Way Status:

Genderfluid AMAB. Pronouns: any of he/she/they. I tag very inconsistently, sorry.

[writingdose]

***not my own screenshot***

AO3 saying they will not be banning AI-generated works on their platform

I agree with them and I respect them for this. no, I am not a fan of AI-generated fics, but as I’ve said many times before in the past:

AO3 was built with the “complete anti censorship” stance. them banning AI-generated works would be them going against their own core values of “no censorship”. and “no censorship” means nothing is censored. and that includes works you dislike for ethical or whatever reasons.

as of now, most (I believe) of creators who use AI to write for them properly tag their works as “AI-generated”. so you can safely filter these works out if you don’t wish to consume them. but I have no doubt the majority (if not all) of them will stop tagging their works as AI if AO3 actually bans AI works, which means these AI works will be untagged. you can never know for sure if the fic you read is AI or not, since they aren’t properly tagged anymore.

whether or not you like it, AI is getting better and more human-like, meaning it’s getting harder to spot when a fic is AI.

speculation, witch hunts, wrongful accusations and harassment harm real writers, as well as writing community as a whole, as much as AI does, if not more.

it’s impossible for AO3 to effectively ban and remove “only AI-generated works” without innocent human-made works getting wrongly marked as AI and deleted in the process. so if AO3 were to ban AI-generated works, it would mean

there was a chance of a human-made work getting wrongly marked as AI and taken down

there was a chance of an AI-generated work being wrongly accepted as human-made

fandom drama could and would cause innocent writers to get their human-made works falsely reported as AI

human-made fics that “upset people”, in terms of contents, could and almost certainly would be reported as AI, because there were people who “found the fics inappropriate/disgusting and wanted them taken down” — and the only way they could do that was by falsely reporting these fics as AI

AO3 volunteers would have to decide which works were AI “based on vibes alone”. and not only was it impossible for them to always make the correct judgement, there simply weren’t enough volunteers and time for every single work that was reported as AI to be thoroughly read by a human volunteer

no, “AI detector” is unreliable and the machine itself is also AI — it’s known to have incorrectly marked human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made.

TL;DR — no matter how much you hate AI-generated fics, banning them would do more harm than good.

[waystatus]

My general stance on this sort of thing is:

1. Basically no platform should completely ban AI.

2. Every platform should require AI works to be tagged and allow them to be filtered out.

This is from experience on Pinterest: often I don't actually care whether the random anime girls I'm using to build a character mood board for myself are AI. But also sometimes my feed gets completely overrun with almost identical AI images and I desperately want a more functional way to filter them out.

[anxietyproblem]

[tapewormmmmdeer]

i love wikipedia so fucking much everyday i thank god that wikipedia exists anyways quite like this guy

[hotvampireadjacent]

Not the Chicago mentioned image with the sports cap replaced with the pope hat 😭😭😭😭

[sysid-ace]

🌂🌑 I just want to know how on earth one grows up in the trope landscape of AIs in fiction, how one has history in a movement that believed that AI was going to kill us all...

🌂🌑 AND THEN YOU SET UP YOUR COMPUTER LIKE THIS???

[waystatus]

This person saw --dangerously-skip-permissions and was like "Pshaw, you call that dangerous? I'll show you dangerous".

[argumate]

kind of true by definition, but plenty of people are just using it for stuff without making fear or loathing or boosterism their personality.

[garmbreak1]

look i'm just not convinced that the TERFs three key positions, "we hate men," "we hate trans women," and "we believe trans women are men" are unrelated

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

FAQ for this post and similar in the discourse:

So you think trans women are men?

No, this post describes a position that TERFs hold. This post is anti-TERF.

Do TERFs actually hate men? It seems like they just hate trans women.

You may be confusing a more garden-variety reactionary for a TERF. I encourage you to search the word "moid" on this site to gain a better understanding of how the average TERF feels about men.

Does this imply trans women and men are under similar levels of threat from TERFism?

Not even a little bit.

What's the point of making a post like this?

Generally it is good to develop a theory of mind for your political enemies and to say true things instead of false things.

[jv]

Wait wait what? The traffic signs in the US are not pictograms but... Plain text????

Wh.. what???

[jv]

[waystatus]

Wha? Signs in the US are often pictograms. That's just an uncommon sign.

[stream-of-stars-polling]

How do you feel about people using ai to show why you shouldn't use ai?

