PSEUDONYM

Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.

Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.

A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.

A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.

Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.

Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.

What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).

Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.

In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.

The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.

Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?

Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.

Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because virtually every single one of his parodies is officially licensed from the rights holders. He asks permission, and shares revenue with the original artists. You hear a lot of people when you look into this - including the man himself! - saying "He doesn't have to do that! He just wants to cover his bases and maintain relationships." And....ehhhh... I mean maybe. Probably, even! But the world of copyright is vast and confusing.

For example, musicians own the copyright to both the lyrics and the music of their songs, and those can operate separately. Weird Al changes the lyrics of his parodies; but he very intentionally does not change the music. It is kind of the point, right? But if your parody recreates 99% of the music of the original, is that "transformative"? Could that not "substitute in the market" for the original work? Maybe American Pie's lyrics are a wash, and we are all only tuning in for the guitar riffs, so The Saga Begins does it for us just as well? Hey, how does retelling Star Wars comment on American Pie? That doesn't seem like a parody to me; that seems like satire, which operates under a less permissive legal regime...

That's literally how it works in the US if you don't want to catch a felony charge and a ten-year prison sentence for an NFA violation.

Obviously I am biased, but the valence of the conversation seems so weird to me. Like no one on either side are treating the works of art (text or visual art) as an object you want for itself and its own qualities. If a story is bad, say it's bad. If it's good, enjoy it. Commentators seem much less willing to say "this writing is simply bad."

Yeah, the advertisements directed at you are annoyingly bad. Does anyone remember the discourse over restaurant websites a decade ago?

Instead, you get a gnostic puzzle of "these phrases and this way of using a metaphor and this particular vocab tell you its provenance, and that drives me into a rage."

Of course if you see the same tics repeated several times you will get sick of them, but what you find out is that only 1% of people are reading enough to get triggered by it, and at least 90% of people respond blankly, completely unaware of the Not X It's Y patterns and if you have to describe the patterns to them, they don't get why it's bad or you're so upset about it.

But putting it that way sounds like "you should like my bot's output and if you don't you're being too picky." And that way lies just as much error.

Zero. Not once. Let that sink in.

And here's the part that's actually fascinating. I like LLMs. I follow a whole crowd of cyborgism folks on Twitter, and a lot of the outputs they post are genuinely delightful. So why does my interest crater the moment I realize something was AI-written? It's a great question — and the answer isn't simple. It's layered. Let's break it down. 🧠

Let me untangle a few threads here, because it isn't just one thing.

First, there's the writing itself. Nostalgebraist and Scott Alexander get into this — current models just aren't, by default, great writers, though that's hard to disentangle from their special talent for taking any nice turn of phrase and flogging it into cliché through sheer repetition across the entire internet. But it's not that they can't write — it's that they can't stop. The symptom is padding. I'll catch myself reading something an LLM wrote directly to me, about a thing I actually wanted to know, and realize it's quietly slipped into filler mode — at which point I slip into skim-for-the-actual-nuggets mode. And this happens with the better-prompted stuff too, like yours. Even the good ones.

Second — and this one matters more than it gets credit for — there's reliability. When I ask an LLM something, I've already decided it's a thing I'm fine double-checking or risking a fully hallucinated answer on. Honestly? I'm not convinced random social media users are any less prone to making things up than current-gen models. I can't be sure a human is any more reliable — but at least there I can follow people I trust and quietly unfollow the ones who don't earn it. That's not a small thing. That's everything. With an AI-written post on some interesting factual claim, I'm stuck in a loop of "oh, neat — wait, is that true, though?" and that loop is exhausting.😮‍💨

Third, there's effort. An AI-written post is frequently Bayesian evidence of low-effort posting, spam, the whole genre. This is my steelman of "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?" — not because readers are some reward you earn through suffering, but because someone trying to spray maximum text for minimum effort is, in most situations, a red flag. 🚩

And fourth, there's a quieter honesty thing. When someone posts something they obviously didn't write and implicitly — or explicitly! — takes credit for it, that can rub me the wrong way. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

But here's where I want to gently push back on myself, because none of this is a dealbreaker. If a rando on Twitter hands me a true, interesting fact, I'm just glad to know it — the double-checking tax is roughly equal whether a human or a model wrote it. And good AI writing exists! I bumped into this post on Reddit with a D&D idea that genuinely caught my imagination, and it was transparently an LLM. Probably a GPT.

