07mk
1yr ago
And what is the end result off all this "democratization"? A golden age of creativity? People taking risks to create new art no one has ever seen before? Or millions of people making the exact same video, talking about the exact same thing, hoping to appease the recommendation algorithm, and endless livestreams of people playing video games, and gossiping about the news, and things other people have done?
I mean, all of these sure look like a golden age of creativity to me. If not golden, then at least bronze. The quality and quantity of creativity displayed in these videos and livestreams can be impressive from my experience. This comment seems akin to saying "What's so special about this Van Gogh fella? He's just drawing a night sky like people have been doing forever."
07mk
1yr ago
I've watched a number of scambaiting videos on YouTube which indicate that scamming old people is something one can do from one's home anywhere in the world and doesn't require any particular education or work qualifications. Watching such videos (try searching for Kitboga or Jim Browning on YouTube) can probably give you an idea of how such scams work and how you could set one up yourself. It seems like a high risk/low reward kind of endeavor, but that's probably to be expected as a trade-off for being able to WFH without any education or work experience.
07mk
1yr ago
I can’t agree on the alleged social threat of trans people, though. Targeting children is somewhere between irresponsible and unethical, but that’s not what they are doing. Literally every trans person I know is an adult and firmly focused on affirmation rather than evangelism. That may lead to a false positive rate by encouraging uncertain members, but this isn’t somehow unique to trans issues. To me that means the live-and-let-live category should apply.
I think there's a sort of equivocation between "trans people" and "trans activists." When people talk about having problems with trans people targeting children, it's in reference to trans activists, and it's hard to tell how much that overlaps with actual trans people. In my experience, the vast majority of trans activists are not trans people, for instance, but that doesn't stop them from claiming that their activism is on behalf of trans people. This is why I suspect that this sort of equivocation is actively encouraged by trans activists as a useful rhetorical tool by which to defend their positions as being what trans people - the actual minority that people care about - want rather than merely what trans activists - just some set of humans who agitate for sociopolitical change - want.
07mk
1yr ago
I hope this doesn't detract too much from your message but I don't think the average Indian- American ( From India) at least first gen really cares that much whether there are enough Indian actors in Hollywood or not
I don't think the average black American really cares that much whether there are enough black actors in Hollywood or not either. What the average person of (race) cares about really isn't a concern when it comes to the claims of the activists who do care about it.
07mk
1yr ago
I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.
No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.
07mk
1yr ago
To a large extent, I think this isn't even particularly malicious or intentional. The phrase I keep thinking of when I encounter other leftists in CW contexts is "cargo cult." There's just a real lack of understanding of how things work and a deep belief that pantomiming the general behavior of things that did work in the past is how to make things work. One example would be the anti-climate change "strikes" by kids not going to school until They do Something about the Problem. Strikes worked because they were literally workers that company owners needed to literally do stuff so they could literally make money from real customers; kids not going to school doesn't put any such pressure on governments. A more minor but much more common example is calling people "Nazis" as a way to discredit them; Nazis weren't bad because there's something magical about the syllables "nah" and "zee" when put together in order; they were bad because of real things they really did to real people using real guns held by real men.
Likewise, awards like Hugo's aren't prestigious or well-regarded because there's some ceremony and the author gets a fancy statue or whatever; it's because there's some credibility in the institution that chooses the award recipients that provides a sort of promise that the works they selected meet some level of quality that readers value. Handing out awards to people based on sociopolitical preferences doesn't give prestige to those sociopolitical preferences, it just kills the credibility of the awards.
My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.
07mk
1yr ago
but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.
07mk
1yr ago
OK, I want to understand your perspective a little better. At this point, it's completely uncontroversially established science that speed is fundamentally subjective. Albert Einstein theorized as such, and experiment after experiment has proven him right on this point. According to your perspective, does it then follow that speed is completely subjective and, as such, whether or not a cheetah is faster than me when running on an African prairie is a completely subjective matter, one open to interpretation with no objectivity whatsoever?
To get away from a question of science, it's also pretty well established that "quality in being a soccer player" is subjective. We can use stats to get close to objectivity, but those stats are also largely determined by the player's teammates and opponents that stats can't get us all the way there. Does it then follow that the question of who is better at soccer, Lionel Messi or 07mk, a completely subjective one, with no way of determining a right answer other than just what answer appeals to whom the most?
07mk
1yr ago
One thing I loved about Kim was a sort of "uncanny valley" about her that made her so close to being a Mary Sue and appear as one to so many characters within the show. It was to the extent that even I as an audience member who got to watch her darker parts felt confused as to why someone like her was with someone like Jimmy, and I had to constantly remind myself that she really wasn't the perfect hyper-competent well-put-together lawyer that her image made her out to be. Her flaws were huge and significant for the impact it had on so many lives, but also subtle due to her presentation, which I suppose was a common theme with most of the main characters in that show.
