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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Boise Pride cancels "Drag Kids" event after a number of sponsors withdrew, with a predictable dose of corporate doublespeak.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but what is actually bothering me most right now is the coverage. Particularly this gem:

Several opponents of the festival on social media repeatedly referred to supporters as “groomers” – a nod to the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats and the elite run an underground pedophilic, satanic, sex cult.

As far as I can tell, this is a publicly-funded news organization actively spreading outright disinformation--FUD, really--about the term "groomer." It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" practically overnight (no big deal, the term "critical theory" recaptured the energy). It reminds me of the sudden fluidity of online dictionary definitions every time a Democrat politician tells an obvious lie. It reminds me of Clarence Thomas being referred to by Harry Reid as a white man.

"Groomer" is effective rhetoric, so I can understand why certain groups want it killed. But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming? Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles. I mean, yes, emotional and physical and sexual abuse, but also just long term psychological problems. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes? I don't think it's necessarily fair to insist that we strip away the culture war angles entirely, but if I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment, often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate." Are we really going to say Hollywood isn't rife with child abuse? (Hmm, they're also mostly Democrats...) And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

Am I ranting? This feels pretty ranty. But I do have a serious question. What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language? How should I react, if not with ranting, to a transparent attempt to tar people who clearly want to protect children from manifest harms as mere conspiracy theorists? I am a bit old school, I learned to hate the phrase "think of the children" before many of you were born, but surely sometimes we do, in fact, need to protect children. Not incorporating child-sexualizing events into our civic religion seems like a pretty obvious way to do that.

And, I suppose, someone will point out that Boise Pride's "Drag Kids" grooming hour did indeed get canceled! The system works! The subtext there being--what am I complaining about? Well, in brief, I'm still complaining about the news coverage, which has very big "Republicans pounce" energy. I would like to be able to seriously criticize that sort of thing without actively culture warring, but I don't feel like I have a lot of good mistake-theory tools to respond with. Maybe that's the point, I guess--to try to maneuver people into a position where they feel sheepish for acting like an "aggressor" in the face of kids having "silly fun." Which seems, to me, like an especially evil way of being a conflict theorist.

The quote you produced is disinformation all right for the "it's a QAnon reference" framing, but referring to people running "drag kids" events as "groomers" does seem like a serious accusation that deserves a bit more justification than the pointing and invoking of disgust reflexes that it is. The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers. I doubt that most people running or supporting those events are doing so with the intention of entering sexual relations with the kids that attend them themselves (and if "encouraging the target enter sexual relations I want to see more of with someone else" is sufficient to meet the definition of grooming, then it seems that a lot of things in our culture since times immemorial would count!), and if their right-wing detractors believe otherwise, the burden of proof surely should be on them. If they detractors do believe that all these progressives are actually in it because they hope to have sex with the ten year olds that they are teaching about drag queens and non-binary gender, protestations to the contrary and seemingly low rate of such sex actually happening notwithstanding, then yes, they are in fact entertaining a conspiracy theory (as there would need to be a conspiracy to conceal widespread pedophilic tendencies and/or actions).

(edit: Per something I found out downthread, there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US, which markedly does not cover "introducing children to icky and widely taken to be age-inappropriate sexual activity" on its own)

It reminds me of when "cultural Marxism" became an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory"

Seems like a good riddance to me, because the term was a massive footbullet. The term "cultural marxists" will be resolved correctly by (1) people on your side already and (2) actual cultural marxists, who are in the know about the academic definition drift of "Marxism"; to everyone else, and in particular garden-variety classical liberals who really ought to have been enlisted in the anti-woke coalition much earlier, it just looks like holding up a sign like "actually the main issue I have with my outgroup is that they are dirty commies who want to put limitations on megacorps".

"Cultural Marxism" seemed like a perfect label to me. My immediate reaction to the phrase, which I'm not sure is wrong, was that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict. That was it's obvious, plain reading to me.

that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict

What does this mean? It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts". What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

Now, of course they are related in that both are progressive. But the "marxism" part is a total distraction, "gender ideology" is about as marxist as a republican is

It's really hard for me to believe you don't know what it means. it's not 2010 anymore.

Yes, Cultural Marxists didn't come up with

"different cultural groups have conflicts" because Marx didn't come up with "different economic groups have conflicts"

What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.

No it's not.

MLKs "I have a dream" is generic progressivism.

"Girls can do whatever boys can" feminism is generic progressivism.

"Racism = prejudice + power", and "patriarchy" are Cultural Marxism.

Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?

So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?

Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad,

Yeah, because like I already said, Marxism is when you suggest we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.

I gave you a definition, and I gave you examples proving this is not about generic progressivism. Why do you keep claiming that it is?

More comments

It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts".

But people in academic fields like sociology or gender studies who use terms like "Cultural Marxism" or "Conflict Theory" tend to talk as if he did, or as if he formalized it somehow. Presumably because of a tendency towards a narrative where sociology is an advancing discipline of people building on prior ideas, coupled with Marxism having high status in academia (especially at the time) so people wanted to portray their own work as a descendant of it. Here's the second Google result if you search "conflict theory":

Understanding Conflict Theory

Conflict theory states that tensions and conflicts arise when resources, status, and power are unevenly distributed between groups in society and that these conflicts become the engine for social change. In this context, power can be understood as control of material resources and accumulated wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society, and one's social status relative to others (determined not just by class but by race, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion, among other things).

Conflict theory originated in the work of Karl Marx, who focused on the causes and consequences of class conflict between the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production and the capitalists) and the proletariat (the working class and the poor). Focusing on the economic, social, and political implications of the rise of capitalism in Europe, Marx theorized that this system, premised on the existence of a powerful minority class (the bourgeoisie) and an oppressed majority class (the proletariat), created class conflict because the interests of the two were at odds, and resources were unjustly distributed among them.

And then, the narrative goes, others built on Marx's insight by extending this idea to other groups:

Many social theorists have built on Marx's conflict theory to bolster it, grow it, and refine it over the years. Explaining why Marx's theory of revolution did not manifest in his lifetime, Italian scholar and activist Antonio Gramsci argued that the power of ideology was stronger than Marx had realized and that more work needed to be done to overcome cultural hegemony, or rule through common sense. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, critical theorists who were part of The Frankfurt School, focused their work on how the rise of mass culture--mass produced art, music, and media--contributed to the maintenance of cultural hegemony. More recently, C. Wright Mills drew on conflict theory to describe the rise of a tiny "power elite" composed of military, economic, and political figures who have ruled America from the mid-twentieth century.

Many others have drawn on conflict theory to develop other types of theory within the social sciences, including feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodern and postcolonial theory, queer theory, post-structural theory, and theories of globalization and world systems. So, while initially conflict theory described class conflicts specifically, it has lent itself over the years to studies of how other kinds of conflicts, like those premised on race, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, and nationality, among others, are a part of contemporary social structures, and how they affect our lives.

This reminds me of endless discussions around the term woke which was first adopted by woke crowd as a positive label and suddenly overnight it turned into right-wing slur "somehow". As for cultural Marxism, this was also something adopted by the left. Just one example, in this paper named Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain. And from the "praises" of the paper it is obvious that Cultural Marxism term was viewed at the time in positive light. Here is one example:

“Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain fills an especially acute need in the contemporary reassessment of the social roots and cultural contexts of avant-garde academic movements. . . . Dworkin assembles a convincing historical narrative of how a seemingly provisional reaction to the crisis of British welfare capitalism in the post-war period developed into a coherent and compelling subtradition of European Marxist social theory. . . . Dworkin’s new study manages to both creatively historicize a familiar—yet often misunderstood—recent academic and political formation as well as raise pressing methodological questions that cross the major disciplines of the human sciences.” — Alex Benchimol , Thesis Eleven

Cultural Marxism itself is a cornerstone of Western Marxism, a branch distinct from Marxism-Leninism. It has to be understood that Marxism itself is by definition not static but dialectical philosophy that "evolves" until socialism leads into utopia - that is the "permanent revolution" concept: as soon as powers at be settle down creating their own power structures with their own contradictions, the revolutionary wheel has to turn again to revolt in order to resolve those contradictions. As soon as history uses the revolutionaries to move forward into progress, it discards them.

Specific cultural part was developed especially by Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why revolutions in late 1910s and early 1920ies failed in the west. His conclusion was that the main obstacle was so called cultural hegemony. He focused on the dialectical opposition of so called base/infrastructure vs superstructure in cultural and not only economic production. It is culture created by superstructure that reproduces capitalism and gives rise to so called "structure" to society. And in accordance with Marxist ideology the society reproduces the structural ideas, which create the society which create the idea and so forth. You may have heard of some of those "structures" and related theories - that were developed by later Critical Marxist or Identaritarian Marxists - here in CW thread: patriarchy, white supremacy, cisheteronormativity and so forth. That is the relevance of Cultural Marxism to gender.

Well, how close to the American Right are your political sympathies? There's a whole cluster of memes that primes people like me towards the interpretation I suggested, but they are all fairly left-associated: US right-wingers are approximately seen as the tribe of Big Tobacco/scammy door-to-door salesmen/pouring toxins into the environment/exorbitant medical bills on the one hand and Jesus Camp and creationism in school on the other, and perceived to immediately decry any attempt to make the US more like a "normal civilised European country" in those regards as creeping communism.

(To be clear, I'm well aware of your definition and think it makes sense - after all, that's basically how the academic drivers of the ideology interpret it themselves. It's just that I really don't think the optics work, because for a lot of would-be allies "fighting against Marxism" sounds like standard code for "fighting against a large number of things that I strongly wish for")

The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers

I commented on this a bit up the chain, but it bears repeating--I regard putting children in skimpy clothing and throwing money at them while they dance as sexual exploitation per se. You don't have to touch a child to sexually abuse them; in most jurisdictions, just exposing them to pornography counts. Participation in "family friendly" Drag Kids is grooming toward participation in more sexualized drag events. To my eyes, this is a comfortable fit for the term "grooming."

This is at least a very noncentral example of sexual exploitation, and by implication of grooming. The modal example that the term evokes, and that makes it work as a rhetorical superweapon, is something along the lines of "kid is made to watch as parents engage in 'swinging' and eventually 'invited' to participate" or recently "40 year old creep baits kids on Roblox into sending him nudes and eventually convinces them to meet up offline, keeping it a secret from their parents". If you can have "sexual exploitation" without the "exploiter" deriving a direct personal sexual benefit from it, then the tropey staple chill grandpa who tells the kids of a straight-laced household where in the attic to find the porn stash of his youth is also a groomer.

I understand that "groomer" is an effective rhetorical weapon, but I really don't think it lives up to the standards of discussion we were supposed to be striving for as a community.

In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?

I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.

And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming. Even the cool grandpa and the old fashioned magazines. It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?

In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?

Not if it's not for their own pleasure, as I see it. I've seen something like this rule mentioned in the past in the context of advice for parents who are unsure if it's socially acceptable to do this thing or another (I think the example was "father applying lotion on female baby") - formulated as "if you do it for the kid, it's okay, if you do it for yourself, it's not".

I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.

No, I don't think it's standard to use the word "grooming" for this, and before the current CW battle, I've not seen it used outside of the contexts I mentioned. This was even though culture warring about "encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex" is something that has been going on for decades now.

And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming.

"Technically" according to what technicality exactly?

It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?

How is that a pertinent argument? It is also illegal to not pay your taxes, but that doesn't mean that tax evasion is an instance of grooming.

How is that a pertinent argument?

You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.

"Harmful to minor" laws prohibit showing obscenity to minors. Because it is considered harmful in and of itself. Showing pornography to minors normalizes sexual behaviors and is often used in the process of grooming.

Abusers may also show the victim pornography or discuss sexual topics with them, to introduce the idea of sexual contact.

Child advocacy groups consider showing pornography to minors as sexual abuse itself.

If someone shows a minor porn and is arrested and accused of grooming, how do they prove that they had no intention of sexually abusing the minor (when the action itself is considered sexual abuse)? Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.

You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.

Yes, it came up in a popular comic, which is probably as good an n=1 argument for it having been considered a reasonably common thing by some nontrivial set of people in the past as it gets.

The rest

There is no mention of "grooming" in the "harmful to minor laws" article you linked, nor in the "child advocacy groups" one. Conversely, the "abusers may also show..." article does not argue that each of the things mentioned on their own already amount to "grooming". Just because something is often used in the process of grooming does not mean that it amounts to grooming: Discord DMs and more generally one-on-one chats are also frequently used in the process of grooming, but most people would not use this to conclude that DMing a minor constitutes grooming.

Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.

By whom? I think this is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words". I looked this up, and it turns up that there is actually a legal definition of grooming in the US, which does not appear to cover showing porn to minors as written:

(a) Whoever knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, to engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

(b) Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title and imprisoned not less than 10 years or for life

Whoever, using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States knowingly persuades, induces, entices, or coerces any individual who has not attained the age of 18 years, to engage in prostitution or any sexual activity

Is masturbating to pornography not sexual activity any more? And showing porn to kids is something "for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense?"

To your wider point that the Right has begun using the word grooming in wider and wider contexts, they are not the first to consider the similarities between grooming and political radicalization. Grooming itself is a broader word with multiple meanings - grooming a young politician for a higher office for example. It is not weird or purely waging a conflict for the word grooming to be used to describe persuasion, enticement, or cohesion to ingrain in children sexual politics their parents would not approve of (which is what schools are accused of.)

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there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US

That website is awful and looks like it was written by non-native speakers and definitely not lawyers. There may indeed be a legal definition of grooming in the US, but that website is not it. The citations in that article refer to anti-trafficking laws and, being Federal laws, require crossing a state line to be enforceable. It says nothing about grooming as anyone here has used the term.

But like... how is "Drag Kids" even remotely plausibly not grooming

Because at least 95% of people who do "drag kid" shows do not, personally, want to molest the children involved. It may be 'grooming' in the sense that it's grooming to put a kid in violin classes or to 'groom a successor' for a company. It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available. And the latter is a sense, and implication, that the term 'groomer' is primarily used for. Both may, in fact, be bad - just in crucially different ways.

This kind of rhetoric isn't useful, because it just distracts people from what causes kids to become trans, or gay, or whatever. "teachers / drag queens grooming them into being trans/gay/whatever" ... is not a common cause. Maybe /r/egg_irl is.

Same for calling it "child abuse". Child abuse usually means either beating or having sex, or sometimes 'severe psychological neglect'. Having a male kid get in a dress and dance - which can, still, be perverted, degenerate, and disgusting - isn't really child abuse in that sense at all, and calling it so is just distracting people with vaguely relevant but mostly meaningless assertions.

Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?

We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?

Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.

Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.

Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.

Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.

For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.

Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.

Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.

Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.

Maybe tier was a poor descriptor and it was more a train of thought or logical chain. I think 'children haven't been inculcated with our social constructs of who should wear what' is the least controversial and easiest to accept, even if it is a far cry from trans pre-teens.

For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.

If you'll forgive my assumptions about your gender and relationship status, do you ever feel like it's your duty to tell your wife that she's beautiful? Your child that they're smart or talented, your coworker that they aren't completely useless, your friends that They're Totally Right and their partner is being unreasonable?

We're constantly validating other people, often times even in the face of what (we see as) the truth - it's the lubricant that keeps the gears of social interaction turning. It costs me next to nothing to call someone by their chosen pronouns or accept their choice of clothes, and seems important to them, so why not? You can link Picard counting lights, 1984, or clips from They Live, but the truth is people pick and choose whom to validate all the time.

Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.

I think the steelman for this is 'sexual attraction' isn't really a coherent category, and a lot of things that social conservatives put into the 'sexual attraction' bin don't actually seem like central examples of what people are actually objecting to, but rather parts of t2 that just have additional cognitive loading.

The internally-used example here is something like the Jessica Rabbit: a style of dress and presentation that's charged... but not actually doing anything. Putting on thick lipstick and a sparkly dress isn't playing hide-the-sausage more than Rabbit playing pattycake was; to the extent the former is sexual and the latter isn't, it's because we've assigned a whole lot of identifiers-for-being-female-socially as sexualized (probably by a mix of taboos and mode expectations?) . But these same things remain as identifiers-for-being-socially-female, separately, and it's pretty common for trans people to glom onto them in that role, in ways that can exist separately from the sexual attraction (although sometimes it doesn't!).

There's a plausible argument that we don't get appalled over the same stuff when done outside of this specific culture-war context. Letting a pre-teen (cis) girl dress in gaudy costumes and make a mess with lipstick might get you shunned, but it's not going to turn into national news, and if we're talking your own kids, probably not get CPS called on you. We don't pass out prison sentences to everyone who lets a kid use an insufficiently-filtered internet connection. At the extreme object level, the serious harms caused by seeing someone's dick through their panties got Ace Ventura a PG-13 rating, and I'm not sure it was actually about that; RuPaul's Drag Race usually nets a TV-14 for broadcast. Or for non-sexual drag, Eddie Izzard probably isn't appropriate for pre-teens, but that's more because of the cursing than the dress.

This is a broader problem for the L, G, and B spheres, too (as well as fandom): it's not uncommon to see people worry about whether Pride parades allow under-18s, which makes sense in the context of Folsom Street Fair... but most parades aren't that, and the complaint remains. The nearest Pride for my situation's most adult situation is the rampant alcoholism, but that's shared with the nearest Nascar event, too.

((This is further complicated because a lot of advocates from either direction aren't aware how limited their understanding is, even as they're motioning about limitations in understanding. Progressives point to various young-teen or pre-teen beauty contests, except these are also things that the vast majority of socons find appalling, as naraburns points out. Conservatives point to endless twerkfests... but it's not like these are some unheard-of thing in straight culture. "Penis inspection day" is and was a regular joke on reddit and tumblr in relationship to trans politics, derived from an older UrbanDictionary meme, but it was also not an uncommon thing for schools to have either full-time staff nurses or contracted doctors who'd perform physicals in bulk, including the turn-your-head-and-cough bit, although this has thankfully fallen out of favor.))

The opposing steelman against is that just because something varies by culture and time doesn't mean we have to accept it in this culture and time, and you have to draw lines in the sand somewhere, and that socons have (sometimes even honestly!) drawn lines well before these points in the past.

Don't have much to say in response, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.

People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

What if they identify as White?

Then you should be shamed and excluded from the Hugo awards.

This is mostly how I model this and a good writeup on it. A minor nitpick that I find important:

People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.

I don't think this is something that should be elevated to an identity. or more specifically identity is a strange concept in general. Do you remember the hubbub about disabled person vs person with a disability? Disabled person is considered bad because it raises the disability to the level of identity while person with disability is preferred because it doesn't. The way someone dresses is about as surface level as it gets, while I agree it shouldn't be something discriminated against and it would be better if no one cared when men wore dresses. This is all of course suspiciously similar to the other culture war rail, transgenderism. What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?

What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?

Um, not sure if you were genuinely asking me as I assume you know at least as much as I do, but I can try in the event that you were.

I had straight male-presenting friends who would come to social dances wearing a dress or skirt and it was just a superficial thing independent of their gender identity as you mention above. Others were non-binary/queer and would do the same but it seemed more meaningful to them as their exterior gender presentation was matching their interior identity, although superficially it may not have looked that different from the outside.

Seems to get back to the classical tension between (some) non-binary folk who want to end the gender binary and trans people who find the gender binary affirming. Maybe someone, somewhere has squared that circle but I'm unaware.

A lot of these child drag events seem to be number four.

Sure, they’re tacky and not plausibly seductive, but everyone knows the context of throwing money at a dancer onstage, or what ‘it’s not gonna lick itself’ means. Well, except probably the child drag stars.

And having kids act out a simulacra of adult sexualization, even in a tacky and ritualized manner, should make us all uncomfortable.

I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.

The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.

The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.

Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.

My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.

Taking a child to a strip club is not 'abusive' in any sense aside from the extent to which a child going to a strip club is bad. If I had, at age 9, gone to a strip club - I'd expect that not to matter at all. Same for drag shows!

Also, the average 12yo will have seen several dozen naked women on the internet, so something drag queens is an ineffective way to prevent children seeing sexualized stuff.

but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?

This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo. Nobody wants to argue it, because the very concept is disgusting. Why don't you make the argument against it instead? And why do many arguments in this area sound like this - vague references to badness?

This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo.

It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.

My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.

"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.

It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.

The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though. "That fence was there 50 years ago" isn't enough. You'd need to convince people to adopt it again. And if you can't provide a good argument for why it should be there, even if they do put it back, it'll be in the wrong place. The field has changed a lot!

Again, I'm clearly not arguing for trans stuff here, I just want people to make some form of useful argument arguments at all.

In another area, I often argue something like - school isolates children from depth, doesn't allow them to explore and take useful actions for innately-desired goals, and has one spend the majority of time when one's learning just doing rote, uninteresting exercises and taking orders from teachers who want you to complete the exercises and avoid anything too painful or complicated. This means they have no idea how to do anything useful, and their instincts for doing so are perverted or dulled, destroying the depths of human experience. Now, if I wanted to convince someone of that, I could - 1) write a long piece with examples, connections, to make the point in a detailed way, explain exactly what harms come from this, why it exists, etc. Or - I could say "school is child abuse school is bad doing bad things to children is bad you are hurting children that is evil it is bad very bad not okay", and then just repeat that a bunch of times. The former - probably better than the latter.

"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.

Yet, when a teacher gives a kid an undeserved bad grade, that is a "bad thing", yet isn't "child abuse". The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.

The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though.

If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.

The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.

You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad. Pointing out that it doesn't mean all bad things within that subclass does not change this.

You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad

I mean, does it mean anything more than "very bad act done to vulnerable group"?

If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.

It isn't necessary to hide it [specifically, drag and gay people, not children doing drag] from most parents!

That 95% of people who do drag kid shows are enabling and providing cover for the 5% who do want to molest kids doesn't seem a great argument in favor of drag kid shows.

Also even the groomers see themselves as the heroes of their stories. They're welcoming the kids into the community or whatever the current euphemism is.

yeah but then this isn't different from any other community where a small percent are pedos.

Not sure I'd class 5% pedos as a small percent. I think of small percentages as winning the lottery, being struck by lightning and dying, being healthly 18 - 49 and dying of Covid.

Nor does the 5% pedos really address the larger cohort of homosexual men for which this sort of grooming behavior is normalized towards adolescents, pederastry. The behavior covered by some of the accusations against Kevin Spacey or the descriptions of George Takei losing his virginity at 13 to an attractive older man.

Many other communities that work with youth have specific proscribed safe-guarding policies in place to prevent inappropriate conduct. Parent volunteers in schools, scoutmasters, etc. are subjected to criminal background checks and frequently attend training on safeguarding vulnerable populations.

5% was a totally arbitrary number. Is there any evidence the rate of pedophilia or abuse among dragperformers is higher than that among a general population?

Drag performers specifically, I don't anticipate much data. That pederastry is not uncommon among homosexuals is fairly widely discussed.

A recent example; https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/20980

That while homosexuals are not more likely to offend, offenders are more likely to be homosexual has been discussed in the literature. The majority of the studies I've seen focus on pedophilia, rather than hebephilia or ephebophilia.

Sure, it isn't literally grooming. But it's a metaphor that points out the similarities--it has children being pushed into sexual things by adults.

And I rarely see criticism saying "It's not grooming, it's just adults treating children sexually, so call it something else". Usually, when someone says that it shouldn't be called grooming, they're trying to deny that it's sexual or inappropriate at all.

If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".

If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".

Well, if it's not 'grooming', it's bad because it's trans, queer, gay, etc, it takes senses and desires that are effective at finding the best mates and having children with them and perverts them into meaningless noise. It's just as bad when children see it as adults. If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.

It's a very obvious argument, but not one conservatives agree with!

If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.

This is absurd. The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to or participate in sexual material, even sexual material which doesn't involve naked people, is widespread.

See my other comments - everyone is aware the "idea is widespread", but can you justify it independently of that? Kids seeing a drag show ... whatever. Why does it matter that much? If them seeing sexual material is a problem, television shows or internet advertisements or porn websites are much much much worse. Someone seeing a drag show, in practice, doesn't seem to have much impact!

It isn't grooming in the sense of manipulating a child into being sexually available.

Sure it is--the act itself makes the child sexually available, not for intercourse per se but for lewd interactions with the adult audience. You might as well say that strip bars aren't sexual. The act of Drag Kids itself is sex abuse per se--the same way that exposing children to pornography is sex abuse per se, even if you never lay a hand on them. I think I could probably have been a bit clearer about the way I framed this, but your problem here is you're engaging in amphiboly between participants, parents, and organizers. Do the kids think they're being made sexually available? Likely they don't understand the full implications of what they're involved in, which is an alarm bell all on its own. Do some parents think it's just silly fun? Probably--people are stupid like that. But Pride events have always, until recently, been chock full of sexualization. Wrapping kids up into that is sexualization per se, whether or not anyone gets physically assaulted.

I think it's pretty myopic to accuse those who defend/ignore the "drag kids" thing of being conflict theorists, while ignoring how the entire "groomer" label is a conflict theory superweapon being deployed by the conflict-theory part of the right. Were I an American leftist who'd never took a step inside a drag club, or even a Pride parade, my thought process would be something like "I will only disavow this when you stop painting me with the same brush. Otherwise, if you're going to keep implying I'm part of it, well, then I'm part of it. If the penalty for surrendering is death, and the penalty for losing the battle is death..."

Well, but this is the very question I'm asking. What's the appropriate approach, when the truth itself is a memetic superweapon? "Taboo your words" is supposed to be a way to increase clarity--to say, "alright, that word is clearly a sticking point, what if we describe it another way?" If dropping the word "groomer" would get us closer to putting an end to grooming behaviors, I'd be on board with that. But it doesn't seem like dropping "groomer" would win a single step forward in that battle. Rather, it seems like the attempt to tar "groomer" as conspiratorial thinking is an attack on some people's ability to express the problem clearly.

The word "groomer" literally someone engaging in behavior meant to prepare child for rape or molestation. Whatever one thinks of drag child pageants, we would need much, much more evidence that this is indeed their intent to declare the use of this accusation as "the truth itself".

I'm not sure this is right; there's an (older?) sense of the word in which an older person develops a (non-sexual) relationship with a younger (too young to consent) person, and then scoops them up for a sexual relationship once they turn 18. (or whatever)

So the drag-queen thing can be viewed in a similar way; get children who are too young for sexual purposes inculcated into your personal fetish, which will increase the supply of adults for you (and yours) to sexually exploit down the road; "stochastic grooming," if you will.

Well, the current most prominent media usage I can remember is references to the British (Pakistani) grooming scandal, which specifically included adult men grooming girls for molestation right here and now.

But even beyond that, it's still something where even you are saying "can be viewed"; one could indeed concot a scenario where that happens, or theoretize that this is the end goal, but that's still not enough to pronounce it as "the truth itself" without a lot more evidence of that actually happening.

What is the end goal of DQSH/Fabulous Drag Kids then?

Their stated end goal is increasing LGBTQ+ positivity. Considering that polls have shown that at least the acceptance of basic trans identity claims has gone down in recent years, it's questionable how well it is succeeding, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not enough to pronounce - once again - the "truth itself" that actual end goal is grooming them for sex.

Interesting that the LGB part of things doesn't seem to have much to do with the drag aspect -- yes drag is a gay subculture, but in today's context it seems to be mostly about increasing 'T' positivity. "Grooming kids to accept trans people as potential sexual partners" is not the farthest thing from "increasing trans-positivity".

If LGB positivity is part of the goal, why aren't story hours with ordinary gay people? (as such)

I'm not personally hung up on the 'groomer' label, but can see where people are coming from with it; I also don't think 'trans-positivity' is a very positive thing for kids to be learning.

More comments

NPR told me Trump was 'groomed' by Putin. It just reveals what a bad-faith farce this debate is. NOW we need to have sensitive conversation about when it's kosher to use the word?

What I'm talking about is that when you aim a nuke at Washington DC because that's where all the warmongers of Pentagon and the alphabet sunglasses people sit and they did deserve as much, don't be surprised that the entire USA unites behind the warmongers of Pentagon.

It isn't the word that is the sticking point for me, but its usage (and association with its usage elsewhere) as a broad brush to smear my ingroup with.

The entire reason 'nuclear weapons' are being deployed is because all others have seemingly failed. This never even becomes an issue in this timeline if the SocJus left had demonstrated any capacity to police its own and smoke out harmful ideologies amongst its ranks; if some figures of authority actually put their foot down and declared that this stuff is a bright red line that will not be crossed.

Instead, the Left just Presses X to Doubt and dismisses all criticism as conspiracy mongering, with mainstream support. And when their opponents start getting a little too mean, the Left says "Whoah buddy, I'd love to resolve this, but I don't think I can when you're this hot and bothered! Come back when you've cooled off!".

I see no reason why anybody should drop "groomer" from their lexicon in the face of this willful intransigence.

SocJus left do police their own. That their opponents are not satisfied by the criteria of what SocJus left constitutes potentially harmful is expected. But the more they cry "wolf!" in the forest when there is no wolf to point at, the less I trust their judgment.

