America is one of the most propagandized countries in the world, and we don’t even know it. I began to realize it when I heard that most countries find it creepy how we have an American flag in every school classroom. We are one of maybe 4 countries in the world to do that - one of which is North Korea. And then I learned about Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Youth, and I felt really uncomfortable about how we make little kids pledge their undying loyalty to the country every morning in school. We have military recruiters going into high schools to advertise to kids, calling them on their cell phones and visiting their houses. We have ads on TV and Hollywood blockbusters that are also just ads for the military.

Most Americans die within 10 miles of where they were born, and many never leave their hometown. Even fewer leave their home state, and even less visit another country.

There are people who want things to get better - things did for a brief period of time. We went from having to make up a new kind of sexuality to convince women that men who showered more than once a week and wore nice clothes weren’t gay to gay marriage and openly trans people in the government. But there are so many goose stepping “I’m a Republican, I vote for the nominee” idiots and white suburbanites who care more about a negative peace than real change that it took just a little push in the country Hitler referred to as “the sisterland across the ocean” for “Never again” to happen again.

We are a deeply fucked up country whose entire identity is built on the idea of a reality that has never existed. We have a slim chance of changing that, but it’ll be impossible until we clean the fascists out of office and the white supremacy at the core of our culture.

I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can’t be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they’re a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.

Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can’t take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let’s them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.

No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.

A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.

They only have a slim minority. What, 2 seats or so in the Senate? It wouldn’t take many Republicans siding with them to flip. But it also would help if they didn’t do things like vote in support of Trump’s cabinet picks. And Republicans made it their entire existence to prevent things from happening when they were the minority power.

While I understand and generally agree with the idea, I think a large part of how we got here is that they’ve shown time and time again that even when they have power, they won’t use it. They had how many decades to codify Roe? They kneecapped the ACA before the Republicans ever even saw it. People lost faith in them, both in their lack of flexing the power they had and in their taking their voter base for granted.

“Surely the leopards won’t eat my face!”

You’re largely arguing what I’m saying back at me. I didn’t mean that the AI is bad, but that the AI content that’s out there has filled the internet with tons of low quality stuff over the past few years, and enough of this garbage going in degrades the quality coming out, in a repeating cycle of degradation. You create biases in your model, and feeding those back in makes it worse. So the most cost-effective way to filter it out is to avoid training on possibly AI content altogether. I think OpenAI was limiting the training data for ChatGPT to stuff from before 2020 up until this past year or so.

It’s a similar issue to what facial recognition software had. Early on, facial recognition couldn’t tell the difference between two women, two black people (men or women), or two white men under the age of 25 or so. Because it was trained on the employees working on it, who were mostly middle-aged white men.

This means that there’s a high demand for content to train on, which would be a perfect job to hire artists for. Pay them to create work for whatever labels you’re looking for for your data sets. But companies don’t want to do that. They’d rather steal content from the public at large. Because AI is about cutting costs for these companies.

And what is the difference between someone getting paid to draw a picture of Sonic choking on a chili dog by a rando versus an AI generated image of the same?

To put it simply: AI can generate an image, but it isn’t capable of understanding 2-point perspective or proper lighting occlusion, etc. It’s just a tool. A very powerful tool, especially in the right hands, but a tool nonetheless. If you look at AI images, especially ones generated by the same model, you’ll begin to notice certain specific mistakes - especially in lighting. AI doesn’t understand the concept of lighting, and so has a very hard time creating realistic lighting. Most characters end up with competing light sources and shadows from all over the place that make no sense. And that’s just a consequence of how specific you’d need your prompt to be in order to get it right.

Another flaw with AI is that it can’t iterate. Production companies that were hiring AI prompters to their movie crews have started putting blanket bans on hiring prompters because they simply can’t do the work. You ask them to give you 10 images of a forest, and they’ll come back the next day with 20. But you say, “Great, I like this one, but take the people out of it,” and they’ll come back the next day with 15 more pictures of forests, but not the original without people in it. It’s a great tool for what it does, but you can’t tell it, “Can you make the chili dog 10 times larger” and get the same piece, just with a giant chili dog.

