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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. Iām not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like āusing 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 workā is extremely not fair use. In fact itās kind of a prototypically unfair use.
Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like āuhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!ā as though āfair useā is a magic word you say that makes the thing youāre doing suddenly okay. They donāt seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than āAI learns like a person!ā (false) and āwell google books did something thatās not really the same at all that one timeā.
I dunno, I know that legally we donāt 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 āoh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!ā really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that thereās a notable asymmetry here!
Youāre not wrong on the AI corps having good lawyers, but I suspect those lawyers donāt have much to work with:
Pretty much every AI corp has been caught stealing from basically everyone (with basically everyone caught scraping without peopleās knowledge or consent, and OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic all caught scraping against peopleās explicit wishes)
Said data was used to create products which, either implicitly or [explicitly]((https://archive.is/jNhpN), produce counterfeits of the stolen artistsā work
Said counterfeits are, in turn, destroying the artistsā ability to profit from their original work and discouraging them from sharing it freely
And to cap things off, thereās solid evidence pointing to the defendants being completely unrepentant in their actions, whether that be Microsoftās AI boss treating such theft as entirely acceptable or Mira Murati treating the job losses as an afterthought
If I were a betting man, Iād put my money on the trial being a bloodbath in the artistsā favour, and the resulting legal precedent being one which will likely kill generative AI as we know it.
God, that would be the dream, huh? Absolutely crossing my fingers it all shakes out this way.
Stranger things have happened. But in either case, we should commit to supporting every effort. If one punch doesnāt work take another. Death by a million cuts.
I think thatās a great framing here.