#correcting people on misinformation = good

[aeolianblues]

Also correct, it does not stop at wherever you, one single person that believes you’re reasonable, wants it to stop.

Do you know how quickly misinformation spreads? Have you not seen this in action? Misinformed people will full-throatedly support people that want to erase your existence. And when you question them? They’ve been told they’re helping erase monsters that do unspeakable things. They may not think it’s you they’re harming but they’re TOLD they’re being good upstanding citizens— like you are about explicit content/porn/whatever you think you’re doing a good job erasing. It may, in the end, affect 0 of the hypothetical boogeymen created by those who do have motives to suppress the voices of a marginalised group—because the bogeymen indeed, are hypothetical. But someone that you, the good, reasonable person never wanted to harm, will have lost their livelihood, or have found their work or even existence, wrongly labelled as illegal.

All of a sudden, that mother breastfeeding on the train is in trouble. That queer person is in trouble for not going undercover and passing as cishet. That interfaith couple is getting lynched. That interracial couple is watching the clock turn back 80 years. You give an inch, they’ll take a mile.

Sometimes I feel like people who grew up with certain hard-fought for rights can ignore or forget what it took to get to that point. Why do you think it took decades, centuries to overturn legal discrimination? Homosexuality (in particular sodomy) was illegalised in my country in the 1800s. It was only overturned about 5 years ago. (Notably, this was a big decision but still a partial victory. Queer people can’t get married or own together. Landlords are free to discriminate. Many people will still pass themselves off as housemates or present as single legally. And of course, decriminalising sodomy in the penal code does not 1) remove stigma 2) nor quite serve as legal protection for queer people outside the specific context of gay sex).

Give an inch, they’ll take a mile. Straight young couples have been chased by mobs for holding hands in public in my country in the too-uncomfortably-recent past. Do you really want to willingly hand over control to conservatives? ‘It happened in your backward-ass country, it can never happen here!’ It can happen here. Don’t wait to find out.

“Why are you so upset about adult content bans? You don’t even post that stuff. can’t you just look at porn somewhere else?”

Well, you see, I have this small problem where my very existence is considered adult content by a small but very powerful group of people and I actually rather enjoy being able to exist in public without restriction so uhhhh put that in your bong and smoke it kiddo.

[gender-euphowrya]

spell of explode all transphobes Activate

[lord-squiggletits]

Man, it doesn't matter what the medium or fandom is, truly the debate that ruins fandom discussions the fastest is when people try to decide which characters "deserve" what. Especially when it comes to them deciding which characters are evil, how evil they are, and how severe their punishment should be for their evil deeds.

It's really annoying/harmful on multiple levels. For one, morally speaking, the line between "evil, but can repent/compensate for their deeds" and "evil, cannot be redeemed, suffer and die forever" is harder to define than you think, and who has the authority to define it anyways?

But also, fictional stories (especially the better, more nuanced, more mature ones) are rarely ever about "deserving" and don't divide their characters neatly between the "good" and the "evil." Every time I see fans debate about "how evil" a Problematic Fave is, or if Fave 1 is better/worse than Fave 2, all I see is people ruining their own fun and stirring up bad blood between other fans. Why would you add this dichotomy of "deserving" to a FICTIONAL story and start real life beef with people over it? At that point you're getting more invested in your discourse over imagined good/evil binaries than you are invested in watching/reading/consuming the actual story itself.

[slingerapen]

im genuinely so sorry for everyone who has ever been negatively affected by it, but ofmd discourse is so entertaining

[chronic-frustration-syndrome]

Oh, absolutely, there is a difference between the groups. (Part of the problem with "I'm so" was that it wasn't just "I'm so", but also "you're so" & "that's so", which is very different from "I relate to this personally".) And it is, of course much easier to treat people with empathy when they're already treating you with empathy.

(Ugh, I hate brain fog, got halfway through this & am now struggling to say what I mean, so apologies if I start making less sense; going to stubbornly finish this anyway, because I enjoy discussion when I can manage it.)

