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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

				
				
				

				

					2 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 342


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a very wide diversity of viewpoints in the DR.  Claims made by one person may not be valid for another.




generally in favor of state-backed discrimination against racial minorities




The DR is in favor of racially homogeneous societies.  There shouldn't be any racial minorities around to discriminate against in the first place, because they should be living somewhere else, among their own people where they can be governed by laws of their own making.




policies restricting women's ability to participate in society and politics as equals to men.




I wouldn't be surprised if there were some influential figures in the DR who supported this.  But in general the DR doesn't spend too much time talking about women's issues, because they're viewed as secondary to racial issues.  More of a day 2 item than a day 1 item.


For what it's worth, one of the leaders of the UK group Patriotic Alternative is a woman, and the National Justice Party's official platform summary says nothing about women.  So they're not exactly frothing at the mouth to put women in chains or anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I very likely wrote some of the posts on /ic/ you’re referring to.


My mental model of the developers/proponents of AI art (and AI in general) is that they believe that they’re genuinely making the world a better place, at least by the measure of their own terminal values. I just happen to sharply disagree with them.


Obviously, posts written on 4chan to blow off steam and commiserate with people in your own camp do not always reflect the nuance and complexity of one’s actual views.


EDIT: Well, since I just brought up the subject of having nuanced views, I should acknowledge that I don’t think the motives of AI developers are entirely pure-hearted in all cases. If you read the /sdg/ and /hdg/ threads, hardly a thread goes by without someone saying “fuck artists” or “it’s over for artcels”. There’s clearly some amount of resentment there for people who possessed a skill that they wanted, but were not able to obtain for whatever reason. As for a broader UN/WEF conspiracy to reduce the global population by replacing workers with automation - obviously I don’t have any concrete evidence of an intentional conspiracy, but I do fear that a future like that is possible, even if no one is consciously intending to bring it about.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did you actually watch the video?


I don’t see how you can walk away from it thinking that Vaush doesn’t deeply care about this issue on a personal level. And I went in skeptical, assuming that he didn’t care about it on a personal level.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:






Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.






It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.




This doesn't sit right with me.


Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers.  It's simple supply and demand.  Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap.  The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope.  Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task.  Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding.  Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives.  If you can't do the same, that's on you.


Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course.  If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc.  Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are.  If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat




I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis.  It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.


Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either.  But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing.  When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?  I don't think that's accurate.  Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The left wing seems like it has a perpetual conspiracy theory about Republican plots to institute an actual hard theocracy




Not every mistaken or unsupported belief is automatically a conspiracy theory.  There has to be some sort of criteria to distinguish between them.


I think left wing fears about the coming theocracy are better explained as just generalized anxiety about the opposition, or perhaps false beliefs about the views of individual Republicans, although I agree that they easily could become conspiracy theories with the right narrative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does that make any sense? What’s the causal mechanism there?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. [...] The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.




I find this to be one of the more beautiful aspects of Christian thought.  Life isn't always fair.  Coming to an understanding of the intense burdens that have been placed upon your shoulders simply for existing, burdens that you didn't ask for and had no foreknowledge of, offers a powerful antidote to the modern obsession with rationality without thereby causing a descent into total nihilism.  Along similar lines:




"I like Schelling's nice totalitarian view; his idea is that even if you have no choice, you are still fully responsible for it.  [...] It was forever decided, determined in the very fate of Judas, that he will betray Christ; he didn't have a choice.  It was his destiny.  But nonetheless he's fully responsible for it. [...] Schelling's solution of this enigma, which you find already in Kant, is a wonderful one.  It's kind of a transcendental a priori act, it sounds idealist but it's not, it's very close to what in psychoanalysis we would have called the choice of the fundamental phantasy.  In some kind of atemporal a priori act we are, as Sartre would have put it, responsible for our project; for what we are.  Of course in our temporal reality we experience this as our nature, you cannot change it, but fundamentally at an unconscious level we are responsible for it.  And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession.  You have to confess your blah blah.  No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything.  In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.




I find this to be deeply resonant.  Others will find it to be nonsense.  There's no accounting for taste.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the people actually building the technology don’t believe in doom.




I don’t see why the people building the technology should be taken to be any more informed than the average interested layman on this point.


An AI that’s intelligent enough to be an x-risk is, as of today, a purely hypothetical entity. No one can have technical expertise regarding such entities because we have no empirical examples to study. No one knows how it might behave, what its goals might be, how easy it would be to align; one guess is as good as any other.


