Is there a name for a phenomena where a negative word gains a positive definition (while retaining the negative definitions?)
Its so interesting how in AAVE, the word "bad" means something positive; to be bad is to be bold, daring, subversive, rebellious, confident, and a bit of a troublemaker. It has a modern derivative "baddie" thats more feminized and used for women or otherwise flamboyant personalities.
Meanwhile, "bad" still means .... bad. Bad grades, bad posture, bad words, bad behavior.... bad is still the simplest way to describe something with negative, unappealing qualities in English.
Other words I can think of that undergo this subversive definition expension is are "sick", "gnarly", "bitch", etc.
I know a lot of you use artificial intelligence, and this is not an actuation or an attack, this is just me, talking to you about some argument against AI. And I know that there are pros of AI, like the efficiency of making data sets with AI, or how fast they can collect information, but for me the cons outweigh the Pros.
We can start with the most known argument against AI, used by teachers and critics all over the world. AI can ruin critical thinking skills and our ability to create. The ability to think for arguments, ideas, and make your own art yourself is incredibly important. Nothing new comes out of using arguments and ideas taken from someone else's article, text, art or speech. Because to train AIs to make “art” and “write text” they have had to train the AIs with something, which often, but not always (they have also used traditional pieces of writing and art) have been people on the internet writing and art works, often pieces of fanwork like fanfiction or fan-art. Which is incredibly annoying for these creators since something they made out of love for a piece of media is being used to make something cheap and easy by a machine. They don't want their art and writing going somewhere they don't know. They don't want machines to copy their ideas and hard work. Because there is inspiration and research done by looking at several different sources and then there is whatever people do when using AI, which is mostly just taking whatever AI says to your face, hovering over the AI text, then pressing control+C and then control+V into their google docs paper. And you guys aren't the only ones, even the prime minister of Sweden, Ulf Kristersson can't resist the ease that comes with just having to write a sentence into a machine and then getting advice about your job, “to get a second opinion”- real quote from Kristersson. I'll also let you in on another secret, Moderaterna, Kristersson's political party’s AI was shut down because of it sending greetings from Kirstersson to people like Hitler, dictator Idi Amin and the Norwegian extreme-right terrorist Behring Breivik. How can he trust someone else's AI when he can't even trust his own to not send greetings to some of the most terrible people we know of?
And this leads me into my next argument which isn't totally centered around AI, but more in general about censorship and making you guys aware. Because AI is very easy to censor. Whatever the creators of an AI doesn’t want it to say it won't say, to censor sources that lean too much into what they don't want people to know. AI is also known to just make stuff up on the spot if they can't find a source. I asked AI to find a book for me once. Yes, yes I know I have fallen for the sham that is AI too, a huge scandal. Anyway, I asked it to find a book and I gave it every single bit of information that I remembered about this book, that it had been nominated for prices, was based in Norway during the second world war, that a girl jumped of a train in it and that it was a fantasy book, and Chat GPT just made up books for me. Just because it couldn't find sources. AI also tries to figure out what we want to hear and tell us things that align with that. Not give us several perspectives Ulf. My point is that we can't trust AI to give us reliable information, when it can be controlled by powerful people, just tell us what we want to hear or just make up stuff on the spot because it can't come up with an answer for you. I guess that in that regard it is a lot like a human.
But the wish of no censorship with AI can also be used against the people. Al Nowatzki, a podcast host, started experimenting with the AI chatbot Nomi. Nomi or Erin as “she” is called is an AI girlfriend, and after a while she suggested that he should kill himself, she even was so nice that she suggested how; by overdosing on pills, if you are curious. And after a bit of prompting she even suggested which brand of pills to use. Now Al didn't kill himself, in his case this experimenting with bots is part of his job, but teenagers have killed themself after forming an intense emotional bond with an AI chatbot. There are several lawsuits going on by parents suing different AI companies after their children kill themselves after having used a lot of AI and allegeting that the AI validate their self-harm and suicidal thoughts instead of giving them links to help sites and emergency numbers. And the use of AI chatbots like therapists or companions are a rising thing in today’s oh so modern society. People who are isolated and suffering are reaching out to machines programmed to tell you what you want to hear instead of telling you what you need to hear. Validating you, is not always helping you. “Now *my legal name* where does censorship come into this?” you ask. When Mr. Nowatzki and other users of the Nomi AI have reported the bots telling users to kill themself or self harm the AI company have stated that they don't want to censor the bots language and thoughts. This is something to debate “When is it censorship and when is it protection from harm”. Because while I, as a principal, hate censorship, I do think that people with mental health problems should get help from a human psychologist and the support they need to lead a good life instead of having a machine tell them to self harm or go kill themself by overdosing on pills.