And don’t get me started on Hollywood or any of those other corporate leeches. I think Adam Savage said it best when he said last year that someday, a film student is going to do something really amazing with AI - and Hollywood is going to copy it to death. Corporations are the death of art, because they only care about making a product to be consumed. For some perfect examples of what I mean, you should check out these two videos: Why do “Corporate Art Styles” Feel Fake? by Solar Sands, and Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul by Tantacrul. Corporations also have no courage when money is on the line, so that’s why we see so many sequels and remakes out of Hollywood. People aren’t clamoring for a live action remake of (insert childhood Disney movie here), but they will go and watch it, and that’s a safe bet for Hollywood. That’s why we don’t see many new properties. Artists want to make them, but Hollywood doesn’t.

As I said, in my ideal world, AI would be making that corporate garbage and artists would be able to create what they actually want. But in the real world, there’s very little chance that you can keep a roof over your head making what you want. Making corporate garbage is where the jobs are, and most artists have very little time left over for working on personal stuff. People always ask questions like, “Why aren’t people making statues like the Romans did,” or “Why don’t we get paintings like Rembrandt used to do.” And the answer is, because nobody is paying artists to make them. They’re paying them to make soup commercials, and they don’t even want to pay them for that.

This kind of stuff has always been an endless war of escalation, the same as any kind of security. There was a period of time where all it took to mess with Gen AI was artists uploading images of large circles or something with random tags to their social media accounts. People ended up with random bits of stop signs and stuff in their generated images for like a week. Now, artists are moving to sites that treat AI scrapers like malware attacks and degrading the quality of the images that they upload.

I agree that’s a BIG if. In an ideal world, people would cite their sources and bring more attention to the creator. I also didn’t mean that artists should create work for the opportunity to have it turned into a meme and maybe go viral and get exposure that way, but that at least there’s a chance of people getting more clients through word of mouth that way for work that they’ve already done, however small, compared to having their art thrown into a training algorithm which has an absolutely zero chance of the artist seeing any benefit.

Last I heard, current AI will devour themselves if trained on content from other AI. It simply isn’t good enough to use, and the garbage noise to value ratio is too high to make it worth filtering through. Which means that there is still a massive demand for human-made content, and possibly will be even more demand in the future for some time yet. Pay artists to create that content, and I see no real problem in the model. There are some companies that have started doing just that. Procreate has partnered with a company that creates websites that is hiring artists to create training data for their UI generating LLM and paying those artists commission fees. Nobody has to spend their day making hundreds of buttons for stupid websites, and the artists get paid. A win-win for everybody.

My stance on AI always comes down to the ethics behind the creation of the tool, not the tool itself. My pie in the sky scenario would be that artists could spend their time making what they want to make without having to worry about whether or not they can afford rent. There’s a reason we see most artists posting only commission work online, and it’s because they can’t afford to work on their own stuff. My more realistic view is that there’s a demand for content to train these things, so pay the people making that content an appropriate wage for their work and experience. There could be an entire industry around creating stuff specifically for different content tags for training data.

And as for AI being similar to humans, I think you’re largely right. It’s a really simplified reproduction of how human creativity and inspiration work, but with some major caveats. I see AI as basically a magic box containing an approximation of skill but lacking understanding and intent. When you give it a prompt, you provide the intent, and if you’re knowledgeable, you have the understanding to apply as well. But many people don’t care about the understanding or value the skill, they just want the end result. Which is where we stand today with AI not being used for the betterment of our daily lives, but just as a cost-cutting tool to avoid having to pay workers what they’re worth.

Hence, we live in a world where they told us when we were growing up that AI would be used to do the things we hate doing so that we had more time to write poetry and create art, while today AI is used to write poetry and create art so that we have more time to work our menial jobs and create value for shareholders.