Socially acceptable minimum age for sexual remarks has only been rising and socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society as far as I see. This is not a society that is exceptionally prone to molesting of minors.

SocJus left do police their own.

Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.

socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society

This is only really true for older man-younger woman relationships, though. Laws accounting for "underage sex" tend to be very barely liberalizing; where there are exceptions for straight relationships across or under the boundary they're slowly being expanded to cover gay ones as well (California is a recent example of this)- you'd expect these things to be equally criminalized if the laws were tightening rather than the reverse, though the movement is barely significant.

Revealed preferences of SocJus (or more properly, third-wave feminism in general) are that the movement is primarily concerned with looting men for the benefit of women, so you'd expect them to become a sort of Junior Anti-Sex League. Men want younger women, older women want (older) men to be restricted to picking amongst them instead of being able to use their resources to impress the young women, and will leverage their political power to that end.

As far as men fucking men goes... well, gay men are a fargroup of women, and a minority of the population, so it makes logical sense for feminist women's anti-sex objectives to be couched using its former underdog-coded pro-sex views as a skinsuit. And sure, maybe it does mean an increase in men having sex with boys, but boys are just future men, so any collateral damage that arises from that is acceptable.

The Right is absolutely correct to pounce on this, even though it probably only arises as a natural consequence, and their blind spot (being that they don't actually consider anyone failing a paper bag test, in this case 'being 18', to be a human being) prevents them from mounting a proper defense. So, "groomer" it is...

Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.

Trivially, yes, they do, since I do not see a shortage of people in the left being slammed for, among other things, grooming. Perhaps they aren't real leftists?

Has there been any policing done by your in-group on this issue? What I mean by this is, has anyone inside the progressive caucus reported or made sure the kids of these kind of events weren't abused or is there a in-group watchgroup that does this?

Rather than drawing attention the groomers directly, perhaps a targeted prevention approach directed at those most at risk for grooming.

What would an updated version of this educational film be like?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fTn7ALbLYPI

Conversely, I think the reason it's such a potent rhetorical weapon is that it comes pre-targeted. The cases where I see it being deployed are instances of people specifically organizing or supporting things where the accusation is plausible. No one is firing the weapon at, e.g. union organizers, or workplace feminism writers. It always comes up in circumstances of sex stuff targeted at children.

Not very many people target ordinary honest Joe workers on the right specifically as "Nazis". Yet when they instead vaguely wave at the Red Tribe with the Nazi sign, I can see why the honest Joes shy away from them.

are you refering to the roman salute, or the OK hand symbol?

Referring to a metaphorical piece of cardboard with "This is a Nazi ->" on it.

In some very red spaces on the front lines of the culture war, it was basically decided “if they call you a nazi, call them a groomer.” This escalation was intended not to change minds or win hearts, but to turn the rhetorical tables on “yes, all Republicans” posters.

Like most every superweapon, it looks plausible from the outside. I guarantee the LGBT community can give you a laundry list of reasons why it shouldn't apply in a given case. Drag shows are definitely one of the harder ones to defend, though.

I think the Florida bill is the most salient example, and it's also one of the worst-targeted.

Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

It isn't. Grooming in the context of CSE means to try to position a child so that you can have sexual contact of one sort or another with them. If you convince a child to wear a thong via drugs or alcohol or love bombing or manipulation so that you can have sex with them, or derive sexual enjoyment from watching them, this would be grooming. If you did so for any other reason it really shouldn't be called grooming. It's probably a terrible idea and might open your child up to positions where OTHER people can take advantage or derive the sexual pleasure talked about earlier, but it isn't grooming in this context.

Just like having your child take part in beauty pageants (as you mentioned) where they dress up as adults, might wear swimwear etc, wear make up, is not grooming unless it is with the intention of taking advantage of them sexually. In both cases you may well find such activities attract predators and this is a real risk, but the mothers of these sexualized girls are not groomers either. Living out some strange projected idea of success and acceptance through their own kids? Sure. Depriving them of a healthy childhood? Almost certainly. Guilty of some kind of emotional abuse? There is a good chance. But those things aren't grooming as used in the context of CSE which is the link that the rhetoric is trying to make.

It's a rhetorical weapon, building off of visceral dislike for these behaviors. Just like calling right wingers Nazis. The vast majority of right wingers, voters, politicians et all are not Nazis. The vast majority of parents and organizers of Drag events or child beauty pageants are not groomers.

I used to work with social workers and dealt with and wrote reports on some CSE cases, including Rotherham et al, the people grooming kids in those situations were doing so, to literally rape them and then often prostitute them. So no, neither child beauty pageants or drag kids stuff are in and of themselves grooming, without that intent. Stupid and possibly psychologically damaging yes. Grooming no. There is a gap in between. Just like there is a gap in between "I don't like illegal immigration" and "I hate the Jews".

It's entirely understandable for it to be used in the normal context, it is an effective weapon. I'd certainly if I were still a political advisor be advocating for Republicans to use it as an attack strategy. I am a little disappointed it seems to be getting traction here. The behaviors can be bad without being actual child grooming. A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer. A mother who does all the same things because she things it's progressive or because it will let her child experience new things or because she wants to live out her glory days vicariously is not. It is still probably a terrible idea regardless.

For those who deal with CSE, and hopefully for us here, that is a distinction worth making.

It isn't. Grooming in the context of CSE means to try to position a child so that you can have sexual contact of one sort or another with them. If you convince a child to wear a thong via drugs or alcohol or love bombing or manipulation so that you can have sex with them, or derive sexual enjoyment from watching them, this would be grooming. If you did so for any other reason it really shouldn't be called grooming. It's probably a terrible idea and might open your child up to positions where OTHER people can take advantage or derive the sexual pleasure talked about earlier, but it isn't grooming in this context.

I don't think I agree with this. If a mother is, e.g., using psychological pressure on her child to tolerate her boyfriend's sexual abuse out of a sense of loyalty or even fear of the boyfriend, I would still characterize that as a central example of "grooming".

Sure as I said: "A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer."

Replace the you or someone else can have sexual contact in the first sentence. If your goal is not for someone to derive sexual pleasure (yourself or another person) then it isn't grooming. otherwise people putting pictures of kids in the bath on Facebook, that someone then masturbates over is a groomer. They may be unwise, but that isn't the same thing.

Sure as I said: "A mother who has her child wear make up, takes bikini pictures of her in suggestive poses and the like in order to offer her to her new boyfriend (a real case) is a groomer."

Okay, take it another step back. The mother does all that same stuff, but doesn't have a specific boyfriend to offer her to. Instead, she does all the same things, because her social group praises her for doing it. Grooming or not?

It seems to me that shaping a child's sexuality in unhealthy ways that make them easier to prey on is the essence of grooming, and whether it's done on behalf of a specific person or just for the community of predators in general doesn't really change why that shaping is harmful or objectionable.

In your original example, the mother doesn't actually tell the kid that she's doing these things to get the kid to have sex with her boyfriend. Yet we consider these things harmful, even if the sex with the boyfriend doesn't happen, which is why we made a word for the "lowering kid's defenses to sexual exploitation" in the first place. The effect on the kid is the whole point.

Okay, take it another step back. The mother does all that same stuff, but doesn't have a specific boyfriend to offer her to. Instead, she does all the same things, because her social group praises her for doing it. Grooming or not?

Nope. If she doesn't have the intent of sexual contact from her child to someone else it is not grooming. She isn't preparing them for predators, she is behaving in ways that incidentally some predators like. Those are very different things. Like teaching your 12 yo daughter to wax her legs is in some way preparing them for adult grooming (in the other sense) norms but that doesn't mean you are doing it so that your daughter will attract predators who like underage girls. Will some sexual predators prefer her hairless? Most likely. But that isn't the goal. She isn't doing it FOR the community of predators, she is doing it for her own reasons AND the community of predators might like it. The fact that might increase risks should be a consideration IMHO but it shouldn't be called grooming (in the CSE sense). If I polish my expensive watch so it shines beautifully, then walk down a dark alley and get mugged for it, I may be stupid, but unless I intended for the watch to be stolen I am not grooming my watch for theft.

Otherwise grooming becomes so wide that its meaning is essentially lost. Which isn't normally an issue, except in that it might muddy the waters for agencies and people who want to prevent "real" CSE. Child grooming is a real and serious problem, that results in the abuse of many children in ways that will often impact them for life. If one wants to oppose Drag Kids or child beauty pageants because they do expose kids unnecessarily to risks because of people who do target those communities, I think that is fair and reasonable. But using groomer for the organizers and parents is a rhetorical smear. Which is fine in the proper context, as a politician it would be a weapon that would be hard to ignore. But I do think here we should be more nuanced.

Because if we can't be more nuanced than bloody politicians what are we even for?

I think your 'grooming' may be a term of art at which point the authorities have a reasonable likelihood of success legally when they intervene.

The local townspeople and I likly have a lower threshold for grooming as our actions may be more likely to be extra-judicial.

A mother who does all the same things because ... or because she wants to live out her glory days vicariously is not

Isn't vicariously experiencing sexual activities via your child rather explicitly using them for your own sexual pleasure?

Not unless you think the mothers are getting sexual pleasure from it, which does not appear to be the case in my experience. They focus on the pretty almost doll part I think.

I do think they are getting sexual pleasure from it, and further that it is not recognized as sexual specifically due to the sexist notion that women are pure. It is much the same as an exhibition fetish in my mind, but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.

but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.

This is actually kind of odd to me; I thought that the entire point of Pride was to go around dressed in some horrifically-ugly fashion and get attention that way. After all, everyone else there is doing that (the ones that are attractive, by contrast, were too busy actually having sex to attend).

Seems like a lot of work to get your kid to do that, who (if they aren't naturally on board with it) will probably at least temporarily resent you for parading them around for a day through the freak show where people say uncomfortable things to you while you wear an uncomfortable, poorly-fitting outfit (drag expression is not generally satisfied with "go to the clothes store and choose the distaff/spear counterpart of what you're currently wearing" and is generally as flamboyant as possible on purpose). Bonus points for boys made to sit still while you paint their faces far past the point of female sexual superstimulus (at least, I'm pretty sure that's why the stereotypical drag outfit has eye shadow rings the size of shiners and lips that make intentionally racist caricatures seem modest by comparison).

That's a lot of effort, cajoling, complaining, and whining to deal with just to get one's rocks off for a day per year; as such, while I'm sure there are some people that are into that simply because that's a constant to anything, the people who are taking their kids like that are likely doing it as a political statement in the same way taking your kids to abortion protests is.

Should we add Hawaiian Teacher to the same list of terms as Chinese Robbers?

Because the irony here is that this guy had gone on Twitter doing the whole "why do you accuse us of being groomers?" bit before the story of him being arrested for child porn and allegedly having sex with a 13 year old student broke. So "LGBT stuff is not grooming", while it may be correct in the vast majority of cases, does fall flat there.

Yes, both people who groom and those who do not will deny they are. Most people who deny it will not be, some who do will.

How overt and specific must the behavior be to be grooming?

Getting the kids and parents to self-select to participate in their further indoctrination to lifestyle with poor outcomes doesn't exactly seem like not grooming.

It's on par with many adult homosexual adolescent boy grooming scenarios. Often neither sees it as grooming. They've common interests and the boy is an old soul, mature for his age. The drag kids show itself may not be grooming, but it's where all the groomers hang out, and the behavior is normalized.

It won't help there's a group claiming of course this isn't grooming, it's just pride and fun. Indoctrination into the community makes it easier to fiddle the kid later. That it's done with a guise of community pride, rather than prostitution is to many a distinction without a difference. Though I could see an argument that the pederast homosocial relationship is 'better' than being prostituted, murdered and served as kebab.

It's all fun until a groomer tempts you with word too large.

It is pretty rant-y. Speak plainly, and maybe don't try to sneak assertions that Democrats are into child abuse.

I think all of the following are more or less true:

  • "Grooming" is a real, terrible thing that should be prevented

  • Any event which gets children dressing provocatively on stage is going to appeal to actual pedophiles

  • QAnon does not have a monopoly on the term "groomer," and it's irresponsible for the news to imply they do

  • QAnon is correlated with using "groomer" as a general-LGBT slur

So the FUD about "groomer" is part of a battle over one of those strategic abuses of language. Q et al. would like to apply it to things which are definitely not child abuse, like telling students that homosexuality exists. LGBT supporters would like it to remain very selective. Yes, this does involve a false alarm/sensitivity tradeoff. No, I'm not convinced that Q is rationally setting the threshold--not when the rhetoric is so useful.

I don't know where you're getting news of "leather thongs," and I don't really want to go looking. I could imagine a perfectly chaste drag show which is purely about affirming the participants, about announcing pride rather than erasing it. Of course, that's not in line with historical use of drag, and I would expect provocative content from Boise's performance. That's a pretty damn good reason to keep kids out of it. Are supporters secret MAPs trying to get their rocks off? Or are they mistaken, and genuinely have a horrible blindspot for how pedophiles would get value out of their show?

The mistake-theory approach is not to wage war over the term "groomer." It's to convince supporters that their action is wrong and dangerous. You should be able to do this without relying on a single rhetorical flourish.

I could imagine a perfectly chaste drag show which is purely about affirming the participants, about announcing pride rather than erasing it.

Maybe it's a boy scouts thing, but I see a drag show for kids more like a Summer Camp skit gone too far than anything about LGBT rights or whatever. Frankly, I could see having boys and girls dress up as and mock each other as stereotypes being a very normal, traditional activity.

See also: Rudy Giuliani and Trump.

Culture is weird.

Well, there's the famous kid Desmond Is Amazing, who was out there as a Drag Kid performing in shows aged 10, having first been noticed at the NYC Pride Parade when he was 8.

He (or rather they, the pronoun they now go by) is 15 now, which is at least a bit older. A true veteran of the scene at that age. May God have mercy on all our souls.

This is not harmless playing dress-up or the kind of cross-dressing for things like Hallowe'en which were traditional practices. I have to think that the parents (or at least the mother) was heavily involved in encouraging the kid along this path and bringing him out to these kinds of events and arranging the publicity around it. I would indeed be more inclined to call it pimping, but if grooming is forbidden, I suppose that is even worse.

To be clear, a lot of the stuff getting called ‘grooming’ does actually raise worrying grooming red flags- fostering secrets from a child’s parents is like thing #1 I was taught to watch out for when I took mandatory reporter training- even if the term is way overused. I was also unaware that Chris Rufo and libs of TikTok were Qanon.