Professional AI researchers could have technical expertise regarding questions about the rate of AI progress, or how close we may or may not be to building an x-risk level AI; but given disagreement in the field over even basic questions like “are LLMs alone enough for AGI or will they plateau?” I think you could find a professional opinion to support any position you wanted to take.


Thus even the most informed AI researcher’s views on doom and utopia should be viewed primarily as a reflection of their own personal ideological disposition towards AI, rather than as being the result of carefully considered technical arguments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


just going to accept their subordination this time?




What kind of “subordination” do you have in mind? What specific policies are being advocated that you find objectionable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What really gets in my gears over this is how pointlessly these people are going to throw away the west's advantages




Detractors of AI technology don't view this as an "advantage" in the way you're thinking of it.


Being the leader in AI is a bit like being the leader in bioweapons.  Tactically prudent, so you don't get blindsided by your adversaries, but it's not something that gives you the warm fuzzies.  It's the sort of thing that you wish wasn't necessary in the first place.  And it's certainly not the sort of thing that you want floating around unaccounted for in private hands.  You want it managed by the public sector, strictly regulated, under lock and key.




Some country is not going to tell these sites to pound sand




"It's legal over there so it should be legal here" is hardly a convincing argument.  The issue here is that Stability is unjustly profiting off the work of artists without proper compensation.  So what if other countries would let them do it with impunity?  People do unjust things all the time, but that's no excuse for you to do the same.


Anyway, if it is a foregone conclusion that artists are all going to be out of a job and nothing they do matters either way, then that's just an even stronger argument for them to go after Stability now, just out of spite.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Your skill is wasted on you. Not «you» inept @furryfutart99, nor a handful of greats, but your trade collectively. You have NOTHING TO SAY.




I understand what you're saying here, but I think it's an effect of the fact that the vast majority of people have nothing to say, rather than being some special vice that's unique to artists.  The probability that a randomly selected person has something to say is tiny - the probability that they have something to say and they're a good artist is even smaller.


People who are really good at X tend to be, unsurprisingly, really interested in X, and not much else.  Most programmers don't care about using their technical skills for social good; they'd rather contribute to an obscure open source OS or programming language or text editor, something that will only be appreciated by a small audience of their fellow programmers.  Mathematicians gleefully extol the uselessness of the frightfully abstract theories they spend so much time on, actively avoiding thinking about the philosophical or practical implications of their work.  The average musician doesn't give a shit about the elaborate philosophical underpinnings of Schoenberg's atonal system; they just want to jam.  And, naturally, the average artist just wants to draw pretty pictures.


Historically, people with "something to say" have gravitated towards literature, philosophy, and other forms of non-fiction writing because, well, words are how you say things.  Words tend, on average, to be better at it than pictures.  In my view, the very idea of "saying things with pictures" didn't become fully developed until the invention of animation, video games, and (modern) comic books, all of which are very young media historically speaking.  So criticizing artists for having "nothing to say" doesn't seem very fair, because that's never really been their job description, and if you do have something to say, the philosophy department is right down the hall.


Nonetheless, there are examples of people in the modern era who used their artistic ability to "say something".  One of my personal heroes is Hideaki Anno, who was involved in the animation, writing, and directing for one of the greatest films (animated or otherwise) of all time, End of Evangelion.  The post-war Japanese manga industry furnishes plenty of other examples of talented author-artists: Yoshihiro Togashi, Eiichiro Oda, Akira Toriyama, etc.  They probably wouldn't fit your personal definition of "having something to say", but the millions of people who bought their books would presumably say otherwise.




Nobody outside your guild gives a fuck about your «creativity».




Well that's obviously not true.  If that was true, then companies wouldn't be spending millions of dollars to build machines to replicate their work.  Who cares whether you think the value is "really" in the "technique" or the "creativity".  Everyone plainly agrees that the work itself is highly valuable.




Then we will navigate this space, and find features and styles beyond yours, and give them inhuman names, and forget you lot like a bad dream.




This doesn't sound very plausible.




We have turned ideas like «meaning», «novelty», «beauty» and others into engineering problems.




Well there are a lot of people who think your "beauty and meaning machine" is blatantly evil and anything it produces is automatically disqualified from being meaningful and beautiful, so you may have to go back to the drawing board.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You're really grasping at straws here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Art's primary goal is communication.




This word makes me nervous.


