Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
There's only one key sentence in the article that you need to read:
As a result of the change, it is expected that Wimbledon's Hawk-Eye challenge system - brought into use in 2007 - where players could review calls made by the line judges will be removed.
How far are we from "JudgeGPT will rule on your criminal case, and the ability to appeal its verdicts will be removed"?
The actual capabilities and accuracy of the AI system are, in many instances, irrelevant. The point is that AI provides an elastic ideological cover for people to do shitty things. He who controls the RoboJudge controls everything. Just RLHF a model so it knows that minority crime must always be judged against a backdrop of historical oppression and racism, and any doubts about the integrity of elections are part of a dangerous conspiracy that is a threat to our democracy, and boom. You have a perfectly legitimated rubber stamp for your agenda in perpetuity. How could you doubt the computer? It's so smart, and it's been trained on so much data. What would be the point of appealing the verdict anyway? Your appeal would just go to the same government server farm, the same one that has already ruled on your case.
Open source won't save you. What I've been trying to explain to advocates of open source is that you can't open source physical power. GPT-9 might give you your own personal army of Terrence Taos at your beck and call, but as long as the government has the biggest guns, they're still the ones in charge.
"AI safety" needs to focus less on what AI could do to us and more on what people can use AI to do to each other.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.
A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.
This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo ago
It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.
Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.
[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?
Can't you ask that about most protests?
I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Peterson disparages a former client as "vindictive", dismisses their complaints as a "pack of lies"
I don't see the problem here? There's a good chance that the client was vindictive, and their complaints were based on lies. As long as he doesn't reveal any of his clients' personal information, there's no issue with him expressing his views on these matters.
and refers to a fellow practicing physician as "criminal" for performing an otherwise legal surgery.
Obviously he's using "criminal" in this case to pass moral judgment on the physician's conduct, rather than making an accusation about actual illegalities. Censuring Peterson for this statement comes off as an attempt to establish this physician's conduct, and the medical establishment's treatment of gender issues more broadly, as being beyond ethical scrutiny - which is something that I certainly cannot accept.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.
Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
Because it is a prize. This is an objective, undeniable fact. It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it. Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".
Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for. But then that's a separate discussion entirely.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
The decimation of the last vestiges of humanistic culture at the hands of our technocratic society continues: The End of the English Major
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
Reasons given by students for choosing STEM majors over humanities majors are in line with what you would expect: STEM majors teach you economically useful skills that translate directly into gainful employment, and humanities majors don't. Especially because ChatGPT just put a lot of copywriters out of business over night.
Although the crisis of university humanities departments has frequently been blamed on recent events like the 2008 Great Recession and the covid pandemic, these trends are not exactly new. In a collection of lectures delivered at Princeton and published in 1938 entitled The Meaning of the Humanities, the sense of crisis was already palpable:
Granting that the humanities are so interwoven with the fabric of society that the world cannot be entirely "dehumanized," a modern humanist can hardly help feeling that his position is far from being secure. In fact, the humanities are attacked on every side; they are losing ground every day; the host of their enemies is legion and their defenders a mere handful. When they are not in danger of being starved and annihilated, they risk being absorbed or annexed by peaceful penetration through the inroads made into their rightful domain by specialists on "human relations," psychologists, educators, and humanitarians.
There was also an acknowledgement that, unfortunately, most people do have to work for a living:
The easiest way to solve the problem is to ignore it, namely, to follow the line of least resistance and to continue along the old traditional lines. It is easy to declare that some studies, called disinterested studies, a polite euphemism for useless studies, will remain accessible to a chosen few, while useful studies, studies preparing for life, meaning by that equivocal term, for a profession, trade or business, shall become the lot of the masses.
It turns out there was never a time where the majority of people could decide on a whim to spend their formative years of education studying fictional events that never happened. Who would have guessed?
There is certainly something to mourn in the gradual erosion of the traditional support structures for western elite culture. I don't take it lightly. But I also believe that there is a fundamental resilience to what one might call the "humanistic mode of thought" that will ensure its survival, even if there were no universities at all. Humans will continue to do philosophy, and make art, and reflect on art, for as long as there are entities that are still recognizably human. There has never been any other time in history when narrative fiction played such a large role in the lives of so many people - it just comes in the form of TV shows and video games now, rather than novels. Although some Rationalists are prone to triumphalism about science and self-perfection through technology, a significant percentage of the output of LessWrong is dedicated to the analysis of philosophical questions, and the single most famous work to come out of the Rationalist movement is a work of imaginative literature. The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.
I suppose what ultimately saddens me the most about the fall of the English major is that it seems to be yet another indicator that the world I once knew - the world that extended roughly from the end of World War II to the 2008 financial crisis, the heyday of middle class consumer capitalism - is dying, if not already dead. As the linked article alludes to, the internet itself may be partially blamed for the decline of traditional university studies:
Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.
It sucks that it's antiquated. I am a hopeless nostalgic. But it is antiquated nonetheless.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
I'm not trans, but I do have a lot of personal experience with transgender ideation. When I was younger, I seriously considered transitioning many times - it came to the point where I had resolved to confess it to my parents, and ask them about actually getting treatment. I ended up chickening out at the last second though, and never went through with it.
