glass threads

For example, a proletarian artist employed by a corporation has no economic incentives to defend the expansion of bourgeois intellectual property rights, because such rights are presently being used to exploit their labor, while a petit bourgeois independent artist often does have such an incentive, because their business model benefits from the expansion of such IP rights. Again, this is not a moral condemnation; you can still be a class traitor! An independent artist need not be anti-piracy, even though it hurt their business model. Plenty of petit bourgeois are subject to terrible economic precarity, which means they are under threat of proletarianization (gotta go work at McDonald's if this art thing doesn't work out) and this means there is plenty of capacity for solidarity with the proletariat there- if they so choose. The other choice is to cling to a temporarily-embarrassed-rightsholder mindset and side with the haute (big) bourgeoisie in matters of (for example) IP law.

See, I've seen a lot of comparisons like this. But coming from someone who has absolutely no skin in this game, from an outside perspective it's looked a lot more like a guy got in a car and all of a sudden someone ran up and started banging on his windows shouting that he shouldn't drive that car.

And the guy in the car was like "I'm just going down the street, and the car is the easiest way to do that", and the guy outside was like "um actually, if you can't enjoy the feeling of running then you shouldn't be going places, and taking joy in the freedom of movement is literally what makes us human and your soulless machine can never replace that feeling."

And the guy in the car was like "okay, but my leg is broken and I can't walk." And the guy outside was like "Nice try but I know plenty of people with broken legs who hop and crawl along the ground without having to use that gas-guzzling pollution machine, so actually YOU'RE the ableist for suggesting that you need it to move."

And the guy in the car was like "well this is actually a race car and while of course it's not the same as a marathon, driving a race car takes its own set of skills and talents that I've practiced and developed over time", and the guy outside was like "yeah right, everyone knows that driving a car doesn't take talent, just putting your foot on the gas doesn't make you a racer."

AI databases do not store art. They do not and cannot "copy and paste" from artwork as I've seen people claim, so it's not plagiarism. An AI program being trained on your artwork does not deprive you of the work or of your copyright, so nothing is being taken from you. There is absolutely no way to frame AI art as theft that does not also entail making fanfiction and fanart illegal, and the harder people push for stricter copyright and IP laws, the easier it will be for large corporations to weaponize it against independent artists. (Not to mention, I've never seen anywhere NEAR this level of vitriol towards people who profit from fanart, despite that being a MUCH more clear-cut example of IP theft under the law.)

And I've said it before and I'll say it again - "automation is taking our jobs" has been a problem for literal centuries and it is buck-fucking-wild that people keep acting like this is a new and imminent horror and not something that the rest of us have already been through. And the people up in arms about all these jobs lost to automation seem to ONLY care about artists - unless all of your furniture is hand-made by a master carpenter and isn't cheap MDF slop from Walmart? I hope all of your t-shirts were made by union printers working for a living wage and not overseas sweatshops? I hope you've never used a self-checkout register that was used to justify cutting cashier hours?

The points of yours that I now agree with, at least to an extent:

That AI doesn’t technically take actual identical aspects, just “learns” from existing artwork.

That it is fiendishly difficult to change the laws surrounding copyright so that AI art is banned, and fanworks are not.

I have three points in rebuttal, primarily:

Sources are a thing

Laws are not necessarily promoting the most ideal behavior

Recognition ability

When I write an essay using sources, I cite them. Not citing the sources I learned my material from is considered academic dishonesty, and I am not allowed to do that. When you look at a scientific study, even, to cite an example not implicitly within the realm of “teachers want to make sure your sources are valid,” they cite their sources. And what they come back with is a product built upon others’ work completely ethically.

AI does not cite its sources. It does not communicate to the viewer where it obtained its information. And the reason that this differs from human-created artwork, where people don’t cite their sources either, is that the AI is not thinking for itself. It does not produce any original material. There is no individual touch. It spits out data in a pattern it has been told to follow. And you may say that makes AI artwork more of a tool or a style than an artist, but I would also like to argue that there isn’t nearly as much of a hand involved in the work as there is in, say, photography or Impressionism, even though those are both famously art forms derided when introduced because of the lack of work critics deemed they involved.

Laws are fiendishly difficult in any situation. They have to say “this behavior should be followed,” “this behavior should not,” and do all of that in a manner that does not allow for loopholes, unintentional interpretations, or future laws that allow for something the lawmaker does not want. Laws are not the ultimate decider of morality. They never have been. Just because something is legal, doesn’t mean everybody should or will like it or agree with it, or the opposite.

I am going to give an extreme, black-and-white example, that I do not believe is in the vein of AI artwork in the slightest, to demonstrate that point. I repeat, NOT comparing this to AI art, simply showing how laws do not and should not equate to morality.