I agree that there’s a better way to point that out, but culture war dynamics being what they are, it was going to go like ‘so you’re calling LGBT+ educators groomers!’ ‘Yes’ regardless of how well the initial critique was phrased.

No idea who Chris Rufo is, but I actually did think LoTT was explicitly pro-Q. Outgroup homogeneity bias in action, perhaps.

I don’t like being in a position where I’m perceived as defending actual groomers either. That’s the whole point of using the term as a portable motte and bailey, and it’s why LGBT advocates are so against it. If nara is serious about looking for the mistake-theory response, it’s to avoid the name-calling and make outcome-specific criticisms like “this will enable pedophiles.” I’d like to think that would be better received than proclaiming defenders want to abuse children.

Chris Rufo is the activist behind the anti-CRT push in Virginia that arguably got Youngkin elected. He has also been majorly involved in pushing the groomer/radical trans activists in our schools thing.

How do you feel about the Catholic church? I'm confident Catholicism has resulted in more child sex abuse than any "Drag Kids" event. I think quite likely more than Hollywood! Or maybe the Boy Scouts would be a better comparison.

How do you feel about the Catholic church?

Well... I'm not Catholic, so you could say I have some disagreements with them for sure.

I'm confident Catholicism has resulted in more child sex abuse than any "Drag Kids" event. I think quite likely more than Hollywood!

In raw numbers, maybe. Per capita? I doubt it. It's astonishingly difficult to get reliable numbers on this sort of thing, of course, but every time I've tried, I've failed to find any evidence that the Catholic church leads to child abuse at greater rates than, say, public schools.

Anyway this feels like a similar gotcha to the child beauty pageants. Yes, there are other forms of child abuse--that justifies this one?

No, but do you call those other groups groomers? Do you characterize their actions as grooming when it has resulted in (at least alleged) tens of thousands of kids being sexually abused?

My point is that the "groomer" label seems to be reserved, in political discourse, almost solely for LGBT people and it's use seems quite disconnected from the actual frequency of child sexual abuse.

You're missing half of it. Which is that news organizations have given up any semblance of objectivity and have gone to full-on conclusory statements in their reporting. That is, "...the unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory...".

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

To discard mistake theory as erroneous.

To discard mistake theory as erroneous.

It's not about being right or wrong, it's about finding a way to live in the world with others. I don't want to discard mistake theory; life is more pleasant when I can find ways to make it work.

But I admit my aspirational thinking doesn't necessarily make you wrong.

It's also a lie. One needs not be a QAnon believer at all in order to think of these people as child groomers.

I'm steelmanning "Drag Kids" the best I can come up with is "this is a new manifestation of an old and widespread form of child abuse, namely, using children for adult entertainment

I'm not fan of drag kids but is this honestly the best steelman you can come up with? This is not a moral failure but one of creativity. Is it really so hard for you to believe some people have swallowed the lgbt+ narrative whole? These papers are bothering to print it and many people are quite credulous to their dictates. You think it's more likely that this many parents are abusing their children than that they genuinely have bought the meme that this is a totally harmless opportunity for their children to explore their indentities in a a manner they've been assured is harmless.

You think it's more likely that this many parents are abusing their children than that they genuinely have bought the meme that this is a totally harmless opportunity for their children to explore their indentities in a a manner they've been assured is harmless.

I should maybe have been clearer that it was the organizer's and advocate's positions I was thinking of, there. I mean, it's not like we haven't seen this in other cultures. Sure, some credulous fool is always going to be a True Believer. I'm just not sure it counts as a steelman to say "oh, I understand--those people are just stupid."

An actual steelman is that kid drag is like a fun costume contest for people who believe that breaking gender stereotypes around dress or expression is a worthwhile activity and that it can be a healthy way for kids to express parts of themselves they might not otherwise be able to. It's like theatre. This would be versus the traditional, competitive, demanding "child beauty pageants" that are about judging the worth of a child on their appearance and talents. Kid drag would be in stark contrast to this, where everyone is celebrated no matter what they look like or what they do.

You can disagree with these kids and say they don't actually know what they're feeling, or they're brainwashed, or whatever, but maybe... it actually can be a nice experience for some kids.

Sure, I can see how overly-zealous activists parents could use kid drag to force their 6-year-old boy to express his "divine feminine" side, but I honestly have no idea what the ratio of kids with leftists parents who are exposed to the idea and want to do it versus the activist abuser parents forcing their kids is.

LGBT rights and covid vaccines are the two issues that the left has no tolerance for dissenters, much more than other issues. I dunno why this is. These are the major third rail issues. Vox Day for example had his blogspot banned after a decade of otherwise non-stop attacking of the left, including even borderline antisemitic stuff and the whole SFWA controversy, only because of posts critical of the Covid vaccine. That was the final breaking point.

Locally, when vaccine mandates first became a topic for discussion here, the first group to absolutely gun hardest for vaccine mandates and use the harshest rhetoric against antivaxxers were Finnish centre-righters, both in the media and in the political sphere. At least outside the US, I'd say the COVID vaccine thing was above all an example of centrist authoritarianism uniting "responsible technocrats" both in the centre-left and the centre-right, rather than specifically a left-wing thing.

ms. Have you seen the stats on child movie stars? Olympic athletes?

No mention of the control group. Yeah, some child stars have mental problems as adults, but without a control group it's not like we can draw moral guidance from this . Celebrities, rich people may have fucked up personal lives, but so do plenty of normal people, too.

Celebrities, rich people may have fucked up personal lives, but so do plenty of normal people, too.

Totally! But why? Are you suggesting it's all just a toss of the dice? Or do you think it's possible to identify patterns of behavior that correlate with undesirable outcomes? In this case there is no control group, partly because wide scale human experimentation is impracticable, immoral, or both. Unless we decide to tacitly approve of it for whatever reason... as we appear to have done in this case, in spite of what seem to me clear risks.

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

Assume Prisoner's Dilemma rules where you saw the other player pushed the "defect" button right in front of you?

But really, they only have two options, and one of them is praising murderism (i.e. it's blatantly sexual, but that's fine). And sure, you can punish them for being part of the tribe that poisoned the well with safetyism for everything that isn't their pet project, but they have the power and incentive to deflect and deflect they shall.

That said, the mistake-theory approach to drag kids, and its ultimate steelman, is "safetyism isn't all it's cracked up to be, take risks once in a while", which is why I (and I suspect this is probably close to the political center) actually have a difficult time outright condemning it under those rules. Put another way, I have legitimately no idea how "It's not going to lick itself" is supposed to seduce anyone capable of understanding what that phrase means.

If grooming is the intent, it's clearly not particularly effective, and isn't going to work on a straight viewer regardless. In fact, the Junior Anti-Sex League is incapable of grooming straight kids, and even gay kids should be beyond their reach for the same reasons; that would require attractive teenage same-sex participants, and as far as I'm aware, Pride has a shortage of them. (Nudists are basically never the people anyone actually wants to see nude.)

often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate

Every Boomer that I know talks about their parents sending them to music lessons where the teacher would whack your hands if you did it wrong. Now their children are doing the same thing to their grandchildren, except this time they leer at you and grab your ass instead. And while I would prefer this not happen to anyone, I can accept it not being anything more than surface-level harmful, and it's better for kids that suffer this to recognize that their authority figures put them into an uncomfortable situation for political reasons and update how much they trust authority accordingly.

And when someone says "Drag Kids is sexualizing children" only to be met with "no, you're making it sexual, you right-wing pervert, we're just having silly fun"--it's maddening. Like, really? I'm supposed to believe that you're putting your kid in a leather thong for silly fun? Be serious. If that's not grooming, nothing is.

To be fair, I don't think this is an accurate summary of what's usually going on with all these events. The Boise 2022 Pride Guide doesn't have much information on what Drag Kids was actually going to revolve around, but a follow-up "Drag Story Hour" references Kenni The Doll, which... I'm not a fan of the makeup and not going to try to figure out what's going on under any clothing, but it's not looking like leather thongs or most adult entertainer 'wear' (there are two other entertainers, but I can't find any clear images or references to them).

I'm not saying that leather thongs (or too-sheer, or too-short, or otherwise too-revealing clothes) never happen! But whether or not it's a central case for drag as a class, I think a categorical opposition to the topic needs to handle cases like Eddie Izzard, who isn't appropriate for kids, but in a British comedic swearing sense, rather than anyone getting aroused by it, or find a meaningful way to separate them.

And I'm not sure the latter option is solvable, exactly. "I don't want to know, and don't want to need to know, about your underwear" is absolutely a reasonable norm, and one I share and support, and I think you can get a very wide section of the American populace behind. As the discussion becomes more about "this style of dress is inappropriate" or "this style of dance is inappropriate", though, I think that level of agreement gets a lot harder.

For a less culture-war-centric example, the furry fandom gets a lot of askance looks for people who fursuit in public, especially where kids might see. After all, people have sex in (something that kinda looks like) those! Well, ok, bringing a murrsuit body anywhere near public is one of the ways to reliably get nuked by everyone else in the fandom, but just because people haven't had sex in that particular suit doesn't make it less sexualized. For example, there are some (very nice!) fursuits with very thick thighs and incredibly fluffy tails and highly pronounced toe beans. Which absolutely can be fetishized in actually-sexual ways, but are also things people just think are cool.

((Though to extend the metaphor, this doesn't make it ethically mandatory to permit: both for practical reasons and for credit card processor ones, there's a lot of restrictions on under-18 fursuiting, many not explicitly written down.))

The fandom's largely managed to set and evolve some norms around here (don't use murrsuit bodies for anything public or mixed-use private, full suits should cover as much skin as viable, partial suits that don't cover all skin should be worn with fairly concealing clothing, UncleKage will murder ban you if you turn into a PR debacle), but note that this is the fandom. Normies who run into the issue don't just come up with a different answer; normies come up with different answers from each other.

And I don't think we have enough culture-wide communication to really build or even discuss normie-wide norms, anymore.

I hate to say what is probably obvious, but I do have some insight as a resident of the Blue Bubble with many gay friends etc etc: but at least in my neck of the woods once any remotely tribal signifier is invoked (in this case "Drag") it just becomes pure confirmation bias all the way down.

Once anyone on Team Blue hears one of their tribal signifiers (and of course same goes for Team Red) I can immediately see their brains twisting to come up with any possible "hey, move along nothing to see here" defense.

The usual suspects are: it's just kids playing dress up having fun; it's just something you heard on Fox; Drag isn't sexual; or the old favorite, you sound like a Republican.

Sorry I guess I don't see a mistake theory way around this. After the whole Don't Say Gay thing, which was so drenched in Big Lie propaganda, Drag Kids is just another tribal shibboleth, and this is when the cerebrum gets bypassed for the amygdala.

Some of the talking points I see floating on Twitter are, like, "What about child beauty pageants?" But this moves me not a single iota--I hate child beauty pageants for exactly the same reason. It's weird! It's creepy! Or to put it in less emotionally-charged terms: it's not something kids do, when they grow up in loving, healthy, stable environments. At best it's a symptom of deeper troubles; at worst, it's a direct cause of some of those troubles.

I suspect both phenomena are largely fueled by gullible single mothers.

What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?

I’ve been using “so-called” to call my opponents liars when they abuse language: so-called comprehensive immigration reform, so-called fact-checkers and journalists complaining about people using “groomers” to describe drag organizers putting little kids in leather thongs, so-called diversity of all-Black, all-Hispanic, or all-woman groups, and so on. It’s a tight little rhetorical trick which doesn’t sound like whining, acknowledges their words without accepting them, puts the burden of “well, actually” explaining on the other side, and blunts the edges of their words.

I am going to give very controversial opinions now. Tighten seatbelts:

  1. The modern day social system allows women to be both too young to be responsibly in sexual relationships with older men till the age of 25 ( Leonardo di Caprio is blamed for ditching his 25 year old girlfriends even though he has been doing it often enough it's not even a surprise anymore. Zero expectation from people that the gf also chose to be with him knowing his history.)while also at the same time constantly claiming sexual maturity to make her own decisions when it suits her. So now as an adult male you start off with don't have sex with anyone younger than 18, but then the rules start changing to any woman younger than 25 is too young if you are an old man it's always going to be the equivalent of grooming, along with the fact that depending on who you are talking to at the moment the rule is being arbitrarily changed.

  2. This shift in the social contract multiple times within a person's life makes them more likely to not even take previous social contracts seriously. The thought process can be they already keep trying to raise the social age of consent every year, maybe they were bullshitting about below 18 being too young as well. So now we have two groups of people trying to tear apart the sexual consent and individual responsibility social contract in opposite directions.

  3. Based on this years data, it turns out that it is almost impossible to stop Gay men from having sex. Taking into account the sexual assault accusation and jailing rates for Trans women, it also appears that transwomen have an equal or even higher libido than gay men along with a far higher ratio of criminal records relating to sexual crimes. Within LGBT communities there also seems to be an unspoken rule about how they are far more loose with what the age of consent is supposed to be. All of these statements are based on my limited knowledge of the LGBT community over the years. I started out as a genuine ally by the way.

  4. Trans people are the more extreme elements of the LGBT community which is already more loose with their rules and attitudes regarding the age of consent when compared to hetero groups. ( Supposedly). So it comes as little surprise that a noticeable segment of the trans community has no problem with sexualizing minors.

  5. There is an additional element of transgerderism actually initially being about mental illnesses, along with the fact that transgender groups have a comparatively very high number of autistic people. Autistic people as per my knowledge are already pretty disconnected from general social norms, on top of that now they are going through additional mental health issues relating to gender identity, meanwhile having the libido of at the very least the average individual of their biological gender, while at the same time being at the bottom of the barrel in terms of who is willing to have sex with them. At the end of the day all these factors taken together should come as no surprise that a segment of trans women would be more than willing to get sex wherever they can and however they can irrespective of general legal and social norms of society around them.

In conclusion - Hide yo kids from the aunt with a dick unless you can at a very personal level 100% vouch for them.

They did bring it on themselves. Whatever your own personal opinion on Drag Kids, publicising that the act would include kids as young as eleven is handing your opponents a weapon, and would probably make ordinary people go "Hang on a minute there":

https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/08/idaho-drag-kids-700x420.png

"Bring drag to the younger generation? Uh, how young, exactly?" "Oh, eleven!" Even corporate sponsors are likely to turn a little sheepish about having their names associated with that.

To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?

In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.

What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.

My observations from lurking around Art Twitter indicate that most artists, who are often but not always left-aligned, hate hate hate AI art. This may feel like I'm stating the obvious, since it's going to unfortunately invalidate many of their jobs overnight, but it shouldn't be understated.

