• 0 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

help-circle


  • In short, AI is useful when it’s improving workflow efficiency and not much else beyond that. People just unfortunately see it as a replacement for the worker entirely.

    If you wanna get loose with your definition of “AI,” you can go all the way back to the MS Paint magic wand tool for art. It’s simply an algorithm for identifying pixels within a certain color tolerance of each other.

    The issue has never been the tool itself, just the way that it’s made and/or how companies intend to use it.

    Companies want to replace their entire software division, senior engineers included, with ChatGPT or equivalent because it’s cheaper, and they don’t value the skill of their employees at all. They don’t care how often it’s wrong, or how much more work the people that they didn’t replace have to do to fix what the AI breaks, so long as it’s “good enough.”

    It’s the same in art. By the time somebody is working as an artist, they’re essentially at a senior software engineer level of technical knowledge and experience. But society doesn’t value that skill at all, and has tried to replace it with what is essentially a coding tool trained on code sourced from pirated software and sold on the cheap. A new market of cheap knockoffs on demand.

    There’s a great story I heard from somebody who works at a movie studio where they tried hiring AI prompters for their art department. At first, things were great. The senior artist could ask the team for concept art of a forest, and the prompters would come back the next day with 15 different pictures of forests while your regular artists might have that many at the end of the week. However, if you said, “I like this one, but give me some versions without the people in them,” they’d come back the next day with 15 new pictures of forests, but not the original without the people. They simply could not iterate, only generate new images. They didn’t have any of the technical knowledge required to do the job because they depended completely on the AI to do it for them. Needless to say, the studio has put a ban on hiring AI prompters.






  • I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.

    Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.

    For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.

    Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.

    A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.




  • He did more than make fucked up jokes, though. He was pushing white supremacist accounts that he followed on social media at one point to his young and impressionable audience. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and he hasn’t done anything to rectify that situation one way or the other. Given the evidence we have, he could’ve simply started wearing his iron cross behind closed doors instead of on stream.

    Having lived long enough to see the edgy teenagers making 4channer jokes grow up to and have those become their actual beliefs, I believe in Philosophical Inertia. You say something often enough, and it becomes what you truly believe. And until you prove otherwise, I am going to assume that your beliefs continue on that same course.







  • This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

    But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.




  • I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can’t be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they’re a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.

    Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can’t take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let’s them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.