ObamaAkbar. posted:

do they not realise they can basically make up whatever rules they want?

ObamaAkbar. posted:

do they not realise they can basically make up whatever rules they want?

Epic High Five posted:

imho Twitter embeds shouldn't work at all here, but blocking platform.twitter.com is a good balance where you only get the text and not the rest of the garbage and your place in the thread zipping around since it's the last thing to load

selec posted:

why, what possible good would that do? hitting their API costs them money. I think embeds should work until the site dies.

Flesh Forge posted:

when your entire concept of ~art~ revolves around consuming disney stuff

https://twitter.com/CatgirlAnarcho/status/1613797134830284800

quote:

I feel like I’m somewhat allowed to give my view as it pertains to art, even though it’s outside the wheelhouse of my flair, in that the art side of things has been what I’ve put most of my non-philosophical time into, as well as some philosophical time, and given a certain amount of familiarity I have with the tech culture’s view of what art is and how LLMs, “generative AI”, affect that.

My worry is not about the ability of LLMs, generative AI (hereafter all under the heading “AI” with appropriate scare quotes), to interfere with our perception of reality, disrupt our notions of authorship, etc. although anybody who thinks that that’s not an issue on some level is fooling themselves at this point. What I am concerned about with respect to art is that AI shows up the conceptual apparatus people use to understand art as just quite weak. This particularly struck me when I went to the discord server for one of these AI art tools, and found out what the examples were they were using in their arguments about authorship, veracity, etc.

The whole discussion seems to rest on this idea that if you can’t tell the difference between a digital copy (maximum and minimum size: a computer and mobile phone screen) and a real example (same dimensions and medium) of a particular author working in their particular style, particularly in a highly industrialised mode (primarily manga, as it happens), then this undermines the whole concept of authorship in art, and that hereafter, either for good or for ill, the whole edifice of art qua art, which supposedly rests on the spurious foundation that art and artist are inseparable, is going to crumble. Mutatis mudandis this is the same if you plug the mobile phone into a 3D printer and generate a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. The basic idea seems to be that what has held up such an edifice is a combination of the artist’s particular facility with their instrument and their particular stylistic tells, plus the institution of copyright, which becomes a much shakier foundation if (a) those facilities and tells can be extracted from the existing work and reproduced in new arrangements, (b) if the copyright system can’t keep up with the sheer volume of copied work (Elmyr de Hory could only paint so many Modigliani’s in a year).

This is a kind of mutant version of Walter Benjamin’s argument from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where he points out that the “aura”, the originality, of the artwork is lessened by its constant reproduction in the photographic form. Mutant because where Benjamin had worked from the assumptions of the early 20th century, now the putative foundations are much thinner and distinctly post-industrial. There is something distinctly “neoliberal” about thinking that you need copyright law and a slip of the pen here and there to stake any claims you might have to artistic originality.

The third point which goes with the aforementioned two is that since AI generated art is original, even in the sense that it copies a style, it can remix existing styles and create something new not just in content but in form: this supposedly vitiates the last refuge of the artist as remixer of the past. I hope I don’t have to show that this is also a distinctly post-industrial, perhaps “neoliberal”, understanding of the artist’s role.

I should stress that while I used the discord server as a jumping off point, the themes I’m talking about are more or less the same almost wherever you go. A discord server might be a particularly stark example, but the standard themes in the mainstream press are very much the same. The reaction to those themes takes a reactionary form, simply stating “the AI will never produce something the same as the human hand”, and while I think that that’s incidentally true, I think it hardly tells the whole story.

What worries me about all this is that it has nothing to do with art qua art. It has nothing to do with questions about what makes art meaningful, even in the thin sense of “well why do people make things which have no productive use?”. I’m actually quite fond of being broadly nihilist about such questions, or at least quietist, or relativist, but I do think it’s concerning that such questions are being conflated with purely aesthetic questions about the artistic image, the essentially mental and purely visual representation of the artwork in the mind, which is what the AI is good at imitating.

I think if you were to look at a society with a more or less psychologically healthy relationship to itself and to its cultural product, you would find that it treated AI generated art as a kind of pranksterism, an occasionally fun annoyance or necessary thorn in the side of art world pretension (Elmyr de Hory!), and at the same time as a genuine opportunity for people who really are committed to creating new kinds of image as a tool for the expansion of creativity in new directions. But instead what you find, what I’ve found at least, is on the one hand a tech culture which takes this opportunity to be a thorn in the side and instead runs away with the idea, setting out to move fast and break everything,1 and on the other a lot of people rightly concerned that since there is such a thin and atomised and post-industrial view of art (or the artistic image) therefore AI reproduction poses a genuine threat to a certain way of life and a number of careers. You know I don’t think that in a culture which puts such a high aesthetic premium on unique images, and yet is only willing to reward the creators of those images with ever-diminishing and increasingly precarious careers as, essentially, self-employed advertising professionals, there should be a cultural counterblast to those creators daring to speak up when they feel that they’ve been shafted, having already tied themselves in knots trying to fit their creative impulse into the market imperatives which would give them some financial stability.

