frankPodmore @ frankPodmore @slrpnk.net

London-based writer. Often climbing.

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Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.

I've been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don't have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!

I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.

Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it's anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I'm not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.

Prison seems the obvious one. It's obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don't think there's a better solution, unfortunately.

• Sport and art
• low cost and free places to do sport and art
• linked together by public transit and clean, safe places to walk, run or cycle (or scoot or skate or whatever)
• a shorter working week, so people have time to do the above
• a higher minimum wage, so people can afford the (ideally low, if necessary) costs involved

So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that's your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there's space for that.

Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that's your art.

Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.

Oh no. Not the real estate industry.

People are already painting his face on walls.

Heh. Yeah, I can't really hold up a country backsliding on trans rights as an example of an effective constitutional monarchy.

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don't think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should've added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there's no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn't.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain't broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It's better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn't really the issue.

Assuming we're going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.

The Newer Forest.

Always makes me laugh that the 'New' Forest is getting on for a thousand years old.

Again, you've written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.

Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that's not the same thing.

Imagining the idea 'I'd like to see an image of a lemming', which is what you've done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your 'prompt' to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn't entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)

You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don't know you and I wouldn't want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.

Current AI is lacking both.

Only word wrong here is 'current'. AI will never have creativity or craftmanship. It's impossible.

You're lazy and talentless, and you like how it allows you to steal the hard work and talent of others.

That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by 'AI' does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: 'It's statistically likely that the phrase "to be" will be followed by the phrase "or not to be"'. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI 'art' is not creative and therefore not art at all.

Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not 'having ideas'; it's an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you're not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You're saying 'Show me the statistically likely output for this input'. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.

Also, it looks terrible.

Yes, very useful for subtle distinctions like this!

Yes, it's metonymy, as people have said. You also get it in similar contexts where people will name a building such as 'the White House' or '[10] Downing Street' to refer to the governments of the US or the UK.

Me. But I should add that a system of wages and salaries is not slavery, and that part of the reason I know this is that actual slaves really, really want instead to be paid a wage or a salary.

By far the most coherent response, thank you. I still think the contexts are sufficiently different that I find it odd that anyone would feel the need to paint his face on a wall thousands of miles away.

I think you probably understand why it's ridiculous when right wingers say that socialised healthcare = Stalinism, and so on an identical basis you should see it's ridiculous to describe the people of the UK as oppressed slaves.