EldritchFeminity

@EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone

This is a remote user, information on this page may be incomplete. View at Source ↗

⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it's big with all the kids, they're calling it "Karting"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Are you a friend of Dorothy?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad Ports⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Fun fact that may or may not be true: The left side of a ship used to be called “larboard” (to go with starboard) because that’s where the larder was - where the food was stored, and this was supposedly changed to port because that’s also where the wine was stored and it was both easier to say and easier to identify as being different from starboard.

Another fun unverified nautical fact: The word shit originated as an acronym for the storage of cow manure during transport at sea - Store High In Transit. Dried cow pies apparently have…violent reactions to salt water.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumper sticker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
How long you’ve been taking hormones is the important part. How long you’ve lived as amab only really matters until a certain point, as it’s very difficult to maintain muscle mass from before you started hormones. And afab people have to build up muscle mass even when they start taking testosterone.

And yes, not every trans person is taking hormones or even will. But I have yet to hear of a single example of a trans person in regulated sports who wasn’t competing in the division of their gender while on HRT. Even the preteen kids were on puberty blockers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumper sticker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Accurate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumper sticker⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Fun fact, a recent study reported that cis women have an advantage over trans women in sports due to their higher testosterone levels allowing them to build more muscle mass.

You know, the same argument transphobes use against letting trans people be athletes because of their supposed “biological advantage.”

Which is the same one that’s been used for almost a century now to ban black women from women’s sports due to their naturally higher testosterone levels when compared to white women.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You don't need to answer this⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
As cruel as it is, I can’t help but make the joke

Thoughts and prayers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨conditional probability⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Honestly, I think you’re spot on that not everyone got the memo. It feels to me like a game of telephone where people argued against women choosing the bear with logic and statistics, and then people came along to defend the original group using post hoc logic and statistics to justify choosing the bear. And both groups completely lost the context along the way that it’s not about the statistical chance of being mauled by a bear vs a man, but about the 20% of women who will be sexually assaulted in their life and the culture that perpetuates and supports these conditions.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨conditional probability⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The entire question itself I don’t think was ever meant to hold up to any analysis. It’s more about making a statement on how threatened women feel in public. Bear attacks are rare while women are acutely aware of how dangerous being out in public feels. Roughly 20% will be sexually assaulted at least once, half of them before the age of 18, and that number jumps up to somewhere around 40% for trans women specifically, but the stats don’t account for the cultural pressure that’s exerted on every other woman outside of the victims by things like victim blaming and the way that men act in regards to women and their bodies. A simple look at current American politics is a perfect example of why women would “choose the bear.”

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the question about the walrus and the fairy that went around Tumblr earlier this year. It doesn’t matter what the stats say about the likelihood of a fairy being the one knocking at your door. More people would be surprised to find the walrus on their doorstep because at least with a fairy, you just have to accept that magic exists and not figure out how the walrus got there or learned how to knock on your door.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit morals vs Lemmy morals in the greentext community⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Seriously, I assumed it was downvoted because the hexbear and lemmygrad chuds got butthurt.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This world is cruel…⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
On Barq?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life imitates art⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
A truly visionary work, alongside the greats such as Please Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Premium Ads⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Having seen plenty of pixels in my time, I can confirm that those are German pixels.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm surprised it hasn't been taken down yet ...well maybe not that surprised⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
The moment you see people who voted for Harris assaulting third-party voters, you let me know. Some of the takes are over the top, but where they’re coming from is completely understandable. Dehumanization is an attempt to rationalize away empathy to prevent guilt and trauma from what people think is the fight to come.

The moral high road is littered with the corpses of people who tried to fight fair. In self-defense, there are 2 rules: a battle not fought is a battle won, and, if you have to hurt a man, hurt him so bad that you need never fear his vengeance.

If doxxing a couple of assholes like this is enough to intimidate the bigots who are now emboldened to attack and rape people and save even a few lives, then it’s worth it - we’ve solved things with rule number one. If it doesn’t stop them, then fyi: the back of the eye socket is thin enough to push through with your thumb and into the brain behind it. There’s no such thing as “fighting dirty” when it comes to survival. There’s no room for mercy when somebody is trying to kill you, and these people have tried before and say that they’re going to try again.