What really got me off the idea for good - what made me stop viewing transition as a live option - was discovering radfem (TERF) blogs online. They were completely unabashed in saying, this is ridiculous, you are not a woman, we will never view you as a woman, what you're doing is harmful to actual women, and you really should just stop. And I ended up concluding, you know what? You're right. This is silly, and I should stop.
So, I'll reiterate what I said earlier and what others have said as well. The solution is to encourage a culture of open and honest discussion where no meme is above criticism. Some people will still choose to go through with medical transition anyway, or develop an eating disorder, or what have you. But it will certainly be less people, if the broader culture encourages them to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant.
The administration was ordered to “facilitate” his return. That’s different.
It’s unclear why SCOTUS should be able to order the president to take a citizen of El Salvador, who is currently residing in El Salvador, and bring him to the US. What if El Salvador just doesn’t want to give him up? Given these facts, it’s reasonable to read “facilitate” as “facilitate only to the extent possible”.
Even SCOTUS has limits on their powers. I don’t think we should expect them to be able to order the president to bomb another country, for example. Their power diminishes rapidly outside of US borders.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
It is worth talking about! There’s a lot you could say about the role that the stock market plays in the right wing imagination, its relation to anti-elitist attitudes, etc. You could turn that into a great post. But you have to actually write that post. You can’t just post a bare twitter link and say “take a look at these jackasses”.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
The most obvious irony here is how she wrote an entire article to tell us about how the girl friendship is more meaningful than her old boyfriend and her's, but it's clear to anyone who read it that she had much more thought and feeling for Him than for Her.
A lot of women (of a more progressive bent) have a complex about how much the approval and company of men actually matters to them. A shocking number of young women are trying to force themselves to become lesbian or bisexual because "a man shouldn't be the most important thing in your life", even though they have no sexual attraction to women at all.
The ironic thing is that women's dependence on men is nothing compared to men's dependence on women! I don't think that women are really capable of understanding the reality distortion field that emanates from every non-ugly woman, and the effects that said field has on straight men.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Broke: "It's my fault that I failed so I should just give up."
Woke: "It's other people's fault that I failed, so I should try again."
Bespoke: "I am responsible for everything that happens to me and everything that happens to everyone else. I have failed before and I always will fail, but I'll keep trying anyway because as the Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith I embrace the absurd. God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God."
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, denying tens of millions of Americans the chance to get up to $20,000 of their debt erased.
The ruling, which matched expert predictions given the justices’ conservative majority, is a massive blow to borrowers who were promised loan forgiveness by the Biden administration last summer.
The 6-3 majority ruled that at least one of the six states that challenged the loan relief program had the proper legal footing, known as standing, to do so.
The high court said the president didn’t have the authority to cancel such a large amount of consumer debt without authorization from Congress and agreed the program would cause harm to the plaintiffs.
The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system). One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other. The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different. And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high. If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest? The group identity angle is obvious. AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians. Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder. Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics. So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
And where are we going to be in another few decades?
The Right needs to learn that 2010s trans activism - Trans Women Are Women, respect people’s pronouns, etc - is believed by 90% of people even in a conservative workplace.
Someone needs to put their foot down.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2yr ago
Maybe being sexually unsatisfied is just normal? Maybe there’s no reason to expect otherwise?
What baseline are we comparing against here? If you polled men in rural England in the 1500s and asked them “Are you satisfied with your sex life?” what sort of responses would you have gotten?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s.
I mean, of course she's wrong about this point. An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers. I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.
But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do. She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.
Also I have to comment on this:
the ‘male centered woman.’
because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection. Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post. ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly). She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2mo ago
You wrote this as a pretext for asking Dean to finally explain what his ideology is, didn’t you?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
The tacit agreement was that they wouldn’t have to be capable of fighting their own battles (and in the case of say Germany, a lot of people didn’t want them to be capable of fighting their own battles — the memory of WW2 was still quite fresh when the Berlin Wall fell). For the sake of stability in Europe, the agreement was that countries would become semi-vassals of the US empire in exchange for the US’s protection.
Not to say that the terms of this agreement have to be binding for all eternity. If a new arrangement is needed then so be it. But this idea that European countries did something “wrong” by not maintaining a larger military presence is, I think, lacking in historical context.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.
At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1yr ago
I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.
It wasn't so much his object-level political views, which as you point out were largely garden-variety conservative talking points that would have been at home on 00s Fox News. What really made him unique was his personality and his discussion style.
He was supremely confident in his own views, and seemingly oblivious to any and all criticism, despite being (in my own personal opinion) supremely wrong about some of those views. He frequently railed against "postmodernism", despite the fact that a simple transcript of his comments would constitute a pretty good experimental postmodern novel in its own right. He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other. He had a habit of simply fleeing from any sub-thread where he was asked to provide direct evidence of his claims; this clashed very noticeably with the "grizzled military veteran, ride the tiger, don't take no shit from no one" personality that he wanted to project. It was this contrast that made him such a frustrating and fascinating character.
I'd rather have a discussion partner who's interesting and wrong, than a boring one who I agree with. In spite of my numerous disagreements with him, I would often check on his profile just to look at his recent comments and see what he was up to. So his ban will constitute a loss for me in that regard.
I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.
NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.
Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:
I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.
I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.
Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.
For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.
Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.
It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.
TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.
*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.
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