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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2025

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  • If I lived in a city where there are lots of different retailers that carry varieties of products then maybe I wouldn’t use Amazon. But when you live in a more rural area where the selection is limited and you like better stuff, there’s really not many other options.

    It also seems like a very one sided criticism of Amazon. No corporation is good, and Amazon might very well be evil™️ but not everything about it is negative. It has also brought thousands of jobs to rural or semi rural areas that pay better than anything else in the area. They increase access to products that people like me wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. And they are actively trying to disrupt the healthcare industry by lowering prices and giving greater access to healthcare to people who are far from cities.

    I also suspect that these descriptions of working conditions at Amazon centers seem to be cherry picked and might be attributed more to bad managers than company policy, because I’ve met people who work at Amazon warehouses and they don’t complain about this kind of stuff at all. In fact they seem to generally like their jobs.




  • Most of these arguments were made for computers back when they were gaining popularity fyi.

    The people outsourcing their thinking to LLMs weren’t gonna do much thinking in the first place. And honestly once you use them for a while you quickly realize what their good uses are and what are their limitations and thinking is not its strong suit. But it’s great at sorting large data and making it digestible. Or writing corpo copy that was devoid of meaning anyways.

    Remember that a hammer can kill a person just as well as it can build a house.

    Now I agree that it is annoying that it is being shoved into everything without any good reason, but the market will sort that out. What you are seeing is everyone rushing into a nascent market before it ossifies and shakes everyone except one or two winners. In 10 years I’m sure LLMs will be more like you have one that you plug into every service you use and it will be provided by one of a handful of companies who are the only ones capable of profiting from this because of the economies of scales it requires to work. Ergo not very different from every other tech rush that has happened in history.

    LLMs are tools, simple as. Being a Luddite, screaming and kicking and crying over them is not gonna make it go away any more than boomers crying over computers have managed to make computers go away.


  • What you are describing has nothing to do with the tool. It’s dishonesty which is different.

    The idea is that instead of commissioning the cow on the field, you go to the AI and ask it for that and it gives you a cow in the field. If you claim you made it, you are lying but that would be true even if you paid an artist and then claimed the same.

    So with AI made art you’ll say “this art was made by an Ai” and no one will be confused as to who takes the credit, because it belongs to the algorithm.

    Have you ever made art in your life? Because a big part of art is mimicking. Like 98% of it is mimicking. I draw, write and have dabbled in making music and playing instruments. You can’t learn these skills without mimicking. And most artists don’t ever do anything truly original, that’s a rarity and even when it happens you can trace the influences to other artists if you know how to look.

    You could argue that AI has not developed its own style yet but that’s bullshit too imo because everyone knows the default AI art style when they see it, so that means that AI has a distinctive style. Is it unique? Maybe not, but neither is the art style of most artists or writers or even musicians.



  • Art has no rules my man.

    You can do all kinds of mental gymnastics you want but there’s no difference between an artist looking at Frank Frazetta’s art and basing their style off of it and an AI doing the same thing. You might not like it, but it’s the truth.

    Do I think the art has the same value? Not necessarily. But I also never thought that all art has the same value. There has always been trash production line art and good art.

    But also I have to say that I’ve already seen some people use AI as a tool for art and make some really cool stuff that I don’t think any other artist would have made and it’s more unique than most of the stuff out there. You can use it as the tool it is or complain and cry about it to no avail.

    The chef example is especially good since most chefs are just following recipes and altering simply a few things here and there. AI essentially does the same thing. Honestly like no one has come up with a good argument to change my mind that the way AI operates is exactly how humans learn and create new things. If you’ve engaged in art you know that you are always imitating and taking from the art you consume to make your own.


  • So what you are saying is that it has a purpose. Also if an artist is inspired by another artist, and they have a generally similar art style as the artist they are inspired by, are they stealing? Was HP Lovecraft stealing from Lord Dunsany when he imitated his style? Where all those monks that transcribed Greek works stealing from the Greeks?

    I will say that most AIs are unethical because they have been trained on pirated works. But an AI trained on publicly available works (ie news articles, blogs etc) and movies, books and music for which access to was paid for is as ethical as you or me emulating an artist or building on an idea that we read to create something new. And if that’s unethical then all human art in history is unethical because all artists are inspired by other artists, no one creates in a vacuum.











  • Oh for fucks sake, you keep using the same trite examples of shithole websites instead of looking at the place you’re at. I already told you, lemmy has a pretty good balance and this is where it should be as far as I’m concerned.

    I don’t know what people want to be told, but I can tell you the double standards very much apply to both sides of the aisle. Like this very conversation is proof of that because the modern day American “leftist”simply defines itself in opposition to MAGA.

    But even then I don’t even know why you bring that up because I’m not making an argument in favor of a side. You seem to imply that I do simply because the view I’m advocating for is often shared by the right, and because so much of the left is defined by being in opposition to MAGA then I must be defending MAGA or Trump; I guess the logic is that surely someone who disagrees with them will take every opposing viewpoint at any moment.

    The fact is that heavy centralized moderation simply lends itself so that corporations can enforce whatever are the views of the current government. Which is fine they are in their right to do so, it is a private network after all. But I’m not gonna defend it no matter if it’s left leaning or right leaning because it just doesn’t seat right with me being dictated by a corporation what is correct enough for me to hear and see, and I will always move to the platform that has the least amount of paternalistic attitudes towards its users. Thats it, that’s the bottom line.

    If you prefer heavy moderation and an enforced point of view of the world then that’s fine, there are plenty of social media networks with that approach. Just look at hexbear or r/conservative. No one is taking away your right to be dictated to.