Aside from all the artists whose work was fed into the AI learning models without their permission. That art has been stolen, and is still being stolen. In this case very explicitly, because they outright removed his work, and then put it back when nobody was looking.
I could create a faithful reproduction of the Mona Lisa
You could, but Stable Diffusion couldn't. All it can do is output what it's been fed. It doesn't know composition, or colour theory. It doesn't understand that something is a human, or a fabric, or how materials work, it just reproduces variations of what it's been fed. Calling it "intelligence" is disingenuous: it doesn't "know" anything, it just reproduces what's built into it's database, usually without the artist's permission.
I didn't see mentioned anywhere what happens to the plant waste once the 1% of protein is extracted, but this is really neat! Definitely hope to hear more about it.
Mine’s from 2010. It’s got colours but I’m not sure they’re quite right, and it’s got some sounds (music and explosions), but is lacking in others (dialogue).
Not to mention that people in America and Europe aren't necessarily at "the bottom". A lot of today's wealth is built on the backs of poorer countries that make even less than we do, or nothing at all, or by exploiting them by coming in and privatizing something as basic as water.
There's more overall for everyone, but the people at the bottom are getting a smaller and smaller share, and a lot of important things, like housing, not to mention with things like streaming, and online stores, we don't really "own" most of the media we consume anymore, we just pay forever to rent it. Fast fashion and planned obscelescence means that our clothing is worse than what people used to have, and our machines don't last as long, so we have to keep replacing both of those.
What we do have is designed not to last, and more meaningful, life-long purchases are out of reach. Meanwhile the people at the top of the pile who do literally nothing but "have wealth" sit around on their yachts blissfully ignoring the people starving to death on the streets.
Since the current system allows the people who make the rules to be bought, I think we'd have to start over entirely from scratch for it to work at all.
“Free market” Capitalism is self-destructive. As the wealthy build and consolidate power, more and more resources get funneled to the top while the people at the bottom actually creating those resources go with less and less, and it’s unsustainable.
Being a billionaire is a moral failing. To have the ability to do something about all the suffering and death in the world, and to choose to do nothing borders on sociopathy. The systems designed to allow for billionaires to exist ensure that they don’t pay a fair share of their taxes, and they contribute nothing to society. They are leeches, feeding off the working class and giving nothing in return, when they have so much more to give than anyone else.
I think that the whole world doesn't need to be divided up into little "with us or against us" wars like this; there's nuance to be had, like in every other situation.
Some mods are good and only want what's best for their community, and some mods are bad and are power hungry control freaks.
Mods are people, same as the rest of us. Often they're valued members of the community before they're given the position.
Do I think that the job needs to exist? Absolutely. Good, bad, or otherwise, they do a lot of work to protect us from the tidal wave of crap that comes in, whether it's bots, scammers, trolls, hate advocats, etc., and I'm thankful that it's not me who needs to deal with all of that.
TL;DR: Mods do important work, but they're also people, and not everything has to be an "us VS. them" situation.
How many people do you know with the power or means to run hospitals or fund research into curing diseases? That’s what taxes are for, and that’s the only scale that works for something as big as a pandemic, or country/province-wide healthcare in general.
No, the government should be taking care of it's people. That's literally it's only job. Sitting on money while people are dying is a complete failure of government, and at that point it should be replaced.
Aside from all the artists whose work was fed into the AI learning models without their permission. That art has been stolen, and is still being stolen. In this case very explicitly, because they outright removed his work, and then put it back when nobody was looking.