As somebody who almost went into the video game industry, I look at it the same way I look at people saying that you should buy a game "to support the devs" even if the company has all kinds of issues like not paying their workers well.
With games and movies, the workers already got paid. Whether you buy the game or not doesn't affect the devs at triple A companies - they got paid before it shipped, and the same with movie actors. They did their job and got paid, so meme away without a care. In that sense, movies and games are the exact opposite of the generative AI issue. You wanna play the latest Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard slop? Pirating it and somehow finding a way to slip the devs 20 bucks for the beer fund is far more helpful to them than paying $70+ for it at retail.
Memes are honestly the perfect content to make with generative AI. The only issue is that the software we have right now is made by companies taking the work of others and not giving them their due. We aren't doing it with a profit incentive, but they are. Which puts us in a situation where people want the reward of making art without putting in the effort or paying somebody else to put in the effort. It's like these companies are selling coloring books of stolen artwork. You can't link back to the original artists (if you could even spot the style of one specific artist in the generated image), so you can't even bring attention to them. Making a meme out of art posted on social media can actually be a great advertisement for the artist (so long as people know where and how to find them) because that's often part of the reason why artists post their art on social media in the first place. They're advertising their skills to people who want to commission artwork. When people repost art without a source, they can actively harm the original artist. I've seen tons of artists complain about how reposts of their work by bot accounts will get thousands of views and likes while the original post on their account will get like one hundred views.
The tech is great, but the companies making it aren't. And by using it, you generate revenue for them and incentivize them to continue their malicious practices. Until we're in a position where artists are being fairly compensated, we need to be mindful of where this stuff is coming from.
One of the companies that makes one of the big digital art programs partnered up with a website design company a few months ago that is using gen AI in their website template maker. But, this company has hired artists to make the stuff that they're training the program on, and the artists get royalties out of it. That's how it should be - the artists got paid for their efforts, they get the credit that they're due, and nobody has to spend all day making stupid buttons for a website UI.
I like to view it in the context of the passage about the three people donating money. One wealthy man donates a large sum of money, while a man who makes an average living donates a smaller amount, and the last is an old lady who donates something akin to $1.50. In the end, Jesus declares that the old lady gave the most because she donated all that she feasibly could while the wealthy man gave what was a mere pittance of his money and the other man gave a noticeable portion of his salary, but not enough that he would miss it.
The effort and generosity behind a donation (whether of time or money) is more important than the donation itself, and that's what the rich can't understand. By the time you get to that level of wealth, you've spent so much energy in accruing wealth that you no longer have the empathy to see those around you who truly need aid, and to lose that empathy is to lose an essential part of what makes us human - a part of the divinity that exists within us.
Image generators are not an essential resource. They're a luxury. Using that as justification to keep doing a corporation and exploiting the working class just makes you a class traitor for convenience who doesn't want to feel guilty about it. Like buying stuff from Amazon or Starbucks right now while their workers are both in the middle of massive strikes.
Some consumption is less ethical than others. If you wouldn't buy stuff made in sweatshops, then why are you okay with putting artists in the same position? Until we get image generators that are open source and pay artists to use their work, we should stand with our fellow working class in solidarity.
More than half of Walmart's employees are on food stamps or some other form of government assistance. So along with everything else, our tax money goes to pay their employees because they won't.
I call that a tax break, paying shit wages, AND ruining the local area by making everybody more poor all rolled into one because Walmart employees often shop at Walmart for their employee discount (because they can't afford to shop elsewhere on their poor wages), meaning that their wages go right back into the company's coffers right alongside our tax dollars.
It's like the TikTok equivalent of YouTube clickbait titles and thumbnails. I don't even use TikTok, but I can hear the stilted AI lady voiceover saying, "Wait Until The End. You Won't Believe The Transformation."
As is downplaying the risk and severity of what is very much still a dangerous virus - something that the US government is complicit in doing. Those numbers were national numbers for the US that week. Regardless of what part of the year they peak in, they're both dangerous, but the CDC is only mandated to be unable to report on cases in any other way except by wastewater for one of them. And that means it's impossible to get a proper comparison, but I'd say that it's still a safe bet to guess that COVID peaks during the Christmas season and into the new year when people are inside more. Besides, the facts remain that not only is COVID still killing plenty of people - especially amongst those with medical issues that prevent them from getting vaccinated themselves or leave them immunocompromised - but every infection, regardless of severity, has a high chance of causing permanent damage to any organ. COVID has been found in every single organ in the body, from the brain to the testicles, and many long-term debilitating symptoms have been attributed to COVID infection. Things like brain fog, chronic exhaustion, sleep disorders, infertility, and many more.