07mk
1yr ago
I think this is onto something but also missing a key step. The "lived-experience" that a flaw that that a woman thinks she has but is actually reflective of a continuous and systemic oppressive event is in itself a narrative that is taught to many women (and men) who then go on to write characters that reflect the narrative that's been taught to them about their lives.
07mk
1yr ago
Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.
I mean, this isn't unique or even unusual to the transgender "movement" within the broader left/"progressive"/SocJus movement sphere. I'd even call this standard operating procedure at this point. It's just the inevitable result of grouping emotional harm with physical harm so as to attach the negativity of the latter to the former and of categorizing "disagrees with me in this issue" as causing emotional harm. It creates a chain of "logic" that allows the activist to say that someone who disagrees with them is being literally violent towards them, and so it follows that any environment in which people are free to disagree with them is one that is toxic to them.
07mk
1yr ago
The point is not that my observation isn't obvious, it's that the consensus which has been absorbed into our institutions and collective thought did not consider this as the default explanation.
Consider that our institutions and collective thought did consider this as the default explanation but discarded it as being incorrect. Now consider that not only is your observation obvious, it's evident, and then consider the credibility of our institutions and collective thought when it comes to determining true things.
07mk
1yr ago
I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.
I don't understand why people use this sort of heuristic when talking about something like this. By definition, one's friends and acquaintances are the types of people who have friends and acquaintances. The men with porn addictions so severe they "blow up their lives" are ones who have very few to none of those things. Given that, the odds are very good that your perception of the prevalence of such people based on your observation of friends and acquaintances is lower than the true prevalence.
Your other points about lack of evidence has some value, but this one about your own experience with your friends and acquaintances doesn't, and the fact that you seem to be informing your view based in part on this is troublesome.
07mk
1yr ago
The moral (or rather, social) panic I see isn't about romance novels, but rather about the failure of men as a class to not produce enough of them that meet the expectations of women who want a Mr. Right who's rich, hot, tall, gentle, and a vampire. The analogue for porn would be if there were a moral panic about not enough women being young, attractive, sexually open and skilled nymphoniacs. It's just identifying the societal problem at different parts; for unrealistic expectations set by romance novels, the "panic" is around the failure of men to achieve them, while for unrealistic expectations set by porn, the "panic" is around men consuming and being influenced by them.
07mk
1yr ago
I have noticed the analogy, which is part of why I’m slightly surprised that this forum is so pro-AI.
The analogy doesn't quite fit for where the rubber meets the road, does it? When it comes to deeming something created by Midjourney "real art," what does that actually involve for the individuals involved? Nothing, really; a particular arrangement of pixels being "real art" or not is mainly a metaphysical question that doesn't interact with our physical reality to much of an extent. At the end of the day, the arrangement of pixels is the arrangement of pixels, and people will continue to use that arrangement of pixels for things that arrangement of pixels are good at doing, regardless of whether we consider it "real art" or not.
When it comes to deeming a transwoman a "real woman," what does that actually involve for the individuals involved? It means, among other things, having some sort of enforcement regime by which people talking about the transwoman are limited in the terms they can use. It's not just a metaphysical question that people can make an invisible mental categorization as they wish and go about their day; it's a physical question with physical consequences that differ greatly depending on the categorization.
07mk
1yr ago
I don't think the forum is anti-trans in principle; it's just that almost all trans are diametrically opposed to more core values that this forum holds.
I don't think this is quite right, actually. People in this forum being "anti-trans" is really only true to the extent that they are against the demands of self-proclaimed pro-trans activists. In terms of the literal meanings of the terms "anti" and "trans," this forum is pretty full of people who aren't anti-trans. Rather, it has to do with opinions specifically about the demands of self-proclaimed pro-trans activists. Obviously this is an easy equivocation to make by accident just because of the literal words involved; my belief is that this type of equivocation is encouraged - and likely even believed in - by the self-proclaimed pro-trans activists; more people believing in the unsupported notion that these activists are speaking on behalf of the actual trans population lends them greater credibility.
07mk
1yr ago
No, I think you were incorrect when you wrote "it's just that almost all trans are diametrically opposed to more core values that this forum holds." I don't think it's the case that almost all trans are diametrically opposed to this forum's core values. I think it's the case that almost all trans activists are diametrically opposed to those, and also that trans activists try to give the (unsupported) impression that trans people in general have some meaningful level of agreement with trans activists.
07mk
1yr ago
But this suggests another strategy: don’t train it on the world as it appears to be. Train it on the world that could be.
Is creating such training data trivial? No. Does it require discriminating against anyone? Also no. Seems like a decent idea to me.
