Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Potato]

Anyway, here's Nepenthe's tirades about human advancement because she's personally miserable from that Adobe thread, in case anyone still believes she isn't against everything but mandatory poverty, also bitching about users not knowing the unwritten rules again: https://www.resetera.com/threads/adobe-execs-say-artists-need-to-embrace-ai-or-get-left-behind.1019421/page-4#post-130663608

But I also know it's not pure evil and has some benefits, if properly understood and regulated.

You're on a planet undergoing ecological collapse right now because of unfettered and unregulated mass production and consumption poisoning the environment.

This is not going to be ethically regulated. It wasn't when Stability first laundered the data sets!

Shit, years ago, Google fired their people in charge of ethics.

Things are pointing toward YOLOing and fuck any and all consequences.
Like holy shit, if I hear one more person defend the shittiest of technologies with "it'll be fine if we regulate it," I'm going to scream.

Without technological advancements making us more productive you'd still be farming 16 hours a day to fill your belly with only local produce in a shit shack with cold wind blowing instead of being able to fill your belly buying food from another nation at your grocer with 30min of work. What you said isnt wrong but dont pretend the advancement of productivity efficiency didnt make our lives better. Tools making our time more efficient is what made us go from having to spend all our time being hunter gatherers to be able afford time to improve our lives and start civilizations.

This is basically just tech-colonialism, an extremely flat, context-less take on how technological advancement has hurt as much as it has helped.

Again, you're living through ecological collapse as a direct result of unregulated and careless technological and military advancement. And the reason we're not seeing a reversal anytime soon should be obvious!

Technology should ultimately be developed responsibly in tandem with concepts of conviviality and sustainability. Unfettered technological advancement under a capitalist lens is going to be the death of millions of us on the good route, and potentially billions on the bad route. The fact that a tool or an advancement has no inherent moral value in a vacuum is irrelevant because nothing exists in a vacuum anyways.

And yet, the modern culture is: «Go fast and break things»

People legitimately got pilled into believing that technological development on its own within a capitalist framework is going to save humanity from fascism and climate collapse instead of humans working together with one another to organize for our collective benefit.

Maybe the wires are a bit crossed but for me when I'm talking about "does it make our lives better" I meant in factors like how much fulfillment you get, how much work you do, how much free time you have, things in that sense and I would argue that those aspects were massively improved with increased sociatal productivity through technogy. I absolutely agree we arent being responsible and we are heading straight through a wall crashing with how reckless we are to the environnement and exploitation of others in pursuit of those goals.

But even then, I think parameters like "fulfillment" and "free time" must be examined in a more critical and dialectical lens. Like, the computer in a vacuum allows me more free time because of how fast it is at making calculations and processing data. But it also allows me unfettered access to addictive games and social media, potentially impacting the quality of free time it has in turn given me. Indeed, my social and mental health are significantly improved the more I get away from digital devices and spend time in nature or with other human beings, despite these being extreme advancements in technology that would kill a theoretical Victorian child, as it were lol.

But again, the computer doesn't exist in a vacuum. Nothing does. Our world is vastly interconnected and almost infinitely complex. Technological gains do not come without losses, sometimes very grave ones, somewhere, and the lie that every self-proclaimed pioneer, from Ford to Gore to Musk, has told us is that nothing but utopia and freedom await on the other side of whatever gadget they've helped cook up.

So yes, while it is undeniable that capitalism has led to advancements in productive output which in turn have led to more comfortable lifestyles for those lucky though to be born in the West, it is also undeniable that it has literally cost millions of lives from direct harms like chattel slavery to indirect harms like cancerous pollutants, to say nothing of the vast billions of people living in deliberately underdeveloped societies. Social and cultural connections have been made as well as torn; while I can speak to almost anyone in the world no matter where they are, the social fabric of standard American living is lonely, full of mistrust and perpetual grievance, and interactions meant to be transactional versus just quality time spent together, far moreso than in underdeveloped areas where communal ties are more maintained. And it goes on and on.

Tl;dr- my feeling about these false beliefs of technological utopia, these distinctly European, quasi-Christian ideas that we are meant to colonize and conquer everything with no regulations or second thoughts, all while living on a dying planet can be summed up with the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

this is such a frustrating reply. Jordan117 has gone out of their way to provide balanced information on AI for the benefit of this community, including obtaining mod approval for a thoughtful thread that ended up getting randomly shut down without warning. they aren't at all asking for recognition as a victim, they're saying this is an important topic for everyone in the world to keep abreast of, and yet era is arbitrarily limiting that discussion.

as i mentioned earlier in the thread, AI threatens my livelihood as a writer. that is precisely why i want to learn as much about it as possible so that i can make informed decisions about where to focus my work. the victims here are the people who aren't able to view or discuss up-to-date information on technology that might change their lives for better or worse.