So let me end on the thing I can't prove but can't shake. I get the sense that how invested the model is — or is simulating being — actually shows up on the page. Ask one to ghostwrite a dull post for someone else, or summarize some news story, and it phones it in. But when it seems genuinely engaged, the writing gets richer, sharper, more willing to actually wrestle with the problem. I can't prove this (though it could probably be tested with interpretability tools, so... maybe I will 👀).

It's beat for beat the same, so only bother reading it if you found the above prose too annoying to read, or you want to compare for some reason.

The actual thoughts/content in both are all genuine, to be clear; only the silly AI prose was a joke.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

Obviously I am biased, but the valence of the conversation seems so weird to me. Like no one on either side are treating the works of art (text or visual art) as an object you want for itself and its own qualities. If a story is bad, say it's bad. If it's good, enjoy it. Commentators seem much less willing to say "this writing is simply bad."

Yeah, the advertisements directed at you are annoyingly bad. Does anyone remember the discourse over restaurant websites a decade ago?

Instead, you get a gnostic puzzle of "these phrases and this way of using a metaphor and this particular vocab tell you its provenance, and that drives me into a rage."

Of course if you see the same tics repeated several times you will get sick of them, but what you find out is that only 1% of people are reading enough to get triggered by it, and at least 90% of people respond blankly, completely unaware of the Not X It's Y patterns and if you have to describe the patterns to them, they don't get why it's bad or you're so upset about it.

But putting it that way sounds like "you should like my bot's output and if you don't you're being too picky." And that way lies just as much error.

Zero. Not once. Let that sink in.

And here's the part that's actually fascinating. I like LLMs. I follow a whole crowd of cyborgism folks on Twitter, and a lot of the outputs they post are genuinely delightful. So why does my interest crater the moment I realize something was AI-written? It's a great question — and the answer isn't simple. It's layered. Let's break it down. 🧠

Let me untangle a few threads here, because it isn't just one thing.

First, there's the writing itself. Nostalgebraist and Scott Alexander get into this — current models just aren't, by default, great writers, though that's hard to disentangle from their special talent for taking any nice turn of phrase and flogging it into cliché through sheer repetition across the entire internet. But it's not that they can't write — it's that they can't stop. The symptom is padding. I'll catch myself reading something an LLM wrote directly to me, about a thing I actually wanted to know, and realize it's quietly slipped into filler mode — at which point I slip into skim-for-the-actual-nuggets mode. And this happens with the better-prompted stuff too, like yours. Even the good ones.

Second — and this one matters more than it gets credit for — there's reliability. When I ask an LLM something, I've already decided it's a thing I'm fine double-checking or risking a fully hallucinated answer on. Honestly? I'm not convinced random social media users are any less prone to making things up than current-gen models. I can't be sure a human is any more reliable — but at least there I can follow people I trust and quietly unfollow the ones who don't earn it. That's not a small thing. That's everything. With an AI-written post on some interesting factual claim, I'm stuck in a loop of "oh, neat — wait, is that true, though?" and that loop is exhausting.😮‍💨

Third, there's effort. An AI-written post is frequently Bayesian evidence of low-effort posting, spam, the whole genre. This is my steelman of "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?" — not because readers are some reward you earn through suffering, but because someone trying to spray maximum text for minimum effort is, in most situations, a red flag. 🚩

And fourth, there's a quieter honesty thing. When someone posts something they obviously didn't write and implicitly — or explicitly! — takes credit for it, that can rub me the wrong way. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

But here's where I want to gently push back on myself, because none of this is a dealbreaker. If a rando on Twitter hands me a true, interesting fact, I'm just glad to know it — the double-checking tax is roughly equal whether a human or a model wrote it. And good AI writing exists! I bumped into this post on Reddit with a D&D idea that genuinely caught my imagination, and it was transparently an LLM. Probably a GPT.