At the most simplistic level you get the sorts of awful things that go on in high school English classes, where students decode the "symbols" of the text, which is how you end up with nonsense like "the message of Hamlet is that revenge is bad".  Well why didn't Shakespeare just come out and say that?  Why go through the trouble of making up a whole story?  It makes the artist out to be some kind of lunatic.  I think we're in agreement that this is no good.


But even this idea of "communicating things that can't be put into words", I think it still doesn't capture the magnitude of what goes on in authentic creativity.  I think it makes the process too subjective - it conjures images of like, the artist just has a feeling one day, or comes up with a thought, and thinks "ah, it would be nice to communicate this".


Derrida gave a lovely description of what he felt when he was writing Of Grammatology:




"I actually had the feeling that something very unique for me took place.  I had the impression that an interpretive edge, a lever, appeared to me.  It's not as though I created it myself.  I never have the feeling, even when I'm happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it's me.  This is why I have a feeling both of responsibility and irresponsibility when I write a text.  When I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something that had imposed itself on me.  In Of Grammatology, I had this feeling in an even stronger way.  I felt as though something had happened to me.  I don't want to give this a religious sensibility - it wasn't an apparition or an ecstasy - but that something had taken hold of me and happened not by me, but to me."




I think moments of genuine creativity always have this sort of texture - this feeling that you've discovered something that is common property.




I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.




That would be a catastrophe.


(At the very least, artists don't experience commercial art as a burden that's keeping them from making "real" art - they need the money! And they're very happy to get paid for something they enjoy doing anyway!  Take commercial art away and they still need to find some way to make a living.)




Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God?




Sorry if I was confusing here.  I didn't stop believing in God because of art or aesthetic considerations or anything like that.  I stopped believing in God because of a confluence of philosophical arguments - the conceptual incoherence of "free will", severe difficulties for substance dualism as a philosophy of mind (would it necessarily violate the causal closure of the physical? how does it handle hypothetical split-brain cases?), and in general the alleged evidence for religion not passing the "smell test" and having a similar epistemological profile to other discredited phenomena like ESP and cryptids.


I've softened on some of these considerations over the years and I'm willing to keep an open mind.  But those were my initial motivations at any rate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why is it a bad thing to be an appendage of an opinion-forming group?


In some sense, we are all opinion-forming groups of one, and every time we post, we are acting as ambassadors of that group of which we are the sole member.


I’m not trying to be cheeky. I really just don’t see why it would matter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You know I’m a man right?


Anyway I bear no ill will towards you, so if you don’t want to continue the discussion we don’t have to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Most people know it's just a chatbot, but a significant number of users have seriously and unironically fallen in love with their Replikas, and come to believe they are alive and sentient. Even people who know it's just a chatbot become emotionally attached anyway.




Well we have to keep in mind that this is not in any way a controlled experiment; there are lots of confounding variables.  We can't adopt a straightforward explanation of "if people become attached to the chatbot then that must be because they thought its output was just that good".  There are all sorts of reasons why people might be biased in favor of rating the chatbot as being better than it actually is.


You have your garden-variety optimists from /r/singularity, people who are fully bought into the hype train and want to ride it all the way to the end.  These types are very easily excited by any new AI product that comes out because they want to believe the hype, they want to see a pattern of rapid advancement that will prove that hard takeoff is near.  They've primed themselves to believe that anything an AI does is great by default.


Then you have the types of angry and lonely men who hang out on /r9k/, i.e. the primary target audience of AI sexbots.  Normally I don't like calling things "misogynist" but in this case it really fits, they really do hate women because they feel like they've been slighted by them and they're quite bitter about the whole dating thing.  They would love to make a performance out of having a relationship with a chatbot because that would let them turn around and say to women "ha! Even a robot can do your job better than you can.  I never needed you anyway."  Liking the chatbot isn't so much about liking the chatbot, but rather it's about attacking people whom they feel wronged by.


There are all sorts of ways a person might conceptualize their relationship with the chatbot, all sorts of narrative they might like to play out.  They might like to think of themselves as a particularly empathetic and open-minded person, and by embracing relationships with AI they are taking the first bold step in expanding humanity's social circle.  None of these motivations have to rise to the level of consciousness of course.  All of them are different factors that could influence a person's perception of the situation even if they're not actively acknowledged.


The point is that it's hard to get a neutral read on how "good" a chatbot is because the technology itself is so emotionally and philosophically charged.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Entire worlds can be contained in a syllable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You want it both ways then man. ... special accommodations are not correct.




Au contraire.


