07mk
11mo ago
As stark as 20% drop within a month is, I don't think you can declare a loss in your prediction yet; we've still got a long ways to go before the 6-month mark. I admit, I predicted similarly to you, and I too am surprised, and I could see the boycott having legs for 6 months and beyond, if regular consumers switch over to Coors Lite or Miller Lite or whatever and make it their habit. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new habit that one sticks with. I personally don't drink much light beer at all, so I can't say if these products are sufficiently interchangeable that Bud Lite drinkers could stick with the change long-term; the beer snob in me would say obviously they're fungible, but that's obviously not accurate. So maybe the people who are angry/hyped enough to switch over for a month could only handle forcing down Coors Lite for so long before they have to switch back to their favored Bud Lite.
On the boycott itself, though, has any organization come out and called for people to boycott Bud Lite/ABI? I feel like I've seen a lot of people talking about not buying them in reaction to the Mulvaney marketing, but I haven't seen any widespread calls for solidarity coming from big names/organizations. Then again, I'm not much in the target audience for something like that, and I also don't remember much of that during the recent boycott against Hogwarts Legacy, so maybe I shouldn't expect to see something like that.
07mk
11mo ago
That's a fair point; perhaps Hollywood is doomed anyway, unless they can get AI into the executive suite as well as in the writer's room.
But I also have to wonder if the terrible writing in those Disney films is because they didn't have access to writers good enough to write good scripts while meeting the constraints placed on them by executives. Perhaps the constraints that executives place on the writers makes it literally impossible to write a good script, in which case the prior paragraph holds, but what if it's just that the writers weren't skilled enough to figure that out? I don't know what sorts of constraints the execs at Disney and Lucasarts placed on the writers for Rise of Skywalker, but perhaps a more skilled writer could have written a script that was at least half-decent? And what if AI could/would have elevated those writers to such a level?
07mk
11mo ago
It's argued that the people in question just destroy those things publicly and then need to go buy new ones, meaning it doesn't actually cause any financial harm.
I've seen this thrown around more as low-effort jabs on Twitter than a serious argument, and in multiple directions, e.g. pointing out people burning Harry Potter books or replacing the covers with Rowling's name removed, to protest Rowling's anti-trans-activist stance. The low-effort jabs tend to be responses to similarly low-effort posts where someone shows a video of themselves shooting the product in their backyard or whatever, which I don't think were meant as serious demonstrations of boycott, but rather as virtue signalling.
In the case of images for training image generation AI, I don't think they were published on the internet with license agreements stipulating limitations on what people could do with the images after downloading them. IANAL, but I think if you publish an image online and don't gate it in some way like behind a password login and license agreement, you get nothing beyond the default basic legal protections for how people use it, i.e. not publishing a copy or derivative work and whatnot.
07mk
11mo ago
If you think it's possible for an artist to have any rights at all over whether their work is used for AI training or not, then clearly they should be able to seek redress for images that have already been used without their permission. Trying to get off on a technicality of "aww shucks, maybe if you had published your work back in 2015 along with an explicit notice that said 'you do not have permission to use this image to train any AI models' then you would have a case, but, you didn't, so too bad..." is just silly.
I think it's possible for an artist to have such rights, but IANAL, and that's ultimately a question for the courts to decide. But in any case, no artist would have had to predict the advent of machine learning if they didn't want their images to become part of, to quote aqouta, "general inspiration in the air;" they could have just gated their images behind license agreements that included standard boilerplate stuff about how anyone who downloads the images are only granted rights to do XYZ, all other rights reserved. Again, IANAL and I don't know if the courts would see their lack of such gating and license agreements as giving implicit permission for viewers to use to train ML software, like how it gives other implicit permissions to viewers. Honestly, all this is so new that I'm not sure even a lawyer would be able to make a meaningful prediction on how things will go.