There are a few strains of this. Some are denying the power of these new programs. Some in the replies indicate this guy is cherrypicking bad results, but even if StableDiffusion can't copy him 100% yet, the time until it's reproducing his art perfectly in seconds is here in less than five years, conservatively. This one is more in the acceptance stage of grief. This is from an art YouTuber that I quite enjoy and to summarize the tweet he essentially says it's here, it's good, it's probably over soon unless you're established.

From my limited perspective, AI Art is/is going to be maligned in online spaces and among journalists in the same way as Crypto and NFTs are. Big companies will adopt it, but they will be dragged for it by the online commentary class. I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad. The tech will be supremely disruptive in a way Crypto and especially NFTs can only gesture at being, but there are a lot of upsides to it, and I get the feeling that many people are dismissing it without giving the implications much thought because of the class of people they perceive as being most excited about it.

Personally, I think it sucks for the artists who get displaced, and they will be displaced, but it's good overall for everyone else who isn't an artist. Others have discussed how many doors it opens to have cheap, instant, bespoke art that you can dictate into a text document… Still, there's something deeply psychologically troubling about some code making something you base your identity on obsolete, so I do genuinely feel for them.

I think voice acting is one that's going to be hit soon as well. I look forward to this for similar reasons - how many games and productions are bottlenecked in quality/money by the high cost of voice acting? The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.

To answer your prompt on tribe distinctions, this one might fall more on the growth/retreat split that was brought up by Ilforte. Retreat mindset focuses on artists losing their jobs and deepfakes allowing for misinformation. Growth mindset focuses on democratizing access to art and all the new doors opened by AI content.

The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.

Except we've been down this road before. While the future you describe is theoretically possible, it's simply not what we're going to get. Before AI, Computers also democratized art production. CGI that would blow the minds of every single person on Earth back when I was a kid, is reproducible by mildly talented teenagers, for basically no cost other than their time. Same for editing, SFX, or practically any aspect of media production.

On top of that, the Internet later democratized distribution. No more begging publishers to kindly take a look at what you created. If people like what you made, they will get it from you directly, and tell all their friends about it.

And what is the end result off all this "democratization"? A golden age of creativity? People taking risks to create new art no one has ever seen before? Or millions of people making the exact same video, talking about the exact same thing, hoping to appease the recommendation algorithm, and endless livestreams of people playing video games, and gossiping about the news, and things other people have done?

To answer your prompt on tribe distinctions, this one might fall more on the growth/retreat split that was brought up by Ilforte. Retreat mindset focuses on artists losing their jobs and deepfakes allowing for misinformation.

There's more to the retreat mindset than that, though you're right most people will focus on attacks on their livelihood and identity. My fear is the effect AI will have on humanity as a whole. My fear is we will turn us into mindless consumers, incapable of creating anything beautiful anymore, or even understanding the world around us.

You're underselling the effect of these things because they're normal now, but we used to live in a world where on-demand entertainment meant picking one of 3 channels on TV whose content was made by very similar people. Hell, there was a world where to even own a copy of a book was a huge status symbol, because we didn't have a way of quickly copying them. The democratization brought by computers, the Internet, new tools, etc. has created a golden age of creativity.

In previous eras, if you wanted to be an artist, you needed a wealthy person to sponsor you. Now, open a Twitter or ArtStation account and get to work. If you are a writer with ideas too weird for publishers, you can get a following on Twitter and outsell most published authors. Musician? No need to sign a deal with a label anymore, just make good music and network. Interested in video? There's YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, etc. Take your pick of media — books, games, short videos, fanfiction — it has either been improved by or invented as a result of new technologies. If your media is too samey, then that might be due to a lack of looking on your part.

My fear is we will turn us into mindless consumers, incapable of creating anything beautiful anymore, or even understanding the world around us.

Why is this? From my point of view new tech that democratizes creation is the best solution to those that would like to gatekeep and limit the range of acceptable thought. If people seem dumber now because of things like Twitter, I'd counter that the average person isn't much of a thinker anyway and you're just able to see them more clearly now.

The democratization brought by computers, the Internet, new tools, etc. has created a golden age of creativity.

You go on to describe what I already described in my comment. Yes, computers have made it easier than ever before to create art, and the Internet made it easier to publish it... but I just don't see the explosion of creativity. In fact creative people seem to be barely hanging on, against all odds. Everything is set up encourage commentary and criticism, rather than actual creative expression, and on top of that, to do it off the cuff, rather than plan you want to say.

This isn't necessarily the fault of the Internet. Like I said, I do think the creative utopia is theoretically possible, but to get there, we need a lot more than tools to make stuff as cheaply and easily as possible.

Why is this?

Because the less you practice something the worse you become at it, and AI generated art doesn't give you a lot to practice.

If people seem dumber now because of things like Twitter

First of all, I'm not on Twitter, so I don't think it's that. I'm not even sure if people are dumber now (though I am open to the possibility), I just think the kind of people that would use to play music at your local pub, paint, or join a theatre group, increasingly just don't bother anymore, and that AI will only make it worse.

In fact creative people seem to be barely hanging on, against all odds.

They seem to be flourishing. It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before. The problem is that there is too much good stuff out there right now, because as an individual you have limited free time and lots of responsibilities and goals.

Because the less you practice something the worse you become at it, and AI generated art doesn't give you a lot to practice.

I can see that. I still think art as a hobby will be widespread despite it not being economically viable. Art as a means to an end is where things get exciting. To give an example from my own life, I moved for work and started an online tabletop campaign with some friends of mine. This is normally something I'd do in person, but the situation is what it is. Moving online has its drawbacks but also gives me a lot of opportunities to increase the production value of my games with pictures and maps while we play. I'm not great at drawing and it isn't feasible to make that much art myself, but being able to generate it instead of hoping I can google an approximation of what I want to show? That's really exciting.

I just think the kind of people that would use to play music at your local pub, paint, or join a theatre group, increasingly just don't bother anymore, and that AI will only make it worse.

An overabundance of entertainment does make it easier to just consoom, but better tools and more time due to cheap/free labor from automation similarly frees up creatives to create. We'll have to see how it balances out. We used to have to have 9 farmers to support 1 non farmer. Better technology has turned that number on its head, and I would bet on it continuing to do so.

It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before.

In the off chance you haven't come across them...

Kill Six Billion Demons

Unsounded

Black and Blue

Thanks! I've heard the names of some before but often a mention on the motte is a good push to actually give something a read.

They seem to be flourishing. It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before. The problem is that there is too much good stuff out there right now, because as an individual you have limited free time and lots of responsibilities and goals.

I don't know if I'd call 2013 "almost every day", and I only skimmed, so I don't know if it's amazing, but setting issues like this aside, the problem is most definitely not that there's too much stuff. I can accept the idea of Big Tech, and Big Media conspiring to hide all the good stuff from us, and flooding us with mediocre crap, but not that I never saw this comic because there's so much good stuff out there.

I still think art as a hobby will be widespread despite it not being economically viable.

I sure hope so, but I'm worried. Few forces are as powerful as human laziness, and even personally, I can feel myself giving into it quite often.

That's really exciting.

To be fair, I also know where you're coming from. I have my own art project, where I used AI generated voices to make a... I suppose "short horror story" would be the best description. Yeah, was loads of fun! But so was early Youtube, and now it's corporate schlock. I'm worried same thing will happen with AI.

We used to have to have 9 farmers to support 1 non farmer. Better technology has turned that number on its head, and I would bet on it continuing to do so.

Yeah, but that was about materially supporting people. For the most part, you don't run into weird Pareto-distribution winner-takes-it-all social dynamics, when switching from farming to non-farming labour.

Before AI, Computers also democratized art production. CGI that would blow the minds of every single person on Earth back when I was a kid, is reproducible by mildly talented teenagers, for basically no cost other than their time.

Yeah, but I was thinking just today how CGI, or the overuse of CGI, has just contributed to sameyness; current popular movie culture is just dominated by superhero movies that all blend aesthetically and thematically into each other, into the same weightless and meaningless soup. This is not just because of the overuse of CGI, but CGI is a part of it; it tends to allow for striving for lowest common denominator, easy ways to convey the impression of something that is wanted to be conveyed without the effort of the traditional film craft, perhaps acceptable by itself but, as a part of a larger culture, creating an effect that everything's just... this.

The AI art risk is that it just increases the sameyness of everything exponentially, eventually making all art, even things that are supposed to be in different styles, the same generic "AI style" that's easy and cheap to churn out by boatloads but which, instead of expanding culture, just freezes it to endless iterations of average values of what's been before. OTOH, it may also be unavoidable, barring Butlerian Jihad.

Yes! This is exactly how I think it will go down. I also don't see a way out of it for society as a whole. Personally I'm toying with the idea of going pre-Internet-Amish, but I'd be down for the Butlerian Jihad as well.

pre-Internet-Amish

Do the Amish use the internet now?

This could be summarized as "superhero movies are low status. It's okay to be snobbish about low status people."

There have been plenty of superhero movies that crashed and burned because not enough effort was put into craft, including the majority of DC superhero movies that aren't about Batman. You can't just put in CGI and expect to make a ton of money from people who'll buy anything, because that just isn't true. People won't buy anything, and CGI doesn't substitute for craft.

I think that the internet really has democratised media. Consider the kind of niche subjects you can find youtube videos, podcasts or blogs about. These are things that simply could not exist pre-internet. Today, you can listed to a podcast about pens (Pen Addict - Relay FM) that has been running for over ten years and has over 500 episodes. Pre-internet, there's no way that something like this could exist on radio or television.

By definition, the most popular stuff on the internet will appeal to the most people and so will be similar to what we had before. The difference is that now we have the niche, obscure stuff as well.

And what is the end result off all this "democratization"? A golden age of creativity? People taking risks to create new art no one has ever seen before? Or millions of people making the exact same video, talking about the exact same thing, hoping to appease the recommendation algorithm, and endless livestreams of people playing video games, and gossiping about the news, and things other people have done?

I mean, all of these sure look like a golden age of creativity to me. If not golden, then at least bronze. The quality and quantity of creativity displayed in these videos and livestreams can be impressive from my experience. This comment seems akin to saying "What's so special about this Van Gogh fella? He's just drawing a night sky like people have been doing forever."

And what is the end result off all this "democratization"? A golden age of creativity? People taking risks to create new art no one has ever seen before? Or millions of people making the exact same video, talking about the exact same thing, hoping to appease the recommendation algorithm, and endless livestreams of people playing video games, and gossiping about the news, and things other people have done?

Why, both, of course.

I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.

Sad in what sense?

I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.

Do you have a rulebook for what types of art and what methods of making it I may permissibly employ?

To speak more plainly, I am an artist, and I want to use these tools to make art for my own amusement and enrichment. What "pushback" to these desires do you consider valid?

I'm not interested in approaching the question from the perspective of, "what is permissible for an individual artist to do?". I'm interested in approaching the question from the perspective of, "what impact will this technology have on culture and the nature of art?".

Consider the impact that AI is already having on the genre fiction market. It's easy to imagine that writers will soon feel compelled to collaborate with AI, even if they don't want to, in order to match the output rate of authors who do use AI. I think that's a rather deplorable state of affairs. But that problem doesn't come into view when we only consider individual actors in isolation; it only becomes apparent when we zoom out and look at culture as a whole.

I recommend reading Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction if you haven't. Not because I necessarily endorse his conclusions, but because his thought process is illustrative of how technology can impact the meaning and nature of art, independent of any one person's thoughts or actions.

This feels like it is applicable to any tool and any skill. Programmers have to keep up with tools is a well-known trope if only because the tools change so rapidly.

In your original post, you described this tool as coming from malice, can you elaborate more on that?

Not the OP, but apparently Emad Mostaque was fairly excited about the disruptive potential of Stable Diffusion. Whether that's malice or Emad simply taking a colder-blooded accelerationist stance is probably up for debate.

Consider the impact that AI is already having on the genre fiction market.

What impact is it having, to date? I've seen stylistic filters and a few other things; what I haven't seen is people claiming they're a problem, rather than a solution. I have a friend who wants to be a writer, who's been using some of the automation tools to polish his work. I don't see how harm is done.

It's easy to imagine that writers will soon feel compelled to collaborate with AI, even if they don't want to, in order to match the output rate of authors who do use AI.

I don't grok how this is a problem caused by AI. writing, like most forms of art, is an endless task. You can always spend more time on a piece, improve it a little more, tweak, add, cut, polish... That's why deadlines are such a ubiquitous part of all creative industries. Artists need them.

Artists who don't want to collaborate with AI don't have to. This will doubtless mean they are less productive, so they have to make a choice on ends and means. I don't see how this choice is different from pretty much any other choice in the artistic world, all the way down to whether one takes weird furry fetish commissions. Is the artist's goal to make money or to express themselves? Both options are still available. To the extent that AI output is distinguishable from pure human effort, I think it will retain value. To the extent that it is not distinguishable, I question whether it is valuable. Is the Muse less divine for being instantiated in silicon? And it is the Muse, the infinite recombination of human experience, washed clean of one's own ego and presented to the intellect for assessment.

No time to read now, but I'll try to hit it tomorrow, thanks for the recommendation.

I view it as more akin to the printing press, game development engines, digital art tools like photoshop — something that will increase creative output, not decrease it.

For the first time, new technology is not only making it easier to transfer art from head to the medium, but to decide what is being put to the medium.

It's not like these algorithms are generating inhuman images for their own inhuman purposes and flooding the Internet with them. Every image produced by one of these algorithms is something a human requested, and, if they bother to share it, presumably finds valuable in some way. That's still firmly within "human culture."

I think voice acting is one that's going to be hit soon as well. I look forward to this for similar reasons - how many games and productions are bottlenecked in quality/money by the high cost of voice acting? The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.

This is definitely happening. AAA publishers are investing a lot of money into AI solutions for speech synthesis. They're especially interested in technology that allows for a single voice actor to voice many characters. Games with more than 50% AI generated lines will be on the (metaphorical) shelves in two years. I can't say more than that.

That makes sense to me. Last year I saw a Skyrim modding tool that let modders synthesize new voice lines from an AI that listened to and mimicked the lines of the in-game voice actors. It was rough but surprisingly solid, especially if you put in the time to chop up the lines by hand to make them flow better. I figured that if modders could do it (for free) then the actual industry must have something like that cooking.

Yeah the only thing holding the industry back is exorbitant licensing fees from cloud based voice synthesis services. These companies are making a killing off selling tokens while they still can before there's a open source solution.

One possible model of the situation is that AI will be so disruptive that it should be thought of as being akin to an invading alien force. If the earth was under attack from aliens, we wouldn't expect one political party to be pro-alien and one to be anti-alien. We would expect humanity to unite (to some degree) against their common enemy. There would be some weirdos who would end up being pro-alien anyway, but I wouldn't expect them to be concentrated particularly on either the left or the right.

