DID YOU KNOW that sometimes characters lie. out loud to others and internally to themselves, and it'll happen right there on the page. other times they are just flat out wrong and don't know it. oftentimes they don't ever find that out. a sizable portion of any story is decidedly not cold hard fact.
I don’t have time to unpack my full thoughts on the whole argument of ‘you shouldn’t be a burden to the healthcare system’ but I would like to chime in on it:
so, all athletes should immediately stop playing sports. construction workers, anyone with jobs that put them at risk, they need to find different employment. people with uteruses shouldn’t ever get pregnant, either. actually you know what? don’t enter a car or vehicle at all! and don’t even get me started on old people. what age do we think they should just give it up & throw in the towel? 50? 60? after that they become way too burdensome. it’s a problem.
sweet baby eugenicist, your anger is misplaced. they want you to blame yourself instead of their crumbling system. you should be asking, what kind of a fucking healthcare system is it if it can be burdened by the very thing it exists to provide? which is healthcare?!
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
my friend just had an art show and they were communicating with the gallerist over email. They could clearly tell that the gallerist was using AI to respond to their emails, but just rolled their eyes and moved on.
and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"
gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"
my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."
gallerist: "that isn't true."
and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.
so my friend had done all of this communication about their needs and expectations to be able to make the show possible, and the person whose job it was to read that information and get it done had simply.... not read the information and not done it. because AI.
Your tree has been visited by the Flying Tree Doctor and diagnosed with Infested. He has removed the Unauthorized Fucking Thing. Praise be to Flying Tree Doctor.
Being a huge fucking bitch isn't a terribly effective way of doing science communication so maybe I'll make the very mean video and my Worksona, Allison, will explain why it's fine to use grapeseed oil in a calm, patient, reassuring tone.
"People are lying to you on the internet and they're not even bothering to lie well. I'm going to need you to exercise some discernment on your Facebook feed before measles kills a few thousand people this year."
"Seed oils, like most fats, are perfectly fine to consume in moderation and are certainly safer to consume regularly than saturated fats are. If you're concerned about your health, please speak to your doctor, but as long as you are eating a varied diet with lots of fruits and veggies, you are eating enough food to maintain energy, and you get some exercise, you're doing pretty well!"
My uncle has been diagnosed with some kind of gut disorder and is struggling to figure out how to do an elimination diet and his woo-woo friend is sending him tiktoks about "ingredients you can't pronounce" and i need to start making tiktoks about food additives and what they do and how they're produced and how, unless you've got an allergy, there's no way that it's worse for you to consume soy lecithin than it is to consume beef tallow.
and honestly it's just fucking insane that every time we try to talk about harm to children in particular we have to talk circles around the fact that these things are very, very overwhelmingly done by parents/family members/teachers/religious leaders/known and trusted adults in a position of power over a child, to the extent that many people's suggested solution to child abuse is "give the people most likely to abuse a child EVEN MORE strangling legal and material power over the kid"
you're not supposed to actually address who is abusing children and what can be done to give those children recourse and the ability to leave abusive situations because nobody actually gives a shit about child abuse beyond the familial property rights violation it represents to them and the cudgel against minorities which it can be turned into
You see something broadly similar in nursing where you have to tip toe round the fact that nurses can directly and intentionally harm patients; one of the most common phrases you'll hear when trying to address an issue is something like "well no nurse is coming to work deliberately wanting to hurt their patients". I don't say this to derail from the issue of protecting children from their parents/guardians, i say it because i think it highlights the consistent problems that not offending the sensibilities of people in positions of power over vulnerable people is seen as more important then actually protecting those vulnerable people. "How dare you suggest I'm a bad parent, I'm not going to listen to anything you say because clearly you just hate me, and my feelings are clearly the real issue now" type mindset that means you end you talking circles around issues trying not offend anyone instead of directly addressing what is wrong
I feel like simply calling JK Rowling a transphobe isn't strong enough anymore. Like. This is not your grandpa calling you by your deadname at a restaurant kind of transphobic. This is her wanting to eradicate all trans people (with an extra special hatred towards trans women specifically). This is her trying just that by personally funding transphobic hate groups with millions to push around laws in the UK. It is not hyperbolic to call her a dangerous, genocidal maniac.
It's not about cancelling a problematic writer. It's about literally trying to save lives by denying her as much money and power as possible.
A lot of cis people are treating her like an actress who pushes diet culture or a singer who is too sex forward for their tastes. Like she's an inconvenience to their moral comfort instead of the existential threat she is.
She is not that.
She is Elon Musk. She is Trump. She is a powerful monster with the money to end lives.
Giving her money and creating a demand for her books by engaging in fandom should be seen the same way owning a cybertruck is seen. Harry Potter gear is in the same category as MAGA gear.
I need to see the same disgust and outright hatred of her that I see about all the evil men in her category. I don't know if people see her as less dangerous because she's a woman or if people are worried that hating on a woman will get their feminist card revoked, but she needs to be taken more seriously by a lot of people. She's a big name heavy hitter with more money than anyone should be allowed to have.