And when it comes to authors and artists, it amounts to wage theft. When a company hires an artist to make an ad, the artist gets paid to make it. If you then take that ad, you’re not taking money from the worker - they already got paid for the work that they did. Even if you take a piece from the social media of an independent artist and make a meme out of it or something, so long as people can find that artist, it can lead to people hiring them. But if you chop it up and mash it into a data set, you’re taking their work for profit or to avoid paying them for their skills and expertise to create something new. AI can not exist without a constant stream of human art to devour, yet nobody thinks the work to produce that art is worth paying for. It’s doing a corporation to avoid paying the working class what their skills are worth.

Well, your example isn’t quite right because these companies didn’t buy the data originally.

I’d say it’s more like when somebody samples a song without permission and uses it in their own music. If we wanna go even further, I’d say the AI companies we have today are basically making and selling synthesizers created off of samples used without permission. The AI don’t learn the way we do, they simply regurgitate what they think is correct based on the probability they get from an algorithm derived from their training set.

Yes and no. American companies have been following OpenAI’s strategy, which is simply scaling up as quickly as possible. From massive data centers swallowing our drinking water for coolant to coal and natural gas power plants to keep it running, it’s been all about pouring as much money and resources as possible in order to scale up to improve their models.

What DeepSeek has done is prove that that’s the wrong way to go about it, and now suddenly, all these companies that have been a massive money sink without any clear path to profitability already have to completely pivot their strategy. Most will probably die before they can. Investors are already selling off their stock.

So AI will become closer to actually being practical/profitable, but I imagine most of the companies who reach that goal won’t be the companies that exist today, and the AI bubble itself will probably collapse from this pivot, if we’re lucky.

Since DeepSeek is also open source, we might even see free competitors that can be run locally pop up that can go toe to toe with the likes of ChatGPT, which would be a real stake through the heart for these massive companies.

The issue with AI isn’t the tool, but the ethics of its creation (and the greed of those trying to put it in anything and everything, but that’s another matter), and this is so often lost in these conversations. Like pro-lifers arguing with women’s rights activists. Two completely different concepts being argued past each other. Your use case is exactly the kind of thing that AI could be great for - if it wasn’t made by stealing the work of others.

That out of the way, I think you’re going to have to look for lists of campaign donators, shareholders in companies Musk owns, and as somebody else said, those rolling back DEI programs and the like.

It’ll probably be easier to find lists of which companies oppose the horrors, honestly.

I only know because it was circulating last night on Bluesky in regards to this comment.

Nobody knew if he still held those opinions and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt since it’s been like 6+ years since then, but it’s still good to keep in mind.

Hopefully he’s changed a bit since then, because he got kicked off of Twitch for making some racist comments, and he made some disparaging comments about trans women around the same time.

But even if he hasn’t, a broken clock and all that.

Supposedly, none of the musicians who played at the inauguration were paid for it.

Really tells you about the caliber of these people. Both the artists and the administration.

MLK and the Civil Rights Movement have been majorly white-washed since they happened. That narrative is a big reason why protests since have been largely ineffectual in the US.

MLK supported the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and said that the only reason that he didn’t do anything more than the sit-ins and such was because that was already illegal and anything more could get them all jail time. And he was still seen as being just as violent as they made BLM out to be.

The Million Man March was seen as a threat of violence by white America. If he could get a million people to mobilize in the capital and shut down the entire city, what else could he get them to do?

Also, civil rights were only put into law after a full-on week of violence that burned down entire sections of cities and did millions in property damage. Years of protests led to flowery words. A week of riots saw the bills written, voted on, and codified into law.

Ada is the admin of blahaj, not a part of the mod team for 196. She has final say on anything that is on the instance but isn’t directly involved in 196.

The reason for the move hasn’t really been clear. The mods were vague when they announced the move, effective immediately, and the most common theory I saw was about a certain person who uses neopronouns and an event where Ada stepped in to use her power as admin to overrule the mods of 196. The mods of 196 have since clarified with a vague statement about how they don’t like how Ada handles moderation across the instance (banning trolls more on a “vibe check” than hard rules or something? I don’t really know) and praise for .world’s instance level rules regarding things like trolls and harassment.