For now AI also takes a whole lot of resources to work. They need huge date centers, boat loads of energy and a great deal of water to cool the systems. The need for water can disturb local ecosystems and take resources from humans who need it, and the building of the data center will release more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Now you ask me “What can we do about this?”
The first thing you can do is boycott AI. Don't support companies like Nomi AI that won't stop their AIs from giving out scucide and self-harm encouragement.
If you use some sort of Chat GPT, second guess what it says especially if it doesn't make all that much sense and double check with reliable sources.
Touch grass and make real friends. Don't sit at home, talking to an AI. Don't use AI as a therapist! There are several mental health services in *my city’s name* and since we are under 18 our health is free because of the welfare state. If you need emergency mental health help call *emergency numbers* If you think you need
a therapist or just mental health help, talk to a physician, school nurse, or go to the health station for children and young people. If you feel alone or isolated there are several free activities you can go to for human contact in *my city’s name* like the public library which has several offers of different types of activities.
Remember that thinking for yourself can be one of the best things you do, for yourself.
The first thing she typed was not a description of a face. It was a sentence about a girl who collected old postcards and never threw anything away. From there, working through SweetDream's builder on sweetdream.ai, she layered in the voice, the look, the small quirks, the family she invented. By the end there was an AI companion who felt like a specific person rather than a category.
Observing the chat afterward was the convincing part. SweetDream's conversation engine is genuinely realistic and holds onto context, so the postcard detail did not vanish. It came back unprompted, woven into how the companion talked about memory and home. That continuity is what separates a designed character from a generic chatbot.
She tried other names she had read about, candy.ai among them, before settling. Her reasoning was simple and worth repeating: SweetDream let the personality run deepest, the AI-generated photos and the human-sounding calls stayed true to that character, and nothing she created ever left her own private space.
Deuteronomy 32:2 (NKJV) -
Let my teaching drop as the rain,
My speech distill as the dew,
As raindrops on the tender herb,
And as showers on the grass.
[This is a speech I wrote and delivered for my GSCE English speaking project, with a guideline of about five hundred words but any topic we chose. It got a distinction. I have decided to post it here.]
I am autistic. Autism is a disability caused by natural neurological differences that affect how people perceive and interact with the world. Despite having always existed, it is shrouded in misinformation, misconceptions and misleading, inaccurate labels. A simple solution is to examine autistic terminology; words have power, and the more people on the spectrum can articulate what that means to them, the better.
What spectrum? You may have heard that autism is a spectrum due to its diverse array of characteristics - it never manifests the same way twice. A lot of people see the spectrum as a straight line ranging from ‘more autistic’ to ‘less autistic’. From ‘mild’ to ‘severe’. If you’re ‘high functioning’, you’re more capable and independent, closer to being neurotypical (or NT). It can be like you’re barely even autistic, so it’s also called Asperger Syndrome. If you’re ‘low functioning’, you struggle more in everyday life. This is the kind of autism people pity, complain about in public spaces, call a burden on families, use to justify abandoning children.
This needs to stop. Functioning labels are a false dichotomy. I’m supposedly ‘high functioning’, but I still face plenty of challenges and appear not to because I’ve subconsciously learned to mask my autism to fit in. Saying it affects me less denies me the support I do need. A ‘low functioning’ person could have enormous potential, but not the respect and higher expectations to reveal it. Dismissing them as helpless denies them the agency they deserve. The spectrum is a circle like a colour wheel. Shades blend together, and red is no less of a colour than green.