So I think that, at least as concerns art, the worry about authorship and and the worry about a feeling of unreality just go hand in hand with the fact that even the word “community” is a buzzword for name brand places (“reddit”) you hang out with other people on the internet. I’m not a critical theory guy, so my reference texts for this are more Guy Debord (Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle) than Adorno and Horkheimer (“The Culture Industry” from Dialectic of Enlightenment), and I think a diagnosis of how this affects us personally is more alive in Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life) than it is in something more academic like Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man). I confess my sources are indeed quite old, and I’ve been once again enjoying Heidegger’s Der Ister, grossly offputting as parts of it are, for those specific lecture’s particular diagnosis of the modern world (those lectures were given in Germany, in 1942!) as mistaking the scientific-technological metaphysical image of the world for the real thing.

I read more current sources and they seem to mostly say (as Debord points out) the same things over and over again, just happening to concentrate on particulars rather than bigger themes…I don’t know if some kind of economic or cultural shock happened in the 1970s which put thinkers into such retreat but it must have been a big one.

There is another category: people who love art qua art and loudly champion the possibilities of AI over the din of other art lovers complaining. Some of these people are my friends, and I respect their views! I should be one of them, but at the same time that loud championing is right now is more or less exclusively a promissory note, and the fulfilment of that promise will ride heavily on what the current state of things will permit.

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Jjyurii/status/1614725522235265031

lobster shirt posted:

a blissful forums experience

Epic High Five posted:

I don't think outflows to SA embeds are something that's showing up on their money loss radar at the moment. They should be banned because it's stupid dogshit 99% of the time and it makes posters lazy and weak.

Epic High Five posted:

I don't think outflows to SA embeds are something that's showing up on their money loss radar at the moment. They should be banned because it's stupid dogshit 99% of the time and it makes posters lazy and weak.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

chaser:

https://twitter.com/StannisUSA/status/1615153852126208002

One More Fat Nerd posted:

2023 cspam is not 2009 LF. There are too few posters, and the posters that remain are old and tired and have responsibilites (kids) to worry about. No one has time to truly post post poast. We have moved from a content creation model to a commentary/criticism model.

This will change as the primaries spin up and an influx of posters appears, but you may not like what you get.

Epic High Five posted:

I don't think outflows to SA embeds are something that's showing up on their money loss radar at the moment. They should be banned because it's stupid dogshit 99% of the time and it makes posters lazy and weak.

mawarannahr posted:

regarding its widespread use for launching a discussion, a whole lot of people seem to prefer seeing a tweet with thumbnail and a link to some article to a well-formatted excerpt. even if theres a paywall. i think people like to react to the headline and comments than read some boring writing.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Flesh Forge posted:

when your entire concept of ~art~ revolves around consuming disney stuff

https://twitter.com/CatgirlAnarcho/status/1613797134830284800

Epic High Five posted:

Well yeah, problem is headline writers know that too.

Epic High Five posted:

It's not oppression to expect people to write a sentence or two, it's barely more work than just posting a link.

Epic High Five posted:

It's not oppression to expect people to write a sentence or two, it's barely more work than just posting a link. I'm fully aware of the cycle and it's not actually worth worrying about but it is what I believe. In threads like this it makes sense, but I firmly believe that social media is evil and will be remembered like leaded gasoline and as a result I will never support its accommodation in any case for any reason. Anything else would be moral cowardice, and pathetic besides because the stakes are so low.

lobster shirt posted:

where do people find these like 300 follower accounts

Epic High Five posted:

It's not oppression to expect people to write a sentence or two, it's barely more work than just posting a link. I'm fully aware of the cycle and it's not actually worth worrying about but it is what I believe. In threads like this it makes sense, but I firmly believe that social media is evil and will be remembered like leaded gasoline and as a result I will never support its accommodation in any case for any reason. Anything else would be moral cowardice, and pathetic besides because the stakes are so low.

quote:

This might be more suited to another forum but I've been banned elsewhere because of my conservative views. Do people really give a drat about social media drama? I mean for crying out loud, you've got so much drama plaguing Fecesbook now. For crying out loud, when I open my Fecesbook app, I see nothing but cringe and narcissism. I don't know about the younger generation but I vividly remember in my time when myspace was still the mainstream go-to social media site that people often made fun of peeps who posted their selfies 24/7, who had to take pics of their food and what they did for the day. We would often joke, "the only thing you haven't posted is you taking a poo poo."