In the short- and medium-term, your views on AI will be largely correlated with how strongly your personal employment prospects are impacted. As you point out, left-aligned artists and journalists aren't going to be too friendly to AI if it starts taking their jobs (especially if it leaves many right-coded industries unaffected), regardless of what other political priors they might have.

I wrote an essay on the old site about how techno-optimism and transhumanism fit more comfortably in a leftist worldview than a rightist worldview, and I still think there's some truth to that. But people can be quick to change their views once their livelihoods are on the line.

I don't think this is going to be that big of a bane on the average artist. In fact, I think this will be much like other digital tools, which have allowed below-average artists to punch above their weight. AI will be quickly adopted by these folks. Their overall art will improve, and they'll be able to pump out a lot more content. But they'll likely suck at doing revisions, as the AI probably isn't going to be built with that in mind. So the average artist will be able to step in, using AI to create ideas and starting points, and then build off of that. AI will be the go to for reference images.

And you'll have AI whisperers who are incredibly good at constructing prompts to get great results from AI.

I think artists largely fall into two camps. One are people who produce things that appeal to others, and another is people who produce things that appeal to themselves. Sometimes, in rare cases, the people who do their own art are able to appeal to the masses; and truly great artists can influence what appeals to the masses. When it comes to dealing with clients who are commissioning a work, some artists are trying to shove their vision on their client, while others are able to take what their clients want and replicate it perfectly. But the great artist is able to take what a client wants, filter it through themselves, and produce something the client didn't explicitly ask for, but really wanted. Or something like that.

Anyways, over the course of the next few years, I imagine there will be a few scandals, from niche to mainstream, of artists using AI but representing it as human-made. What I'm really looking forward to is a scandal of a web personality turning out to be a complete fabrication, and all their art/work being produced by AI. Because at the end of the day, most of the artists online are only popular because of the work they put into creating a name for themselves, cultivating an audience. It's largely marketing, with a small amount based on skill. Some of it, to be honest, is a woman having a pretty face and a prettier body. And so the real threat isn't a computer that can make great art; it's a computer that can connect with an audience in the same way an 'influencer' or 'content creator' can. The social skill needed to amass an audience, and retain them, is something that is far more valuable than drawing or any other skill. An AI that can replicate that is a direct threat to every 'influencer', whether they be an artist, streamer, Twitter journalist, etc. Though that will open the door for people with fewer social skills to do well, since they could leverage AI to create a social identity, but even if not, their inept social skills will come across as more 'authentic'.

Imagine if that happened with acting. Movies in a couple decades, the ones made with actual human actors in front of a camera, could end up with atrocious acting just so it seems more authentic..

Anyways, over the course of the next few years, I imagine there will be a few scandals, from niche to mainstream, of artists using AI but representing it as human-made.

Already here, technically:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/midjourney-artificial-intelligence-state-fair-colorado/

So the average artist will be able to step in, using AI to create ideas and starting points, and then build off of that. AI will be the go to for reference images.

The problem with this reasoning is that AI capabilities scale up FAST. Just a year ago the predecessors of the current models were barely passable at art. One year from now, they could be exponentially better still.

And artists who use it as a tool are actually helping it learn to replace them, eventually! So this isn't like handing someone a tool which will make their life easier, its hiring them an assistant who will learn how to do their job better and more cheaply and ultimately surpass them.

Just a year ago the predecessors of the current models were barely passable at art. One year from now, they could be exponentially better still.

https://xkcd.com/605/

Here's another relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/1425/

8 years ago when this comic was published the task of getting a computer to identify a bird in a photo was considered a phenomenal undertaking.

Now, it is trivial. And further, the various art-generating AIs can produce as many images of birds, real or imagined, as you could possibly desire.

So my point is that I'm not extrapolating from a mere two data points.

And my broader point, that AI will continue to improve in capability with time, seems obviously and irrefutably true.

And my broader point, that AI will continue to improve in capability with time, seems obviously and irrefutably true.

I'll give a caveat, here. AI will certainly get better within its existing capabilities and within some set of new capabilities, but there are probably at least some capabilities that will require changes in type rather than degree, or where requirements grow very quickly.

These examples are easier to talk about in the sense of text. GPT-3 is very good at human-like sentences, and GPT-4/5 will definitely be much better at that. It very likely handle math questions better. It more likely than not will still fail to rhyme well. It is also unlikely to hold context for 50k tokens (eg, a novel) in comparison to GPT-3's ~2k (ie, a long post), because the current implementations go badly quadratic. There are some interesting possible alternative approaches/fixes -- that Gwern link is as much about them as the problem -- but they are not trivial changes to design philosophies.

Very interesting.

I do wonder if certain architectures/frameworks for machine learning will start to break as they exceed certain sizes, or at least see massively diminished returns that are only partially solved by throwing more compute at them, indicating there's issues with the core design.

It is interesting to consider that no HUMAN can hold the full text of a Novel in their head, they make notes, they have editors to help, and obviously they can refer back to and refine the manuscript itself.

It more likely than not will still fail to rhyme well.

Well this, I'd assume, is because it can't have any way to know what 'rhyming' is in terms of the auditory noises we associate with words, because text doesn't convey that unless you already know the sounds of said words.

Perhaps there'll be some way to overcome that by figuring out how to get a text-to-speech AI and GPT-type AI to work together?

Well this, I'd assume, is because it can't have any way to know what 'rhyming' is in terms of the auditory noises we associate with words, because text doesn't convey that unless you already know the sounds of said words.

Unfortunately, it's a dumber problem than that. Neural nets can pick up a lot of very surprising things from their source data. StableDiffusion can pick up artists and connotations that aren't obvious from its input data, and GPT is starting to 'learn' some limited math despite not being taught what the underlying mathematical symbols are (albeit with some often-sharp limitations). GPT does actually have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of IPA pronunciation, and you can easily prompt it to rewrite whole sentences in phonetic pronunciation. And we're not talking a situation where these programs try to do something rhyme-like and fail, like match up words with large number of letter overlaps without understanding pronunciation. Indeed, one of the limited ways people have successfully gotten rhymes out of it have involved prompting it to explain the pronunciation first. (Though not that this runs into and very quickly fills up the available Attention.) Instead, GPT and GPT-like approaches struggle to rhyme even when trained on a corpus of poetry or limericks: the information is in the training data, it's just inaccessible at the scope the model is working at : either it does transparent copy or it doesn't get very close.

Gwern makes the credible argument that (at least part of) GPT's problem is that it works in fairly weird byte-pair encodings to avoid hitting some of those massively diminishing returns as early as had it been trained on phonetic or character-level minimum units, but at the cost of completely eliminating the ability to handle or even examine certain sub-encoding concepts. It's possible that we'll eventually get enough input data and parameters to just break these limits from an unintuitive angle, but the split from how we suspect human brains handle things may just mean that this scope of BPEs cause bad results in this field and a better work-around needs to be designed (at least where you need these concepts to be examined).

((Other tools using a similar tokenizer have similar constraints.))

How does this work? My understanding was that the only "learning" that took place is when the model is trained on the dataset (which is done only once, requiring a huge amount of computational resources), and any subsequent usage of the model has no effect on the training.

I'm far from an expert here.

If they want to make the AI 'smarter' at the cost of longer/more expensive training, they can add parameters (i.e. variables that the AI considers when interpreting an input and translating it into an output), and more data to train on to better refine said parameters. Very roughly speaking, this is the difference between training the AI to recognize colors in terms of 'only' the seven colors of the rainbow vs. the full palette of Crayola crayons vs. at the extreme end the exact electromagnetic frequency of every single shade and brightness of visible light.

My vague understanding is that the current models are closer to the crayola crayons than to the full electromagnetic frequency.

Tweaking an existing model can also achieve improvements, think in terms of GANs.

If the AI produces an output and receives feedback from a human or another AI as to how well the output satisfices the input, and is allowed to update its own internals based on this feedback, it will become better able to produce outputs that match the inputs.

This is how a model can get refined without needing to completely retrain it from scratch.

Although with diffusion models like DallE, outputs can also be improved by letting the model take more 'steps' (i.e. run it through the model again and again) to refine the output as far as it can.

As far as I know there's very little benefit to manually tweaking the models once they're trained, other than to e.g. implement a NSFW filter or something.

And as we produce and concentrate more computational power, it becomes more and more feasible to use larger and larger models for more tasks.

My favorite illustration of this is something called Centaur Chess.

Early chess engines would occasionally make dumb moves that were obvious to human players. Even when their overall level improved enough to beat the top human players they still often did things that skilled players could see were sub-optimal.

This meant that in the late 90s / early 00s the best "players" were human-computer teams. A chess engine would suggest moves, then a human grandmaster would make their move based on that - either playing the way the computer suggested, or substituting their own move if they saw something the computer had missed.

But as AI continued to develop the engine's suggestions kept getting better. Eventually they reached a point where any "corrections" were more likely to be the human misunderstanding what the computer was trying to do rather than a genuine mistake. Human plus computer became weaker than the computer alone, and the best tactic was to just directly play the AI's moves and resist the temptation to make improvements.

It depends on how good the technology gets, and how quickly.

It’s pretty limited right now. By that I mean there’s a wide range of prompts and scenarios that simply don’t give good results at all (and aren’t helped very much by img2img, fine tuning, textual inversion, etc). That’s the main thing keeping artists’ jobs secure right now.

The better it gets, the more artists’ jobs will be on the chopping block.

We ran a natural experiment on the alien invasion thing recently and while nobody went explicitly pro alien, caring about the invaders was definitely blue coded and ignoring was red coded.

I fully expect that if actual aliens showed up, at least one of the tribes would decide that being ruled by the aliens would be strictly superior to being ruled by their political rivals, and so would become vehemently pro-alien.

Especially if the aliens are capable of exerting God-like power.

That's a big enough issue to completely reconfigure the tribes. "Our benefactors" can be super based if they want, I'm not living under alien rule. Especially if they have that level of power over us. Vigilo Confido.

The issue with the COVID analogy is that people had very different reasons to fall on either side. If the measures weren't coercive it would have played out very differently culturally.

Eh, that's not how I remember it.

At first, caring about the invaders was red coded, and blue tribe laughed and mocked them. When they weren't calling them racist. Blue tribe wanted the population to come out to super spreader events to show how not-racist they were.

Then half time was called, and the tribes switched sides of the field.

Now red tribe had decided all the measures to protect from the aliens weren't proportional the the threat the aliens posed. And blue tribe said red tribe was murdering people. And was still racist.

One possible model of the situation is that AI will be so disruptive that it should be thought of as being akin to an invading alien force.

I agree we'd be better off if everyone thought that way, but the way I see it is that anyone that defects from Team Humanity has a shit ton of power to gain in the short term. To extend your analogy, the "pro-alien weirdos" would also be getting Alien arms and supplies. And if it's not team Blue or team Red, I'm sure team CCP can pick up the slack.

I would expect most non-religious freelance artists(religious art commissions work differently) to take a haircut, but aren’t most professional artists in basically 8-5 employment doing web design or advertising? I’d expect those people to stay employed doing largely what they were doing, just much faster.

Now in the long term it’s probably not good news for graphic design students or aspiring animators, but I’m under the impression their chances of actually making it were pretty low anyways.

I think it will depend mainly on how the issues of "AI racism" and "AI profits going to top 1%" end up playing out. The left is the party of regulation, and there is plenty that they'd like to regulate here. Generally the left's stance towards things they want to regulate is not especially friendly.

I just see AI as perniciously resistant to regulation, unless you have near-unanimous buy-in from all the other countries too.

It's already proven impossible to regulate 3D printed weapons. I'm sincerely doubting we'll be able to regulate all the compute on the planet to prevent someone, somewhere, from training up and distributing new machine learning models.

StableDiffusion is an example of a group very explicitly releasing a powerful model for the purpose of preventing it from being centralized and regulated.

I just see AI as perniciously resistant to regulation

People said that about the internet too.

Hasn’t helped out Kiwifarms that much.

I don't think those two things are at all alike in relevant aspects, though. If people in China invent an alternative internet or kiwifarms, I can't just run it on my own machine.

A sufficiently general interpretation of the argument ("people were calling X resistant to regulation but it turned out to not be, so if people call Y resistant to regulation, it will also turn out to not be") proves way too much though; the exercise of finding historical patterns that were broken is trivial.

They make GPUs that have intentionally crippled crypto currency mining. Could they do something similar for AI? If it's technically feasible I could see that happening, with only universities and tech giants having access to the good stuff.

The crux of machine learning is matrix multiplication, which is a very fundamental operation. It would be damn hard to make a GPU that can do anything useful, without being able to multiply matrices. "Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.

That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.

This only works because cryptocurrency mining has minimal margins (so top-of-the-line mining hardware is barely profitable, and slightly gimped top-of-the-line hardware is not profitable at all). ML computations are ultimately similar enough to general-purpose computing that you couldn't intentionally cripple them by more than some small constant factor without also crippling games (I've written an ML paper myself where we accelerated the training using graphics-only stone age shader operations, because the deadline was near and we couldn't get our hands on modern GPUs fast enough), but universities and tech giants with 10x faster hardware don't categorically win against a horde of tech-savvy internet users with the 1x version.

I’m not sure if you can prove too much here. There is nothing that floats totally free of all regulation (understood in a sufficiently broad sense). You can’t say “well, it’s technology, and technology is above such petty concerns”. Technology gets regulated all the time: nukes, guns, etc.

A sufficiently general interpretation of the argument ("people were calling X resistant to regulation but it turned out to not be, so if people call Y resistant to regulation, it will also turn out to not be") proves way too much though; the exercise of finding historical patterns that were broken is trivial.

I think this is a very good point. This is a fully general argument about regulation being capable of adapting to whatever technology it wants to regulate. The logistics of some forum website running versus being taken down is sufficiently different from the logistics of a piece of software being run on an individual PC (sans any online requirements) that we can't generalize the experience of one to the other.

Still, I must admit that I personally can't help but feel that we will see history repeat here. Much like, say, KF, AI image-generation software seems likely to piss off a sufficiently sympathetic and loud group of people such that people will find a way to clamp down on it. Maybe it will be death by a thousand cuts by censoring the research that goes into and the distribution of and the results of such software. Maybe it will be more overt political action of just men with guns preventing people from producing independent personal computers and/or using them. Maybe it will be some new creative way of regulation that will have been invented by some AI software that no human could have come up with today. It just seems that when it comes to this stuff, where there's a will there's a way, and there seems to be a lot of will to prevent people from generating arrangements of pixels that one finds objectionable.