So let me end on the thing I can't prove but can't shake. I get the sense that how invested the model is — or is simulating being — actually shows up on the page. Ask one to ghostwrite a dull post for someone else, or summarize some news story, and it phones it in. But when it seems genuinely engaged, the writing gets richer, sharper, more willing to actually wrestle with the problem. I can't prove this (though it could probably be tested with interpretability tools, so... maybe I will 👀).

It's beat for beat the same, so only bother reading it if you found the above prose too annoying to read, or you want to compare for some reason.

Obviously I am biased, but the valence of the conversation seems so weird to me. Like no one on either side are treating the works of art (text or visual art) as an object you want for itself and its own qualities. If a story is bad, say it's bad. If it's good, enjoy it. Commentators seem much less willing to say "this writing is simply bad."

Yeah, the advertisements directed at you are annoyingly bad. Does anyone remember the discourse over restaurant websites a decade ago?

Instead, you get a gnostic puzzle of "these phrases and this way of using a metaphor and this particular vocab tell you its provenance, and that drives me into a rage."

Of course if you see the same tics repeated several times you will get sick of them, but what you find out is that only 1% of people are reading enough to get triggered by it, and at least 90% of people respond blankly, completely unaware of the Not X It's Y patterns and if you have to describe the patterns to them, they don't get why it's bad or you're so upset about it.

But putting it that way sounds like "you should like my bot's output and if you don't you're being too picky." And that way lies just as much error.

Zero. Not once. Let that sink in.

And here's the part that's actually fascinating. I like LLMs. I follow a whole crowd of cyborgism folks on Twitter, and a lot of the outputs they post are genuinely delightful. So why does my interest crater the moment I realize something was AI-written? It's a great question — and the answer isn't simple. It's layered. Let's break it down. 🧠

Let me untangle a few threads here, because it isn't just one thing.

First, there's the writing itself. Nostalgebraist and Scott Alexander get into this — current models just aren't, by default, great writers, though that's hard to disentangle from their special talent for taking any nice turn of phrase and flogging it into cliché through sheer repetition across the entire internet. But it's not that they can't write — it's that they can't stop. The symptom is padding. I'll catch myself reading something an LLM wrote directly to me, about a thing I actually wanted to know, and realize it's quietly slipped into filler mode — at which point I slip into skim-for-the-actual-nuggets mode. And this happens with the better-prompted stuff too, like yours. Even the good ones.

Second — and this one matters more than it gets credit for — there's reliability. When I ask an LLM something, I've already decided it's a thing I'm fine double-checking or risking a fully hallucinated answer on. Honestly? I'm not convinced random social media users are any less prone to making things up than current-gen models. I can't be sure a human is any more reliable — but at least there I can follow people I trust and quietly unfollow the ones who don't earn it. That's not a small thing. That's everything. With an AI-written post on some interesting factual claim, I'm stuck in a loop of "oh, neat — wait, is that true, though?" and that loop is exhausting.😮‍💨

Third, there's effort. An AI-written post is frequently Bayesian evidence of low-effort posting, spam, the whole genre. This is my steelman of "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?" — not because readers are some reward you earn through suffering, but because someone trying to spray maximum text for minimum effort is, in most situations, a red flag. 🚩

And fourth, there's a quieter honesty thing. When someone posts something they obviously didn't write and implicitly — or explicitly! — takes credit for it, that can rub me the wrong way. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

But here's where I want to gently push back on myself, because none of this is a dealbreaker. If a rando on Twitter hands me a true, interesting fact, I'm just glad to know it — the double-checking tax is roughly equal whether a human or a model wrote it. And good AI writing exists! I bumped into this post on Reddit with a D&D idea that genuinely caught my imagination, and it was transparently an LLM. Probably a GPT.