That's slightly disingenuous in that COVID is still very dangerous. The last time I checked the fatalities, which I believe had been those of the first week of November, there were somewhere around 400 deaths from COVID that week and 13 from the flu in that 7 day period.
I remember reading reports about the strains going around at the beginning of last year (Jan of 2023), and those were actually more dangerous and more infectious than the original strains were. But there were nowhere near the casualty rates because the vaccines work. But not everybody can get vaccinated, and every infection still has about a 20% chance of causing Long COVID despite the vaccine, which can be so crippling that it can put you on permanent disability or cause infertility (COVID is also stored in the balls, along with the pee).
The reason that we see the wastewater reports is because that's the only way that they're legally allowed to report infection rates. The government mandated that the CDC stop recording other rates sometime during the height of the pandemic, around the time that companies started pushing for an end to lockdowns and for grandparents to die for the economy because their grandkids would thank them for it. Also around the time that DeSantis tried to make the person running the COVID tracking website for Florida fake the numbers so that he could say that COVID was over.
I keep forgetting to get mine, but last year, when I went to schedule mine, they had open appointments starting a half an hour from then. I could've practically walked in and gotten a shot right then and there.
It's a tool made unethically. Just because corporations use sweat shop labor doesn't mean we should, too. The Screen Actors Guild has been on strike for weeks now demanding contracts for jobs that ensure that their performances won't be used to train AI models to replace them. Would you cross the picket line and use an AI Harrison Ford?
Open source LLMs or those trained on ethically sourced data are awesome. OpenAI saying that they would go bankrupt if they can't steal copyrighted material for their training data is not. Unless they end up getting into trouble for pissing off Disney and going bankrupt. That would be hilarious.
Made using a tool created by stealing the effort of the working class. Giving it a pass is like giving Temu a pass on working conditions and pay because it's just cheap garbage.
Obviously. But we're talking about a made-up saint here, not the actual man himself.
In the same way that I didn't actually bother downvoting, I figured it was in the spirit of the meme to present it the same way people attribute their values to Jesus.
But it is important to remind people how these current iterations of generative AI are damaging to the livelihoods of working-class people. The goals of the companies making these are the same as UHC - the violence is just more silent and slower paced.
Appreciate the link. I've got a hand-me-down Ionic in my house, and knowing that I can skip running it for basically the same effect means I can save a couple of cents on my electricity bill.
Gonna take another look at those IKEA tables with the HEPA filters built in. Those seem handy to avoid having to dust so often.
Plus, the two can be used in combination. Improved passive cooling systems will make active cooling better by reducing the need to run the active system all the time, or at least run it at reduced rates, which will make the whole system last longer and reduce maintenance.
I totally get it, I live in the US and I'm so goddamn sick of hearing about this nonsense. The worst part for everybody else is how much money is in the US economy, which means that basically everything we do affects the world and is therefore international/world news.
As somebody who almost went into the video game industry, I look at it the same way I look at people saying that you should buy a game "to support the devs" even if the company has all kinds of issues like not paying their workers well.
With games and movies, the workers already got paid. Whether you buy the game or not doesn't affect the devs at triple A companies - they got paid before it shipped, and the same with movie actors. They did their job and got paid, so meme away without a care. In that sense, movies and games are the exact opposite of the generative AI issue. You wanna play the latest Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard slop? Pirating it and somehow finding a way to slip the devs 20 bucks for the beer fund is far more helpful to them than paying $70+ for it at retail.
Memes are honestly the perfect content to make with generative AI. The only issue is that the software we have right now is made by companies taking the work of others and not giving them their due. We aren't doing it with a profit incentive, but they are. Which puts us in a situation where people want the reward of making art without putting in the effort or paying somebody else to put in the effort. It's like these companies are selling coloring books of stolen artwork. You can't link back to the original artists (if you could even spot the style of one specific artist in the generated image), so you can't even bring attention to them. Making a meme out of art posted on social media can actually be a great advertisement for the artist (so long as people know where and how to find them) because that's often part of the reason why artists post their art on social media in the first place. They're advertising their skills to people who want to commission artwork. When people repost art without a source, they can actively harm the original artist. I've seen tons of artists complain about how reposts of their work by bot accounts will get thousands of views and likes while the original post on their account will get like one hundred views.
The tech is great, but the companies making it aren't. And by using it, you generate revenue for them and incentivize them to continue their malicious practices. Until we're in a position where artists are being fairly compensated, we need to be mindful of where this stuff is coming from.
One of the companies that makes one of the big digital art programs partnered up with a website design company a few months ago that is using gen AI in their website template maker. But, this company has hired artists to make the stuff that they're training the program on, and the artists get royalties out of it. That's how it should be - the artists got paid for their efforts, they get the credit that they're due, and nobody has to spend all day making stupid buttons for a website UI.