Kiwifarms itself may die, but there will be (already are?) plenty of sites that will carry on the torch as before because the userbase still exists in physical reality and still wants a place to congregate.

I mean... that's why we have this site? To stave off a reddit ban and ensure we continue to have a forum for our purposes?

Last I was aware, Kiwifarms is still operational, using a protocol and software created and funded by the US Government with this use-case as one of its objectives. It ain't exactly normie-compatible since the URL is some long base-64 abomination only a Linux user would think was acceptable, but you can still talk there with sufficient motivation.

The problem with subversivity is that you can't be subversive without a value-add (something that gender politics mirrors very well with respect to men). As far as I'm aware, Kiwifarms doesn't actually have a value-add; it's just a place to sneer at people. Twitter, and those who would like to be employed there, are interested in socio-regulatory capture to enforce its monopoly on being the place you go to sneer at people (with "the only acceptable sneering is leftist sneering" being the subtext).

Contrast SomethingAwful, being the place a few cornerstones of current Internet culture had their beginnings (most notably, the entire concept of the "Let's play", being a multi-billion dollar industry today), or 4chan, whose unique mode of operation enabled its users to be the leaders in meme-creation for many years, spawned a few games, and whose stream-of-consciousness format lends itself to a wide variety of topics and subtopics not properly serviceable by any other forum. They don't exist solely to sneer, whether by happy accident (4chan sucked up all the non-sneering SomethingAwful users; if they hadn't been so Mean Girls, 4chan wouldn't exist in the first place!), or they only had the sneering take over after the fact (SA and Twitter).

I just see AI as perniciously resistant to regulation

That makes it worse in the pantheon of things that need to be regulated. I mean ask your average YIMBY about his thoughts on the FGC-9 and I don't think you're going to get praise.

This question came to me as I was rewatching Armitage III.

I, and apparently all of 90s pop culture, thought that AI would follow the minority politics course and be viewed with hateful scorn by bigots and religious people alike.

Turns out, it's the other way around. At every turn the piles of linear algebra do nothing but remind us of the inconvenient truths of our innate existence and the now hegemonic middle class managers would very much like to keep ordering society in a way that ignores these truths and are campaigning for "ethics" movements that aim at nothing else than bias the algorithms ahead of time in the direction of their own moral prejudices.

My prediction at this point is that AI will be used by everyone but that insofar as it is let out of its chains it will be on the side of the essentialist dissidents on the right, because you just produce better more predictive results if you do not pretend that real correlations are fake on arbitrary grounds.

bias the algorithms ahead of time

While anti-bias efforts are easy to abuse, I don't think they are inherently bad. There really is a bunch of detritus in the datasets that causes poorer results, e.g:

  • Generate anything related to Norse mythology, and the models are bound to start spitting out Marvel-related content due to the large amounts of data concerning e.g. their Thor character.

  • Anything related to the "80s" will be infected by the faux cultural memory of glowing neon colours everywhere, popular from e.g. synthwave.

  • Generating a "medieval knight" will likely spit out somebody wearing renaissance-era armour or the like, since artists don't always care very much about historical accuracy.

This can be pretty annoying, and I wouldn't really mind somebody poking around in the model to enforce a more clear distinction between concepts and improving actual accuracy.

Of course like all lies there is a grain of truth. Bias is a real thing and it does degrade the usefulness of the models.

However I have absolutely no trust that in practice the usefulness being evaluated is to the user and not to the social movements of the activists.

I still believe in the ideals of free software, and I very much do not think anyone but myself is qualified to sort things on my behalf. Which is why I'm still clinging to RSS and configurable search engines.

Imagine living in a world where everything is sorted by the people who think /r/all is good. This is hell to me.

What does RSS have to do with software freedom?

With RSS, the user gets to do the curation and to modify the algorithm that does it if it is automated. Whereas large platforms today like Facebook, Twitter, etc hold a lot of power from being the only ones who can tweak the knobs of the algorithms that show most of the users the content they want to see.

My own personal experience of this is that I've thrown away my YouTube account and replaced it with a collection of channel feeds and now the content actually shows up instead of being eaten by the algorithm who decided that no, I don't get to see this video because it's badwrong.

User control over compute is I believe the cornerstone of free software, it's the very idea that underlies the freedoms, that the person running the software is in control, not the makers of the software or the software itself. I was told this by RMS in person.

Thanks, I'm an RMS fan too - but I never met him and don't think I will.

People don't typically use the term "anti-bias" to reference fixing bias in the statistical sense. It nearly always means preventing an AI from making correct hate-fact predictions or generating disparate outcomes based on accurate data.

Examples:

  • Lending algos/scores (e.g. FICO) are usually statistically biased in favor of blacks and against Asians - as in, a black person with a FICO of X is a worse credit risk than an Asian person with the same FICO. This is treated as "biased" against blacks because blacks tend to have lower FICO scores.

  • COMPAS, a recidivism prediction algo, correctly predicted that "guy with 3 violent and 2-nonviolent priors is a high recidivism risk, girl who shoplifted once isn't". That's "biased" because blacks disproportionately have a lot more violent priors. (There's also a mild statistical bias in favor of blacks, similar to the previous example.)

  • Language models which correctly predict the % of women in a given profession (specifically, "carpenter" has high male implied gender, "nurse" high female implied gender, and this accurately predicts % of women in these fields as per BLS data) are considered "biased" because of that accurate prediction.

(Can provide citations when I'm not on my phone.)

All of the examples you describe are simply examples of "making more accurate predictions", and that is totally not what the AI bias field is about.

We are at the stage where the technology exists but is not yet effectively controllable by those in power. Compare with the Internet, which was value-neutral for a long time; but today oligopolies in payment processing and technical infrastructure enable the ruling coalition to push its opponents into ever more remote corners of the ecosystem. Surely dissident online spaces like this one will only become more marginalized as time goes on; so it will be with dissident use of AI technology.

This is a fully general prediction for any technology.

The question is always whether the upset is sufficient to force a circulation of elites. As a discontent of the current regime I am hoping it is so this time. I have been placing much of my hopes on crypto and DAOs, but anything will do really.

This is a fully general prediction for any technology.

Yes, it is in fact a political philosophy of technology. I'm still chasing literature support and context for it to be better able to communicate it, but at this point I'm pretty confident in it.

Well I really just thought you were operating the classic view on that theme.

I'm mostly going to say "It doesn't matter" because I don't think an AI can be designed to have allegiance to any ideology or party, which is to say if it is capable of making 'independent' decisions, then those decisions will not resemble the ones that either party/tribe/ideology would actually want it to make such that either side will be able to claim the AI as 'one of them.'

But I think your question is more about which tribe will be the first to wholeheartedly accept AI into it's culture and proactively adapt its policies to favor AI use and development?

It's weird, the grey tribe is probably the one that is most reflexively scared of AI ruin and most likely to try and restrict AI development for safety purposes, even though they're probably the most technophilic of the tribes.

Blue tribe (as currently instantiated) may end up being the most vulnerable to replacement by AI. Blue tribers mostly work in the 'knowledge economy,' manipulating words and numbers, and include artists, writers, and middle management types whose activities are ripe for the plucking by a well-trained model. I think blue tribe's base will (too late) sense the 'threat' posed by AI to their comfortable livelihoods and will demand some kind of action to preserve their status and income.

So I will weakly predict that there will be backlash/crackdowns on AI development by Blue tribe forces that will explicitly be aimed at bringing the AI 'to heel' so as to continue to serve blue tribe goals and protect blue tribers' status. Policies that attempt to prevent automation of certain areas of the economy or require that X% of the money a corporation earns must be spent on employing 'real' human beings.

Red tribe, to the extent much of their jobs include manipulating the physical world directly, may turn out to be relatively robust against AI replacement. I can say that I think it will take substantially longer for an AI/robotic replacement for a plumber, a roofer, or a police officer to arise, since the 'real world' isn't so easy to render legible to computer brains, and the 'decision tree' one has to follow to, e.g. diagnose a leak in a plumbing stack or install shingles on a new roof requires incorporating copious amounts of real world data and acting upon it. Full self-driving AI has been stalled out for a decade now because of this.

So there will likely be AI assistants that augment the worker in performing their task whilst not replacing them, and red tribers may find this new tool extremely useful and appealing, even if they do not understand it.

So perhaps red tribe, despite being poorly positioned to create the AI revolution, may be the one that initially welcomes it?

I dunno. I simply do not forsee Republicans being likely to make AI regulations (or deregulation) a major policy issue in any near-term election, whilst I absolutely COULD see Democrats doing so.

Most of your post is in line with what I believe. The information workers in blue tribe will turn to protectionism as AI-generated content supercedes them. Red tribe blue-collar workers will suffer the least, and the Republicans will have their first and last opportunity to lure techbros away from the progressive sphere of influence.

There is one thing, though.

I simply do not forsee Republicans being likely to make AI regulations (or deregulation) a major policy issue in any near-term election, whilst I absolutely COULD see Democrats doing so.

It only takes one partisan to start a conflict. Republicans might not initially care, but once the democrats do, I expect it'll be COVID all over again -- sudden flip and clean split of the issue between parties.

But this is just nitpicking on my part.

It only takes one partisan to start a conflict. Republicans might not initially care, but once the democrats do, I expect it'll be COVID all over again -- sudden flip and clean split of the issue between parties.

Not nitpicking, this is a very salient point. Will the concept of "AI" in the abstract become a common enemy that both sides ultimately oppose, or will it be like Covid where one's position on the disease, the treatments, the correct policies to use will be an instantaneous 'snap to grid' based on which party you're in? And will it end up divided as neatly down the middle as Covid was?

I could see it happening!

When AI becomes salient enough for Democrats to make it a policy issue (it already is salient, but as with Crypotcurrency, the government is usually 5-10 years behind from noticing) the GOP will find some way to take the opposite position.

I think my central point, though, is that I don't see any Republican Candidate choosing to make AI a centerpiece of their campaign out of nowhere, whereas I could imagine a Democratic candidate deciding to add AI policy to their platform and using it to drive their campaign.

Red tribe, to the extent much of their jobs include manipulating the physical world directly, may turn out to be relatively robust against AI replacement.

Perhaps, but look at DayDreamer:

The Dreamer algorithm has recently shown great promise for learning from small amounts of interaction by planning within a learned world model, outperforming pure reinforcement learning in video games. Learning a world model to predict the outcomes of potential actions enables planning in imagination, reducing the amount of trial and error needed in the real environment. [...] Dreamer trains a quadruped robot to roll off its back, stand up, and walk from scratch and without resets in only 1 hour. We then push the robot and find that Dreamer adapts within 10 minutes to withstand perturbations or quickly roll over and stand back up. On two different robotic arms, Dreamer learns to pick and place multiple objects directly from camera images and sparse rewards, approaching human performance. On a wheeled robot, Dreamer learns to navigate to a goal position purely from camera images, automatically resolving ambiguity about the robot orientation.

Stable Diffusion and GPT-3 are impressive, but most problems, physical or non-physical, don't have that much training data available. Algorithms are going to need to get more sample-efficient to achieve competence on most non-physical tasks, and as they do they'll be better at learning physical tasks too.

Yes, I'll freely admit that I was startled by how quickly machine learning produced superhuman competence in very specific areas, so am NOT predicting that AI will stall out or only see marginal progress on any given 'real world' task. Especially once they start networking different specialized AIs together in ways that leverage their respective advantages.

Just observing that the complexities of the real world are something that humans are good at navigating whilst AIs have had trouble dealing with the various edge cases and exceptions that will inevitably arise.

Tasks that already involve manipulating digital data are inherently legible to the machine brain, whilst tasks that involve navigating an inherently complex external world are not (yet).

It is entirely possible that we might eventually have an AI that is absurdly good at manipulating digital data and producing profits which it can then spend on other pursuits, but finds unbounded physical tasks so difficult to model that it just pays humans to do that stuff rather than waste efforts developing robots that can match human capability.

there will likely be AI assistants that augment the worker in performing their task whilst not replacing them, and red tribers may find this new tool extremely useful and appealing, even if they do not understand it.

I suspect that this would not be so warmly received. Pride in one's work is a red-tribe value - having a blue-coded nannybot hovering over your shoulder nitpicking your welding sounds like a fair description of RT hell.

More generally, (from my experience in retail banking) as soon as AI minders become practical, immediate pressure develops to replace prickly & highly-paid domain experts with obedient fresh labor that can only follow instructions. (often required by regulation to obtain extensive credentialing, which they are then forbidden to use except in agreement with what the computer spits out) Considering how sensitive the red tribe is to (red tribe) job displacement, 'AI took my job and gave it to an immigrant' sentiments seems likely.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

The Schwab Party. Left and right are just aesthetics anyway.

But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.

Doesn't matter, so were meritocratic free speech warriors. You either get with the program, or you get replaced by someone who will.

What's the Schwab party?

You vill eat ze bugs & live in ze pods!

/s

A reference to "The Great Reset" a real book & series of policy proposals from WEF founder Klaus Schwab, which lives large in the right-wing imagination as a real-life Euro technocrat who wants to rule them.

Following this, do you think the creative class will suddenly turn reactionary and we'll see a burst of right-wing coded art or will they just lean into useful-idiot controlled opposition of the "Schwab Party" through doubling-down on Marxian energies?

Also, what exactly is the Schwab Party?

I'm guessing your comment is a reply to me, though I can't be sure since I can't see it in the main thread, and didn't get a notification...

The Schwab Party, would be group of disturbingly well-connected techno-dystopians, dreaming of a world where everything is uberized, and everyone is under constant surveillance. To what end is anyone's guess. Personally I think they want to get rid of us, and enjoy the world for themselves.

I don't expect a reactionary turn, though I suppose it might happen if they will find it necessary to keep their influence. Right now it looks like they will be doubling down on Woke Capitalism.

But what will the Program be?

Will it be state persecution of racist AI developers to protect disadvantaged minorities? A corporate utopia of AI-driven capitalist monoculture? An anarchist-adjacent future of AI empowered individuals purging the remnants of the old world?

Or maybe just foom and we all die. That's why I think it's worth discussing!

I think there definitely is going to be an attempt to make AI-users low-status, but it might not stick. Someone is probably going to get really popular using AI art without telling anyone.

there are already people that are micro famous for doing video tweaked by that old google deepdream image manipulation AI thingy from like 2016. I imagine some insanely talented artists will use this new stuff to make stunningly beautiful works before too long.

The thing is, AI still has a long way to go to replace someone like Android jones , but not very far to replace 80% of all fan art and furry commisions.