The thing is, I think the common assumption that people saying "so relatable" directly are the only ones who are aligning themselves with a group due to shared experience rather than clichéd assumption is flawed. After all, on face value, saying "I'm so/I'm such a" is just a way of saying "I relate to this group of people strongly enough to align myself with them directly". Obviously conext & so forth can change this, but if we go in with the assumption "these people don't actually relate" we lose sight of the people that do relate, they're just expressing themselves poorly.

Let's leave OCD aside for the moment, & take ADHD as an example, since "I'm so ADHD" was as much of a thing, as well as being the originator of the "so relatable" meme.

The person who was always late, constantly teased by their friends for being forgetful, etc, saying "I'm so ADHD" was 'jokingly' beginning to scratch the surface of a possible explaination for their struggles. However, unlike "stop being so relatable", the general/most common response wasn't "here is some more information so you can figure out if this is actually something you can look into" but "you can't say that" which just stops all potential understanding in its tracks. Even though there was an increase in awareness of ADHD (however flawed) due to it constantly being mentioned, there was no particular increase in understanding that resulted from this. If, instead of "you're trivialising REAL ADHD" (which many people were, to be fair) the response had been "many people struggle with time management, here are some ways in which neurodivergent & neurotypical struggles can differ, as well as some strategies that can help people with various neurotypes" I wonder if we might've reached "so relateable" sooner.

In many ways discussing OCD is harder than discussing ADHD, both because it is more widely misunderstood, & often more negatively perceived, but also because OCD itself often makes elaborating on certain experiences nigh impossible. But it is precisely because of this that I think extending as much empathy as possible is important. By that I don't mean "people with OCD should just suck it up & let themselves be misrepresented on the off-chance that the person commenting flippantly about their struggles just so happens to have undiagnosed OCD themselves", but rather "because OCD is so widely misunderstood, any opportunity to educate people is a good thing, & people are much more able to absorb information when it is presented kindly".

It's similar to how arguing with TERFs & other essentialists rarely results in the essentialist themselves changing their mind (in fact it often makes them double down), but that it's still important to engage with them in good faith, for the sake of people on the fringes who are more likely to see it & actually engage with the information provided.

i genuinely think ocd is incredibly underdiagnosed bc i will see people posting what are obvious rituals, compulsions, intrusive thoughts, spiralling, hyper morality, etc and its like Have You Considered This Might Be An Issue

[bisexualamy]

.

[doppelnatur]

to a certain degree i don't think there is such a thing as purely internalized and internally directed bias. i don't think directing bias at yourself is morally much better than directing it at others it's just a lot harder to stop. that said, as soon as your self cruelty begins to affect anyone else it's just cruelty. a gay man being homophobic is not any more justifiable than a heterosexual man. then again, maybe this entire way of thinking shows a lack of compassion for myself and is a form of bias.

[flimsy-roost]

at least once a week I think about the whiplash of my creative writing professor praising and raving about a personal narrative I wrote because I so vividly conveyed what it's like to have the extreme sensitivity to sound that I do that she could viscerally understand my experience and capped off the compliment paragraph by saying that it was especially impressive that I could communicate these feelings so well because I don't feel emotions

[girl-with-bones]

Holy shit I'm so fucking tired of this- PUBERTY. THE- IT'S. IT'S FUCKING PUBERTY.

THAT'S WHAT HRT DOES. I DONT KNOW HOW OR WHY PEOPLE HAVE IT IN THEIR HEADS THAT HRT IS SOME EXTRA SPECIAL EXTRA SCARY BODY HORROR SHIT THAT KICKS YOUR PUPPY AND KILLS EVERYTHING YOU HOLD NEAR AND DEAR TO YOUR HEART.

Does Puberty affect people's singing voices? Yes? Cool. Hrt will do that too. Does every single male singer say Puberty ruined their voice? No? huh that's weird, maybe Hrt is the exact fucking same.