We all hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is better to be prepared and not need it than to wish you had it when the jackboots are stomping on you. And when somebody has told you who they are, you believe them. If it quacks like a Nazi, swims like a Nazi, and goose-steps like a Nazi, then it ain’t a duck.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump's sentencing was postponed to after the election to avoid any assistance of election interference. Can he be sentenced while he is President Elect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Not “tyrannic” yet, but Project 2025 is 3 months away.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump's sentencing was postponed to after the election to avoid any assistance of election interference. Can he be sentenced while he is President Elect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Flowery words coming from someone who now lives in a tyrannic monarchy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pretty sound reasoning here.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Nah, the elephant gun bullet would stop because a horse isn’t an elephant.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Add in a magic trick (experiment) that they can do themselves, and you’ve created a little baby physicist.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yep, it's me⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
It’s just Minecraft, bro. I won’t teach them about logic gates again, I swear!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bitey⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Crocodiles are also one of those rare animals that don’t “age” in the traditional sense. Once they reach adulthood, they continue to get larger and larger until they eventually starve or their organs collapse under their own body weight. They don’t lose muscle mass or bone density or any of the usual issues we attribute to getting older.

Imagine having the build of a 25 year old at 100 and being 7+ft tall. That’s how crocodiles age.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
We’re already living in a dystopia. Companies are selling your work to be used in training sets already. Every social media company that I’m aware of has already tried it at least once, and most are actively doing it. Though that’s not why we live in a dystopia, it’s just one more piece on the pile.

When I say licensing, I’m not talking about licensing fees like social media companies are already taking in, I’m talking about open source software style licensing - groups of predefined rules that artists can apply to their work that AI companies must abide by if they want to use their work. Under these licensing rules are everything from “do whatever you want with my code” to “my code can only be used to make not-for-profit software,” and all derivative works have the same license applied to them. Obviously, the closed source alternative doesn’t apply here - the d’jinn’s already out of the bottle and as you said, once your work is out there, there’s always the risk somebody is going to steal it.

I’m not against AI, I’m simply against corporations being left unregulated to do whatever the hell they want. That’s one of the reasons to make the distinction between people taking inspiration from a work and a LLM being trained off of analysing that work as part of its data set. Profit-motivation is largely antithetical to progress. Companies hate taking risks. Even at the height of corporate research spending, the so-called Blue Skies Research, the majority of research funding was done by the government. Today, medical research is done at colleges and universities on government dollars, with companies coming in afterward to patent a product out of the research when there is no longer any risk. This is how AI companies currently work. Letting people like you and me do all the work and then swooping in to take that and turn it into a multi-billion dollar profit. The work that made the COVID vaccines possible was done decades before, but no company could figure out how to make a profit off of it until COVID happened, so nothing was ever done with it.

As for walled off communities of artists, you should check out Cara, a new social media platform that’s a mix of Artstation and Instagam and 100% anti-AI. I forget the details, but AI art is banned on the site, and I believe they have Nightshade or something built in. I believe that when it was first announced, they had something like 200,000 people create accounts in the first 3 months.

People aren’t anti-AI. They’re anti late-stage capitalism. And with what little power they have, they’d rather poison the well or watch it all burn than be trampled on any further.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
His entire audience is “anti-woke” weirdo conservative chuds. I made the mistake of clicking on a video of his on YouTube talking about a trailer or something, and half the comments were people yelling about how the game was gonna suck because of women or something.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
And what free infrastructure would that be? Social media is privately run, as are websites. Art posted online largely falls under the category of advertising, as artists are advertising their services for commission purposes.

AI bros say that image generators have democratized art. Do you know what actually democratized art? The pencil. The chisel and slate. The idea that taking the effort of other people and using it for your own convenience without giving them proper credit isn’t democracy or fair use. It’s corporate middle management. People simply don’t want to put in the effort to learn a valuable skill, and they don’t want to pay for it either, but they still want the reward for said effort. It’s like expecting your friend to fix your computer for free because they work in IT.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not about “analysis” but about for-profit use. Public domain still falls under Fair Use. I think you’re being too optimistic about support for UBI, but I absolutely agree on that point. There are countries that believe UBI will be necessary in a decades time due to more and more of the population becoming permanently unemployed by jobs being replaced. I say myself that I don’t think anybody would really care if their livelihoods weren’t at stake (except for dealing with the people who look down on artists and say that writing prompts makes them just as good as if not better than artists). As it stands, artists are already forming their own walled off communities to isolate their work from being publicly available and creating software to poison LLMs. So either art becomes largely inaccessible to the public, or some form of horrible copyright action is taken because those are the only options available to artists.

Ultimately, I’d like a licensing system put in place, like for open source software where people can license their works and companies have to cite their sources for their training data. Academics have to cite their sources for research, and holding for-profit companies to the same standards seems like it would be a step in the right direction. Simply require your data scraper to keep track of where it got its data from in a publicly available list. That way, if they’ve used stuff that they legally shouldn’t, it can be proven.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Have you ever heard the saying that there are only 4 or 5 stories in the world? That’s basically what you’re arguing, and we’re getting into heavy philosophical areas here.

