Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Polident]

The rapid acceleration of AI development is actually really fascinating. In a better world it’s seeing the holodeck made real within our lifetimes. As it is, with how ill equipped people are mentally and emotionally to handle paradigm shifting technologies, maybe we’re headed for the butlerian jihad. With luck there is a narrow window between the two that’ll kick ass.

[Propagandhim]

To be fair, AI must seem pretty cool if you've never actually given much thought to literally anything except your own whims. I can see why it would be a downer if people kept bringing up stuff like "our interdependent economy" or "social relations" or "standards of shared truth" or "ethics." Buncha pessimists.

Right, exactly.  Your own whims.  Ya know, like solving terminal existential problems like diagnosing human disease and cancer, and treating them through protein-folding and mrna sequencing, or discovering and testing enormous multivariate datasets of alloys to analyze and run simulations to achieve better energy efficiency to put a dent in the climate change crisis, or analysing predictive data to monitor and tend to natural disasters...you know, just shit in the immediate purview of your own whims, not like worrying about losing your furry commissions to a computer - no, that's a holistic human problem.

[kaleidoscopium]

This is just one facet of this whole thing, but it's because we live in a world where rampant misinformation and conspiracism bolsters bigotries which in turn commonly gets minorities killed, whether we're talking about women- cis and trans- getting fucked over by transphobes over their identity, to Black and brown men being misidentified as criminals, to groups like in Gaza having undergone settler colonialism for decades without pushback.

Information is excessively important to the well-being of the worst off, both in terms of its veracity, its framing, and its availability to the masses. We need to be able to accurately identify problems and furthermore be able to figure out solutions to those problems by using good information as a baseline.

However, for some odd reason, otherwise well-meaning people are celebrating the fact that we are about to happily allow the entire world the ability to create even more convincing misinformation at an extremely higher volume. People, namely women, are already expressing and going through with suicidal ideation over the porn deepfakes that exist with the technology we have. And "it's only going to get better." It's going to be less flawed, more versatile, and more easy to do.

Ultimately there is fundamentally no scenario where everyone can create realistic-looking videos of anything they want, and someone doesn't get targeted for it. And those someones are usually minorities. This goes beyond the arts; this is going to have sociopolitical ramifications if not aggressively kept in check, and likely people who look like me are going to be the proverbial and literal sacrifices to the alter for it on this front alone. We're not even talking about how economic disruption affects minorities more, or how the use of energy needed for this stupid shit is going to fuck the Global South more. The misinformation alone should at least mildly concern people who claim they care about social justice causes.

But hey, some folks are gonna get more episodes of some fucking cancelled tv show out of it, so I guess the universe is balanced out.

[Propagandhim]

"Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."

[Propagandhim]

There's absolutely no way you can turn a discussion of the pros and cons of AI into an attack on POC.  I can't even imagine how you would do it. *sensible chuckle*  No way in hell.  



Challenge accepted.





edit: Damn, I'm late

[Snoopy]

Normal person’s immediate reaction to this new A.I stuff -

Yes, favourite celebrity nude. Favourite dead musician/actor brought back to life.

Ree’s immediate reaction to it-

Child porn

[jooseloose]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/openai-unveils-sora-a-shockingly-realistic-video-generator.818091/post-119298780

Before anyone especially the people who cheer the death of art on a regular basis starts celebrating let's like, use critical thinking skills and acknowledge the reasons why this is fucking awful. Starting with how it's a continuation of awful things already happening:

@allyrooker

 

"my page is full of people who are making AI stuff and other people who are enjoying it...why do we think this is ok?? why...why...why are people not freaking out about this??"

I saw that Tom Warren tweet the other day and wasn't sure if he's acting thick on purpose or not.

[Propagandhim]

The problem is that we were probably always destined to get where we are. Science being what it is, incentives economic or otherwise being what they are. If it's not discovered through public and open research, it is (like we are witnessing now) through closed and private research. If not openly in the US, or the EU (which is the best world to live in unfortunately) then covertly in China. It has the unbearable stink of capitalist incentives all over it but it's because the rest of society is just too slow to respond to the lightning fast allocation of resources that capitalism enables (externalities be damned, which is a problem I agree). We should have had laws on the books 3 years ago to avoid the worst, but we don't. So unfortunately in my opinion the best case scenario now is to dominate the field in any way possible and openly declare to everyone and especially politicians, anything on the internet is untrustworthy now, fix it or burn.