07mk
11mo ago
I don't think that 28/34 fraction means a whole lot, necessarily. Sequels can be different from predecessors while being even better sometimes (The Godfather: Part 2 comes to mind, along with Terminator 2 and Aliens), and that's even more the case for spinoffs within the same universe (e.g. Rogue One being a spinoff of the Star Wars films). Remakes/reimaginings can also be perfectly good and creative depending on how they're handled - e.g. I haven't watched either Scarface film, but I've been told the remake from the 70s was even better than the original from the 30s. And if that 28 includes adaptations of stories from other media, then there's just no issue; making a film version of a written story is a new creative endeavor in itself, and there are countless examples of great, creative films that have come from adapting existing stories.
So the fraction might not be indicative of anything, but I do think there's something going on with the lack of creativity in Hollywood the past decade. The rise of the soft reboot (e.g. Jurassic World to Jurassic Park, The Force Awakens to A New Hope, Ghostbusters to Ghostbusters, and even arguably The Incredibles 2 to The Incredibles if you squint) does show some lack of creativity; these aren't remakes/reimaginings that try to present a fresh take on the same story, they do the exact opposite by dressing up the same stale core with minor cosmetic changes. And there are the Disney live-action (CG) remakes of their old cartoons, which they're pumping out at astonishing rates and which either add nothing to the original story (e.g. The Lion King which also took away a whole lot including one of its best songs) or just miss the entire point or "soul" of the original story (e.g. Mulan where the titular character literally had The Force magical chi powers, or Pinocchio where the titular puppet never makes any mistakes and is also rewarded for lying by having his nose grow long in a way to help him get the key to his cage). These show both a lack of creativity and a lack of understanding of what made the original works so beloved. Then there's Marvel, where every character feels like they're trying to imitate Iron Man with their sarcastic quips and every film has the same tone due to that.
Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that these studios have gotten very risk averse in part due to how much these high production films cost to make. Maybe there's something to it; after all, The Force Awakens and The Lion King both made a billion dollars. But I also have to wonder if that's the kind of trick you can only pull off so many times before the audience catches on, and Hollywood isn't adapting all that quickly. My hope is that with the rise of generative AI, we'll see the costs drop so drastically that indie studios - perhaps even dedicated hobbyists - would be able to put together 2-hour long films with the production values - encompassing everything from the visual effects, sound effects, set design, costume design, acting quality - of a modern Hollywood blockbuster. Hollywood still owns most/all of the well-known brands, and they also have the industry expertise to use these tools better than most, so they could still thrive in such an environment. But more independent filmmakers making something equivalent to Avatar 2 in production values could mean more creative and imaginative films in the landscape in the future.
07mk
11mo ago
I haven't run into the word "bussy" much, but I never got the sense that it had anything to do with transwomen. If anything, it was more associated with gay men. Or rather, with boys who were to be the receivers of gay men, whether or not those boys themselves were gay.
07mk
11mo ago
The Mummy - original
This only strengthens your point, but I think The Mummy was a remake or reimagining of an older film from the 30s.
07mk
11mo ago
Exactly, which is my point in general. It's not about sports, it's about using sports as a pretext to attack trans people.
I don't think calling it an "attack" on trans people is either charitable or accurate. Disagreeing with the defining of the term "woman" to include "transwomen" isn't an attack on trans people, at worst it's an attack on a certain ideology that pertains to trans people.
07mk
11mo ago
Even the most haughty CEO-aristocrat has to also be wondering "will humans accept a social structure where the overwhelming majority of them have the status of serfs", for example, right? And if the answer isn't "definitely not", then 3 potentially-pissed-off serfs might be too much more of a security risk than 3 potentially-hackable robots. If the upside to human labor is "my biscuits might be seasoned with their delicious salty tears" and the downside is "my tea might be seasoned with rat poison" then the CEO's valuation of human labor might be negative.
