ITS TOO EARLY I MISREAD THIS AS "SELL HEROIN"

we’re you born a misogynist or do you think society (porn) made you that way?

society (porn)

Please, please, have a seat.

I’m here to debate Steven Universe with you

im so tired of horror youtube man

By all means please reblog this post and feel free to expand on the reasons behind your choice.

How exactly do you advance AI ethically? Considering how much of the data sets that these tools use was sourced, wouldnt you have to start from scratch?

a: i don't agree with the assertion that "using someone else's images to train an ai" is inherently unethical - ai art is demonstrably "less copy-paste-y" for lack of a better word than collage, and nobody would argue that collage is illegal or ethically shady. i mean some people might but i don't think they're correct.

b: several people have done this alraedy - see, mitsua diffusion, et al.

c: this whole argument is a red herring. it is not long-term relevant adobe firefly is already built exclusively off images they have legal rights to. the dataset question is irrelevant to ethical ai use, because companies already have huge vaults full of media they can train on and do so effectively.

you can cheer all you want that the artist-job-eating-machine made by adobe or disney is ethically sourced, thank god! but it'll still eat everyone's jobs. that's what you need to be caring about.

the solution here obviously is unionization, fighting for increased labor rights for people who stand to be affected by ai (as the writer's guild demonstrated! they did it exactly right!), and fighting for UBI so that we can eventually decouple the act of creation from the act of survival at a fundamental level (so i can stop getting these sorts of dms).

if you're interested in actually advancing ai as a field and not devils advocating me you can also participate in the FOSS (free-and-open-source) ecosystem so that adobe and disney and openai can't develop a monopoly on black-box proprietary technology, and we can have a future where anyone can create any images they want, on their computer, for free, anywhere, instead of behind a paywall they can't control.

fun fact related to that last bit: remember when getty images sued stable diffusion and everybody cheered? yeah anyway they're releasing their own ai generator now. crazy how literally no large company has your interests in mind.

cheers

is 5 too young for the dark crystal? i don’t want to scare my sister but i want to show her

hey man mind if i reclaim some slurs next to your parrot

the Guardian

UK criticised over apparent call to firms to rebuild disputed areas of Azerbaijan

Officials held online meeting with business leaders despite flight of ethnic Armenians after military takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh

Officials from the UK Foreign Office and the business department held an online meeting with British business leaders in November to encourage companies to take advantage of the “great opportunity” to support Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev’s rebuilding agenda.[...]

In the days after Baku’s military operations the UK government publicly condemned the Aliyev regime’s “unacceptable use of force” in Nagorno-Karabakh and warned that it had “put at risk efforts to find a lasting peaceful settlement” in the region.

But a recording of the online meeting, shared with the Guardian by campaigners at Global Witness, includes one senior UK government official encouraging business leaders to take advantage of the financial opportunities in the “huge western chunk of the country that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up”.

“The Azerbaijan government is supporting what it calls ‘the great return’, which is essentially providing the opportunity for the 700,000 [internally displaced people], these refugees, to basically return to Karabakh. So you have this great opportunity here actually,” the official said.

It is not clear whether the official was referring to Nagorno-Karabakh specifically, part of the far larger Karabakh region. Aliyev set out plans in 2020 to rebuild the “liberated districts” of the Karabakh region in western Azerbaijan, which includes Nagorno-Karabakh. The president said it was important that all displaced Azerbaijan citizens return to Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent districts where they used to live.

A second government official told business leaders: “[There’s] a great opportunity here actually. [It was] just an empty land that was ready to be built over from scratch.”

Jonathan Noronha-Gant, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said: “Behind closed doors, the UK government is calling Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh a ‘great opportunity’. What century are these officials living in? It’s not a great opportunity for the UK, nor for the people who were displaced.”

In the recording the first official said UK companies were “well-placed” to collaborate with the Azerbaijan government to provide infrastructure advice to “a government which has financial means given that it has very large energy resources”. Azerbaijan owns one of the world’s largest gasfields, Shah Deniz in the Caspian Sea, and is a growing exporter of gas to Europe.[...]

A UK government spokesperson said: “These comments from UK officials have been misrepresented. Discussions of reconstruction referred to the UK government’s public work to assist with possible future development in the new towns being built for those displaced by decades of conflict.

“The UK is not involved in commercial activity or reconstruction efforts in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh region recovered by Azerbaijan through its September 2023 military operation.[...]

The Guardian revealed last year that Azerbaijan’s share of two large oil and gas projects operated by British oil company BP had earned its government almost $35bn (£28.6bn), or more than four times its military spending since 2020 when war broke out in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.[...]

BP also plans to build a 240MW solar farm in Azerbaijan’s “liberated lands”, according to Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister. The Azerbaijani prime minister, Ali Asadov, met with the BP head of production, Gordon Birrell, recently to discuss the Sunrise solar project, which is planned for an area near the ghost city of Jabrayil, which was left in ruin after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

22 Feb 24

I've started mentally describing every instance of delayed gratification, especially when chosen but even when not, (e.g. Seeing a painting from across the art gallery that you think you will especially enjoy, and not walking right to it but instead enjoying the nearer paintings first, or having a delay on your approach to a place you're excited for) as "like edging". I think I might be onto something about the nature of pleasure