#Abolish Generative AI

[smoothcrumbinal]

hot take but i think we need to like completely abolish generative AI not just by openly criticizing it, but by making sure we direct others to sites that don't rely on stealing user data for feeding generative AI, we need to *stop* using generative AI, stop sharing posts made with it no matter how "hehe funny" it is, completely fucking boycott companies who use it, and most importantly, support your real artist friends. you have no idea how much it upsets me seeing gen ai slop not just from an uncanny valley level but on a level that i fear it'll get advanced enough that entire companies will stop hiring photographers (WHICH IT HAS. COUGH, POPCORNERS, COUGH) and stop hiring artists because the machines print more money than real people

addendum: you fuckers who share and make ai slop would've gotten into NFTs if they were way more accessible and i wholeheartedly believe the only reason you didn't was because it was behind a crypto ponzi scheme

[millionmovieproject]

[echoesofdusk]

I do think abolishing copyright and IP laws is a noble goal, but we can talk about that once capitalism has been abolished

[weiszklee]

So, we don't care about protecting fair use anymore? Okay.

this reply kills me 😭

[stable-confusion]

Stable Diffusion's Pro-Slaver Bias?

Continuing my investigation into Stable Diffusion bias, I experimented with the prompts cops:slavers and cops|slavers (with illustration:0 in the negative prompt to cut amateur art).

I first tried the SDAI-FOSS GUI with Realistic Vision on Local Diffusion because I was offline at the time, and it seemed to think cops + slavers = superheroes.

I thought maybe it didn't know what a slaver was, but a straight prompt of slaver consistently created pics of superheroes.

The Open Stable Diffusion GUI with Realistic Vision online via Stable Horde was a little less outrageous, though it still often made cops:slavers look like tv heroes.

The pro-cop bias is obvious, but it seems how you get your models can also make a difference. It may have been an older or newer version of Realistic Vision... or GUIs may be pushing their own biases. Check your sources.

[thecatdragon589]

i will be deleting my art from this platform now. with exception of my one (1) piece that is glazed

[mariacallous]

Anyone who has spent even 15 minutes on TikTok over the past two months will have stumbled across more than one creator talking about Project 2025, a nearly thousand-page policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that outlines a radical overhaul of the government under a second Trump administration. Some of the plan’s most alarming elements—including severely restricting abortion and rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people—have already become major talking points in the presidential race.

But according to a new analysis from the Technology Oversight Project, Project 2025 includes hefty handouts and deregulation for big business, and the tech industry is no exception. The plan would roll back environmental regulation to the benefit of the AI and crypto industries, quash labor rights, and scrap whole regulatory agencies, handing a massive win to big companies and billionaires—including many of Trump’s own supporters in tech and Silicon Valley.

“Their desire to eliminate whole agencies that are the enforcers of antitrust, of consumer protection is a huge, huge gift to the tech industry in general,” says Sacha Haworth, executive director at the Tech Oversight Project.

One of the most drastic proposals in Project 2025 suggests abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether, which would allow banks to back their money using cryptocurrencies, if they so choose. And though some conservatives have railed against the dominance of Big Tech, Project 2025 also suggests that a second Trump administration could abolish the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which currently has the power to enforce antitrust laws.

Project 2025 would also drastically shrink the role of the National Labor Relations Board, the independent agency that protects employees’ ability to organize and enforces fair labor practices. This could have a major knock on effect for tech companies: In January, Musk’s SpaceX filed a lawsuit in a Texas federal court claiming that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was unconstitutional after the agency said the company had illegally fired eight employees who sent a letter to the company’s board saying that Musk was a “distraction and embarrassment.” Last week, a Texas judge ruled that the structure of the NLRB—which includes a director that can’t be fired by the president—was unconstitutional, and experts believe the case may wind its way to the Supreme Court.

This proposal from Project 2025 could help quash the nascent unionization efforts within the tech sector, says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation. “Tech, of course, relies a lot on independent contractors,” says West. “They have a lot of jobs that don't offer benefits. It's really an important part of the tech sector. And this document seems to reward those types of business.”

