I understand, albeit in layman’s terms, more or less what LLMs and image generators are doing, and used the ship of Theseus as shorthand referring to the processes by which real photos are laundered into data sets.

I am aware of the literal difference between an individual model and the data it trains on, and understand that Grok and it’s like are divorced from their output. I have even played with running a local model. This level of concern would be unwarranted if humans were decent and only trained Grok on and requested of Grok to generate puppies playing in open fields.

That doesn’t mean any image created by it henceforth is in any meaningful way a picture of you.

Of course not, it is a picture of hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people who offered up varying degrees of consent* for the use of their bodies to make any kind of porn.

*Usually 0%, as data illegally scraped is not subject to a hostile TOS agreement if it is uploaded as training data by the scraper without even the knowledge or consent of the original company hosting the data

Like anyone who has ever seen a child or depiction of a child producing any sexually explicit illustration of any sort everafter, then? Because even human artists do not create ex nihilo, they start from a foundation of their cumulative experiences, which means anyone who has ever laid eyes on your child or a photo of your child is at some level incorporating some aspect of that experience however small into any artwork they create henceforth and should they ever draw anything explicit…

I think this largely speaks for itself as some of the worst words ever put together in any order generally. Comparing human creativity and how we draw inspiration from our forebears to the present subject is abhorrent. Imagining human minds turning every single speck of human flesh they see into jackoff material because you assume that is how the mind works because you learned it from a robot is beyond everything.

Die on some other hill unless you’re being paid well. This is a neo Nazi’s CSAM and propaganda machine. If they want to fix it, they’ll scrub their training data and figure out the weights and do a massive ban wave on the abusers. It is not on this world to suffer excuses for this hideous fucking bullshit.

A computer program trained off millions of pictures of people that the program’s parent company acquired by hook or by crook and now any photo you posted of your kids is fair game to be recycled into the most heinous shit imaginable at the press of a button by the kind of slug still using Twitter. There is abuse happening there, when they decided to build a machine that could take family photos put online by wellmeaning people and statistically morph them ship-of-Theseus style into pornography with no safeguards.

If I were a parent and even theoretically one pixel of hair on my child’s head were used as aggregate data for this mathematic new form of abuse by proxy, I’d be old testament mad. I would liken it to a kind of theft or even rape that we have no clear word for or legal concept of yet.

I would suggest just not defending this stuff in any way because you’re simply going to lose, or from your perspective, be dogpiled by people having what you perceive to be an extreme moral panic over this issue.

I love giving up the franchise!

The future you’re talking about won’t be in your own hands. Technocapital will make those decisions about how to exploit the planet for you, and population stability, quality of life, and economic, measured use of resources (ie literally “conservative”) will all be secondary, tertiary, or even more distant goals. There will not be a great flash of light where turning the planet into a gray brick will yield a positive singularity. When we’ve used the world up, it’s gone, but you and I will be left alive for a litle while to writhe like flayed worms in hell. Maybe another species can guzzle up our bones in several million years to make a computer do unnecessary math calculations with the hopes of achieving infinite growth?

I do understand, and it does make sense to me.

Been reading this thread interested as someone whose loved one works for municipal IT. On that basis I sympathize with your perspective, but I have to take issue with this statement:

And now, Americans, stuck in a system that has been stolen by a skinwalker.

I wouldn’t say so. This is the system that we have. The executive office has been erasing checks and balances since WWII. The Heritage Foundation and other SIGs have been pushing white supremacy for 200 years. ICE was created by Bush Jr. after after a mob riot in Florida disrupted a recount that could have given the presidency to Al Gore. Generously this is when we can say our democracy first proved flawed, but the rationalizations and mechanisms go back to our founding. We haven’t been hijacked, we are the monster and have been for some time.

Could you try explaining what the user said that was incorrect instead of calling them racist four times and citing some book?

