Mastadons are amazing and hence Mastadon is an amazing name.

There is a far greener country where such things are unheard of.

Good insight. Washington was correct it seems.

Yes and no. More than half the country is wanting to move in the direction of other modern nations. The trouble is we have the electoral college which was instituted as a compromise for slave holding states at the foundation of our country and which gives conservatives outsized power which has resulted in a long-term deadlock.

It’s likely that as demographics shift over the next decade, this deadlock will be broken and we’ll probably enter a period of rapid progress, but that’s only if we make it that long. With the degree to which Republicans are either brainwashed or willfully ignoring reality for the sake of trying to gain power, it remains to be seen whether we can.

It does feel that way a bit, but it’s important to keep pushing for a positive experience here. If any given instance becomes too toxic, we always have the option to move and de-federate. It’s nice for that to be a possibility.

I read an article on PC Gamer just the other week where one of the prominent D&D artists said AI was already impacting his work. And not just in the usual way of stealing away jobs, but also, by damaging their artistic reputation by people generating ai artworks in their style, and people not knowing what was or wasn’t actually his.

I take it you’re not an artist? That’s not how or why you do studies.

I use git for writing. It’s fantastic. You can use branches to try different ideas and approaches and merge it into your main branch once you’re sure of the direction you want to go.

I take the approach of doing content first and styling second. For content I don’t need anything more sophisticated than a plain text editor. I like it because it removes decisions that I really don’t need to be making at that point.

I do grant completely the valid uses for the technology which pertain to individual interests. I think there’s interesting possibilities there as well.

There’s a quote from the Tao Te Ching, which says, “why must you value what others value?” I think that’s relevant here. It may be true that those with money and power will always try to force their own interests (See the app formerly known as Twitter for reference). I’m not suggesting that we can or should try to shove this technology back in the bottle so to speak. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t so easily accept corporate interests as being in the interest of humans more generally and we should be skeptical of anything that sounds like happy tech industry propoganda.

As to the latter part, it’s just my perception based on what I’ve read. It may not be accurate.

The notion of progress is too much of a catch-all positivity word here. If speed and efficiency is all we care about then, sure, ai will blow traditional artists out of the water. If however, we care about what the artist themselves brings in terms of their unique perspective, talents, and stories, ai art will only serve to muffle and homogenize that.

The notion of people with disabilities being able to use it to create something is a fair point. I think it’d be absurd to say that it’s only negatives. However, these kinds of cases, as good as they are, are often used to patch over the uglier aspects of what ai generated images is doing and will do. Kind of like how in Florida they’re talking about slavery teaching people valuable skills.

I think the people most excited about it are those who seem to have a resentment of artists at some level, likely because those artists are already doing what they wish they could do. That’s why I think there’s almost a perverse giddiness at the notion of crushing artist’s jobs and replacing them with these tech-oriented ones.

It seems like for some people, the ideal society is one in which humans have been made irrelevant and machines interface with each other in perpetuity, generating a heap of content that no one ever sees or thinks about. It’s the kind of sci-fi dystopian ending which we don’t want to acknowledge because there’s money to be made for someone and nothing is supposed to get in the way of that.

And that’s totally fine. I could see using it for that purpose too. I think there are a fair number of people who might like to be artists, but they think it’s too hard, and so they look at ai as being a shortcut.

I was awful at drawing and painting and now I’m not. I’ve walked that path, and I’m glad I spend the time learning those skills. I much prefer creating whatever I want to as opposed to pecking a word at a time, trying to coax something vaguely like it from an algorithm. That seems sad to me.

Also, all of the time that people spend tweaking their prompts could just as easily be time spent learning to create their own art. The distance between absolute beginner and competent artist isn’t as vast as some people would like to believe. It’s just intimidating to a lot of people to get up the will to even try.

Twitter already died. X (seriously?) almost certainly will too.

I haven’t touch them in a long time, but I went in and closed down two old accounts today.

Could be. I don’t really know for sure. Just speculating.

There’s significant overlap there.

I think part of it is that it seems like Lemmy has older users on average than Reddit. For teenagers and young twenty years olds raised on the internet, they seem to not really know how to talk to people in a productive way, so it’s often just toxic, nasty or empty. Obviously this isn’t all people, but internet culture kids tend to all sound and act the same.

LinkedIn always struck me as a sad and desperate place filled with mannequins.