Disregarding that hilarious sentence in bold...this is complete bullshit.  They're against open-source AI like Stable Diffusion, just the same.  It really just comes down to them valuing certain things, disregarding what other people value, and being completely ignorant of the positive impact it produces in the system, despite reaping all the benefit from it, all the while.

[benji]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/why-the-most-educated-people-in-america-fall-for-anti-semitic-lies-the-atlantic.817833/

Some dude already trying to justify anti semitism:

And like, the article comments about the preemptive defensive position a lot of people have been placed into. Where their guilt is actively assumed unless they demonstrate that they're, essentially, 'one of the good ones' who understands the Palestinian plight. So like, I get how the article wouldn't want to engage in having to make those same arguments to prove its point in the distress that many people have felt from this, whether or not, and even if, they had any actual connection to Israel at all


But it also belies the point, hinted at in choice phrases like the above, that the author doesn't really want to discuss some of the biggest factors of why people are primed to jump on board this stuff, except where they can specifically tie it to people being duped by Hamas. It even blunts their own point about how much weight there has been placed upon people being able to prove their suffering, even while other, incredibly dubious sources are believed without reservation. Again, I get that runs counter to the piece as an attempt to convey a minority's frustrations with people that they thought friends and allies, but it does make it hard to entirely take in good faith. But then, that's maybe the point so... hrm

What a ride in two paragraphs.

I think this is a very good attempt to disentangle the ways in which this is deeply messy. In particular, I don't know how I'm supposed to talk about the fact that currently a state that defines itself by its Jewishness, controlled by Jewish people who make their identity a core part of the ideological thrust of all of their activity, is committing violence and atrocities on a mass scale and just...bracket out that factor? Like, I think Netanyahu is a monster, full stop. There are other historical figures, past and present and from every continent, who I could analogize him to. But any attempt to articulate that some specific Jewish people in power in Israel both have powerful allies in the US government and are currently carrying out what appears to be eliminationist violence is represented and reflected back "So you're saying all Jews are powerful goblins who control the world? Wow very revealing". Its this weird disempowering move where no Jewish people can ever be held account to anything they would do with power because by definition the idea that any Jewish people anywhere are powerful or have influence is antisemitic. What are you supposed to do with that?

I don't know how it plays out in regular online discourse, but there have been concerned raised about, for example, the Anti-Defamation League using accusations of anti-semitism to silence criticisms of Israel's genocidal actions against the Palestinian people. I do think based on that it's fair to say that there's at least some degree of complexity in how the actions of Israel as a state and the safety of Jewish people as a set of ethnic groups are muddled in popular narratives

Weren’t you assholes using the ADL to prove that stuff like Pepe and the OK signs were racist dog whistles? Now you suddenly think that is manipulative.

I was going to say, they were using this stuff to attack people just like months ago. Remember when they were claiming that criticism of billionaire George Soros was anti-semitic? They spent how many years accusing Joanne of being an anti-semite because GOBLINS ARE OBVIOUSLY JEWS and saying that Hogfart's was based on a "Jewish conspiracy theory" somehow.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/openai-unveils-sora-a-shockingly-realistic-video-generator.818091/post-119300100

I care about consent. Unless literally every single video used to train this model had the creators of it personally contact the people whose videos they took to train it to get consent then it is made is created from stolen data.

This is an insane standard. Especially since he goes onto talk about brains and shit, like should I have to get permission to read somebody's book and build my research off of it?

Do you just not care? Can you just STOP infodumping about how it works, gaslighting about whether or not stolen data was involved, and just, express, an opinion, on the consequences?

Completely unhinged behavior.

We should have had laws on the books 3 years ago to avoid the worst, but we don't. 

I really don't think we should be designing laws to make crimes before things even exist. Especially when we want to enforce these crimes before things can come into existence. This is, again, an insane standard for anything but especially lawmaking.

[benji]

Apparently now we're allowed to demand people shut the fuck up and just give an opinion on THE CONSEQUENCES. Yet notice how Crossing Eden, Nepenthe, the rest of the forum, etc. are never held to account for the easily foreseeable consequences of their own demands. And indeed are given a pass for how they want to outlaw human advancement and pine for an apocalypse to destroy society because they have "good intentions" according to themselves.

[Propagandhim]

They just pull shit out of their ass.   The people involved in developing AI come from all over the world, some of the most preeminent people in the field are "minorities". Are Demis Hassabis, Fei-Fei-Li, and Andrew Ng white now?  And some of the largest beneficiaries of AI text generation are people from developing countries.  China and Singapore are 2nd and 3rd after the US in terms of benchmark rankings on AI (articles published on AI, professionals, patents granted, AI systems published, top 500 supercomputer FLOPs, co-location data centers, total funding of AI companies and start-ups) - are asians not considered "minorities"?  