Metaphorically speaking, I feel like those salty tears might be just that delicious that it'd be worth the risk. The pleasure of having the submission of a regular human who was produced and born the old fashioned way is something that simply can't be replicated with AI, and it could end up being the most high status resource due to how much slower humans are to produce compared to AI, and also the expenses involved. It's still a dystopia, of course, and likely they could cut down the human population by 90%+ and still have enough servants to go around.
One scenario where AI could replace this would be some combination of amnesia + VR tech where the rich people pop themselves into a fully immersive world after erasing their memories of actual reality, thus allowing themselves to genuinely believe that they're being served by real humans while actually being served by VR. I think this wouldn't be attractive to most of the elites compared to having the real deal, and it also would be dangerous to themselves, since being lost in a virtual world would leave an opening for another elite to come along and take their stuff and/or kill them by developing their own AI to circumvent their AI defense systems.
07mk
11mo ago
I saw yesterday that Matt Yglesias tweeted that maybe all these issues with transwomen in sports would go away if we just recategorized women's sports as "AFAB sports." I'm skeptical of this, but I sure wouldn't mind seeing it happen just to observe how things play out.
07mk
11mo ago
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying.
This is the part I find a lot of problem with whenever this topic comes up, often in the context of sexual assault/rape accusations. I don't think any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. It necessarily implies that the accuser is wrong. Given what we know about the fallibility and malleability of memory, particularly when stressful situations are involved, it's entirely possible for the accuser to be honest to the best of their ability and still be completely, entirely wrong about the facts of what occurred. I don't know if this affects the legal calculus of the potential defamation suit; is the claim that an accuser is making an incorrect accusation for whatever reason - without implying that the accuser is lying - defamation? I don't know, but that's the actual pertinent issue than the claim that they're actually lying.
07mk
11mo ago
When denying an accusation, I don't think you need to specify whether the accuser is lying or merely mistaken. Just that they're wrong. If you go into specifics, e.g. explicitly accuse the accuser of lying, I think it'd be correct to leave you open to liability. But that level of specificity isn't necessary for denying an accusation.
07mk
11mo ago
I disagree, the specifics are important here. I deal with this constantly with clients who deny the allegations but then have no follow-up explanation. In a hit & run case, the defendant denies he was driving the car. Ok then who was driving your family's car then? In a stabbing case, the defendant denies the witness correctly IDed him. Ok then who else had access to this building? In another case, the defendant claims the witness is lying. Ok how do you know? why are they lying? what's their motive? when did they coordinate their stories? etc and so on.
I know this list of examples is in no way exhaustive, but only one of those examples had the accused person making a positive claim about someone else being dishonest (the lying witness). The others seem to me, if those questions were answered and explained, to be just fine ways to deny the accusation without impugning the accuser's honesty or otherwise defaming them. For the claim that a witness lying, I'm thinking the defendant shouldn't claim the witness is lying unless they have some specific evidence or motive, and if they lack such a thing, they should retreat to the "witness is wrong" claim rather than "witness is lying."
IANAL, so I can't speak with authority on any of this, and I can't speak to the ins and outs of how a defense strategy gets formed and implemented. It just seems to me that, unless there's specific reason to think so, there's no need to claim that an accuser is lying, but rather just wrong. If they claim that the accuser is lying but lack the evidence to substantiate it, then they shouldn't have made such a claim as part of their defense in the first place, so not being able to do so for fear of a later defamation lawsuit down the line doesn't seem like a loss. If they do have such evidence, then that would strengthen their defense and also protect them, however imperfectly, against defamation lawsuits.
07mk
11mo ago
Something I am still struggling with - shouldn't a Marine know how to hold/disable somebody without killing him?
I have basically no 1st hand knowledge on the subject, but any time I hear from people who have actual knowledge of combat (e.g. mixed martial artists or law enforcement), it seems to me that humans are very fragile creatures where the line between merely stopping an oppositional person with force and killing them is extremely fine. I'm sure there are techniques that maximize the chances of someone surviving when holding/disabling them, but the chaotic nature of a physical altercation makes it so that there's a lot of variance and unpredictability in the outcome. So my thinking is that it's very possible that he tried his best to disable him without killing him but failed at that endeavor, for whatever reason. Whether that was due to reckless negligence is up to the courts to decide, I suppose.
