I think the AIs scrape everything, but you raise a good point that only big names are mentioned in prompts, so big names are the only ones AI users specifically mimic (as far as I know).

But is direct mimicry the only way AI hurts artists? Or will regular, non-rich artists suffer in other ways? Will they land fewer commissions as cheap or free AI images become increasingly indistinguishable from real stuff? Will they have a harder time attracting a following as convincing AI starts to dilute the airwaves? Will AI users start to pass off generative AI as their own work, out-competing artists who have to spend hours of labor on each piece?

speaking of learning calculus, I also recommend the "integral solver with steps" website https://www.integral-calculator.com/

i'm trying to think of an argument that would make it not be profitable to deny me healthcare

labor aristocracy is a matter of how much you get paid, not whether you work up a sweat. Most artists already do not make a living off of art.

also, part of what makes something a bullshit job is that it provides no value to society, but doesn't human expression enrich people's lives? Don't people have cultural needs on top of material and social needs? I don't think all of modern art can be dismissed as mere slop and consumerism, it's not all artists begrudgingly fulfilling commissions for big-titted Elsa or whatever. I still see people expressing themselves and their experiences and getting paid for it.

Maybe AI won't threaten that, maybe the people who use AI were never going to pay for art anyway, but if entertain the notion, if AI did hurt artists' incomes, I think it would be a bad thing worth caring about, even if artists aren't doing heavy physical labor and they're not perpetuating socialist ideals.

This is great, really well written. Also, this was quite a statistic:

From 2001 to 2020, “median rents grew by 21 percent, after inflation, while renters’ incomes grew by 2 percent.”

Midjourney has a discord server

like being one of those machines they extrude spaghetti out of

I totally agree with what you're saying, it's bad strategy to dogpile someone like this—not only because they might be reachable, but also because we should be practicing to get better at radicalizing people online and in person. Even if the person's not receptive, it hones our rhetoric and exposes us to counterarguments.

Also, dogpiling someone like that just makes us look unreasonable and gets us defederated from more instances.

I think we have itchy trigger fingers because we don't get that many actual chuds to fight anymore, and we miss fighting.

*edit: and by “dogpiling someone like that” I mean “dogpiling someone who is similar to that user,” not “dogpiling someone, like we did.” I think dogpiling is called for sometimes. Like if someone is not only wrong but also a shitty person.

Transphobes in the comments saying "this would confuse the children" like there are no trans children who are already confused and would be much less confused if the world acknowledged their experience.

I was in these threads, I saw what people were saying. People were vicious on all sides—and, crucially, very crucially, that doesn't mean they're vicious people, on either side, any more than two spouses who get in an argument are bad people. The argument just has a life of its own. People feel attacked, so they defend by attacking back, and in that rush to attack back there's no time or emotional space to actually reach an understanding and resolve the conflict. So it keeps going, and with every trade the interpersonal damage grows and reconciliation gets harder.

On a forum it's even worse, because there's an audience, your lizard brain's thinking "if I lose this exchange then hundreds of my peers will turn against me."

So, yes, people get vicious. And when the dust settles, the bitterness lingers, and that bitterness accumulates with each struggle session, until the site starts to have a general atmosphere of conflict. And when that happens people start to clique up as a way to defend themselves, which leads to a further breakdown in communication, which leads to even more conflict and resentment, until the site dies. Then afterward the cliques are like two exes who each insist the other was a crazy narcissist, when really they were just bad at resolving conflicts, and the fights brought out the worst in them as fights tend to do.

There's a solution to this, which is to slow down, communicate patiently and respectfully, and try to reach an understanding. Even if the other person is already agitated.

Yeah, it's hard to do, it requires some vulnerability to not rush to defend by attacking back. And it's slow; the whole time you're writing your response it can feel like you're losing ground, like everyone's reading the other person's comment and making up their minds. Which is the other purpose of being civil: it gives the other person time to gather their thoughts, process their emotions, and actually express themself in a constructive way, and then they're more likely to do the same for you because they feel safe, and you get to have a healthy exchange that closes the gap faster than it opens it.

I think we maybe miscommunicated

From my point of view, for a while my perception of the situation has not been two groups of users having struggle sessions between them, while the mods remove comments they think are too inflammatory and will escalate things, or otherwise work to de-escalate.

I realize that in the past two struggle sessions the mods had a side. When I talk about deescalating and talking things through, that includes conflicts between users and mods. I don’t know how to talk about that without it turning into “I’m trying to defend whatever specific thing the person reading this is mad at the mods for.”