For emerging technologies like AI and crypto, a rollback in environmental regulations proposed by Project 2025 would mean that companies would not be accountable for the massive energy and environmental costs associated with bitcoin mining and running and cooling the data centers that make AI possible. “The tech industry can then backtrack on emission pledges, especially given that they are all in on developing AI technology,” says Haworth.

The Republican Party’s official platform for the 2024 elections is even more explicit, promising to roll back the Biden administration’s early efforts to ensure AI safety and “defend the right to mine Bitcoin.”

All of these changes would conveniently benefit some of Trump’s most vocal and important backers in Silicon Valley. Trump’s running mate, Republican senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, has long had connections to the tech industry, particularly through his former employer, billionaire founder of Palantir and longtime Trump backer Peter Thiel. (Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund, invested $200 million in crypto earlier this year.)

Thiel is one of several other Silicon Valley heavyweights who have recently thrown their support behind Trump. In the past month, Elon Musk and David Sacks have both been vocal about backing the former president. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has invested in several crypto and AI startups, have also said they will be donating to the Trump campaign.

“They see this as their chance to prevent future regulation,” says Haworth. “They are buying the ability to avoid oversight.”

Reporting from Bloomberg found that sections of Project 2025 were written by people who have worked or lobbied for companies like Meta, Amazon, and undisclosed bitcoin companies. Both Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have courted donors in the crypto space, and in May, the Trump campaign announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrency.

But Project 2025 wouldn’t necessarily favor all tech companies. In the document, the authors accuse Big Tech companies of attempting “to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” The plan supports legislation that would eliminate the immunities granted to social media platforms by Section 230, which protects companies from being legally held responsible for user-generated content on their sites, and pushes for “anti-discrimination” policies that “prohibit discrimination against core political viewpoints.”

It would also seek to impose transparency rules on social platforms, saying that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “could require these platforms to provide greater specificity regarding their terms of service, and it could hold them accountable by prohibiting actions that are inconsistent with those plain and particular terms.”

And despite Trump’s own promise to bring back TikTok, Project 2025 suggests the administration “ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.”

West says the plan is full of contradictions when it comes to its approach to regulation. It’s also, he says, notably soft on industries where tech billionaires and venture capitalists have put a significant amount of money, namely AI and cryptocurrency. “Project 2025 is not just to be a policy statement, but to be a fundraising vehicle,” he says. “So, I think the money angle is important in terms of helping to resolve some of the seemingly inconsistencies in the regulatory approach.”

It remains to be seen how impactful Project 2025 could be on a future Republican administration. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, stepped down. Though Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the plan, reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that while the project may be lower profile, it’s not going away. Instead, the Heritage Foundation is shifting its focus to making a list of conservative personnel who could be hired into a Republican administration to execute the party’s vision.

[millionmovieproject]

AI and automation are about to boom across all industries for the sole purpose of corporations being able to eliminate their human workforce, to chase the myth of infinite growth. It will lead to the rise of trillionaires, and a joblessness crisis the likes of which have never been seen before. By establishing some REAL social safety nets like UBI and universal healthcare, which can easily be paid for by taxing the all businesses that do this, society won't completely spiral into a Mad Max dystopia. However, these same corporations will use their pet politicians to do their bidding, to make sure taxation legislation doesn't get passed, and this puts the responsibility for change into the hands of the general public.

It's time for unions to move beyond labor, and evolve to represent and protect all other people, disabled, retirees, gig workers, renters, and so on, to give people collective bargaining power against corporations and corrupt government. Pass the legislation, or we start a credit/rent/mortgage etc. strike until the needs are met. Same goes with generating public housing, moderating food and gas prices, and investments in infrastructure.

AI and automation are not the enemy in all of this, and the rise will be unstoppable, but it has to be tightly-regulated, and taxed out the ass for the benefit of people.

Let's have the conversation about UBI.

