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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".

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

Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The British abolished slavery without a Civil War! If the US had been militarily part of the UK you don't get WW I and II (probably) and as a bonus no communism.

Of course WW1 and 2 would start with the same arrangement of players if Britain was more powerful, but that doesn't there wouldn't be massive wars. Maybe the war would have been British vs the whole Europe.

Manifest Destiny!

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