You'd think all this talk about democratizing the tools of production was sincere, but these coffee shop communist revolutionaries don't want the 'global south' to thrive via cheap production and information tools, they know they can't compete with them - they love being coddled by their first world privileges.  How else do you get someone like Nepenthe - an adult woman living with her parents, luxuriating in a suburban home in a peaceful wealthy country, afforded the comfort to draw and talk shit on a message board all day, and still do absolutely nothing substantial with herself.

[Nintex]

AI is awesome, much like the first smartphone but I feel this is way bigger perhaps even bigger than the invention of the internet itself. 

We'll have to adjust, we'll have to invent new things, we'll have to learn.

Lots of opportunities and something to be excited about. One of the few things that could actually break the corpos as small companies can more easily change their way of working.

[benji]

These people claim to be against the War on Drugs but they want to recreate it pretty much identically for AI. You'd think such informed progressives would be aware of the CONSEQUENCES of outlawing research on Schedule I drugs and significantly hampering it on the lower Scheduled drugs.

[HaughtyFrank]

This is just one facet of this whole thing, but it's because we live in a world where rampant misinformation and conspiracism bolsters bigotries which in turn commonly gets minorities killed, whether we're talking about women- cis and trans- getting fucked over by transphobes over their identity, to Black and brown men being misidentified as criminals, to groups like in Gaza having undergone settler colonialism for decades without pushback.

Information is excessively important to the well-being of the worst off, both in terms of its veracity, its framing, and its availability to the masses. We need to be able to accurately identify problems and furthermore be able to figure out solutions to those problems by using good information as a baseline.

However, for some odd reason, otherwise well-meaning people are celebrating the fact that we are about to happily allow the entire world the ability to create even more convincing misinformation at an extremely higher volume. People, namely women, are already expressing and going through with suicidal ideation over the porn deepfakes that exist with the technology we have. And "it's only going to get better." It's going to be less flawed, more versatile, and more easy to do.

Ultimately there is fundamentally no scenario where everyone can create realistic-looking videos of anything they want, and someone doesn't get targeted for it. And those someones are usually minorities. This goes beyond the arts; this is going to have sociopolitical ramifications if not aggressively kept in check, and likely people who look like me are going to be the proverbial and literal sacrifices to the alter for it on this front alone. We're not even talking about how economic disruption affects minorities more, or how the use of energy needed for this stupid shit is going to fuck the Global South more. The misinformation alone should at least mildly concern people who claim they care about social justice causes.

But hey, some folks are gonna get more episodes of some fucking cancelled tv show out of it, so I guess the universe is balanced out.

Remember how they talked about how amazing it is that minorities can fight back by recording shit and then it turned out the whole situation was a lot more complicated than the video implied? HaughtyFrank members
https://www.resetera.com/threads/camera-phones-are-by-far-one-of-the-best-tools-for-marginalized-folks-to-have-as-protection.719452/

It's very foolish and patronizing to think that minorities wouldn't use the same tools the same way. Like there's generally a worry that AI tools like this will increase misinformation to the point where you might not be sure what to believe anymore, but framing this as a racial problem is just so typical RE again.

[benji]

This goes beyond the arts; this is going to have sociopolitical ramifications if not aggressively kept in check, and likely people who look like me are going to be the proverbial and literal sacrifices to the alter for it on this front alone.

Altar, an "alter" is like if the tailor altered the man's pants.

[benji]

Not to be confused with the machine that was the genesis of the Microsoft Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

[HaughtyFrank]

I can't be the only one waiting for Sam Altman to release the Trump pee pee tape. Lets finally close that chapter.

[Propagandhim]

Information is important, thats why anyone who doesnt parrot the same exact opinion as me, or produces competing information i see as a liability to my emotional well-being, gets banned on my forum. And when i say "me" i mean the people of color i speak for on a daily basis. Repeat after me: veracity, framing, availability.

[Propagandhim]

I can't be the only one waiting for Sam Altman to release the Trump pee pee tape. Lets finally close that chapter.

Thats a good point, you know these people dont care about "veracity" or truth.  If they discover a way to use AI to promulgate their stupid beliefs, through the use of the same manipulation and fraudulence that theyre complaining about, make no mistake:  they'll do it.

