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Who do you think is applying non-public pressure, and how?
By definition, I don't know, and may never know, or even know what I suspect didn't happen. For some patterns I've seen elsewhere...
At the most likely and least objectionable side, I'd be very surprised if a variety of internet safety guardians have not been sending parades of horribles and warnings about how machine learning could undermine all of their good work and result in horrible abuse and probably make puppies cry, of varying levels of accuracy or honesty. Above that, slightly, I'd be only slightly surprised if congressional discussions weren't also happening in the background, starting at the 'my staff would like to hear how this works and you better have a good answer' to the 'I would invite your staff before X event occurs, and thankfully no subpoenas will be issued'.
At the intermediate, most of these ML training groups are dependent on datacenter resources and other materials which they don't actually own. This could range from 'pay us the full rates that no one pays in bulk' to 'do you want us looking at your data buckets' to completely being booted. And the datacenter resources in turn could be getting calls or letters. So on for banks, and the whole 'build your own' stack.
At the less-likely and more-objectionable end, you start to have someone in or adjacent to law enforcement (uh, including those safety guardians) sending the equivalent of 'I don't want a messy court case, and you don't want a messy court case, and your business and everyone you employed don't want a messy court case, so how about we have a meeting of minds?' Or the 'we've got a bill in planning with your businesses name on it'.
EDIT: and there's weirder stuff. SoFurry changed its policy on ageplay and adjacent written material recently, and one of the motivations involved threats related to the site owner's international business travel. Or gelbooru and google pressure.
Again, I don't know that any of this is happening, nor would there be a way to prove it isn't. So I don't really want to poke too much at it. But Defense Distributed is (and remains) instructive.
Hang on, I'm confused, haven't you officially said you're in favor of censoring problematic art that people draw? Like, several times you've brought up Problematic Furry Artists needing to be forced to stop drawing problematic things. Surely this pressure is no different than furaffinity banning things.
Again, mu?
You've talked about several artists by name. I believe zaush(?) was one, but if you really want to make me dig I can find it for you. Just thought you'd be willing to come out and say it because you were so forthright about it before.
For Adam Wan/Zaush specifically, my complaint about his content was that he'd posted stuff on a (few) sites that prohibited that content, while not tagging it with any of the many widely-recognized terms used by people who really strongly objected to seeing that content, denied it was anywhere close while being even less believable than the typical 'she's really a thousand-year-old dragon', and which he mostly got away with because of his social connections and popularity. Which, to be fair, he's since gotten a lot better about, albeit as much because no one was buying it after some tweet oopsies.
I've generally been vague on the specifics for this matter outside of PM because the specifics aren't as interesting as the more general problem of how rules squish, but I do think it a useful case because it's one most people would expect social and legal rules to be much stricter.
I recognize that tagging has some coercive nature to it, but I don't think it's on the same scale as... almost anything else, and it is a pretty important social norm for the fandom. I'll admit I'm tempted to make an unprincipled exception for the specific content for that case because I dislike it to an extent I do few if any other kinks, but it remains useful even for matters like m/m, m/f, f/f or kinks that I do like.
I'm not sure what other artists. The only other person I can remember mentioning in that sorta context is (the author) KyellGold, but then only to contrast with the largely positive coverage that 'mainstream' indie works like Blue Is The Warmest Colour (and it's a far more marginal case than that work). And... uh, I found that offputting enough to skip over Aquifiers, but I've recommended a number of KyellGold's other works.
But I may be forgetting other stuff.
At the broader object level, there probably was (and is) some underlying pressure campaign behind FurAffinity banning the stuff to start with, especially given SoFurry's recorded legal pressures and the Google pressures applied against Gelbooru (and probably e621?), and I've not posted on it where I've done so for AI art restrictions here (albeit for much more than one site) or even smaller examples like the short VioletBlue delisting. Some of the reason's the above unprincipled exception, I'll admit, but some of that's because there was not (to my knowledge) anything as glaring and public as the Eshoo letter, and some's just that FurAffinity in specific made the change predating the Culture War Roundup and either predated or was pretty early in SSC-reddit's life.
I don't think places focused on the stuff (or just widely permissive for it) should be banned, could be banned, or should suffer several coercive or economic pressures; art isn't life. I've openly praised ArchiveOfOurOwn for resisting censorship, for example. And at a pragmatic level, as much as I dislike this class of content, it does seem better that outlets exist and are well-demarcated, both for the trivial benefit of letting people not see it, and for the more serious and important goal of keeping people focused on it in a sphere that can work to protect minors from adults rather than 'protect' people from content (contrast eg Discord, where official bans also unintentionally make it hard to block predators or their potential victims, or... everything going with Twitter's old safety policies).
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