Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Not a sneer, but something that'll inspire plenty of schadenfreude:
Brian Merchant: The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground
Brian's done plenty of good sneers on AI, I'd recommend checking him out
This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. I'm not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like "using artistic works without permission of the original creators in order to create commercial content that directly competes with and destroys the market for the original work" is extremely not fair use. In fact it's kind of a prototypically unfair use.
Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like "uhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!" as though "fair use" is a magic word you say that makes the thing you're doing suddenly okay. They don't seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than "AI learns like a person!" (false) and "well google books did something that's not really the same at all that one time".
I dunno, I know that legally we don't know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers, but something about the way everyone seems to frame this as "oh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!" really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that there's a notable asymmetry here!
I think that's a great framing here.