So let me end on the thing I can't prove but can't shake. I get the sense that how invested the model is — or is simulating being — actually shows up on the page. Ask one to ghostwrite a dull post for someone else, or summarize some news story, and it phones it in. But when it seems genuinely engaged, the writing gets richer, sharper, more willing to actually wrestle with the problem. I can't prove this (though it could probably be tested with interpretability tools, so... maybe I will 👀).

Nobody was behind me in line, which seemed to be a good reason for her to treat me to a five minute retelling of the identification, rescue, and argument over initial custody of Kit Kat, who was so small they thought when they first heard him crying for help that he was a bird and not a kitten in a tree, and is now fifteen pounds of "pure, sculpted lardass".

And I didn't mind, precisely, I wasn't bored or anything, but around the time she was bringing me up to speed on Kit Kat's current status it occurred to me that this woman is a cashier in a store that primarily sells candy bars and beverages. People must buy Kit Kat bars from her multiple times a day. Does she do this every time there's nobody in line behind the purchaser? Did I just have that I Own Several Cats And Will Enjoy Your Cat Stories look about me? Was it the first time it occurred to her that she sold the brand of candy bar she named her cat after? Was she new to the job of selling Kit Kat bars?

I was in the same snack shop, which I'm in, like, once a month, recently. I only recognized her because I spent five minutes listening to this monologue in sincere wonder. But I did recognize her, so as I was buying a soda and a Milky Way bar (this time) I said, without thinking about how this would come across, "Hey, how's Kit Kat?"

She looked genuinely horrified and said, "What...how?"

"Oh fuck!" I blurted. "Sorry! You told me about him last time!"

This is still quite cryptic as responses go but she gave me a frankly frantic look of sudden recognition and said, "He's fine! You bought a Kit Kat! I was unmedicated!"

I did not inform her she is small town famous on Tumblr and instead just said, "Glad you're both doing well!" and we parted as confused and mortified friends.

centipede god

bonus:

The blood, the desperate clutch, the crying and the pose all suggest something religious, making the post all the more impactful with its drawing- The caramel frappe does not answer the subject, just as God does not answer the subjects of paintings who depicted the same theme.

It’s also intriguing where OP chose to put details. In amostly minimalist creation, the (relatively) detailed frappe, hands, and face guides your eyes in a a dynamic way- from the frappe to the face, then follows the line of the body out to the end of the legs- making the art more interesting to the eye.

"It must have serious value!"

I've been thinking about this. And this may sound controversial at first, but I'm hoping people will hear me out.

We should stop trying so hard to detect AI art.

I think we should all lift that burden from our brains.

I have often talked about "woke goggles." Where conservatives have lost the ability to enjoy anything because they are hypervigilant about detecting anything woke. They've cursed themselves into just hating everything. All they have left is the "God's Not Dead" Cinematic Universe.

And I worry people are getting AI goggles now. They are so concerned about accidentally enjoying robot art and hurting artists that they have overcorrected to the point where they are hurting artists.

One cannot say "AI is all soulless slop that always looks bad" and then accuse a real artist of making something that looks like AI and not hurt them. By doing so, it includes the baggage of all of the "slop" comments along with it. This crusade is having collateral damage to the very artists we are trying to protect.

Yes, we need to be cautious about malicious AI images. Misinformation and deepfakes are going to be a big problem. People using AI imagery for profit is already a mess. But if you are cruising your feed and like a cool sci-fi robot gal or a photo of a waterfall and it turns out to be AI... that's fine.