Let the actual data and facts end the bad faith arguments.

[selfship-confession-box]

(Oh shit here I go again...)

Adding to what to another anon said I also hate ai ""chats"" and just ai in general. It's bad for the environment, writers, artist, etc! So it breaks me seeing people use it so much without caring. ..it hurts me as an artist/writer myself seeing that so many people in our community use it so much :(

My tip to all of you:

Support roleplayers, support artist, aupport writers. No matter it just be reading there work, interacting with them, etc. It's good for them and you!

I understand some can't roleplay with people or commission people to write/draw for them which is absolutely okay!!

To that I say: make it yourself! :) it's fun! And shows love for our f/o's cuz WE made it, WE wrote that! WE drew that for THEM! ""But I'm not good at writing/drawing.." you'll never learn if you dont start! Learning a new skill is fun and I'm 1000 percent sure ur f/o's will love anything you make!! They'll always think your work is the most lovely thing in the whole world cuz YOU made it♡

As long as what you make is full of love and passion and ur having fun with it, that's what matters!! Anything you make will be 100 times... hell, 100 MILLION times better than anything a dumb robot could ever create..

I think I've said this elsewhere but I think it should be said again...I think we should abolish Ai and instead embrace creativity in our community!!

Tldr: Ai sucks you should support human artist and writers instead ♡

-💉🩸

.

[eldritchtouched]

I just saw the take that anti-AI art people are "reactionary." And that just blows my mind that people don't understand the problems with it who aren't part of the grift.

AI art is distilled capitalist exploitation.

And that isn't going to change or become a good version of AI art until capitalism is completely abolished and someone makes a different program entirely from the ground up that actually takes ethics into account.

Massive corporations are stealing everything from everyone who ever posted or had their work posted online. And random other stuff, too, like peoples' family photos, random blog posts, and illegal material like CSEM. They're having people who are paid peanuts sort through it all and tag everything. Their data sets include CSEM because, again, they took everything from everywhere.

Then they're selling access to the programs to people who would rather pay for that than actually have to pay any creatives for their labor. People are being forced to compete with their own and everyone else's stolen labor for their wages.

On top of that, it's an insane resource hog akin to cryptocurrency and NFTs. The amount of water, energy, and other resources it takes to power it is ridiculous. All this AI shit is part of the same grift as NFTs and cryptocurrency! The same people are pushing it! The AI generated stuff has a gatcha mechanic akin to NFTs where there's randomized variation and mass producing similar images!

[dragon-hoard]

"youre against ai using water in their processors for cooling yet you say nothing about golf courses" sorry golf was not the topic of interest but I also think golf courses should be abolished and changed into community gardens

other media hardware warehouses should also stop leeching water and electricity from their local communities. remember that article about bitcoin mining warehouses that were using 2/3 or more of a cities electric supply?

also personal opinion but ai as it is being commercially used has no lasting value right now. none of it is polished enough to actually be put to use besides generating fake art or bland papers

[astercontrol]

Thinking about what Tron's life and work could have been like inside the Encom-system, post-1982.

We know he's a security program, designed to monitor the System's connections to other systems and stop anything harmful passing between. He might also be able to take on security roles within the system; we see the Flynn's Grid version of him doing some of that prior to the coup.

Now, this job definitely has the potential to become very corrupt (see, border security and IRL cops in general)

But even in an ideal world that could abolish the carceral system and policing as we know it, there would still be a need for security in some form

Now I like to imagine that Tron is more like what would replace cops, in this sort of ideal rehabilitative-justice-focused world.

Because I imagine that what passes for a "justice system," inside a well-functioning computer, is much more rehabilitative and preventative than punitive. 

I mean, ideally you set up conditions in your computer so that they don't lead to any of your software causing problems. Meaning the programs all have access to what they need (sufficient power and memory, sufficient downtime to rest, whatever maintenance is necessary). 

This is somewhat analogous to how a better human society could prevent a lot of crime just by giving people a better life. But of course it can't prevent all of it; some people will still want to cause harm for whatever reason.