07mk
11mo ago
I wonder if 8 hours of work a day for the 5 workdays managed to become a popular standard due to it cleanly cutting in half the 16 hours a day that most adults are expected to be awake. It's just easy to wrap your head around the idea of cutting up the day into thirds of 8 hours each. I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.
07mk
11mo ago
I have little to add, but I found my experience with the social "sciences" to be similar to yours, and it was discovering this about 10 years ago that made me disillusioned with the social justice/identity politics left. I'm not a scientist, but I did have enough experience with it in college and liked it enough to keep abreast of it after, and the common theme in science, the underlying principle that makes science science, seemed clear to me to be being open to oppositional perspectives. The more I looked into it, and the more rigorous any science got, the more welcoming and actively encouraging of skepticism and attempts to disprove claims it seemed to be. But most social "sciences" do not follow this at all and have, in fact, built up a whole structure of justifications for why basic scientific skepticism is wrong. That's not a science by any meaningful sense of the term, and it can't be expected to land on truth except by complete chance (likely worse than chance, due to how it's not a complete random process but rather follows incentives of its own based around social approval and signalling).
It's a shame, because social science is something that potentially could add immense value to the world through actual production of knowledge. And some of it does seem to happen, just completely drowned out by the monstrosity that wears "social science" like a skinsuit. I think about something the social scientist Jon Haidt (I think) said about biases and belief, that if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?" If social scientists can just try to avoid this fairly obvious pitfall and force themselves to always look for excuses not to believe evidence that reinforces their biases (e.g. that some patterns of behavior must have social/cultural origins rather than biological ones), they might be able to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Sadly, they mostly seem to be committed to the exact opposite.
07mk
11mo ago
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes.
I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
07mk
11mo ago
He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules
I disagree that it's absurd or inflammatory. I think it's probably wrong, but it seems an entirely reasonable belief, not just about US leaders, but basically anyone in general. Erring on the side of "people won't give a shit about megadeaths and megasufferings of people who are useless to them and powerless to stop them" doesn't seem like a major error, even if it is an error.
07mk
11mo ago
Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.
07mk
11mo ago
It's hard to sever, that's for sure. But there are aspects of many modern Disney films that are bad regardless of those stuff. Rise of Skywalker wasn't helped by Rey continuing to be a Mary Sue, but the entire plot point of Palpatine somehow returning and bizarre plot contrivances like the dagger shape matching up to the Death Star ruins (just one example among many) by themselves were enough to make the film awful. Doctor Strange 2 wasn't helped by Doctor Strange being a supporting character to his own film, but the utter lack of internal logic and bizarre plot contrivances by themselves were enough to make the film awful. I've heard Peter Pan and Wendy is quite woke, but also it's been heavily criticized for awful acting, awful color grading and set design for Neverland, and awful combat choreography. Perhaps a lack of focus on the messaging would have allowed Disney to put some more focus on these other technical and fundamental script writing aspects, so I agree that it's hard to sever, but at the least, these films didn't seem to have some salvageable, worthy core that would have been fine but for the woke messaging.
Their films with less woke messaging don't seem to be particularly better, either. The Lion King remake did make a lot of money, but arguably that was riding the coattails of the original masterpiece, and it did turn off a lot of fans for being a near-shot-for-shot remake but with a lot of the soul ripped out due to the hyperrealistic style and bad voice acting. We'll see with the upcoming prequel CGI film about Mufasa if this was a one of those "fool me once/fool me twice" situations, I suppose. The Pinocchio remake has been criticized for missing the point of the original story, making the titular puppet a complete goody two-shoes from the beginning who is passively pushed into bad situations rather than making bad decisions, along with the lying-causing-nose-to-grow being used to help him get out of a sticky situation rather than punishing him. I heard that film had some woke messaging with some casting choices, but those weren't the downfall of the film, from what I understand.