The difference is in the process. Anybody can take a photo, but it takes knowledge and experience to be a photographer. An artist understands concepts in the way that a physicist understands the rules that govern particles. The issue with AI isn’t that it’s derivative in the sense that “everything old is new again” or “nature doesn’t break her own laws,” it’s derivative in the sense that it merely regurgitates a collage of vectorized arrays of its training data. Even somebody who lives in a cave would understand how light falls and could extrapolate that knowledge to paint a sunset if you told them what a sunset is like. Given A and B, you can figure out C. The image generators we have today don’t understand how light works, even with all the images on the internet to examine. They can give you sets of A, B, and AB, but never C. If I draw a line and then tell you to draw a line, your line and my line will be different even though they’re both lines. If you tell an image generator to draw a line, it’ll spit out what is effectively a collage of lines from its training set.

And even this would only matter in terms of prompters saying that they are artists because they wrote the phrase that caused the tool to generate an image, but we live in a world where we must make money to live, and the way that the companies that make these tools work amounts to wage theft.

AI is like a camera. It’s a tool that will spawn entirely new genres of art and be used to improve the work of artists in many other areas. But like any other tool, it can be put together and used ethically or unethically, and that’s where the issues lie.

AI bros say that it’s like when the camera was first invented and all the painters freaked out. But that’s a strawman. Artists are asking, “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Copyright is a whole mess and a dangerous can of worms, but before I get any further, I just want to quote a funny meme: “I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed none of them.” If you’re going to make a point, give the actual point before citing sources because there’s no guarantee that the person you’re talking to will even understand what you’re trying to say.

Having said that, I agree that anything around copyright and AI is a dangerous road. Copyright is extremely flawed in its design.

I compare image generators to the Gaussian Blur tool for a reason - it’s a tool that outputs an algorithm based on its inputs. Your prompt and its training set, in this case. And like any other tool, its work on its own is derivative of all the works in its training set and therefore the burning question comes down to whether or not that training data was ethically sourced, ie used with permission. So the question comes down to whether or not the companies behind the tool had the right to use the images that they did and how to prove that. I’m a fan of requiring generators to list the works that they used for their training data somewhere. Basically, a similar licensing system as open source software. This way, people could openly license their work for use or not and have a way to prove if their works were used without their permission legally. There are some companies that are actually moving to commissioning artists to create works specifically for use in their training sets, and I think that’s great.

AI is a tool like any other, and like any other tool, it can be made using unethical means. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter because artists wouldn’t have to worry about putting food on the table and would be able to just make art for the sake of following their passions. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and the generators we have today are equivalent to the fast fashion industry.

Basically, I ask, “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” And the AI companies of today respond, “No! It belongs to me.”

There’s a whole other discussion to be had about prompters and the attitude that they created the works generated by these tools and how similar they are to corporate middle managers taking credit for the work of the people under them, but that’s a discussion for another time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Copyright is its own whole can of worms that could have entire essays just about how it and AI cause problems. But the issue at hand really comes down to one simple question:

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

“No!” Says society. “It’s not worth anything.”

“No!” Says the prompter. “It belongs to the people.”

“No!” Says the corporation. “It belongs to me.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
But just about any artist isn’t reproducing a still from The Mandalorian in the middle of a picture like right-clicking and hitting “save as” on a picture you got from a Google search. Which these generators have done multiple times. A “sufficiently convoluted machine model” would be a senient machine. At the level required for what you’re talking about, we’re getting into the philosophical area of what it means to be a sentient being, which is so far removed from these generators as to be irrelevant to the point. And at that point, you’re not creating anything anyway. You’ve hired a machine to create for you.

These models are tools that use an algorithm to collage pre-existing works into a derivative work. They can not create. If you tell a generator to draw a cat, but it hasn’t any pictures of cats in its data set, you won’t get anything. If you feed AI images back into these generators, they quickly degrade into garbage. Because they don’t have a concept of anything. They don’t understand color theory or two point perspective or anything. They simply are programmed to output their collection of vectorized arrays in an algorithmic format based upon certain keywords.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

Why not sell it? Pet Rocks were sold.

I didn’t know that pet rocks were made by breaking stolen statues and gluing googly eyes on them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Ah yes, how dare artists make $5 an hour instead of $0 while you pay a corporation a subscription fee instead. That’ll show those lazy artists that they’ve had it too good for too long.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not everything needs to be Art⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
To quote a funny meme: “I’m not doing homework for you. I have known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed none of them.”

You should make an argument and then back it up with sources, not cite sources, and expect them to make your point for you. Not everybody is going to come to the same conclusions as you, nor will they understand your intent.