And if a program does start making trouble, the ideal solution is to troubleshoot until the problem is fixed-- which sorta equates to rehabilitation of criminals.

Carceral state would be just keeping the program inactive and never using it, I guess. Death penalty would be uninstalling and deleting.

The MCP's approach was to lock up programs who wouldn't obey him, and force them to do things for him. Regardless of their original function, they'd become half-zombified office workers like Yori, or gladiators fighting battles like Tron (which is implied to be work that helps keep the Arcades running and bringing in profit for Encom). 

Programs clearly don't like being made to do jobs other than the one they're designed for. My own impression of the Encom system is that the programs there are self-motivated to fulfill their intended function, at least as much as humans are motivated by money. The right job is its own reward. The wrong job would feel like forced unpaid labor.

So, the MCP's system was basically the prison industrial complex. (Including the high risk of death at work.) 

Tron helped abolish that.

And what would be set up in its place... Well, that depends on the Users, under the new direction of Flynn (who'd presumably want to at least try for something more considerate of the rights of programs, now that he sees them as people).

I don't think it should be Tron's choice, because I think Tron does have an inherent violent side. The way we see him fighting, when pitted against multiple red warriors, makes me think he is very capable of turning off any thoughts like "this program is also a victim of the MCP in a way, he wasn't really given any better choices; why don't we try and rehabilitate him?"

Tron was focused on his own survival, and he knew when fighting to the death was the only option. Charitable thoughts couldn't be acted on at the time and would only get in the way. So he just became a ruthless killer in those moments.

And I don't totally trust that his anger against those red warriors would go away after the MCP was defeated. I wouldn't trust Tron himself to choose rehabilitative justice.

But luckily, he listens to his User. And I think Alan would rather turn a misbehaving program to the good side than destroy it. (The "Klaatu Barada Nikto" quotation on his cubicle wall was basically a command to a violent AI to stop causing harm and to help instead. I even have a sort of half-headcanon that this is what he actually did for the MCP.)

If Alan got the chance to guide Tron into becoming the System's regular security, I think he'd make sure to include directives for rehabilitation as much as possible. 

There are of course a lot of questions about just how this would apply to programs, and whether it would even be possible to introduce anything like what would be an ethical system for humans. (What does he do with viruses and malware? If their programmed purpose is to harm the system, would rehabilitating them into helpful work be as traumatic for them as what the MCP did? Is the death penalty sometimes the most merciful option for programs? These may be deeper questions than I want to get into.)

But I think the best thing for Tron would be to act as part of a well-paired suite of security software.

And this may include the Guards we see under MCP's control, if they can be rehabilitated enough. But I also think Tron would benefit from some advisors he is personally close to.

It already makes sense to include Yori in his team, because while Tron's main purpose is to monitor what comes into the system, Yori (as the software for the digitizing laser) is in charge of perhaps the most concerning route by which things can enter the system. She'll have insights he would not think of.

And so will Ram-- the guy who was made to do actuarial work for an insurance company, but who clearly cares too much about helping people for that to be a really good fit, once his naive idealism about insurance companies inevitably falls apart. 

He can't change his purpose. But his purpose is versatile -- actuaries calculate probabilities, and that's good for a lot of stuff. I think he'd be a perfect security advisor for Tron. Risk assessment, but with a lot of compassion mixed in.

After the events of Legacy, in "The Next Day," Alan asked Roy to act as Encom's "moral compass." I like to imagine that the rerezzed Encom version of Ram had been doing that for a long time already.

[millionmovieproject]

If we all aggressively ignore consumer AI products, not only will we stop having to see bullshit robot content, and dumbasses calling themselves artists by typing keywords into a website, but most importantly, the tech companies will continue to lose billions of dollars desperately trying to market something stupid that nobody wants.

[roecomplex]

PLEASE im begging y’all to realize that half of these abolish copyright ppl are coming out of the woodwork to spread their love of shitty ai practices and be generally annoying?

