Olives @olives@qoto.org

It makes you wish the days when it was just investors hyping up cryptocurrencies or something.

While I'd say that we are now free of "the metaverse" type rhetoric from 2022, unfortunately, I've seen enough bad takes about VR (though fewer) that I had to specifically add that to my post.

One of the worst things about the "AI" products which were launched in 2022 (remember that "AI" is not a new technology) is that we now have to waste a lot of time with stupid takes, and usually the same stupid takes. It's tiresome.

I suppose one of these shills for surveillance / censorship will try to argue that Australia becoming more irrelevant in the tech world (and shrinking the economy) is somehow a "good" thing.

Also, weren't there tech companies moving from the U.K. to France? France has been behaving weirdly lately though.

This time, it seems that a tech company is leaving Australia for Switzerland. Last time, it was one leaving Australia for America.

I'm aware of the anthropologist. He doesn't say anything of interest to be worth including in the science post.

I'm fairly sure he regurgitated a negative stereotype about a minority sexuality, because one of the people he spoke to told him it. There are also a lot of salacious details of people masturbating and I don't think he tells us anything we don't already know.

Reading a paper about fandoms.

When I read something I thought might be interesting, and the person clearly knows far less than I do and is trying to explain the basics to me.

More books for me to read.

They literally wrote a propagandistic document telling people to conflate the two.

There are a few reasons I don't use the term "CSAM" that much.

Other than wanting more specificity, there is the fact that a group which was aggressively promoting the term was also conflating it with porn and wanting to censor that.

Why would I go out of my way to use a term just because a bunch of bad faith people want me to use it?

Also, the way I've seen a few people use the term has been more along the lines of "look at those freaks" (and it can be quite ambiguous) than something used as a new form of terminology.

I don't think that is a useful contribution to the discourse.

"as if it is one amorphous thing"

I've covered this particular issue in greater detail in other posts, so if my coverage of it here seems a bit brief, that is why.

It's less the term itself, and more what makes sense in covering an issue. Here, the term is ambiguous, it is novel, and it tends to collapse context. Perhaps, I could have conveyed that better.

I considered accepting a small expansion of the term in that post but I think the terminology creep has overall been happening in huge bad faith and the well is too dirty.

I think the bigger thing is that there is always a better way to discuss particular issues.

"AI CSAM getting more extreme"

See, the thing about "AI generated" images is that it doesn't really matter how "severe" the depicted abuse is... Unlike actual photographs where it might correspond to a different form of abuse to someone.

It's clearly someone trying to pull at someone's emotions.

It is also coming from a very unreliable "source" which is known to mislead people... Including by selectively reporting things. In fact, it is probably coming from something the same "source" said around about... 16 months ago but which gets repackaged as if it's new every single month.

It is also not "CSAM". Hell, the reason grifters like using that term here is that it collapses the context in discussions by framing it as an extension of some other amorphous phenomena. Perhaps, by framing it as being a matter of potentially shadowy people on the so-called "dark web" (a very rare phenomena, all signs would indicate).

There are *far better* terms which better reflect whatever it is that is going on. No need to lump everything in the "CSAM" box as if it is one amorphous thing (that is something I noticed happens *a lot*).

How about "deepfake"? The term has been around for seven years. It seems to be less prone to misuse, maybe someone still misuses it, I dunno. Or talk about consent? So, suppose someone disapproves of something that depicts them?

It feels like someone is deliberately trying to use ambiguous language, and they insist on doing so despite being repeatedly told that it is confusing and ambiguous. Oftentimes, they try to push some other agenda.

These are the same grifters who might argue that no one has ever been harmed by government censorship, including since the 1970s, even though many people have clearly been harmed by some sort of government censorship.

These are the same grifters who misrepresent statistics about presumably actual photography, even though the vast majority of these are duplicate.

In fact, these grifts might even be something which someone could ignore, if they didn't keep coming up with bad ideas.

These are also probably the same people who were against educating someone about respecting someone's boundaries and other such things not too long ago... At best, they seem to conveniently forget that is even a thing. If they do come up with something, they point to some fringe faith-based crap (which has no credible record of being effective). Not helping, folks.

Or they might be someone who sells a product, which uses dubious means, which purports to fight an "amorphous phenomena"?

I'm hearing that Bluesky is the sort of company which looks at a very SFW image and deems it "NSFW".

One of the good things about this instance is the generous character limit.