Yeah, hrt can fuck shit up. So does REGULAR PUBERTY BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT HRT IS. THAT IS WHY IT WORKS. YES IT IS DIFFERENT IN SOME WAYS BUT IT IS STILL JUST THE BODY REACTING TO HORMONES BY GOING 'OH SHIT WE GROWIN UP'

please im gonna. fucking. burn parliament down I don't even know I just- HELP

i am SO sick of the fearmongering around T and how it will affect your singing voice. i have been singing since i was a kid. i mean i have been singing as long as i could talk, i was once in an all girls choir, i was the youngest person in my churches choir when i was, like, 8. i never had much confidence in my voice because i sounded like a girl, which led me to singing less, which led me to sounding worse. before i started T i was SO worried that it would ruin my beautiful feminine singing voice.

but the difference is like night and day. i sound SO much better than i did pre-T. i can sing without hating myself. i sound like a man and i can sing

and yea maybe i’m no longer and 8 year old soprano. but i can sing and listen to myself and not want to die and isn’t that fucking wonderful?

[ashenberry]

I want to bite into something

[that-stone-butch]

transphobic family members are one thing but it's so hard to deal with family that are convinced they're supportive but are bumbling, misinformed, or forgetful and will still misgender/deadname you nearly as frequently, but when you call them out or ask them to try harder all of a sudden you're the bad guy. i have heard some of the most fucked up shit from 'liberal' parents using the 'correct' terminology about trans people, where what they're actually saying is deeply fucked up. like my step mom excitedly telling me she saw 'an afab man' at the market and explaining how she could tell.

'i don't want to be in a room where i will be misgendered/deadnamed/deal with transphobia' applies even if it happens 'on accident' every single time you see someone. and it's a healthy boundary to set. but good g-d some people would rather kick and scream and cry than acknowledge that they're hurting you, even unintentionally.

[fishyartist]

(Adding an extra image, Source+more info about this specific chart https://bdsmovement.net/Act-Now-Against-These-Companies-Profiting-From-Genocide <click that)

McDonald's is giving out free fries.

Disney is giving out Disney100 cards.

Starbucks is giving out buy one get one frees.

Why? Because their stock prices are falling.

They are losing money because of the boycotts because we are not giving them more money to fund and support the genocide of Palestine.

They're scared.

So they're gonna do whatever they can to get that money.

Keep it up.

Make them cry.

We may not be able to get them all, but the ones we get oh they are gonna suffer.

[pearwaldorf]

People in fandoms* associated with Neil Gaiman are not showing each other the grace they should be in a stressful time, and I would like to remind people of some things:

Not everybody knows about the allegations because it is not being reported widely in mainstream media. Gaiman has engaged a PR/crisis management firm that has done work with Marilyn Manson, Russell Brand, and Danny Masterson to actively squash coverage.

The story broke on a site unfamiliar to a lot of non-UK people. There was confusion as well as outright misinformation about whether the site was a TERF outlet (it is not). While Rachel Johnson, the lead reporter on the story, is a TERF who has publicly clashed with Gaiman about trans rights, she has behaved responsibly and ethically as a journalist regarding this. I wrote more in depth about these things here.

Everybody deals differently with finding out creators are problematic. The method you prefer is not the only correct way of coping. Some people are able to divorce art from the creator and some people are not. This is an attitude that can change over time. And if you feel like you need to express frustration that somebody else's method isn't the same as yours? I would recommend shutting your fucking trap.

If people know about the allegations, it's shitty to assume they're ignoring them or think they're false until somebody explicitly says so. There are many things people don't say online, and you are not owed disclaimers or explanations.

Fandom is more than the work itself. Some people find strength in the community that has formed around it, and rely on each other to help cope with and grieve this loss. The love you have for the work and your fellow fans is not something that belongs to the creator. It never has and that can't be taken away.

Your personal relationship with a creator's work will change over time. That's inevitable regardless of whether they turn out to be problematic or not. And when those works are deeply significant and formative, like many of Gaiman's works are to me** and countless others? That's fucking tough. Be kind to yourself and others when working through this. I love you all.

--

* I have seen this in Good Omens most prominently, although I am sure there are other places where it is happening as well.

