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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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NSFW AI-art project Unstable Diffusion has been axed by Kickstarter, despite already hitting their funding goal. This one isn't too suprising, as KS doesnt allow NSFW and a DIY pornomaker probably was never gonna slip by that filter even if it didn't ship with visible nipples.

Kickstarter took it a step further, however, formally amending their ToS and affirming that "Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work."

It now appears that Unstable Diffusion is being driven off Patreon too, who dont have a no-NSFW excuse. Almost certain to follow the same pattern, at this point; there are too many established artists on that platform who are willing to boycott.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targetting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

Ks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd/community

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/unstablediffusion

Current fallback:

https://equilibriumai.com/index.html

Seeing all of these progressives turn into luddites in this instance, and free speech advocates after the Musk journalist bans in another, I think it's fair to say that there are no principles. There is no political theory of friend/enemy anymore. It's a law. And anyone who pretends to, in any instance, be above that law or exist outside its scope is just, through the act, a self described moron.

Bit of a stretch to make this a target for ranting about progressive hypocrisy.

You could just as easily say

  • "Progressives are the party of labor unions, of course they'd support the interests of established creators."

  • "AI art is exactly the kind of capitalist infringement on creative spaces that inspired [insert any counterculture movement here]"

  • "The deep-seated progressive distrust of technocratic solutions has led them to insist on keeping humans in the loop."

  • Counterpart to the above, "Human involvement is a natural offshoot of the progressive desire for a commissar class."

  • Or my personal objection, "Just because they're whining on Twitter doesn't mean they were ideological progressives in the first place!"

These are interesting subjects for political analysis, and they are worthy of comparison. Each begins from a different slice of the big-tent term "progressives."

The OP elides such a step. He has implied a specific categorization, one antithetical to "luddites," and labeled it "progressives." This is assuming the conclusion. Whatever his reasons, we miss out on the interesting discussion and skip straight to the booing.

I’ll definitely agree that “twitter cancel mob goes after Stripe” has historically been very left-aligned. It’s really hard to imagine KS or Patreon adopting an explicitly conservative or reactionary stance—partly because they would certainly be faced with mass progressive outrage.

Further, anyone still using Twitter for coordination at this point is less likely to be a vocal conservative. Source, if anyone needs it. So a priori, this particular mob is probably mostly Democrats, at least.

My original objection is probably wrong; it would be better to say I don’t think these are particularly ideological at all. If they were, I’d expect to see different language, different appeals. Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity boring financial incentives. I recognize this is a weak no-true-Scotsman!

Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity.

I largely agree with you, but I think it's less horny solidarity and more recognition that sexy art sells. AI drying up the demand for erotic commissions is likely to hit the discretionary spending parts of a lot of amateur artists' budgets pretty hard, to say nothing of the income streams of third-party sites whose business model is acting as an intermediary between those artists and their clientele.

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