My mind’s eye flashes to something like The Master and I’m bummed that’s considered “gamey” by great actors. Not that I expect actors to go fucking play Fallout 1 with a Small Gun Crit/Speech build and go collect the Brotherhood’s data and confront the Master in a battle of words… but if someone would like to show Goggins on their phone that kind of thing is in the games, that the games themselves strived very hard to make living, colorful worlds, I think it certainly wouldn’t hurt the show. Hell if someone wants to show that scene to anyone currently at Bethesda I think it could positively impact the next game.

I miss all previous presidents I have experienced prior to now and even Bush would be an improvement versus what we have literally now. They’re all directly at fault for the present situation in some way.

Regular, non-expert internet users find it interesting, or even amusing, to generate images or videos using AI and to send that media to their friends. While sophisticated media aesthetics find those creations gauche or even offensive, a lot of other cultures find them perfectly acceptable. And it’s an inarguable reality that millions of people find AI-generated media images emotionally moving.

You’re describing the internet equivelant of ignorance and figurative poverty, where people don’t have the knowledge or the resources to make better choices (fast food deserts, faith healers, the PowerBall) because they are institutionally deprived. This is the same class of users/consumers that big companies look for those exact same qualities in to shill the exact same AI garbage to because they don’t know anybetter. This article is suggesting Mozilla flood the streets of a poor neighborhood with their own crank because their crank is cut less. I see the argument as bad, I see the premise as evil, and I see the rhetoric as manipulative. Respectfully, no.

Its hosted on a site called lithub, the author is actually an academic. Maybe what you wanted was a more concise op-ed but its just not what the gentleman wrote.

Prop 50 passed in California in response to Texas’ redistricting. Other states would have to have a competitive congress and the states that need it most are red as hell. In the case of Texas, their redistricting effort was a national push from the party to consolidate their hold on the house, which was easiest to do in Texas because its already gerrymandered to shit and you can pass whatever you want there. However, the most conservative city in the most conservative county in the state keep going nearly purple on them. If you want Prop 50 in your state its going to take a serious groundgame and a charismatic figurehead like Newsom (hocks loogie). Its not possible without a strong local democrat party and some states are too electorally captured, it will take unseating untold numbers of Republicans in those places to even have a referendum. Whats going to kick off now are further redistricting efforts around the country from all states that are solidly one color or another.

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IM SO GLAD WE HELD THAT ONE BACK FOR THE SAKE OF DECORUM AND NOW IT DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL HAAAAAAAAAAA

If Halo wasn’t dead before it is now. Microsoft whored the Chief out. Considering the state the franchise was already in remaking its first game for a third time to milk nostalgia, I just don’t think there’ll ever be another Halo title that doesn’t reek of tonsil stones and human ashes.

This WAS becoming a mainstream issue more people were waking up to. Then ten years of rule by the culprits out large shut the whole thing up and went further to normalize it. Now were just waiting for talking heads to start edging close to saying its not taboo. Dumpster fire of a social fabric speckled by predators hiding in plain sight and laughing at us.

Are you sure its that and nothing to do with the fact we’re taught to understand the relationship between electricity, energy, and computation through the metaphor of a potato battery powering very small things like LEDs?

“Finally”

Hours after it happened I had this hole in my stomach from how bad I wanted panicking conservatives to realize this level of alarm and fear is how regular people feel ALL the time. There are parents whose kids won’t ever come home again and THEY’RE not unique, they don’t matter, and the DOJ isn’t acting as their goddamn lawyer. Right Wingers are reacting like this because this is the first time a shooting at a school campus hurt someome they registered as real and not a crisis actor. Again, being angry, freigtened, and heartbroken is how the rest of America feels about gun violence, and we’re just told to get over it. It sucks it had to happen to someone they knew for that reality the rest of us live to sink in

This is literally the world I and many others grew up. Rifle rounds have more freedom on campus than students do.

I am perpetually haunted by a news story I saw circa 2018 showing footage of children being led around New York at about 1AM by a prim kindergarten teacher-type woman. News sources at the time said they came from the border. So what in the name of God were they doing in New York across the continent? I have had a rising sense of panic about this for ever and I fear you are dead on. Want a never ending goodie bag of slaves with no paper trail? Militarize a border.