we are def not 13 years away from the planet "running out of water" just bc someone generated a cat image with ai. that's super misleading.
so, water scarcity is very real & over 2 billion people lack safe access. but that crisis is about infrastructure, inequality, agriculture, and climate change. it's not a global bathtub draining because of ai prompts.
ai does have an environmental footprint. but like so does streaming stranger things in 4k for six hours. so does gaming online. so does running every social media site we're on right now.
every time we scroll through high-res gifs, art, and videos in tags like #jjk or #mcr, we're pulling data from the same data centers. those centers use water for cooling whether it's ai, netflix, or tumblr dashboards.
if we care about water (and we should), let's talk about real large-scale infrastructure, regulation, agriculture, and corporate energy use, not guilt trip or scare ppl into thinking using ai is killing our planet, k? thanks
honestly, this anti-ai craze is stupid. yes, it's awful for the environment. but like with anything other that ecoactivists are against - we, ordinary people, are not responcible for its overuse. yes, it takes a lot of energy to generate answers and stuff. but ordinary people don't make the same amount of requests to these ais that companies do.
ordinary people may not have the resources to find answers or talk with someone, but companies do. they have lots of money that they're so afraid to spend they'd rather fire people from their jobs and kill our planet
this is how it works with anything that's bad for the environment and people: ordinary humans don't cause all this destruction; companies do.
i feel like a concerning number of people now seem to subconsiously believe that "data centers" (i.e. how cloud computing works and has always worked) are a newfangled techbro thing used exclusively for generative ai and is somehow supernaturally more harmful to the environment when used for said purposes.
it's not the torment nexus it's literally just servers. like sure it IS an important topic, to think about the cost of the IT industry and how we'll be doing this sustainably in the future. but you're not helping the conversation be easier to understand! even IF you are going for butlerian jihad this isn't the kind of walmart you can firebomb.
Not banned books exactly, but can I get your opinion on people online who try to stop people from reading books by problamatic authors such as JKR or Neil Gaiman, please? Seems like a hot topic right now.
Is this not a form of censorship? Bullying and harassing people to stop a certain book from being read.
Personally, I think there are ethical ways to read works by problamatic living authors; buy secondhand books or pirate etc., and don't publicly promote their work. Shouldn't we kindly encourage fans to do that instead than the extreme left equivalent of book burning? I think it would be more productive and less like censorship.
Oof, that's important, but it's gonna be a bit painful for me to answer...
-not because I don't have an opinion, but because my opinion is probably going to upset a lot of people on here that I care about. 😮💨
Let me give a little background first:
So I originally tried espousing all my weird, radical Pro-Freedom-of-Expression and Anti-Censorship opinions in a number of different places online. And people were NOT receptive lol. Once I started discussing genuinely offensive, shocking content, everyone would change their minds on censorship REAL quick.
The one place where I found a lot of support was here on Tumblr. And that's clearly in large part because there are very active fandom communities here with lots of Pro-Ship / Profic people, who don't think others should be harassed because of what content they make or enjoy.
And I say all of that just to explain that I love them and I am REALLY not going to enjoy pissing them all off with the following opinion... 😓
My controversial opinion in question:
I sometimes worry that maybe, possibly... some Proship / Profic people might be acting a bit hypocritically.
I think if you're going to identify as being anti-harassment, you kind of need to be anti-harassment for everything.
I say this because I've seen a number of people who are allegedly "anti-harassment," but who start to get a bit... harassy (for lack of a better term) towards others under the right circumstances.
Some of them have been specifically related to what OP mentioned: fans of Neil Gaiman (sexual assault) and Harry Potter (major anti-trans activism) - those are both big ones right now. Another big one I see a lot is directed at anyone who shows any sort of interest in AI generated content - boy oh boy does that one get a negative reaction.
And I know that "harassment" is a very vague term, but I'm basically talking about things well beyond just pointing out why you think someone shouldn't support that stuff, or arguing with someone online - I mean it's the internet, the whole point is to argue with strangers.
What I'm talking about are things like spamming anonymous threats, making call-out posts to whip up hatred, jumping in when others are already dog-piling on someone, mass-reporting a person's posts so that Tumblr's stupid automated systems will take down the blog, digging through a person's posts / follows / likes to find anything negative you can use to smear them, doxxing someone, etc.
Basically I'd say that harassment, in my mind, boils down to: continuing to forcibly engage with a person when they clearly don't want you to.
And when a Proship / Profic person starts acting like this towards anyone for any reason I just want to be like... hey, remind me what your core rule is again? Ooooh right:
Here's the thing...
You know that feeling you get, when you go to harass someone online cuz they post about the new Harry Potter series or some shitty AI image they made? You know that righteous feeling where you know that what you're doing is Good, because you are a Good Person and the other person is a Bad Person? That feeling where you think "sure, what they like might not technically be directly harming a specific individual in a concrete way, but that doesn't matter because it might cause some sort of vaguely defined harm in the future - and besides, it just seems like such a gross thing to support"?