How things change so fast. In just 5-10 years, that behavior has been normalized, encouraged even! Privacy is out the window. Cancel culture is now the norm. Do one stupid thing and have it go viral and that mistake will follow you and haunt you for the rest of your life as if that will now define you forever, with no chance of rest, respite or comfort. I feel like social media is a dark stain on humanity. I don't know if it's just me but I observe now that it has made people more aggressive, ruder, narcissistic, prone to fishing for likes to get that high on dopamine rush on social media and even to the point of desperation that young girls sexualize themselves for everyone to see and older men preying on them.

It's as if the whole world now is living on social media and people are that loving desperate to advertise themselves. Then we wonder why suicide and mental health problems are on the rise. This craziness was limited to celebrities and politicians before. Now EVERYONE is exposed and at risk and it's not good for their mental health. Whether you have wanted or unwanted attention, you DONT want people putting your life in a magnifying glass 24/7 for privacy and reputational concerns. Are people really this narcissistic nowadays? When I say this poo poo regarding social media, you get told off with "let people enjoy things", "don't be such a spoilsport", "let them live their lives", "They are celebrating." Really? Posting your loving boba milktea is celebrating "victories"? loving hell, they're even justifying this nonsense.

And it's not like I'm ruining everyone's parade. I'm looking at the DEEPER issues that will affect everyone on a societal level. Nothing good comes out of rewarding narcissism. Nothing good comes out of little kids sexualizing themselves on Tiktok. Nothing good comes out of encouraging the masses posting their stupid low IQ opinions and giving them the power to cancel someone. gently caress it. Am I really the only one who sees that social media is a dark stain on humanity that shouldn't exist?

quote:

I once was on a vacation in boracay. While i was on the beach watching the parasails, i noticed an extremely attractive woman who was wandering around the beach take selfies of herself with one of those selfie stick things. I then notice a man walking about 10 feet behind her and he's looking down as he's walking. Later that evening, i came across the same two at a restaurant and I realized they were a couple. The man was sitting at the table with his chin in his palm, looking bored as gently caress. Meanwhile, the girl was taking selfies and pictures of her food. I finally put it all together and realized this was a newly wed couple on their honeymoon, and the new husband just found out that he married a vapid whore. Imagine spending all that money on a fancy honeymoon just spend the majority of it watching your wife take pictures of herself.

Yeah, society is fluid but is all change a good thing? The collapse of the Western Roman Empire into the dark ages in Europe was a massive change but was it good? Just because change happens, it doesn't mean it's for the better. Things can change also into the worse. And when it comes to narcissism, cancel culture and being rude, don't kid yourself. Social media has amplified these things to the max. You could never cancel someone without the internet. They can change and correct their mistakes. Fights rarely happened. People were more chill back then.

We played team sports like basketball, hanged out with friends as a past time, lived at the moment and DIDNT PRETEND we had fun because we REALLY HAD FUN unlike now where you take pics every now and then of your food when hanging out instead of talking, while in reality, all you and your "friends" did was take pics, scroll through your phone and pretend you had fun. Times have changed and it's not for the better. It's for worse. People have no personality now. All you have to do is shake your rear end and wear skimpy clothes in front of the camera and you will get your loving likes.

quote:

you are so hyperfixated on the words I used that you failed to see the forest from the trees. The words "narcissistic vapid whore" hurt you so much that the point totally flew above your head. Women who do not value the time with their husbands on their loving HONEYMOON and would rather be fixated on their phones shows how society has gone so low. A vapid narcissistic oval office would rather spend more time on selfies, pictures and on her phone on their honeymoon than their husband, and people like you defend it. This just proves my point. Relationships and communication nowadays are almost non-existent. The insanity here is people like you defending a woman spending more time on her phone than on her husband on their honeymoon, and cheering for it.

Things will turn for the worse when I see responses and defenses like yours, but good thing I will not be alive by then. I do weep for the next generation because it seems vapid narcissistic cunts (which curiously hurts you for some loving reason when I wasn't even referring to you) will be the norm and there will be nothing we can do about it.

One More Fat Nerd posted:

2023 cspam is not 2009 LF. There are too few posters, and the posters that remain are old and tired and have responsibilites (kids) to worry about. No one has time to truly post post poast. We have moved from a content creation model to a commentary/criticism model.

This will change as the primaries spin up and an influx of posters appears, but you may not like what you get.

cmndstab posted:

So that dude is about to kill himself, I gather?

I mean, someone should probably notify someone I guess. If they feel like it.

ObamaAkbar. posted:

I think he’s just old as gently caress?