A computer system is not a work of art; a work of art is not a human individual; and a human individual is not society as a whole.  Things that are distinct should be judged by their own distinct standards that are proper to them.  A standard of correctness that applies to one type of thing may not apply to another type; indeed, the entire notion of correctness may be appropriate to one category but actively detrimental to another.


Not that I have any particular qualms about contradicting myself anyway.  Contradiction bears witness to the life of thought.




But we can't have that




I want what I want, based on my judgment of what is good and proper.  It's no skin off my back if I "can't have it".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The stochastic inability of mottizens to understand women




Do mottizens do a particularly bad job of “understanding women”?


All I ever see in the sex/dating threads is men bragging about how successful they are with women.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So you would side with (even vote for!) these Stalinists, North Korea apologists, wannabe mass murderers, these certified lunatics, because they said "trans bad"?




The Trans Question in an actual, living political issue in western countries.  It matters; it has a direct impact on people's lives.  Taking a stand one way or the other entails having some amount of skin in the game.  An individual's views on trans issues are a strong signal of what sort of social classifications they belong to.


In contrast to being pro- or anti-trans, being pro- or anti-Stalin is much closer to being a personal aesthetic choice.  It's a dead issue.  There is no realistic chance of anyone implementing a Stalinist agenda in any western democracy.  It's spatially and temporally distant from us; one is free to treat it with a degree of irony.


From that perspective, someone's views on trans issues say a lot more to me about what type of person they are than their views on Stalinism.  I choose my political allies based on their perspectives on living issues, living questions.  Their views on dead issues and lost causes are less relevant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the good kind of neural net that every AAA game is going to be using




“AAA games” should not exist either, so I just view this as killing two birds with one stone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m sorry, but I feel like everyone here is just inventing this persecution of tech workers out of thin air. It doesn’t match my experience at all.


I work in tech. I have never felt any qualms at all about telling people that I work in tech. It’s perfectly respectable. It doesn’t make people kiss my feet, but it’s not low status either. It’s just, fine. Normal. It’s absolutely higher status than telling people that you work in service or retail, which is the sort of answer that the majority of people have to give.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As I already stated, the technicalities of what constitutes "copying" or not are quite beside the point.


Let's put it this way.  Look at the license agreement for Visual Studio Community 2022.  This is a freely (as in beer) available piece of software; anyone with an internet connection can go to Microsoft's website and download it and start using it.  But the license agreement places all sorts of arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can't do with it - for example, you can't use it to develop software if you're an "enterprise" (according to their own arbitrary definition of what an enterprise is) and your application does not fall under the heading of "device driver", "SQL server development", or one of their other arbitrarily-decreed exceptions.


The question naturally arises: what gives Microsoft the right to control what I do with their bits and bytes like this?  Obviously the answer is "because of the license agreement, duh", but why should the license agreement be binding?  Why should they be allowed to write a "license agreement" in the first place?  They put this sequence of bits (the compiled binary) on their website, in plain view, where anyone can look at it and download it.  Once I download it, they can't take it away, or really have any direct control over what I do with it (modulo the fact that the application might call home sometimes, but we can assume that it doesn't, and nothing about the argument will change).  Why can't I just tell Microsoft to sod off at this point?  The bits are mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll use them for enterprise application development and you can't stop me?


I do think that Microsoft should have the right to enforce this sort of license agreement, and I think it stems from a simple and general principle: people who create and distribute sequences of bits should have wide-but-reasonable latitude to determine how those bits are used, and they should be able to seek redress when those agreements are violated.  It's hard for me to see how the frameworks of copyright and software licensing can even exist at all unless one endorses that principle, or one that is roughly equivalent.


Similar to how Microsoft can say "here are some free bits, just don't use them for enterprise software development", an artist should be able to say "here are some free bits, just don't use them to train an AI model".  The fact that the artist's bits represent an image rather than a compiled binary doesn't seem like a relevant difference.


Naturally, this is all very vague by legal standards and makes no reference to actual IP law, by design.  I'm not a lawyer and I won't pretend to know anything about the law.  I'm approaching this from an ethical/philosophical standpoint and arguing based on what I perceive to be fair and equitable.  The technicalities of the law are of secondary importance to me; laws can change, after all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s already been acknowledged that longstanding posters with lots of AAQCs will be given a bit of extra wiggle room, and I would simply extend that to posters with underrepresented viewpoints as well, because the mere existence of a rare viewpoint is its own type of Quality Contribution.