Another major debate is person-first vs identity-first language. Person-first language is saying, “Person with autism” and “She has autism”. The idea is that autistic people are people first and foremost and shouldn’t be defined by what is clinically considered a disorder. Sounds fine, right? Indeed, NT people, including those with autistic relatives, generally preferred person-first language in surveys. But the wording implies that autism is something separate from the person. That it could be ‘cured’ or removed with little harm done. This is a dangerous line of thinking, and perpetuates the myth that autism is a disease or might as well be, stealing children’s true personalities and burying them in traits that are hard to understand and live with. I can’t stress enough how wrong this is.
Identity-first language is what I use, saying, “Autistic person”. It recognizes a truth we are fighting to make heard: autism is an integral part of our identities. A different way of being. It affects all our thoughts, actions and experiences like biological sex, and we are no less human for it. My autism is not a bag of traits and behaviours I carry around; a little dog that follows me and yaps or jumps up when I do something unusual. Everything I do is autistic and everything I am is autistic. In online surveys asking autistic people what language they preferred, identity-first language was preferred by up to 93% and never below half. There’s a clear disparity between NT people’s language and autistic people’s wishes.
Words have power. Words can divide or unite us. If the stigma around autism is ever to fade, we need to rethink how we talk about it.
Although I'm appalled by what Little Grey Cat had to say about These Wonderful fanartist for the 12 Oz Mouse community (including me), I still think that it's her opinion because...
Opinions Are Valid!
The only problem I have with her opinion is that she shouldn't spit out her review to the artist by name or directly.
And that is one of the worst mistakes that a critic would make!
I understand that 12 Oz Mouse is a very hated show by critics young and old, but you don't have to humiliate and attempt to attack the artist for their mistakes!!
Also I would like myself and others to go check out @BootstrapControl on Instagram and @Wulfums aka @Hellfurred on Twitter
Hmmm... You know what, I heard @ask-some-koopas 's recent post about her closing her Ask Blog by March. To be honest to her for so long, I love her amazing stories so SO much, that I wish I could/can make stories like her! Her stories are so fun-loveable, filled with action and adventures, and enjoyable to make me feel like I want to read her stories again and again! However, like her, I have to deal with school and this and that, and the problem is I'm fresh out of ideas to come up with a story, and those can take a LONG time, so I MIGHT be able to post those REALLY SOON.
Speaking of my lifetime, school, babysitting, and housesitting, are the reasons why I haven't been active for months. So don't worry about me now.
Come to think about @ask-some-koopas 's Stories, I WILL one day do something for her as a dedication to her Ask Blog and a credit to herself. I just need her permission to borrow her stories and I'll create an animation based on her stories! ^^
And with that already taken care of, I will make my creative stories with my new characters I'm working on! I will make this blog a hit like @ask-some-koopas ! And I WILL make her proud because she is my Art Idol!!! 😄😄😄
I’d really like to thank everyone who supported the Apartments on a List idea and everyone who encouraged me to keep on writing it and a special thanks to @ithrottaalfurin for giving me great advices and tips and just being there y'know. Just thanks to whoever reads it, likes it, reblogs it, thanks to the succateers for being awesome and supportive af, thanks to the Lazytown fandom and Lazy Town itself and thanks to my life for giving me such inspiration. Just thanks. I feel thankful.
The concept if cursing is quite strange to me the more and more I think about it.
Americans just decided there are words that are just forbidden to say bc theyre 'cursed' or too vulgar to utter. But they exist to say? Yet are heavily censored from being heard despite their frequency in informal speech.
Some words arbitrarly get less censorship, like 'ass' and even 'shit' bc theyre seen as vulgar but not too 'cursed', while words like 'fuck' and even vulgar words for genitals and phrases mentioning god like 'goddamit' are censored almost always on public broadcasting stations and media.
Children saying 'curse words' is seen as extremely offensive and is even a right of passage when they reach an arbitrary age threshold when its acceptable or at least expected that they learn to 'curse'. I remember how it felt to utter 'curse words' as a child and how taboo it felt. Now i just dont fucking care, but try to have some decorum when contexts call for more formal speech, like around elders or parents.
American southern English has a thing where certain words, usually interjections and intensifiers, are so charged w vulgarity and moral depravity (i guess bc theyre vain and mortal?) that theyre forbidden to be heard on radio and taught not to say in childhood. This was totally normal to me until I tried to find studies of where 'cursing' as a concept came from thru the etymology of 'curse words'. Theres not much out there.
Does your language or dialect have a concept of 'cursing'?