It was trained by real artists and AI is going to create some cool shit because of that.

Honestly, I think a lot of the worst slop is because the dipshits creating the prompts have no artistic taste. People keep blaming the AI for how bad it looks and often don't consider it is a product of the loser who published it.

There is plenty of non-slop out there that has fooled me. And, like it or not, it is going to get harder and harder to tell what is AI. Until there are better tools or better regulations, I don't think there is much we can do to avoid enjoying AI art every once in a while. If only by accident.

Current "AI detectors" are mostly a scam. Even the best forensic-level AI image detectors struggle to stay above 70–80% accuracy across a wide range of models and image types. And that's in controlled lab conditions.

Free online tools often drop to near coin-flip accuracy (50–60%), especially with newer image generators and post-processing applied.

The best way to avoid AI imagery is to look at an artist's body of work. It's much harder to create consistent, non-obvious fake images in a large sample size. That is usually enough to have confidence in authenticity. Plus, if they have posted similar art before 2022, you can pretty much rule out any shenanigans.

Otis literally died before genAI was available.

But images you see in the wild, just let yourself enjoy them if that is what your brain wants to do. It'll be okay.

I just think we are attacking this backwards. If we want to protect artists, we need to support them.

Calling out random AI art does not support them.

It does not put money in their pockets.

It does not grow their audience.

Over a decade ago I tried to lead a fight to create better systems of attribution on websites like Reddit and Imgur. I even spoke to the Imgur team after an article was written about me.

I asked them to allow sources on their posts and to develop tech that would help people find where an image came from. They said they were "working on it" and it never manifested.

IMAGE SHARING SITES STEAL MORE FROM ARTISTS THAN AI.

But we just kind of accepted it. No one really joined me in my fight. The prevailing defeatist attitude was, "That's just the way it is."

I think now is the time to demand better attribution systems. We need to be vigilant about making sure as many posts as possible have good sourcing. If an image on Reddit goes viral, the top comment should be the source. And if it isn't, you should try to find it and add it.

Just to be clear, "credit to the original artist" is NOT proper attribution.

And perhaps we can lobby these image sharing sites to create better sourcing systems and tools. They could even use fucking AI to find the earliest posted version of an image.

And it would be nice if it didn't require people to go into the comments to find the source. It could just be in the headline. They could even create little badges "made by a human" for verified artists.

Good attribution helps artists grow their audience. It is one of the single most effective things you can do to help them.

I literally just got this message...

There are maybe 10 popular artists who I helped grow their audience early on. Just because I reblogged their work and added links to all of their social media. I even hired my best friend to add sourcing information to every post because I believed so much in good attribution.

Calling out AI art may feel good in the moment. You caught someone trying to trick people and it feels like justice. But, in most cases, the tangible benefits to real artists seem small. It impedes your ability to enjoy art without always being suspicious. And the risk of telling someone you think they make soulless slop doesn't seem worth it.

But putting that time and effort into attribution *would* be worth it. I have proven it time and time again.

I also think people should consider having a monthly art budget. I don't care if it is $5. But if we all commit to seeking out cool artists and being their collective patrons, we could really make a difference and keep real art alive. Just commit to finding a cool new artist every month and financially contributing to them in some way.

On a bigger scale I think advocating for universal basic income, art grants for education and creation, and government regulation of AI would all be helpful long term goals. Though I think our friends in Europe may have to take the lead on regulation at the moment.

So...

Stop worrying about enjoying or calling out AI art.

Demand better attribution from image sharing sites.

Make sure all art has a source listed.

Start an art budget.

BUT THEN IN THEIR MISREPRESENTATION POLICY THEY SAY YOU CAN'T COLLECT MONEY TO A BANK ACCOUNT THAT'S NOT IN YOUR BUSINESS OR LEGAL NAME. BUT MY LEGAL NAME INCLUDES DICK, WHICH YOU CONSIDER OFFENSIVE.