You have probably seen this article and people being unbelievably mad about it:
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
but, like, I have a lot of problems with this panic. The process of digitization does necessarily involve destroying the book, or at least, if you want to go fast. The fastest way to scan books is to remove the pages from the spine and having them go through the scanner. If the book was getting digitized at a mass level, it was getting destroyed one way or another. Now, I could agree that this should be made available on a public pdf repository, but if any other organization undertook the same amount of digitization, you can bet that the books are not making it out of the process, either.
Also, like, this sort of shit pisses me off so much as a (former) librarian:
One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
like, these people were 1) not seeing the books circulate via sale or 2) making the effort to make the content be available to the public. From the point of view of the general public, you were not getting access to the book either way. These companies are not ripping books off the shelves of public libraries to do this; they are buying books that were not circulating, and they are, as of this reporting, not competing with preservation groups that are trying to digitize the books. This is just blatantly stroking panic when the person that's being interviewed and stroking the panic was also not doing anything about the problem at hand. Why should this be considered a loss, when this small business tyrant is also not diong anything for the public?
On top of that, the article says:
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so.
Like, are we suddenly against first-sale doctrine? Do they know how hard it will be libaries to operate without it? I am just going to take ALA's website's block quote on this matter here:
The “first sale” doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109(a)) gives the owners of copyrighted works the rights to sell, lend, or share their copies without having to obtain permission or pay fees. The copy becomes like any piece of physical property; you’ve purchased it, you own it. You cannot make copies and sell them—the copyright owner retains those rights. But the physical book is yours. First sale has long been important for libraries, as it allows them to lend books without legal hurdles. (Jenkins, Jennifer. 2014. "Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights In The Digital Age". College & Research Libraries News 75 (2): 69-75.)
In other words, as ALA says, "first sale is what allows libraries to do what we do – lend books and materials to our patrons, the public." The way that futurism goes after first sales as an underlying cause for this "evil" phenomenon while elevating the voices of small business owners that had no problem keeping the rare books out of the public in the first place shows that this is not out of legitimate concern for the future of public access of/dissemination of past information, but for getting people riled up in cheap moral panic.
I do have legitimate concern about the usage of man hours and construction contracts on stuff that might never pan out (and thus artificially inflating the perception of level of activity that's happening in the economy), but doing this without understanding the process invovled blunts all the legitimate criticisms.
can people not in the profession like stop putting our foot in their mouth for two seconds? The internet archive's digitization process, while not destructive, is much slower and crucially, is like that because they often do not own the books they deal with. The advertisement for their process is supposed to appeal to the people they are asking to borrow from to archive the material. This is a different process from institutions that do own the books they digitize. There is simply no one-size-fits-all best practice for digitization, and pretending that the (relatively) glacial pace at which the internet archive goes through theirs is the best is naive at best and putting books as a sacred object that cannot be harmed as the priority over the quick and efficient process of digitizing books.
Speaking of which, what happens if they adopt the internet archive's method? Let's say the books are saved; do they go back to the private sellers that was "selling no more than 20 books a week"? Who does that benefit, other than the small business owner that was gatekeeping access to people who didn't pay for the book? Do they open Altman-Amodei pile of uncurated books with random ISBN numbers with the leftovers? You do know that the approach with the internet archive works because they rarely, if ever, keep the books and are offering only digital access, right? Since these companies will keep the books, to ensure access to the physical books, do we have librarians, the most expensive part of running a library? You do know that library is not just a place where people pick up books and put them back, right? Having a pile of "rare" books, with no consideration for their needs, is the second-surest way to destroy the book, after doing it physically for a purpose. You are literally just asking for them to destroy the books still, this time, with a risk of a warehouse full of books with mold. So we just get a slower digitization process with destroyed books, or we enrich small business owners here, and why do we want either of this?
Like, books are not, by default, sacred objects. They are tools that are very effective at dissmeninating information. I do have attachements to specific medium carried in text form (I fought to keep the entire run of Sugar Sugar Rune on the manga shelf when I was a public librarian in Hawaiʻi despite zero circulation for years for any of the volumes). All (former and current) librarians come with biases, but we're dealing with the nebulous category of "rare books" here. Do these rare books even hold any knowledge that any institution would want? A copy of a 3DS with Tatakae Butasan installed is rare, but that's because Tatakae Butasan is a digital-distribution-only kusoge that gives you nausea and headaches when you play it from how it handles movement and physical lights. Sometimes, books become rare because they suck. I am not saying that we should destroy every book that never got a second printing with this assumption; that would be just as absurd. I have also said in my original post that in an ideal world, all of these scans would become digitally available, in order to ensure broader, more convenient access to information. With these caveats, the panic over "rare books," nondescript, with calls for action to, so far, adopt a less effective process with the same outcome, to enrich small business owners, or to expand copyright holders' power until libraries themselves are unable to lend books, are all very, very silly solutions.
Cafe at The Portland art museum has Rothko no. 5 cakes. Something intellectually meaty about seeing the painting in person, and then eating a cake copy. The complete experience. Full spectrum.
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