when the jackboot needs to jump

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

It’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of

A great example of how it's misleading is the NYT story about an AI datacenter causing local wells to dry up for residents, but the story is actually about the construction causing water issues - the datacenter wasn't active, hadn't been finished, and the construction could easily have been for a shipping hub or housing development. Framing "construction company did not do appropriate groundwater surveys and fucked up the water table" as "data centers guzzling up water" is extremely disingenuous.

The substack article I linked is quite long and quite technical, and if you're not interested in reading it Hank Green has made a video discussing the fact that there is a lot more nuance in the discourse around AI water use than the most vocal Pro-AI or Anti-AI people are interested in examining.

There are a lot of people who say that all AI use is theft. I think that's uncomplicatedly wrong, that if you're using "theft" the way that the DMCA uses "theft" you're wrong. For more on that, I'd recommend reading the "Expanding Copyright is not the Answer" section of @mostlysignssomeportents's adapted speech on AI criticism or the EFF's comments to the copyright office RE generative AI. (You should actually read both, and you should read Doctorow's article in full because it is a criticism of AI that moves beyond thought terminating cliches to really explore why the AI industry as it stands is bullshit).

I do not, generally speaking, like AI. I think that most AI products create shit results. I think most AI art looks like shit and most AI writing is awful bordering on unreadable. I think that there's a massive bubble built up around AI and I think AI is absolutely fucking the personal computing market.

And, all that said, it is deeply annoying to dislike AI as much as I do and still feel the need to point out that the way that a lot of people criticize AI is shortsighted, reactionary, and just flat-out incorrect. There are real things wrong with how we are approaching AI as a society and how AI is being sold to users and forced into our environments, and "art theft" is not one of those things.

Its one of those "ughhh I don't even like this thing, quit putting me in a position where I feel obliged to defend it on a technicality"

but like it does *matter* when you make incorrect vs correct arguments against a bad thing (because the incorrect arguments can get wielded against other stuff that is not bad)

And it does *matter* when you erase nuance from an issue (because again, good things and people can get caught in the collateral fallout)

also one issue I've seen frequently with people that both dont engage with ai and also argue against ai is talking points that go like "ai is so stupid because it's like xyz. why don't they make something actually useful that does abc?" and sometimes I have to speak up and be like... 'uh, they do already have ai that does abc. that is already a thing that ai does". bc, like, the cherry-picked examples of ai fuckups that go around the web are only ever gonna convey part of the thing. which is gonna make it harder to create cogent arguments about it's problems.