AI discussion isn't wholesale banned. Industry trends are allowed to be posted here. There is also an AI-OT. Jordan's thread being locked was an admitted mistake, but the rule was ultimately to stop a lot of spam and fighting, which it succeeded in doing.

If you are looking instead for a place where people who either aren't in the arts or are more amenable to the technology can nag on artists who stand against the technology, or an overall safe space to be excited about AI content generation, you're not going to find that here. That was by design.

i don't want a safe space, i understand the concerns and criticisms and share many of them myself. i just think jordan is plainly right that the topic is singled out for harsh moderation here and i think that is probably not going to age well in the future or help anyone today.

Jordan isn't correct that this topic is singled out harshly compared to others when there are far more harsher bans on certain subjects here (try to talk about Hogwarts and see how fast you'll get cooked), and just as well moderation has faced more significant quagmires and fires than this regarding subjects being singled out. If anything, the AI ruling was actually one of the few things that went over well with the community at large.

But ultimately, ResetEra is not the vanguard of anything significantly important. Our conversational rules about not just AI, but literally anything here, are not going to have a strong material impact on any relevant industries or political processes. This is a space for minorities to talk about video games and other nerd shit without having to deal with the entire brunt of right-leaning chud bullshit from the rest of the gaming community on spaces like Reddit. That's all it is.

We don't actually owe it to anyone to curate this space in a way that takes into account "the future." We're not psychics. We instead owe that attention to this community to try and make the space they want, and unsurprisingly a community filled with exploited minorities, many of which are professional creatives, hate AI content generation and thus don't want the subject flooding the forum.

If anything, the fact that there is an OT and some guard rails is actually an olive branch, because I was gunning for a full conversational ban when discussing this with staff.

This is a strawman. Every time anyone wants to talk about this objectively important field more openly there's this gross kneejerk reaction to paint them as hateful techbro chuds who just want to troll artists and censor any criticism. It's insulting.

It's not a strawman. That childish attitude was specifically leading to enough fights and hundreds of reports that it prompted a staff discussion in the first place, and we permed our fair share of people over it before settling on the rule we did. It wasn't artists that were the primary problem, although we did ban a few of them as well for being way too antagonistic to folks who actually work in fields relating to AI. It was folks who were repeating corporate buzzwords about "democratization," calling artists outdated like coal miners, and largely just hassling them and acting like they don't know how to do their own damn job that were the problem.

AI proponents are primarily responsible for poisoning the well here. This is the result of their attitude towards artists.

And pretty hypocritical, given the de facto suppression of informational threads while simultaneously tolerating negative threads that spread misinformation or trigger inflammatory attacks on people who use AI or have an interest in it (which apparently you are now explicitly blessing? "Worst proponents" is a qualifier, I guess, but not one I have a lot of confidence in).

Again, the rule was ultimately a concession to not ban the topic outright. This is an anti-AI space, and staff don't necessarily owe it to anyone to make it more fair and neutral. Now, do I think we can be more consistent with how we lock threads? Yes absolutely. It would not personally bother me if you made a Frontier update thread, although I would not actually moderate anyone for being inflammatory towards the tech itself. Do I care that you think it's hypocritical that both staff and members are laxer towards anti-AI threads than neutrally or pro-AI threads? Not in the least.

Also this guy who has the same narcissistic belief as Nepenthe:

Do people really think they can stop AI and people/companies using it?

I don't give a fuck.

What's funny to me is that these creatively infertile deadheads think their shitty generative AI is even of interest to a genuine artist.

I've played around with it, seen its limitations and know it has absolutely to practical use to me. I could generate 100 versions of the same bastardised, distorted image, and not a single one would be what I want. As a 'tool' it has no place in my pipeline. It's useless shit.

I think what some people just can't get through their thick skulls is that artists create art because it's their passion. And if we're lucky, we get paid for doing something we love. And I think that galls those people.

I'm sure people and companies will continue to use AI, and that those same creatively infertile deadheads will think themselves artists because they typed 'Flying burger with wings' into a text field. I bet they all have to use chat GPT to write prompts for them too.

I know exactly what 'the bigger picture' you're advocating for will be.

A world in which commercial 'art' is produced by the least creative people on Earth. Just wall to wall endless dogshit.

Makes me really greatful to have had 44 years experiencing all of the art and media I have, and that I might be dead before 'the big picture' has swallowed everything worthwhile.

This all goes back to that age-old question from NeoGoof of, "What income do you need to have to be considered rich?"

Nepenthe and her retarded acolytes will never answer this question, but it's very clear that they all believe that ANYONE earning even $1 more than them is "rich" and should be murdered by guillotine. 

Nepenthe's whole world view is predicated on this fact and this fact alone. 

She is the most envious cunt in that whole place.