Yeah? You know that feeling?
THAT IS THE SAME FEELING
THAT ANTI-SHIPPERS HAVE
And your feelings are just as valid as theirs (which is to say: not very).
Let me be clear: I fucking despise J.K. Rowling as a person. And I certainly don't want to line her pockets with any more money. And yeah, I do kind of look down on people who still buy Harry Potter shit.
But you can't actively harass someone over that. You just can't.
People have really complex reasons for why they like what they like - reasons which they may or may not fully understand themselves. We're all on a sort of personal journey - your own opinions and tastes have almost certainly evolved naturally in just the last few years. Maybe you should allow other people that same sort of opportunity for growth?
And if you want a more practical reason to not harass: it just doesn't work. In my personal experience, when someone feels surrounded and attacked, it feels like they don't actually tend change. They either A.) only superficially, temporarily change their outward, public behaviors in order to avoid further harassment, or B.) they really dig in and become defensive and belligerent, even when they may have originally been more open-minded.
Again, I know that no one wants to hear this. Sorry. I genuinely don't want to piss people off (even though I appear to be very good at it) 😮💨
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Just watched the latest Monkey Wrench episode, and god there's so much to unpack.
But mainly. The contrast netween Beebs' and Shrike's priorities.
Beebs is striving to save the last member of Lythops species, thinking about people first and foremost
But Shrike seems to have some personal vendetta against the Greens. Which are indeed dangerous, but. In focusing on the enemy, he disregards what he's fighting for, and ignores the actual person in dire need of help - Punti. All while Dolian is actually getting handled by law enforcement.
It's an interesting conflict. It's like Shrike lost the sight of what's really important.
And this dream. I theorize it means that Shrike is familiar with green corruption, and probably failed to prevent it somewhere (presumably, on his own species' planet), and that's why he's so obsessed with "making it right" now.
that post about "people on AO3 are accusing others baselessly of using AI... It must be AI bros coming to our community to stir shit up!" is sooooo funny. so guys the witch hunt is going great but I think we can all agree some of these accusations are going a little too far and causing discord in our village. it must be the fault of the witches
Like it's always funny how in this website it's almost always the fanartists and fic writers voicing the most hardcore anti "art theft" stances like buddy you REALLY don't know what you're asking for.
Every so often someone in the fandom will come up with a justification to do mass targeted bullying, and should you point out that mass targeted bullying is far more mentally damaging and harmful to a community than the thing the bullying is "being done for", regardless of whether said thing is something you like or not (it's not) hundreds of dumbasses participating in it, in order to justify their bullying, will attack you too.
This creates a group of "people doing mass targeted bullying" (Good, doesn't support the bad thing) and "people who say literally anything negative about the mass targeted bullying" (bad, blocked, secretly supports the bad thing because they're not bullying it) in which the "good" people do not reflect on their actions as negative in any capacity
But as a proud hater of many things, I'll happily tell you, if you participate in mass targeted bullying, callout, or harassment, you're far more damaging than a person who drew a picture that makes you uncomfortable.
This goes for just about any dumb thing people like to make a callout post about, btw. Stop participating it and yours and everyone else's life will be so much better, promise
We're reaching a point where Anti-AI people are becoming more annoying than the Pro-AI bros. Personally, I'd rather draw something than use AI, but some people just see the word "AI" and pretense of being a decent human being leaves their body.
AI is only a product of the real issue, capitalism and how since forever, automation and the idea of removing human workers for the sake of expediency has always been a thing. That's the real problem here.
Going after a person because they used AI for a thumbnail, a comic, or made some Family Guy AI song doesn't achieve anything except making you look like an asshole. You want to protect artists? Go to companies and organizations and make an actual effort to make sure AI trained compositions are ethical. Why not do something to make sure that voice actors are paid and/or compensated if they consent to their voices being used? Why not try to encourage more people to draw without it turning into something rude and giving useful advice?
The answer is they won't do any of this, because it's all reactionary.
The real reason the everyman uses AI is because it's convenient, not because they hate artists or want to replace them. I'm sure there are outliers like that, but people like that exist in everything. The price of living is getting higher and people are broke. Why would someone commission a $50 dollar drawing or sub to a Patreon when they can get an AI composition for $10 maximum? I get it, artists have to eat too, but the issue with AI is rooted deeply into our society and how much we rely on products being cheaper/convenient to use.
The unfortunate truth is that society does not value artists very much, despite how many we have. Animators are infamously underpaid. Being an artist isn't sustainable, and banning AI won't make it so, because again, the issue is with society, mainly capitalistic ones itself. Making copyright stricter doesn't help the average man, but companies like Disney.
If you want to quit art because you feel discouraged by AI, maybe the issue is a lack of internal motivation. Society doesn't give art meaning, you do. It's okay to walk away from things for a bit, or even to quit.
Rin Chiropteran @rinchiropteran - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