Presuming that this theoretical "world that could be" is at all different from the "world as it appears to be", it absolutely requires discriminating against someone. There's just no way to bridge that difference without applying some discrimination against someone at some point in the process; otherwise we'd just end up back where we started.
07mk
1yr ago
I don't think I am. I agree that a naïvely de-biased crime model will favour blacks over whites compared to a model that just went for simple accuracy and nothing else, but men will also necessarily similarly have to be favoured. If not, people are immediately going to notice the model convicting men and freeing women even when the facts are identical. There is absolutely no way people are going to accept that; radical anti-racist ideology isn't that powerful.
People have already noticed this IRL and people already accept it just fine, no radical anti-racist ideology needed. It's just the reality of the situation, sans any sort of ideology, that this sort of bias is fully and openly accepted.
But to the actual point of the thread, I think you are missing the point. I don't think sulla is describing a crime model that's de-biased "naively," but rather one that's de-biased in the most likely way that it is to be de-biased, which is by explicitly putting the thumb on the scale against disfavored groups such as whites and men. A universe in which real de-biasing efforts implemented by real institutions tend to follow some "naive" implementation rather than a politically convenient one seems like a neat universe to live in, I imagine.
07mk
1yr ago
If my model generates pictures of people from an even ethnic spectrum, I do not believe I am discriminating against anyone. It's not the Harvard auditions, and this isn't actual people I'm failing to generate or generating excessively.
By this logic, then no model is discriminating against anyone. If a model only ever returns white women for "good person" and black men for "bad person," then that's not discriminating against anyone since it's not the Harvard auditions, and this isn't actual people you're failing to generate or generating excessively. Great, looks like we can associate any race with any quality we want in our model and not worry about discriminating against anyone!
If I'm a designer using a generative AI to fill a world of my making, I do not care for "accurate" demographic representation being baked in the model.
Indeed, and notably no one seems to have any problem with such models existing. There's room for multiple types of generative AI models in this world, including ones that have uniform distributions, desired distributions, best-attempt-at-accurate distributions, or really any other arbitrary distributions of demographics.
07mk
1yr ago
Do you really think your example is as egregious as generating perfectly uniform selections for both "good person" and "bad person" (or "criminal" and "Harvard student", for that matter)?
What does being egregious have to do with this in any way? As you wrote, either way, "it's not the Harvard auditions, and this isn't actual people I'm failing to generate or generating excessively." Given that the reason that perfectly uniform selections isn't discrimination has literally nothing to do with the type of distribution and everything to do with the fact that these are generated images rather than actual people, we can change the distribution to anything we want (including my example of encoding "good person" with "white woman" and "bad person" with "black man") and still land at the same result of "no discrimination is taking place."
07mk
1yr ago
I wonder if they would be okay with it if it (the rapper AI) was operated by black people. If yes, then it's not merely about the AI as an object or the math. You have to argue (and I don't think it's hard) that blacks don't have a monopoly on rap, it's not enough to say "hurr durr it's just math".
So I didn't pay much attention to this controversy, mostly out of lack of interest, but also partly out of unfortunate paucity of coverage, but I think the main issue the "cancelers" had with the AI was that it was generating lyrics implying some sort of personal struggle as a black man facing police brutality, and also possibly using certain slurs that are common in rap songs produced by black people. I'm not sure if the "cancelers" would be okay with the AI if it had been operated by black people, or if they would require that the AI also be written by black people. And if the latter, does it have to be written from scratch with no use of, say, open source code created by white or Asian researchers?
Or would even that not be enough, and the mere fact that it's a computer generating these lyrics instead of a human brain belonging to a black man who had actually suffered police brutality generating them is a problem? If so, it seems reasonable to characterize that as people "canceling a pile of math;" however, it's not clear to me that this is so.
I think this is a very good point. This is a fully general argument about regulation being capable of adapting to whatever technology it wants to regulate. The logistics of some forum website running versus being taken down is sufficiently different from the logistics of a piece of software being run on an individual PC (sans any online requirements) that we can't generalize the experience of one to the other.
Still, I must admit that I personally can't help but feel that we will see history repeat here. Much like, say, KF, AI image-generation software seems likely to piss off a sufficiently sympathetic and loud group of people such that people will find a way to clamp down on it. Maybe it will be death by a thousand cuts by censoring the research that goes into and the distribution of and the results of such software. Maybe it will be more overt political action of just men with guns preventing people from producing independent personal computers and/or using them. Maybe it will be some new creative way of regulation that will have been invented by some AI software that no human could have come up with today. It just seems that when it comes to this stuff, where there's a will there's a way, and there seems to be a lot of will to prevent people from generating arrangements of pixels that one finds objectionable.
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