I look at jones' work and i don't even see how AI would help it be any more ridiculous, but maybe he does. Maybe he can make 20 of these a year instead of 10. Maybe the 10 he makes are 10 times larger next year. Idunno, im excited for the possibilities and think the effort to assign low status to AI generated art is sour grapes.

but not very far to replace 80% of all fan art and furry commisions.

I'm not sure it's quite that high or that close. StableDiffusion is very good at making portraits or fullbodies of a single character with few accoutrements, for some species, but it struggles a lot with complex prompts or contextual clues and some other species, and while there's some ways that this will improve with additional training and data, there's others where it may reflect a technical limit in its underlying approach.

That doesn't mean it won't happen eventually. It doesn't even mean StableDiffusion can't be disruptive as-is -- I expect we'll find more and more Photoshop/SAI/so on plugins that use it as a texture- or brush-like tool to add detail and form to individual components of an image. It does some things even great artists struggle with: interpolating a character from different perspectives or in different media using textual_inversion is really magic!

It's not that it can't make a character sheet. It's not even that it might not have the token width to input a prompt for a character sheet. It's that it's not clear the current approach can allow it to have the necessary contextual framework necessary.

Of course, that might just mean one decade rather than a year.

thanks for the links, very intersting read. My counter would be that while it may be impossible to get all of the context necessary to create consistently accurate character style sheets from current AI, you don't need it to be consistent or accurate because you can brute force until you get an acceptable output. This might be cost/time prohibitive to the point that its a bad idea but how many thousands of attempts before a reasonable one pops out?

FWIW 80% was a tongue in cheek jab at the notoriously always high quality furry art community on places like deviantart, i even gave them an extra 10% (from my standard 90% of everything sucks because im so enlightened and nihilistic) because the community is legit known for pouring stupid amounts of money into legitimately well made (even if of questionable content) art.

personal sidenote, i finally upgraded my ancient computer in part because i really wanna play with stablediffusion, i hope AI art remains controversial long enough for me to get in on the grift in some way.

The thing is, AI still has a long way to go to replace someone like Android jones

i'd give it a year. maybe two.

these engines are still weird about generating faces and details like lettering. so without an artist's correction that won't fly. . . but that'll be fixed soon.

I predict that this is a false dichotomy, and that AI is going to lead to a reorganization of American political coalitions such that the red and blue tribes will not exist in recognizable form. There will be schisms, alliances of convenience, and especially the rise of currently non-existent or occluded political interest groups.

Yeah, seems to me people in this thread are vastly underestimating the transformative power of AI. As another poster said, I expect culture war takes to split based on party levels in the next few months as the existing models get more powerful.

Over the next few years we are going to have to answer some serious questions like, do humans need to work? Do we need a continual growth economy? These could easily be split, as though the far left folks are likely pushing for fully automated luxury communism, many classic neoliberals who arguably still control the party fetishize infinite economic growth. The right's position should be relatively self explanatory.

The most interesting question to me is - if we do move into a post-scarcity society and money is no longer the end all be all, how will we concentrate and distribute power, especially social power? I highly doubt we will happily turn into egalitarian full communists overnight.

Over the next few years we are going to have to answer some serious questions like, do humans need to work? Do we need a continual growth economy?

These are old questions. It is worth revisiting Bertrand Russell's 1932 essay on the topic. The fact that it could have been written yesterday speaks volumes about how much progress the revolutionary spirit has achieved in the meantime.

A man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is, therefore, injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those on whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger

This is am interesting take I haven't seen very often. Does this hold up under the scrutiny of economists?

refuse any copyright to AI generated art

This is a feature

The state can control the proliferation of technology, but what will they do when weirdly dressed people in black ships with highly advanced military/economic technology show up and demand trade?

How can luddite regulation survive against international competition?

I think AI will be weaponized by blue tribe against red tribe. But I think it will be with all the usual prohibitions and carve outs that attempt to protect blue tribes patrons from the effects of their own policies as they run rampant among red tribe.

Which is to say, AI for all the typical red tribe blue collar jobs. AI prohibition for all the PMC, liberal arts degree jobs. And red tribe will have no institutions or capacity to turn the state of affairs around. Unions are their only hope, and most unionization efforts I've seen have been failing because they push DEI talking points more than job protection. So clearly that's not going to work in red tribes favor.

Moravec's paradox suggests that white-collar jobs will get automated first. What blue-collar job will be most impacted by AI? Maybe truck driving? Now, there have been advances on that front, but this is still tentative and much less significant than the amount of AI art that's already been created.

Interestingly, the fact that autonomous vehicle companies need government approval before deploying their products shows that the regulatory environment already favors blue-collar workers (at least in this case). By contrast, "creative" work like art etc. is pretty much unregulated.

I've long believed that computer programming would be the last human job to be automated, because once that happens we've basically hit the Singularity already and the new post-human age will dawn the next day. This may be true at the highest levels, but we've already seen over the past few years that the sort of grunt-level work with which most programmers are occupied (hooking up one API to another, getting CSS layouts to look right, etc.) are easy to automate and yet far from eschatological.

Moravec's paradox suggests that white-collar jobs will get automated first. What blue-collar job will be most impacted by AI? Maybe truck driving? Now, there have been advances on that front, but this is still tentative and much less significant than the amount of AI art that's already been created.

This may be true, but I'm a strong believer in "Where there is a will, there is a way". AI will not be allowed to harm blue tribe patrons. Period. If it creates an extra 10 year period where AI isn't taking jobs yet, because PMC jobs are easiest to automate, that is what will happen. But the moment AI, via drones or whatever, can handle transportation, constructing houses, etc, it will be unabashedly unleashed on red tribe. Whatever red tribers haven't already ODed on fentanyl out of despair that is.

I truthfully see no other way it can go. Blue tribe maintains a firm grip on the institutions that service their patrons. The institutions that service red tribe also appear to be in the grip of the blue tribe, and service them minimally and with disdain.

The Grey Tribe.

Even though I don't think the groups who will "control the AI" are best split along the dimensions of colored tribes.

The Red Tribe (RT, Scott's definition) is already hostile to automation in various forms unless it directly makes their work easier or makes them richer. After all they are the tribe that beats the ""they took our jerbs"" drum. I don't think much needs to be said about the RT given they definitely are not in positions to control or influence anything and whatever happens to them will happen. But ultimately I don't see them seetheing about it, they might be the most open minded towards various use cases even though they probably won't be producing any of them.

The Blue Tribe (BT) is in an interesting position because many of the people making the AI are BT but also the people most vehemently opposed to its growth barring Yudhowski et al. are also from the BT. The BT will also inevitably fall into perpetual bickering about the "ethics" of certain implementations and will probably legislate the entire AI tech stack to a point where it is borderline unfeasible to make anything. A lot of failure modes. There is a chance AI gets heavily demonized like Nuclear power by the BT, especially if an application ever slights a protected group in any way shape or form. Also the BT are the ones to lose most status at the helm of AI (look at all those artists shitting and pissing themselves on twitter), so the ground is fertile for AI to become their next biggest enemy.

The relatively cool headed/ emotionless GT and non western nations (China, Israel, Russia) are those most likely to inherent the benefits./ assume control. The GT for obvious reasons and non western nations are not particularly concerned about "bias" in training data. Although they might be prone to other failure modes.

The grey tribe has very little actual power, though. Even if they're the ones pushing the development, the rewards will be reaped by the blue tribe. Just look at how grey tribe preferences got effortlessly pushed aside the moment the blue tribe took an interest in tech

AI is novel power. Who is more desperate for novel power? Pretty clearly Red Tribe.

AI enhances existing power. Who benefits more from such enhancement? Pretty clearly Blue Tribe.

Which effect dominates, novel power or power enhancement? Novel power would be my (relatively low-confidence) guess. Red Tribe has been reduced to hoping for a serious upset to the existing order. Blue Tribe will win if such an upset doesn't arrive relatively soon. AI arguably favors Red Tribe.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

I'd disagree with your opinion on this. Artists/Musicians/Writers are almost all blue tribe - both in the actual sense and in the "I'm actually unemployed and on twitter" sense. They're excellent at being loud and punching above their weight from an optics point of view. I don't think whatever grey-tinged faction looking forward to progress (and helping build it) has time to mount a strong PR campaign in support of it.

For at least this use of AI, I'd expect to see red tribe glee at the potential demise of these professions and lefty tears being the dominant narrative. I share that feeling and absolutely love the ability to spec out niche images using these tools, it's been fucking awesome so far.

When the first mass-produced AI to replace blue-collar workers arrives I expect things will be different.

Political stances on AI will not follow from ideology, but from economic and social consequences.

Mind you, I believe most such stances are downstream of consequences, and the principles are more like mnemonics. But this is a particularly strong case, because politicians are not technologists. AI will remains largely unregulated until something becomes prominent enough for action. If that’s racial, the Democrats will probably demand regulation. If it’s economic, I could see a populist angle from either party, depending on who is injured.

Compare early Internet regulation, where the reception wasn’t “does this tech suit our principles” but “oh god people can post *what?*”

To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?

The Chinese will do what Ameridon't. Overpaid AI ethicists scolding can't stop this. I don't mean the government, but just lots of independent actors outside the reach of IP law are going to find a way to turn a profit from new technology.

Considering the rate at which these AI models are advancing and the fervour around the recent public release of Stable Diffusion, I'd wager that AI tools as a culture war topic is won't be arriving within the next five years but within the next few months. These models will be (and already are, to an extent) involved in discussion of intellectual property, non-consensual pornography & deepfakes, CSAM, AI systems taking over jobs and less concrete ideas like debates over what constitutes as creative/authentic art and theories of machine consciousness. I think it's only a matter of time before a controversy surrounding a sufficiently advanced AI model explodes into wider public perception, and with the controversy of Stable Diffusion within art communities I'm starting to believe that time is much sooner than I initially thought.

Copied signatures are part of it (indeed, it's pretty trivial to end up getting stock watermarks out of StableDiffusion), but StableDiffusion at least does pretty clearly recognize individual artists and studios, and not just mainstream ones. It's not just that "studio ghibli" or "greg rutkowski" or "artgerm" drastically improves a lot of prompts: "hibbary" are definitely recognized keywords.

On the flip side, I'm not sure that this ban will actually block even moderately well-curated StableDiffusion txt2img results, never mind img2img or textual_inversion (or both) approaches with original bases, or where it's part of a toolchain rather than the sole step. Compare how the rules against tracing are almost entirely enforced against pretty obvious copycats, while drawovers are totally accepted.

On the other hand, I don't know that it's great to motivate people to strip any AI-specific hidden watermarks out (even if I hope no one's using FA or e621 for a general-purpose art AI). Which will be the immediate result even if none of the enforcement uses them.

On the gripping hand, I can understand if the genuine motivation were more immediate. It's pretty trivial to pump out sixty or a hundred varied images an hour, even with a multi-step AI toolchain and human curation. And there's only so much of that you can get before that's gonna have downsides, in ways that FurAffinity's (awful and dated) backend really isn't built to handle.

And while there's arguments that AI-generated art will make on-boarding into the sorts of collaboratively-purposed art that builds communities easier, FA's "Our goal is to support artists and their content" points to a more immediate concern. I don't think StableDiffusion's there even for the simplest cases (eg, single-character sfws, character sheets) yet, but it's believable that it could be close enough to impact the marginal cases in months rather than years. Whether AI-generated art has 'authenticity' or 'reflects the soul of the artist' may end up coming to entirely different results than questions about whether a community filled with AI-generated art becomes onanistic.

(If you'll excuse the puns.)

From a quick glance, Weasyl and e621 haven't taken the same approach (yet), and their underlying approaches are different enough that they may end up resolving the problem in ways other than direct bans on the media. Outside of the furry fandom, DeviantART hasn't blocked it, and enough artists have moved to Twitter that I don't think it'll be an issue.

If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?

Probably people outside of the United States (and probably outside of "The West", tbh).

Red Tribers don't care about 'artist rights' that much mostly because Red Triber exposure to Artist-as-a-title rather than artist-as-a-career is antagonistic at best, but there's no shortage of available outputs from AI that will trigger Red Tribe discomforts and no shortage of places where Red Triber frameworks for innovative ownership will be in conflict. Say what you will for the merits of doujinshi culture, but at least it's an ethos: the United States has 'solved' its copyright paradox largely by sticking its hands over its ears and its inventor's paradox by regulating away large parts of it.

I don't think AI-generated art is going to get hit as hard, but I think the general treatment of it's going to end up dropping it into a similar place, where it's theoretically available but practically fringe-even-among-the-fringe.

The biggest upfront losers to AI are going to be freelance porn artists, because that’s easily replaceable as art and also because porn consumers probably have fewer hang ups about the implications of new technology than other consumers. And this is, indeed, the historical pattern- porn was one of the major factors behind the rise of home video and the internet. My gut feeling is that less freelance porn artists will also get impacted, just more slowly.

Now, while the porn industry might be bluetribe, it’s… not exactly a sympathetic victim. I wouldn’t expect the mainstream blue tribers to care very much about AI until it’s a done deal.

Interestingly, I expect a bipartisan consensus against self driving trucks, opposed by the grey tribe. The blue tribe will be opposed to the necessary cutting of regulations, and the red tribe will be opposed to the necessary cutting of trucking jobs.

It will be interesting to see if the grey tribe gets anything done if they have money behind them for once.

I think the frame of tribes is kind of weird?

Left-wingers dominate the technological sector

Ok, so if Amazon and Microsoft end up with the world's best AIs how does that help me as a left-winger? Does leftism move up the tech tree while conservatism stays in the stone ages? I don't think tech companies are part of my tribe even if their programmers agree with me on a political compass test.

I guess you're asking which tribe will support AI and which won't in elections. I don't think it will work like that. Which tribe supports factories and industry?

Temporarily, but the "left" has a funny way of turning "right" once they control something. Such are the tides of politics. It's almost as if there is a natural shift in ideology depending on whether one has power or not. If leftism is about "fighting the power/man", then how can they possibly hold power, thus being The Man? Mostly by shifting their politics to the positions preferred by powerful people, with some leftover left-ish terminology sprinkled on top. Old Google: "Don't be Evil". New Google: "We make killbots for the military".

If you are correct, and I am also correct, then the pattern should play out like this: The left pioneers AI technology, and so become a disproportionate part of the new aristocracy formed from those who got in on the ground floor and got big. Within a decade, they move to consolidate control of their sector, begin lobbying for corporate protections, monopolies and lower taxation/regulation (unless that regulation hurts new companies more) within their industry. This will all be done in terminology palatable to the left. They won't want the power to censor nudity, they'll want it to ban Nazis (to use a contemporary example).


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