Nepenthe is going to be generating images of scientists and other respected members of the upper echelons of society washing chicken or posting pics of golden retrievers eating babies for pitbull apologia campaigns.

[BIONIC]

I believe we always held that big developments in AI could potentially have their own threads.
The Sora news might well qualify, so I'd say create a thread on it if you want.

[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.resetera.com/threads/constructive-community-discussion.270630/page-192?post=104321237#post-104321237[/URL]

I have taken you up on that, thanks.

This thread got closed with this message:



And this isn't a dig at mods at all, in fact it reminded me how much I appreciate and 100% don't envy them. But I just want to say, I don't think the framing of the thread had anything to do with the failure of that conversation, at all.

I encourage people to go re-read the OP. It was neither 'hype I can get the thing I wanted, screw you boomers', nor was it 'if you think AI might have potential upsides, head on over to Twitter, leave Era'. And to be clear, both types of responses were in that thread - they just weren't in the OP.

I'm not surprised the thread closed. They all seem to end up the same in the end, which I suspect is why containment seemed appealing in the first place.

But putting the failure of that conversation on an OP that didn't paint a spin on the topic either way - just reported what happened, and left the community to discuss - seems disingenuous to me, and seems like pinning the blame where it doesn't belong.

[ISPOILER][Insert 'both sides' here][/ISPOILER]

Oh, the framing definitely did lead to what we saw in that thread. One of the things I've learned doing this job is that an OP can really set the tone and tenor of a discussion to a degree most people don't understand. If you want to have a discussion about how something might be an issue, then that's what needs to be in your OP. You need to actively describe the issue you have and lay it out for people. You can't do a generic thread and then expect it to go a specific way just because. This is how threads go off the rails the way they do, if the framing is bad, or just too neutral, then it'll just turn into stupid arguments for pages and pages and pages where people talk past each other and piss everyone off.

If you want to have a discussion about how AI can lead to important medical discoveries or aid in fact checking or help programmers cut down on their workloads then that needs to be the framing. If you want to have a discussion about how AI can lead to job losses in creative industries or misinformation or an increase in revenge porn and harassment then that needs to be the framing. All a general framing of a topic does is allow for all of that discussion to take place in the same thread. This leads to everyone feeling like everyone else is talking past them and results in an incredibly hostile environment that turns out badly for everyone, including those of us who need to clean up the mess after.

This, I will note, is why derailing threads with other issues can also be bad. It results in the same dynamic. Imagine a thread about how AI is aiding in new medical discoveries getting derailed by people mad about how it's being used to do art and put artists out of business (or vice versa). That thread will almost certainly go badly due to the derail since people would be talking past each other on issues that matter a lot to both sides. Everyone would get pissed off and accuse everyone else of being a jackass and everyone would be "right". It would just lead to toxic community dynamics. It's generally why we hit attempted derails the way we do. They never go anywhere good.

“Ah, but a completely neutral and non-editorialized OP is in itself framing things in a certain way and not at all a sign of the unhinged lunatics that I helped cultivate. I am very smart.”

[killamajig]

They should just merge these threads. The replies are the same.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/my-mother-died-this-week.818166/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/saying-goodbye-to-a-pet-is-awful.818055/

[Propagandhim]

 One of the things I've learned doing this job is that an OP can really set the tone and tenor of a discussion to a degree most people don't understand. If you want to have a discussion about how something might be an issue, then that's what needs to be in your OP. You need to actively describe the issue you have and lay it out for people. You can't do a generic thread and then expect it to go a specific way just because. This is how threads go off the rails the way they do, if the framing is bad, or just too neutral

I know we've said this a million times...but this place is a FUCKING cult.


OP posted an article about a new video generation AI.  You have to defend a thesis paper to a fucking forum to post about it for a discussion? 

[Potato]

So a heterosexual male cannot view women as sexy or have any sexy depictions of women in media, but a lesbian, a "lesbian", or basically anyone else can do that and it's fine? Is that the new rule here? 
They can't really believe that this makes any sense, can they? Why can't everyone just be horny and accept it?

Well, what happens if Hornysmasher, in his mad rush to be first to post on every thread, opens a thread and sees some cleavage?

Poor chap will be scarred for life.

[Uncle]

I can't be the only one waiting for Sam Altman to release the Trump pee pee tape. Lets finally close that chapter.

Thats a good point, you know these people dont care about "veracity" or truth.  If they discover a way to use AI to promulgate their stupid beliefs, through the use of the same manipulation and fraudulence that theyre complaining about, make no mistake:  they'll do it.