** I have been a fan of Gaiman's work longer than some of you have been alive. It has not been a great month or so.

[theultracharmingladynoire]

.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

How can you consider yourself any sort of leftist when you defend AI art bullshit? You literally simp for AI techbros and have the gall to pretend you're against big corporations?? Get fucked

I don't "defend" AI art. I think a particular old post of mine that a lot of people tend to read in bad faith must be making the rounds again lmao.

Took me a good while to reply to this because you know what? I decided to make something positive out of this and use this as an opportunity to outline what I ACTUALLY believe about AI art. If anyone seeing this decides to read it in good or bad faith... Welp, your choice I guess.

I have several criticisms of the way the proliferation of AI art generators and LLMs is making a lot of things worse. Some of these are things I have voiced in the past, some of these are things I haven't until now:

Most image and text AI generators are fine-tuned to produce nothing but the most agreeable, generically pretty content slop, pretty much immediately squandering their potential to be used as genuinely interesting artistic tools with anything to offer in terms of a unique aesthetic experience (AI video still manages to look bizarre and interesting but it's getting there too)

In the entertainment industry and a lot of other fields, AI image generation is getting incorporated into production pipelines in ways that lead to the immiseration of working artists, being used to justify either lower wages or straight-up layoffs, and this is something that needs to be fought against. That's why I unconditionally supported the SAG-AFTRA strikes last year and will unconditionally support any collective action to address AI art as a concrete labor issue

In most fields where it's being integrated, AI art is vastly inferior to human artists in any use case where you need anything other than to make a superficially pretty picture really fast. If you need to do anything like ask for revisions or minor corrections, give very specific descriptions of how objects and people are interacting with each other, or just like. generate several pictures of the same thing and have them stay consistent with each other, you NEED human artists and it's preposterous to think they can be replaced by AI.

There is a lot of art on the internet that consists of the most generically pretty, cookie-cutter anime waifu-adjacent slop that has zero artistic or emotional value to either the people seeing it or the person churning it out, and while this certainly was A Thing before the advent of AI art generators, generative AI has made it extremely easy to become the kind of person who churns it out and floods online art spaces with it.

Similarly, LLMs make it extremely easy to generate massive volumes of texts, pages, articles, listicles and what have you that are generic vapid SEO-friendly pap at best and bizzarre nonsense misinformation at worst, drowning useful information in a sea of vapid noise and rendering internet searches increasingly useless.

The way LLMs are being incorporated into customer service and similar services not only, again, encourages further immiseration of customer service workers, but it's also completely useless for most customers.

A very annoyingly vocal part the population of AI art enthusiasts, fanatics and promoters do tend to talk about it in a way that directly or indirectly demeans the merit and skill of human artists and implies that they think of anyone who sees anything worthwile in the process of creation itself rather than the end product as stupid or deluded.

So you can probably tell by now that I don't hold AI art or writing in very high regard. However (and here's the part that'll get me called an AI techbro, or get people telling me that I'm just jealous of REAL artists because I lack the drive to create art of my own, or whatever else) I do have some criticisms of the way people have been responding to it, and have voiced such criticisms in the past.

I think a lot of the opposition to AI art has critstallized around unexamined gut reactions, whipping up a moral panic, and pressure to outwardly display an acceptable level of disdain for it. And in particular I think this climate has made a lot of people very prone to either uncritically entertain and adopt regressive ideas about Intellectual Propety, OR reveal previously held regressive ideas about Intellectual Property that are now suddenly more socially acceptable to express:

(I wanna preface this section by stating that I'm a staunch intellectual property abolitionist for the same reason I'm a private property abolitionist. If you think the existence of intellectual property is a good thing, a lot of my ideas about a lot of stuff are gonna be unpalatable to you. Not much I can do about it.)

A lot of people are suddenly throwing their support behind any proposal that promises stricter copyright regulations to combat AI art, when a lot of these also have the potential to severely udnermine fair use laws and fuck over a lot of independent artist for the benefit of big companies.

It was very worrying to see a lot of fanfic authors in particular clap for the George R R Martin OpenAI lawsuit because well... a lot of them don't realize that fanfic is a hobby that's in a position that's VERY legally precarious at best, that legally speaking using someone else's characters in your fanfic is as much of a violation of copyright law as straight up stealing entire passages, and that any regulation that can be used against the latter can be extended against the former.

