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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30472 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Grok will let you make anything right now.

Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.

I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.

Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.

Viscerallly I kind of get it, but legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”? I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.

Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.

The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.

I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British. So the printing presses used by the Founding Fathers did a lot of harm even without being "automatic assault presses".

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better off than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better of than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.

Britain was on the hard downturn way before american media "wokeness" was a thing.

Divorced from politics America’s extremely bountiful natural resources mean it is always likely to be wealthier than Britain. The same is true of Australia, which has politics (and a “nanny state”) closer to Britain’s but which is closer to the US in terms of income because of natural resources. Both countries have been richer than the UK since the 1880s and 1890s, before Britain’s decline as a world power accelerated in earnest.

With apologies to Voltaire, if wokeness did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.

I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.

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