Nepenthe is going to be generating images of scientists and other respected members of the upper echelons of society washing chicken or posting pics of golden retrievers eating babies for pitbull apologia campaigns.

[Potato]

Pretty much. But it's also a sad indictment of where we are. If Biden is the best we can hope for, it pretty much shows we're at the end of American democracy. We're just kicking the can down the road until the guillotine falls

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ezra-klein-urges-democrats-to-hold-an-open-convention.817935/page-6?post=119292672#post-119292672

Whatever happened to their dooming and glooming over the oceans literally boiling and the earth being scorched into a hellscape?

That seems to have gone away in favour of the "end of democracy" talk, which is hilarious considering they keep advocating for the end of democracy at every opportunity.

[Propagandhim]

I can't be the only one waiting for Sam Altman to release the Trump pee pee tape. Lets finally close that chapter.

Thats a good point, you know these people dont care about "veracity" or truth.  If they discover a way to use AI to promulgate their stupid beliefs, through the use of the same manipulation and fraudulence that theyre complaining about, make no mistake:  they'll do it.

Nepenthe is going to be generating images of scientists and other respected members of the upper echelons of society washing chicken or posting pics of golden retrievers eating babies for pitbull apologia campaigns.

[Potato]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/why-women-criticise-sexualised-character-designs-ot3-make-her-look-more-corpulent-more-stuffed-where-the-eyes-cant-escape.275780/page-322?post=119292516#post-119292516

I think the 'Classic' look currently being offered up could easily be altered by just changing the booty-shorts to cargo trousers, and bam, practicality whilst keeping the general iconic colours and style. The attempts at tribute update outfits with the Reboot Trilogy just felt a bit oddly-designed, as though they had to be modern-trendy first before they were pulpy adventure clothes, and none of them sat quite right as a result. (I prefer bomber-jacket Lara anyway and wore the Aviator/Remnant Jackets in the first two of the Reboot games, but I understand the importance of the original outfit as hopefully a directional arrow for fans to know how the series is tonally heading next.)

However, as mentioned in my other post, my fiancée still wears booty shorts and tank tops as her regular daily clothing DESPITE LIVING IN SCOTLAND BECAUSE SHE IS SOMEHOW IMMUNE TO THE WEATHER and it's certainly not for male attention. Some of the posts flying about (not pointing at you in particular) have been very heavy-handed and dismissive of any favourable attitudes towards Lara's old styling and it actually hurt a little to read those, as though my fiancée wasn't the "right" kind of lesbian woman for having that as her fashion sense.

I had to refresh my memory on the "tribute outfits" from the reboot saga. Besides the PS1 skins. I only see "classic" alt colors for some outfits, which are low effort. But also I'm less familiar with her classic outfits besides the iconic one. I digress.

Even if I'm not guilty, I do feel for you getting hurt by what some have said. That isn't right. Critical rhetoric can go too far or rather miss the fictional and hit the real instead. Which isn't right and justifiably hurtful to those affected. It's sometimes a blurry line and other times not. I endeavor to try and limit my own rhetoric so as to avoid doing that, but I'm ever learning.

I can't make any promises, but do feel free to report any posts that cross the line. At the very least I'll look at them.

You see, it's not Princess Bubblegum who is slut shaming women who wear shorts, it's THE OTHER people who are slut shaming women.

[benji]

Oh, the framing definitely did lead to what we saw in that thread. One of the things I've learned doing this job is that an OP can really set the tone and tenor of a discussion to a degree most people don't understand. If you want to have a discussion about how something might be an issue, then that's what needs to be in your OP. You need to actively describe the issue you have and lay it out for people. You can't do a generic thread and then expect it to go a specific way just because. This is how threads go off the rails the way they do, if the framing is bad, or just too neutral, then it'll just turn into stupid arguments for pages and pages and pages where people talk past each other and piss everyone off.

This guy reads his own forum right? The one where people almost never read the OP and even the staff don't sometimes read thread titles?

[Besticus Maximus]

They will have about as much success in stopping AI as they did in stopping their own admins playing hogwarts

[HaughtyFrank]

You see, it's not Princess Bubblegum who is slut shaming women who wear shorts, it's THE OTHER people who are slut shaming women.

I feel like princess bubblegum is almost on the right track to realizing how much of a shit show that thread is, and how often it's actually just men telling women what they can enjoy and what not, but then keeps falling back into it and there's a chance it's all just motivated because she wants to enjoy her lesbian sexualization without feeling guilty