Similarly, a lot of artists were cheering for the lawsuit against AI art models trained to mimic the style of specific artists. Which I agree is an extremely scummy thing to do (just like a human artist making a living from ripping off someone else's work is also extremely scummy), but I don't think every scummy act necessarily needs to be punishable by law, and some of them would in fact leave people worse off if they were. All this to say: If you are an artist, and ESPECIALLY a fan artist, trust me. You DON'T wanna live in a world where there's precedent for people's artstyles to be considered intellectual property in any legally enforceable way. I know you wanna hurt AI art people but this is one avenue that's not worth it.

Especially worrying to me as an indie musician has been to see people mention the strict copyright laws of the music industry as a positive thing that they wanna emulate. "this would never happen in the music industry because they value their artists copyright" idk maybe this is a the grass is greener type of situation but I'm telling you, you DON'T wanna live in a world where copyright law in the visual arts world works the way it does in the music industry. It's not worth it.

I've seen at least one person compare AI art model training to music sampling and say "there's a reason why they cracked down on sampling" as if the death of sampling due to stricter copyright laws was a good thing and not literally one of the worst things to happen in the history of music which nearly destroyed several primarily black music genres. Of course this is anecdotal because it's just One Guy I Saw Once, but you can see what I mean about how uncritical support for copyright law as a tool against AI can lead people to adopt increasingly regressive ideas about copyright.

Similarly, I've seen at least one person go "you know what? Collages should be considered art theft too, fuck you" over an argument where someone else compared AI art to collages. Again, same point as above.

Similarly, I take issue with the way a lot of people seem EXTREMELY personally invested in proving AI art is Not Real Art. I not only find this discussion unproductive, but also similarly dangerously prone to validating very reactionary ideas about The Nature Of Art that shouldn't really be entertained. Also it's a discussion rife with intellectual dishonesty and unevenly applied definition and standards.

When a lot of people present the argument of AI art not being art because the definition of art is this and that, they try to pretend that this is the definition of art the've always operated under and believed in, even when a lot of the time it's blatantly obvious that they're constructing their definition on the spot and deliberately trying to do so in such a way that it doesn't include AI art.

They never succeed at it, btw. I've seen several dozen different "AI art isn't art because art is [definition]". I've seen exactly zero of those where trying to seriously apply that definition in any context outside of trying to prove AI art isn't art doesn't end up in it accidentally excluding one or more non-AI artforms, usually reflecting the author's blindspots with regard to the different forms of artistic expression.

(However, this is moot because, again, these are rarely definitions that these people actually believe in or adhere to outside of trying to win "Is AI art real art?" discussions.)

Especially worrying when the definition they construct is built around stuff like Effort or Skill or Dedication or The Divine Human Spirit. You would not be happy about the kinds of art that have traditionally been excluded from Real Art using similar definitions.

Seriously when everyone was celebrating that the Catholic Church came out to say AI art isn't real art and sharing it as if it was validating and not Extremely Worrying that the arguments they'd been using against AI art sounded nearly identical to things TradCaths believe I was like. Well alright :T You can make all the "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a catholic" legolas and gimli memes you want, but it won't change the fact that the argument being made by the catholic church was a profoundly conservative one and nearly identical to arguments used to dismiss the artistic merit of certain forms of "degenerate" art and everyone was just uncritically sharing it, completely unconcerned with what kind of worldview they were lending validity to by sharing it.

Remember when the discourse about the Gay Sex cats pic was going on? One of the things I remember the most from that time was when someone went "Tell me a definition of art that excludes this picture without also excluding Fountain by Duchamp" and how just. Literally no one was able to do it. A LOT of people tried to argue some variation of "Well, Fountain is art and this image isn't because what turns fountain into art is Intent. Duchamp's choice to show a urinal at an art gallery as if it was art confers it an element of artistic intent that this image lacks" when like. Didn't by that same logic OP's choice to post the image on tumblr as if it was art also confer it artistic intent in the same way? Didn't that argument actually kinda end up accidentally validating the artistic status of every piece of AI art ever posted on social media? That moment it clicked for me that a lot of these definitions require applying certain concepts extremely selectively in order to make sense for the people using them.