Any use of ai is bad (for environmental and other reasons)

I like it because it discourages people from using ai

I think that it gets people to use ai because they'll repeat what was done

I think ai is the future and people should use it despite it's drawbacks

I don't care about the ethics of ai or its impact on society and our planet

Voting ended onMay 25

This is ONLY regarding Gen ai

I see a lot of content where someone uses ai as a demonstration to discourage people from using it.

Example this YouTube video: I replaced my social life with ai (for science). In this video a person uses only chatbots for social interaction and gets very lonely. They also demonstrate how the quality of the ai is not very good.

EDIT: I have been informed that these options are subpar, I'm going to rerun this poll in a few days with better options. If no option applies to you but you want to see results, please choose the last option.

[waystatus]

I voted for the cartoonishly-pro-ai fourth option here because the most general version of my opinion is "AI is not Satan" but my actual opinion in this specific case is "it depends".

I think it's fine to use AI to illustrate AI fucking up as a reason not to use AI for that particular task. If you wanna use AI to mock AI in general I don't think that makes much sense usually, but I'm not your boss and maybe you have a good way of doing this. In general, AI is a normal technology and the ethical concerns about AI are basically the same as any new method of automation, which is to say that the biggest ethical concern is actually capitalism and how it interacts with the new technology rather than the technology itself.

[st-just]

It is of course very far from their most egregious sin but I do kind resent 'radical feminism' using 'radical' in a fairly specific sense ('at the root', patriarchal oppression being the foundation upon which society's cruelties and pathologies are built), thus immediately dooming us to half a century of confused and pointlessly unpleasant discourse as people see the name and assume it just means 'feminism but moreso' or 'feminism but angry about it'.

[waystatus]

In the original context they were both senses, so it wasn't necessary to differentiate.

Of course now, while they are still "radical feminists", they're not the only or even the most feminists-who-are-radical.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Genuinely, I think the most publicly visible AI advance so far this year is how thoroughly and abruptly the "image generators can't do legible text" problem has beem fixed.

For those who haven't been paying attention, this is a recent ChatGPT output. It can do this sort of dense sensible text in images totally one shot, so don't rely on bad text to identify AI images any more.

[crypticspyder]

Was the text also generated? was it generated before, and given as an input, or was it generated with the image?

[not-terezi-pyrope]

The text was its own invention.

Here is the entire interaction that produced this image:

I've seen other people do much more sinister things with this! You can produce 100% realistic fake screenshots of news articles, tweets, that sort of thing, if you can convince the bot it's kosher to do so.

[sigmaleph]

i like that 'how do you pronounce ms.' poll because everyone who says 'i've pronounced it the same as miss my entire life and nobody said a thing' validates my belief that native english speakers are lying when they act like z and s make completely different sounds. they clearly can't hear the difference either

[paradigm-adrift]

I found out that most English speakers don't pronounce "been" and "Ben" the same way and that they don't pronounce the L in "balm" making it homophonous with "bomb" and I was shook. Even now when I hear people say those words my brain just assumes they're doing it like I do.

[loki-zen]

how does not pronouncing the l make it homophonous with bomb? like even in most American accents that's not quite the same I don't think

[deadgenerations]

this is just silly. firstly because most english speakers do pronounce the l in balm. but to the main point; the reason people don't get corrected on pronouncing Ms as miss is because Miss is a word already and it's used in almost the same fashion, so most people would naturally assume you are saying Miss, and since most womening using Ms are unmarried why would they correct you? it's also a new word serving a new social calculation, it hasn't had much time to normalise. and because correcting pronounciation is not generally the done thing. the reason z and s are pronounced inconsistently is that english inconsistently pronounces letters.

and as I've already done in this post - in nonamerican english S is used where the yanks use Z. Miriam Webster took on the project of normalising/unifying spelling and pronunciation in the United States and in the course of this created Miriam-Webster dictionary. One of his innovations was taking the sound you hear in -ise (and elsewhere) and rendering the S as Z, to help make pronounciation more intuitive for semi literate Americans (and because of his own sensibilities). the word normalise is pronounced the same, but the yanks use a z - frankly I think Webster was sensible here.

[jacketslutjayse]

Yeah uh, to the original point. Americans can most definitely tell s and z sounds apart. If you pronounced rise (z sound) as rice (s sound) or vice versa, they would definitely notice and think you have an accent. Buzz and bus are also very obviously distinct words, they would not confuse them for each other.

I am actually more fascinated by the concept that some languages cannot distinguish between s and z sounds.

Also i think the last person is right. Some people assumed that ms is pronounced miss and nobody ever corrected them because they couldnt tell. Not because the sounds are the same, but because ms and miss serve mostly the same purpose.

