Hello from Madison, new people 👋 I've been trying to figure out the most effective activism with my group's limited resources.

That's useful AI that doesn't take billions of dollars to train, though. (it's also a great idea and I'd be down for it)

I'm doing my part by posting reaction images every day.

Open source software isn't the same as generative AI at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if people who put stuff on GitHub pre-ChatGPT don't want their code scraped for Microsoft to profit off of. I took my personal projects off of GitHub a year or two ago for that reason. Aside from that, open source code is put out there with the intention of being used freely and a lot of art isn't. Art floating around the internet pre-2022 was made either with the intention of not getting paid for it, in which case whatever, or the artist wanted to get paid and was presumably paid but their art ended up on the internet anyway (but they still got paid at least).

My main issues with generative AI models are that most if not all of them were created without the artists' or developers' permission, the profits are going entirely to oligarchs, and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think indie game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.

edit: For what it's worth, I paid for my copy of Reaper and the drum plugin I use. I also paid for all my guitar gear.

~~Writing good music is really freakin' hard, but I do it on my own anyway because the whole point of making something creative is that a person is doing it. It's truly a shame to see people rally for software made by tech bros that takes work away from real artists who could use it.~~

editing to be less snarky: How would you feel if generative AI could make a game and an artist or musician had it make an entire game for their art/music because it saved them money?

I didn't realize Weird Al's line about "me too'ing like some brain-dead AOL'er" was referencing Eternal September, he would make that reference.

The worst part is that we're rich enough as a country to have our obscene military spending and civilized healthcare and education, we just choose not to.

I've read that having a gun in your house does increase your risk of being shot. That being said, I understand that having guns helped groups like the Panthers keep their communities safer. I don't think they'll help us most of the time in resisting a dictatorship, though. If we beat the fascists, I think more of it will come from sabotage, mass strikes, etc, as opposed to shooting.

The problem with having these arguments online is that you don't actually know what nonentity did besides vote. What did you do? I've gone to rallies, I've written my representatives, I helped out at my college's Gaza camp, I wrote and called my college's chancellor about the Gaza camp, I've distributed literature about Palestine. And I fucking voted, uncommitted and then Harris, because as public enemy #1b (trans) I don't have the privilege to let whoever wins win. Because people couldn't be bothered to do the bare minimum and take an hour or two to go vote for the lesser evil, the government is erasing me from existence.

Not having to tear things down would be great, but how do we do that at this point? The president is above the law, and has Congress, the courts, cops, a newly-freed legion of brownshirts, and an actual cult on his side. His party's been getting away with ratfucking elections for at least 25 years.

I certainly think we can tear things down nonviolently, but we're out of ways to do this politely. I don't know how we get past the right-wing propaganda machine or government not being very democratic in the first place. We need to hugely expand the House, get rid of the Senate, and limit federal judge terms at the very least, and none of those are going to happen as long as the federal government is stacked in fascists' favor. The last meaningful amendment was passed in 1971.

It feels so out of character that they'd call each other that, because I think that's really the only part of that movie that didn't age well. The rest of the time they're a great example of guys having a healthy friendship.

I get where you're coming from, but if someone can get away with doing things associated with a group that's shorthand in the West™ for the worst people in the world, I do think that's a problem too.