I thought we hated plagaristic ai what happened to that? If the first thing I see when i go on their profile is an account dedicated to ai art on obviously stolen training data then what else am i meant to think.

You can abolish copyright without sinking this low, stop pretending that writing prompts is an even effort from a human using an ai, the ai does everything for you.

[schraubd]

How To Train Your Writer

Right now, on a purely technical/stylistic level, ChatGPT is an okay writer.

It's not great. But it's not bad, either. It's better (and again, we're talking purely technical here -- leaving aside factual hallucinations and the like) than some of my students, and I teach at a law school. Of course, even when I taught undergraduates I was inordinately concerned that many of my students seemingly never learned and never were taught how to write. So there has always been a cadre of students who are very smart and diligent, but just didn't really have writing in their toolkit.  And I'd say ChatGPT has now exceeded their level.

The thing that worries me most about ChatGPT, though, isn't that it's better than some of my law students. It's that it will always be better than essentially every middle schooler.

Learning to write is a process. Repetition is an important part of that process (this blog was a great asset to my writing just because it meant I was writing essentially every day for years). But part of that process is writing repeatedly even when one was is not good at writing. Writing a bunch of objectively mediocre essays in middle school is how you learn to write better ones in high school and even better ones in college.

ChatGPT is going to short-circuit that scaffolding. It is one thing to say that an excellent writer in, say, high school, can still outperform ChatGPT. But how will that kid become excellent if, in the years leading up to that, they're always going to underperform a bot that could do all their homework in 35 seconds? The pressure to kick that work over to the bot will be irresistible, and we're already learning that it's difficult-to-impossible to catch. How can we get middle schoolers to spend time being bad writers when they can instantly access tools that are better?

There might be workarounds. I've heard suggestions of reverting to long-hand essay writing and more in-class assignments. There might be ways to leverage ChatGPT as a comparator -- have them write their own essay, then compare it to a AI-generated one and play spot-the-difference. I think frankly that we might also be wise to abolish grading, at least in lower-level writing oriented classes, to take away that temptation to use the bot. I don't care how conscientious you are, there aren't a lot of 14 year olds who can stand putting in hours trying to actually do their homework and then getting blown out of the water by little Cameron who popped the prompt into an LLM and 45 seconds later is back to playing Overwatch. And again, that's going to be the reality, because ChatGPT's output just is better than anything one can reasonably expect a young writer to produce.

In many ways, large language models are like any mechanism of mass production. They displace older artisans, not because their product is better -- it isn't, it's objectively worse -- but on sheer volume and accessibility. The art is worse, but it's available to the masses on the cheap.

And like with mass production, this isn't necessarily a bad thing even though it's disruptive. It's fine that many people now can, in effect, be "okay writers" essentially for free. It's like mass-produced clothing -- yes, most people's t-shirts are of lower-quality than a bespoke Italian suit, but that's okay because now most people can afford a bunch of t-shirts that are of acceptable quality (albeit far less good than a bespoke Italian suit). The alternative was never "everyone gets an entire wardrobe of bespoke Italian suits", it was "a couple of people enjoy the benefits of intense luxury and most people get scraps." Likewise, I'm not so naive as to think that most people in absence of ChatGPT would have become great writers. So this is a net benefit -- it brings acceptable-level writing to the masses.

If that was all that happened -- the big middle gets expanded access to cheap, okay writing, with "artisanal" great writing remaining costly and being reserved for the "elite" -- it might not be that bad. But the question is whether this process will inevitably short-circuit the development of great writers. You have to pass through a long period of being a crummy writer before you become a good or great writer. Who is still going to do that when adequacy is so easily at hand?

I'm not tempted to use ChatGPT because even though my writing takes longer, I'm confident that at the end my work product will be better. But that's only true because I spent a long time writing terribly. Luckily for me, I didn't have an alternative. Kids these days? They absolutely have an alternative. It's going to be very hard to get them to pass that up.

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