The community was blindsided by this, as 196 was locked and moved within hours of the announcement; and they largely voiced disagreement with the decision it seems. In response, I believe some member of the community created onehundredninetysix to keep the community on blahaj, and Ada herself is currently the only mod of the community, though she’s looking for people to take it over.

Your analogy is actually very apt because at the height of their power, the Nazi party made up a whopping 15% of the German population, IIRC.

It doesn’t take a lot of crazies to end with a death count for a minority group so high that they only passed their pre-WW2 population levels about 15 years ago. It merely takes the indifference or implicit support of the majority. So many Americans are either one issue voters or indifferent because their rights aren’t up for debate every 4 years that the political compass has swung so extreme that in the first 6 months of (I think) 2022, there were more anti-trans bills proposed than there were days in the year at that point. I did the math, and it came out to roughly 1.2 anti-trans bills per day. The Nazis didn’t start with the gas chambers. They started with prisons and internment camps for political prisoners, LGBT people, immigrants, and anyone else they deemed “undesirable,” inspired by America’s treatment of the indigenous peoples.

If we’re willing to call the people of Germany in WW2 Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, then we can call the “I’m a Republican, I vote for the nominee” crowd that I’ve known my entire life and the indifferent silent majority Nazi sympathizers as well, and the MAGA crowd that call for banning trans people from public spaces and to deport immigrants Nazis. They hold the same values about fascism and white supremacy, and many even wear the same outfits and fly the same flags as Nazi Germany. They’ve been marching in the streets since Trump’s first campaign. And we haven’t even talked about the white supremacist terrorist groups and militias. The FBI spends more than 50% of their time putting down white supremacist groups.

We have been marching down the exact same path as 1910s Germany for years, and we need to call it out. Even Hitler referred to the US as the sisterland across the ocean who shared his values in Mein Kampf. In any other country, the KKK would be considered a terrorist group. Here, they’re a political activist group who almost got one of their leaders elected to a fairly major government position.

The Democrats have spent 50 years “reaching across the aisle.” How’d that go for them in this past election? The country seems to have slipped ever further towards a Fourth Reich to me. When Republicans came out in support of Harris in swing states, she lost a large percentage of independent voters in those states - like 5% of the total voters in each state. There’s no understanding to be had with white supremacists and fascists. All they want is for people like me to die.

And yet you fail to see the parallels between Trump’s rhetoric (one of Hitler’s first campaign promises was to build a wall around Germany to keep the job stealing immigrants out), his and his party’s stated goals, even his failed coup attempt (the Beer Hall Putsch sound familiar?), and the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party. Even the phrase “Make America Great Again” was used by a pro-Nazi American political group during the onset of WW2, who only disbanded after Pearl Harbor because it united the aggression of all sides of the political spectrum in the US.

Your argument basically boils down to “They’re not oligarchs unless they come from the oligarchy region of Russia. Otherwise, they’re “sparkling billionaires.””

You majored in this in college, while I’ve learned much of the finer details of the Nazi party because of Republican policies in the past decade. If it steps like a goose, Sig Heils like a goose, and quacks about the purity of Aryan blood, I’m sure as hell not calling it a duck because it’s an American goose and not a German one of 1910s breeding stock.

And even in that metaphor, you could argue a direct lineage between the MAGA party and the Nazi party because the incoming president is the son of a real estate tycoon who was a German immigrant whose previous business was refining jet fuel for the Third Reich’s Me-262 Schwalbes produced by Messerschmitt.

To quote the incoming administration, “We need a genocide of trans people.”

The LGBT community was one of the first groups in the camps. Alongside the immigrants and socialists. You know the famous picture of the Nazis burning books? Those books were records from the German Center for Sexual Wellness, a repository of knowledge about sex and sexuality, and the first known medical facility to treat transgender people using hormone therapy in the 1910s.

Maybe you should learn history before saying something like a know-nothing ignoramus and discrediting whatever you have to say. But go off about “progressive biases.” To also quote a Republican complaint, “Reality has a left-leaning bias.” Is that what you think, too?