[sigmaleph]

Some people assumed that ms is pronounced miss and nobody ever corrected them because they couldnt tell. Not because the sounds are the same, but because ms and miss serve mostly the same purpose.

why did they never notice people pronouncing 'ms' different from them, though

my suggested explanation is 'those are very similar sounds and it's easy to confuse them for each other'

[waystatus]

Because they were surrounded by people who don't particularly respect "Ms." and its feminist goals. In fact I suspect that's the only thing going on here, and that in actual practice it's as obvious as calling a trans person by the wrong pronouns.

The reason most women who use Ms. won't correct you isn't because they don't care or because they didn't hear, it's because by making the mistake you've shown there's a good chance you're the sort of asshole who's making it deliberately, so there's no point in correcting you.

The reason other people around you won't correct you is that many of them are the sort of assholes who would do this deliberately, or at least don't care.

I agree that the difference between rise and rice or buzz and bus is very obvious and I could make it out even when someone is speaking fast. (But also: did you know that many words are pluralized with a z-sound and people won't notice unless you do it wrong? It's cat-s but bug-z, and people won't realize it's bug-z unless either you point it out or say bug-s.)

[cardassiangoodreads]

I’m sorry Gen Z but you need better taste in vices. You don’t drink or fuck, and are weird puritans about both of those things, but you’re constantly looking for new ways to get addicted to nicotine? I Do Not Get it y’all. You reject the fun (and overall less risky, let’s be honest!) vices for the ones that just suck and are worse for your health.

[rogue-reverie]

yeah vaping sucks but glazing alcohol as a vice while as a millenial i watch a huge number of my friends fucking rot from alcoholism just pisses me off

[hdyram]

very pro alcohol puritanism I agree there

[cardassiangoodreads]

The fact that you guys don’t seem to see a distinction between “any drinking” and “alcoholism” is in fact part of the issue here.

[waystatus]

I once had a friend who was weirdly judgy about any drinking at all. (Admittedly, we met in the context of a college group which had a large number of high functioning alcoholics, so this attitude was not totally irrational.)

Once he graduated and stopped coming to stuff I finally tried alcohol, and... it was fine. I have still to this day never been blackout drunk and I drink alcohol pretty infrequently TBH.

[i-am-a-fish]

don't be mean to yourself that's you

[i-am-a-fish]

you live there

[effiecalvin]

I have this idea for a video game called Are You Out There? where two players control two different alien civilizations and the goal of the game is to invent spaceflight and then manage to find one another in a ginormous universe. You can try to leave signs for each other to find, or send out probes and radio waves, or colonize many systems so you're a bigger target, but its hard because the universe is really big.

Idk just a thought.

[apricops]

at first the anti-AI outrage was merely annoying but the more I see people retreating to positions like "parents should have more authority to surveil their kids" or "more electrical/internet infrastructure is bad, Not In My Back Yard!" the more I'm worried that kneejerk anti-AI sentiment will be a great new way to trick casual leftists into accidentally becoming conservatives.

[morlock-holmes]

I find it very obnoxious when people get annoyed at me because I talk about the thing they said instead of a different, better argument which they ought to have made.

Also, there's this thing where all my rat-adj pals just lay into philosophers but then just make very sloppy arguments.

Like, if your argument is that we can rule out an external soul on the grounds that it isn't necessary to explain observed reality, just... The fact that you keel over dead when I cut your head off is already sufficient evidence for that proposition. We don't need Phineas Gage or the fact that your personality changes in response to external stimuli applied to the brain.

If we had literally no idea whatsoever how cognition worked, that *still* wouldn't be evidence for a soul external to the body; it would merely be evidence that we don't know how cognition works.

If Phineas Gage took that pole right in brain and came out of it exactly the same, this would be no evidence whatsoever for a soul, immortal or otherwise.

Conversely, if you've watched the Matrix, or even had the premise explained to you, you already know exactly how someone would attempt to reconcile both a deterministic physical universe and an external controller of the body which exists outside that universe.

Like, do you think the case of Phineas Gage somehow disproves simulation theory?

[waystatus]

Fun fact: there's actually no evidence that Gage changed personality permanently. By the end of his life doctors were describing him as completely recovered and he was able to hold down a normal job similar in mental workload and executive function requirements to his previous one.

In fact, the main source for the idea his personality changed at all is the one doctor who examined him right after the accident... who happened to be a strong believer in phrenology.