I’m mad that the site health is deteriorating. You might put that all on the mods, but I don’t think that’s how conflict works. Conflict is a process that takes on a life of its own. When people are at odds there’s a right way and a wrong way to handle it. I feel like I’m going nuts because no one seems to know what I’m talking about, like my whole perspective is alien to people and to even start to explain it I have to cross a minefield.

to continue to be charitable

I feel so defeated reading this shit. The site really is going to die and I’m not smart enough to figure out what to say or do about it.

It’s beside the point. That’s one struggle session. I’m not even the one who brought it up.

I’m saying forum health is a collective effort. Blaming everything on the mods is a great way to not learn anything and guarantee another massive struggle session in the future. People here need to learn to talk through disagreements patiently and constructively, not only for the health of the site but for the health of any organizations they may be a part of now or in the future.

This fosters a lot of resentment and frankly I think it is going to kill the site

What’s going to kill the site is the struggle sessions themselves. I almost left after the last two, they’re so miserable. People need to learn to deescalate and talk things out like human beings. Struggle sessions are too fast-paced and defensive to even be dialogue, they’re just screaming, and then people build up these personal resentments that last long after the struggle session ends and have little to do with the original topic of disagreement.

The cure for resentment is to talk things out and try to understand the other person’s perspective, which you can’t even do in a struggle session because they’re too fast paced and everyone is too defensive.

And when the struggle session ends people can’t shut up about it, there are these constant little snipes and eye rolls, like bitter spouses who’ve given up on communicating, and everyone else has to read that shit and soak up that vibe. Most of us have moved on, most of us don’t give a shit.

I mean case in point, this thread we’re in right now is miserable. The removed comment called the mods self-important children and suggested that the site be Balkanized, for fuck’s sake that’s so excessive. The mods aren’t some cabal or narcissists. They ended up here the same way any of us did. They’re just people. What’s broken is the toxic dynamic between individuals not some intrinsic evilness in the individuals themselves.

Like, come on, nothing that TC69 did was

shutting down discussion out of fear that it will explode.

If you mean the recent struggle session where she briefly came back, then yes that’s what she was doing, she even said as much. She ended up making everything worse but when I put myself in her shoes, I understand it: she sees herself getting vilified more with each passing second, the site is tearing itself apart, the thread is moving way too fast, you have all the usual issues of communicating by text plus all the issues of a large crowd of people, the situation was completely out of control and she probably panicked.

iirc the whole thing started over some trivial issue in the first place, so trivial I can barely even remember, I think that was the dunk tank renaming struggle session? Who even gives a shit? We’re gonna have a screaming match over the name of the fucking dunk tank?

You can’t blame everything on the mods, the other half of the problem is users who don’t knows how to deescalate and communicate. That’s a big problem for leftists, both online and in person, we need to work on that as a matter of anti-wrecker praxis if anything.

It’s not all on the mods. The community is way too struggle session-prone, which leads to mods shutting down discussion and criticism out of fear that it will explode. Then we get a runaway feedback loop where shutting down discussion pisses people off, which makes struggle sessions more likely, which leads to the mods shutting down more discussion.

When did the drone thing start? Was it after the CEO shooting?

I think there’s also indication that a lot of school shooters are humiliated narcissists. Elliot Rogers is a good example. It’s an oversimplification but I think it sheds some light.

Except there were widespread riots in the civil rights era, violent unrest was a major factor behind the civil rights act. They’re trapped in the version of the civil rights era that we learn about in high school.

Being nice to entitled men just invites more at-risk dudes to start thinking that way. It needs to be socially unacceptable. We need to be like Gandalf banishing Wormtongue from Theoden’s hall. At the first hint of entitlement, bully the shit out of them. Raise the barrier of entry. Like how demonizing communism means there are fewer communists.

I don't think the article is saying these tactics constitute dual power. Rather, it is saying that, while leftists often associate these tactics with dual power, the tactics are better understood as outreach. I think this is also what CutieBootieTootie meant by putting "dual power" in quotes here:

The article says that "dual power" tactics as we commonly see them are best done for outreach

They're not dual power tactics, they're "dual power" tactics.

Here's an excerpt from the article itself:

The bulk of the current debate over the role of dual power in a strategy for revolution in the United States rests on a relatively recent redefinition and decontextualization of the concept, in which it is effectively stripped of its meaning by becoming so broad that it could refer to almost anything. This, in turn, results in the misunderstanding and misapplication of tactics related to directly meeting the needs of the working class, building a base of support, and ultimately making a revolution.

this was interesting, at 7:18

"This is nothing new, we have not invented a technology here. The half moon technology is actually an endogenous technology to the Sahel, and has been forgotten over time.