This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.
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Notes -
@Folamh3's original comment:
To be pedantic, these are AI-modified images. Twitch thots/OF girls are posting photos of themselves for public consumption on X, and the DignifAI account is replying with an edited version of the same photo. "Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent" describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet (e.g. Now We are Homeress, Miss Teen USA, Chocolate Rain, Leave Britney Alone, Boom Goes the Dynamite, You Da Real MVP, the Trump mugshot, Yao Ming Face, Scumbag Steve). Occasionally Bob/Alice may give their blessing and say that they don't have a problem with said memes, but this is the exception rather than the rule (e.g. Kevin Durant made it quite clear that he did not appreciate people making his heartfelt expression of gratitude to his mother into a cheap joke), and generally happens months or years after people have been nonconsensually editing the original photo/video to their heart's content.
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent. But DignifAI is the opposite of that - you're editing a photo clearly intended to titillate to make it look a photo which was not intended to titillate. It's easy to understand why people might be upset that their reputation has suffered as a result of strangers erroneously believing that they are the kind of person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers - but if you are a person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers, how will a photo of you edited to look like you're dressed more modestly affect your reputation at all? Taylor Swift saying "It's disrespectful and demeaning for people to create or edit photos of me which reduce me to the status of a sex object" is a legitimate complaint; a Twitch thot saying "I don't appreciate people taking photos of me which represent me as a sex object and editing them to make me look like an average woman"? Not so much - if for no other reason than, for most of her life, the Twitch thot in question is an average woman. The titillating clothing and makeup that a Twitch thot wears when she's performing is a kind of costume, and all DignifAI is doing is showing what she (might) look like without the costume. Is it wrong to distribute a photo of Corey Taylor without his scary Slipknot mask? I don't think so.
By analogy, if Bob posts a public photo of himself wearing regular clothes, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a swastika T-shirt, that's a shitty thing to do, and obviously created for the purpose of defaming Bob. But if Bob is an outspoken neo-Nazi who posts a public photo of himself wearing a swastika T-shirt, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a plain black t-shirt - well, so what? (None of the above is to imply being a neo-Nazi is morally equivalent to being a Twitch thot or OF girl, obviously - it's just to illustrate that reputational hits aren't symmetrical as some people seem to think.)
I haven't seen any actual significant numbers of lefties complaining about DignifAI, only people on the right crowing about how it owns the libs.
Touche.
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