IIRC, etc.