Alcibiades

by Sarah Tuttle-Singer  on Facebook:

I feel like the world needs a basic primer on this:

Criticizing Netanyahu and the current government of Israel isn’t antisemitic.

Holding Jews everywhere responsible for the actions of the Israeli government and calling them N@zis is.

Supporting Palestinian rights isn’t antisemitic.

Saying Jews don’t deserve self-determination anywhere and that Israel has no right to exist is.

Advocating for peace, equality, and dignity for both peoples isn’t antisemitic.

Celebrating the murder, kidnapping, or r@pe of Jews is.

Being horrified by the suffering in Gaza isn’t antisemitic.

Denying or minimizing the suffering of Israelis on October 7 is.

Opposing specific Israeli policies isn’t antisemitic.

Using classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish power, money, blood, or control is.

Wanting an end to the war isn’t antisemitic.

Calling for the elimination of Israel while demanding no other nation on earth disappear is.

Criticizing Netanyahu isn’t antisemitic.

Saying “the Jews are Nazis” is.

Supporting Palestinian nationalism isn’t antisemitic.

Erasing Jewish indigeneity and history in the land is.

Calling out extremism in Israel — including the army — isn’t antisemitic.

Applying a moral standard to Israel that you apply to literally no other country is.

Wanting accountability for all sides isn’t antisemitic.

Attacking random Jews, synagogues, or Jewish businesses around the world is.

Feeling grief for Palestinian children isn’t antisemitic.

Mocking or dismissing or even celebrating dead Israeli children is.

Defending free speech on Israel-Palestine isn’t antisemitic.

Harassing Jewish students and making campuses unsafe for visibly Jewish people is.

Saying Palestinians deserve freedom isn’t antisemitic.

Saying Jews are “colonizers” is.

Calling for coexistence isn’t antisemitic.

Calling for intifada “from the river to the sea” without acknowledging what that means to many Jews is.

You can oppose war without opposing the existence of a people.

You can advocate for Palestinians without dehumanizing Jews.

You can love Israelis and Palestinians enough to believe neither should have to bury their children.

AI is trained off of available data. Available data is about the real world, where racism and sexism and all that shit exists. Unless you carefully put effort into making sure that bigotry is EXCLUDED from the training, it will by default be included.

I keep seeing people use free AI detection websites as evidence in AI witch hunts.

These websites are often scams. They use AI to detect AI. They rarely disclose their methods. They are typically only reliable on obvious material and are no better than a coin flip on content that is more challenging (which is usually when AI detection is needed most).

You'll even note that these websites do not give you a strict yes or no. They give you a percentage of confidence. Yes, it is true that human forensic analysis often has a confidence rating instead of an absolute certainty. But in this case, this gives these websites cover for when they create false positives. They don't tell you their actual success rate of detecting AI, so if you get a bad result, they can just say the tool was only 80% confident.

Even laboratory-grade forensic tools struggle to get above 70-80% accuracy, and staying ahead of AI improvements to maintain that accuracy is a constant struggle.

The best forensic analysis of AI media always has a human component. They use detection software in combination with human experts. There is no reliable, fully automated process. Especially now that people are combining AI with traditional techniques. They might generate an AI image and then use Photoshop to add noise, resize it, change the color and contrast. 5 minutes of work can remove the classic signs of AI that many of these detectors look for.

If you are suspicious of something and you want to use one of these tools as an initial indicator that you should seek out more evidence, I feel that is their only real use case. Like, it should be step one of a multistep process of investigation and it should not be your only evidence. In fact, you should not include it as evidence when making an accusation.

Look for creation dates. Look for provenance. Look at the artist's other work. Look for process videos.

But if you use the result of an AI detector to confidently say something is AI, you could very well hurt an artist using a dubious tool that consistently spits out false positives.

I'm feeling a bit psychic now.

I'm guessing Google has one of the most advanced AI detection tools in the world. But this process cannot be 100% automated or else it will continue to hurt artists.

Google has long refused to hire actual humans to assist their automated processes. If a small YouTube channel needs help, they can rarely reach an actual human being. You need millions of subscribers for the privilege of not dealing with some sort of bot.

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Our books had to be a minimum of 100 pages, a total of 300, you couldn't split a book between two tickets, and you had to complete the book. I'd been working my way through a previously-undiscovered set of Sherlock Holmes stories (ah, the delight of being ten and having only read like thirty of the sixty), and since I had finite hours in the day I eyeballed The Secret Garden and went "yeah, that's 300 pages" and toodled along on Sherlock Holmes and a couple of those "haunted schools and other places" books that were popular in the 90s, and also read The Secret Garden--

--which turned out to be 298 pages.

MY TEACHER REFUSED TO ROUND UP.

IN SPITE OF THE FACT I'D OTHERWISE MAXED MY BOOK IT ALLOWANCE PLUS MULTIPLE ADDITIONAL UNDER-100-PAGES BOOKS.

And it was the last day of the month which meant I couldn't even go, like, speed-read a Goosebumps book.

I was the reason my school instituted a "you can only get three Book It tickets per month" rule AND SHE WOULDN'T LET ME COUNT THE TITLE AND COPYRIGHT PAGES.

I read this book so much when i was like 10-13 it now looks like this.

Sorcerer's/Philosopher's was the shortest and it was just shy of 300 pages. The series in total was somewhere just under 3000 pages in America*. And we LINED UP to purchase and read these. I have a very distinct memory of walking down the bus aisle and just seeing a sea of red on either side of me. Probably a dozen or more copies of Chamber of Secrets being devoured on the ride home. And not only were they for children, Rowling had to push back on them being ONLY for children.

In another, Jewish men are seen engaged in the demeaning task of disposing of animal carcasses outside the city walls. Vultures crowd the foreground of the picture frame, flapping their wings and kicking up the dust, adding to the sense of filth and abasement. In a kind of topographical palimpsest that may have been a tribute to the community’s tragic past, Haybi even photographed the dry Al-Sayileh riverbed where Sana’a’s Jews lived until their expulsion in 1679 [known as the Mawza exile]. Upon their return a year later they were confined to a swampy area of the city where they constructed the Jewish ghetto."

Excerpt from Available Light: Pictures from Yemen

Shalom Shabazi, a famous Jewish poet in Yemen wrote in the 17th century about Muslim Arabs in Yemen abducting Jewish orphans:

"Thousands of orphaned souls, both boys and girls, were wrested from the arms of their parents, grandfather and grandmother, by force by the nations all the days of the many kings of Yemen."

Jewish orphaned children in Yemen were thus often quickly hidden away with other families to save them from this fate of cultural genocide.

No Jews are known to remain in Yemen today except for Levi Marhabi, who is held hostage by the Houthis since 2016. All the remainder were forced to flee or were forcefully deported. All were dispossessed.

The cultural loss of Jews of the Arab & Muslim world is immeasurable. Their disaster was never recognized, their histories denied. No refugee agency was created for them, no meetings were held on the world stage to discuss their ordeal.

The properties seized from them total around $ 250 billion USD. The land dispossessed from them totals to around 100,000 km² (about 10 million hectares) or around 4.5 times the size of the entire modern state of Israel.