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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
You’re not wrong on the AI corps having good lawyers, but I suspect those lawyers don’t have much to work with:
Pretty much every AI corp has been caught stealing from basically everyone (with basically everyone caught scraping without people’s knowledge or consent, and OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic all caught scraping against people’s explicit wishes)
Said data was used to create products which, either implicitly or [explicitly]((https://archive.is/jNhpN), produce counterfeits of the stolen artists’ work
Said counterfeits are, in turn, destroying the artists’ ability to profit from their original work and discouraging them from sharing it freely
And to cap things off, there’s solid evidence pointing to the defendants being completely unrepentant in their actions, whether that be Microsoft’s AI boss treating such theft as entirely acceptable or Mira Murati treating the job losses as an afterthought
If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the trial being a bloodbath in the artists’ 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 doesn’t work take another. Death by a million cuts.