07mk
11mo ago
I think this phenomenon happens because many marketers take their ideology seriously. Based on my own experience as a believer in its predecessor ideology, woke ideology is both moralizing and totalizing (AFAICT, it's only gotten worse since I quit around a decade ago), so it has answers to questions of "right" and "wrong" in every possible context. The point of making a film isn't to convince the audience to give you money in exchange for entertainment, it's to make the world a better place by subtly manipulating the audience through social messaging (if they did otherwise, since everything is political, their works would, by default, have messaging that reinforces and upholds the current oppressive status quo). And if the audience dislikes that, that means that they are morally wrong, and it isn't our job to convince them, it's their job to see the rightness of our ideology and come around to it. And we'll bully and verbally abuse them until they do so.
I think a lot of the decision makers in media, likely including in Disney, have experience in seeing this work very well - very very well - in sociopolitical contexts. Often they might have been subject to such "marketing" themselves which led them to becoming true believers. I've seen and experienced this directly plenty, again, for the predecessor ideology. And they might be inferring that they can use similar "marketing" in a commercial context. I don't think I've seen it have much actual success there, though; in sociopolitical contexts, bullying and coercion is the norm and can get good results; in commercial ones, people tend to just walk away instead of handing you money in the face of bullying, and you can't legally coerce them.
07mk
11mo ago
3rd wave feminism/identity politics/SJW. Arguably it's just the same ideology just with less time in the oven and less widespread acceptance.
07mk
11mo ago
There's no such thing as "just" telling people to not drink Bud Light, the context of doing so is common knowledge.
I don't think that means there isn't "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or whatever. It just means that when you "just" tell people to do that, you also necessarily include the context of the common knowledge. That doesn't make a message to Christians to boycott Bud Light not "just" telling people not to drink Bud Light; that's still literally "just" what it is.
My main thought here is that, compared to 2007, the competition for eyeballs is much more fierce. Even ignoring social media and video games, unscripted streams and independently scripted free YouTube videos offer video entertainment accessible to the masses that Hollywood has to prove themselves better than. Their production values are still much better than even the best independent professionally produced non-Hollywood stuff, but that advantage keeps getting chipped away. The one advantage they won't lose anytime soon is ownership of lots of intellectual property, which gives them a legal monopoly on producing certain stories. I think they need to hold onto this with a death grip if they want to keep being prosperous in the future.
And to do that, they need to make sure the IPs they own are associated with high quality content. Regardless of AI, this has been in some trouble lately; e.g. for all the money MCU and Star Wars films make, the trend has clearly been negative in recent iterations, both in box office numbers and sentiment from longtime fans. A large part of that has to do with the quality of writing, which I imagine AI could help with. In the meanwhile, we're likely to see independently produced scripts become higher quality thanks to AI aid, and with the production values also getting better for similar reasons, Hollywood probably needs to make sure they're at the cutting edge in using these sorts of tech; for as well an independent creator can use this tech, Hollywood has the resources to do it 1000x as much and better.
Given that, I'm not sure that this kind of limiting of AI in script writing is viable. Looking at the quality of writing in modern Hollywood scripts, it's quite clear that an amateur writer with ChatGPT and rudimentary understanding of storytelling principles could write better-than-median quality scripts right now. And it will only get better. Perhaps the writers' guild can group together enough and prevent scabs, but then the entire industry has to compete against independent producers whose quality would go up. If the quality of writing in mainstream professional films and shows go down during this strike and/or fewer such mainstream professional films and shows get released, resulting in less prestige in the IPs that these companies hold, followed by the guild getting what they want in terms of AI leading to them having a harder time competing against AI-assisted independent creators, it could end up with less overall money flowing to Hollywood, a Pyrrhic victory for the writers.
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