A lot of people also try to argue it isn't Real Art based on the fact that most AI art is vapid but like. If being vapid definitionally excludes something from being art you're going to have to exclude a whooole lot of stuff along with it. AI art is vapid. A lot of art is too, I don't think this argument works either.

Like, look, I'm not really invested in trying to argue in favor of The Artistic Merits of AI art but I also find it extremely hard to ignore how trying to categorically define AI art as Not Real Art not only is unproductive but also requires either a) applying certain parts of your definition of art extremely selectively, b) constructing a definition of art so convoluted and full of weird caveats as to be functionally useless, or c) validating extremely reactionary conservative ideas about what Real Art is.

Some stray thoughts that don't fit any of the above sections.

I've occassionally seen people respond to AI art being used for shitposts like "A lot of people have affordable commissions, you could have paid someone like $30 to draw this for you instead of using the plagiarism algorithm and exploiting the work of real artists" and sorry but if you consider paying an artist a rate that amounts to like $5 for several hours of work a LESS exploitative alternative I think you've got something fucked up going on with your priorities.

Also it's kinda funny when people comment on the aforementioned shitposts with some variation of "see, the usage of AI art robs it of all humor because the thing that makes shitposts funny is when you consider the fact that someone would spend so much time and effort in something so stupid" because like. Yeah that is part of the humor SOMETIMES but also people share and laugh at low effort shitposts all the time. Again you're constructing a definition that you don't actually believe in anywhere outside of this type of conversations. Just say you don't like that it's AI art because you think it's morally wrong and stop being disingenuous.

So yeah, this is pretty much everything I believe about the topic.

I don't "defend" AI art, but my opposition to it is firmly rooted in my principles, and that means I refuse to uncritically accept any anti-AI art argument that goes against those same principles.

If you think not accepting and parroting every Anti-AI art argument I encounter because some of them are ideologically rooted in things I disagree with makes me indistinguishable from "AI techbros" you're working under a fucked up dichotomy.

[seventhdoctor]

#also to be fair he was a kid when he did it

Okay I wasn't going to comment on the original reply because 1) Yubel's crimes aren't even the point of this post* and 2) that user doesn't seem to like me in particular (given they have an "anti" tag that's just posts of mine they've commented on) and I've blocked them to save us both some headache, but before this risks breaking containment too hard I want to point out the original tags here:

Note that the person who made these comments chose to omit the last tag, which on top of phrases like "never 4get" is intended to communicate that I am attempting to be funny on the Internet and roasting a character I'm fond of, rather than seriously attacking his character. On a joke post, about Yugioh characters saying skill issue.

* And before someone tries to take this out of context again, I shouldn't even have to say this but this skill issue joke post is not intended to be a post where I discuss my opinions of Yubel's crimes and it never was.

Edit: I realize this post is a bit cranky so here's an additional joke now that I've had to comment on the original reply anyway:

Check for comprehension (in the style of reading-comp-posting):

What meme is the original post referencing?

Are the speakers of the shown quotes taken seriously? Are lines like "while you were wasting time being dead" intended to be interpreted as reasonable judgements of others' circumstances?

Is it likely that the tags are taking described offenses seriously? Out of the three shown quotes, why are OP's tags referencing one speaker specifically? What do phrases like "the most guy ever" convey about OP's opinion of that character?

How does user janestvalentine interpret the quoted tags? Given your answer to #3, is this a reasonable interpretation?

Of the original tags, which ones does user janestvalentine include or exclude in their quote? Is any information lost from excluded tags?

OP posted a screenshot edit attributing user janestvalentine's comments to a particular character. Discuss with a mutual familiar with GX: is this a usual comment that character would make? Given your answers to #2 and #5, why might OP have chosen to make this comparison?

Yugioh characters simply have no patience for your skill issues.