Nazism was a political party. All of its actions were legal, at least in Germany at the time. Jews could be legally thrown out of their homes and property and sent to concentration camps. Those objectively evil actions were legal, and were actually illegal to circumvent.

Laws are NOT equal to morality, and they never have been. Hopefully they trend in that direction, but the primary point of laws is to denote what behavior is and is not viable for a successful society, at least from the point of view of the lawmakers.

And, furthermore, people on the internet having a view of something does not inform legalities. I can believe that lobbying is bad because it means that those with more wealth get to determine laws; that does not make it illegal, or mean that a lawmaker is going to introduce a law that makes lobbying illegal. Someone else could believe that taxes are theft; that does not mean the government is going to eliminate taxes.

Lastly, recognition is relevant here. When I buy a bookcase from Target, I know it’s not equivalent to the work a carpenter would put into it. It’s made of dubious materials, thin sheets of cardboard backing, and a few nails and screws that I insert myself. I can very obviously tell the difference.

Same with clothes made from sweatshops, and self-checkout. None of those are the same experience as an actual human putting in the work to create the thing.

[And, furthermore, sometimes to exist is to participate in unethical systems, even when I try to avoid them to the best of my ability. (Was I supposed to tell my first job at 16 not to mass-order camp T-Shirts from a sweatshop? Am I not supposed to use a self-checkout machine when I need something cheap and sensory-friendly to eat and I’m at the airport inside a completely autonomous shop?)]

But human-created furniture and shirts, and human-ran grocery stores, still exist. And I can find them, if I believe in the value of those things (and can afford them, in a society that constantly wants me to pay more for less when it comes to things I need to survive). The problem with AI is that it is nearly indistinguishable from human creation in many cases, because of how it learns from an inherently human product.

I am able to remove certain things from my experience completely, all by myself. I can pick a cash register with a human, I can buy a real wooden desk, I can buy ethical clothing. It is impossible to ensure that the art or book I am purchasing was not created with AI. There are certain tells, but those will be going away when the technology improves.

With Impressionism and photography, you can tell that the product is different. I can tell Tumblr to hide any posts which mention the DSMP from my homepage. If people choose to pass off their AI as something which they made, I cannot choose to disengage from it. And when somebody sells an AI-generated book on mushroom foraging on Amazon that gives literally deadly advice, people will buy it, and people will be killed by it.

When people use AI, they are training AI. And the more AI is trained, the sooner we will be entirely unable to extricate ourselves from it.

That’s one of my biggest problems with the usage of AI.

...sweatshops have, people, working in them...

is the solution to sweatshops banning sewing machines?

it's actually a pretty straightforward parallel with "AI", given how armies of underpaid third-worlders are necessary to refine and quality-control an LLM for it to work

start looking at "AI" from a labor perspective, rather than a consumer perspective or a petit-bourgeois intellectual-property perspective

There is actually one attack we are shown in full, from start to finish, during which attackers are shown to explicitly bypass civilians, and to target and engage with only clearly-designated enemy soldiers, enemy heads of state, and one (1) additional individual actively engaging in combat against them.

So let's all give it up for our ethical queen:

They asked something like “why do the eversions of the trios in wktd and hwbm look and feel so different? The wktd feel much more human than the everted hwbm trio”

And it gave me so many thoughts that im gonna compile (hopefully) all in this post.

Ok the first thing to look at their different contexts, and what eversions mean for each.

So the wktd trio are in a conservative religous environment of the midwest, eversion is embracing the non-human, in this cultural context what is human is a much narrower definition, any queerness is seen as inhuman and other.

In comparison to the hwbm trio, who grew up in space, free to define themselves, their context of being human was much wider, and thus to not be human far stranger.

The wktd trio while inhuman, were still concepts a human can somewhat conceive of and also retained some human components, an angel of light and eyes, a storm of blood and hands, a flood that is a witch.

The hwbm are less nailed down, they fused with their ship-selves, but they also became so much more, bands of stars and nebula and things just at the corner of your eye.

Another component to consider, on the final set of days intro, Saturn says “The shortcut to attaining it is to forsake everything that humans already are.” I think another component is that the wktd did it the hard way, despite all the pain and risk, they stuck together and embraced what made them inhuman, they didnt quite let go of being human, not to the extent children of space do post-cm ending.

Which leads to why? Well i think its cause the differences between the terrestrial and stellar existential threats, the latter were always much weaker than their terrestrial counterparts. And thus the ability to evert much more difficult, They could never possess people like back on Earth, but you can become it by using a gravity reactor and turning inside our, letting go, and embracing the unknown.

Whereas the wktd, were able to assert themselves despite the overwhelming culture-gravity pressure, and thus a more powerful existential threat, they didnt have a shortcut.

the princess in the swamp-witch's lair 🍄💫