Olives @olives@qoto.org

What I was originally thinking of covering also touches on "think of the children" nonsense, because surprise surprise, this is a point of quite a bit of nonsense.

If not, then maybe I can get back to covering what I was originally thinking of covering.

Anything I should cover next?

"I am going to go full QAnon because I don't like #AI. That'll show it." is not the "win" someone thinks it is.

I think that as far as Microsoft is concerned, any "AI" tool should ideally be fully local, and also opt-in (from the user's point of view).

Considering that "AI" isn't reliable, I don't think the government should be relying on it.

Microsoft. Could you please respect user privacy? Thanks.

I am told that there are people who do the same thing but with a higher level of personal "AI" ethics, yes, although it seems strange to go full QAnon in any case.

Apparently, COPPA 2.0 has been snuck into APRA.

It's not surprising that there are people who basically make money off trying to drum up "AI" "scandals".

To be fair, there are a few which aren't as bad. One spoke out in opposition to the chat control, for instance, although there are still quite a few which are pretty bad.

Also, quite a few of these groups have stranger motivations. They might be religious extremists (some would call them cults), or they might be associated with these culture warriors in government (quite literally how they get funded).

Perhaps, someone wants to get revenge for some personal incident. There are quite a few of those.

A person from a "save the children" group is unlikely to lean towards liberty because they want to basically have an excuse to punish someone without due process and without worrying about pesky things like basic fundamental rights.

They're kind of optimized for that. That's what they get paid for.

So, when they open their mouths, and say some crap, it's not really meaningful and they're probably going to put a lot of emphasis on the bad or negative hypotheticals.

Virtually every article of QAlexandra's appears to involve her bitching about "AI" in some way so her motivation here is really not that mysterious.

I'm not keeping an eye on QAlexandra all the time. I don't have a take for every stupid take of hers.

The premise that a "bad person might like something" is fundamentally flawed and very dangerous and I can't really allow her to make this kind of argument just because she doesn't like one particular kind of content.

What is Alexandra bitching about now (a grifter of a minor journo).

So, if I get this straight, she is mad about so-called "photorealistic" "AI" imagery of "children" (not porn though) because she finds the fantasies of the viewers to be upsetting...? (Even the most "scandalous" ones she can produce appear to be pretty clear fantasies, frankly.) Ugh. She even cites someone from a "save the children" outfit who is best buds with an odious far right figure with a bizarre fascination with sex abuse rituals in schools. Then, there is another from another "save the children" outfit offering up his hot takes (working hard to "join the dots", it's what he's paid to do).

There are also strong QAnon type vibes where she "joins the dots" and makes things up about it, even trying to conflate it with people who post borderline child porn, or are otherwise up to no good without any real line of argumentation. One of the dots is that one viewer happens to post actual photographs (not porn).

What is really striking is the actual absence of an actual argument past "them and us".

Alexandra would be best served actually looking at the ethics in question of where it comes from, perhaps a critique of the actual technology itself (if anything), rather than trying really hard to push this whole thought police angle / Q shit. That would require a shred of intellectual honesty though.

At the end of the day, it winds up feeling like a lot of nothing. It's hard to believe Alexandra is making the world one iota better. It's a grift which is squeezed hard to produce clicks and views. That is what she is all about.

It's annoying how a few people like to literally make things up about "AI" to try to make it sound "very bad".

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/22/more-than-half-the-world-cannot-speak-freely-report-finds
"Half the world’s population cannot freely speak their mind according to a new report on freedom of expression.

In its annual report, the advocate group Article 19 found the number of people facing a “crisis” in freedom of speech and information was the highest this century after a sharp rise from 34% in 2022 to 53% in 2023."
#FreeSpeech

"keyword lists"

I wanted to cover this, because I'm seeing a bad faith British individual talking as if this is some sort of silver bullet or panacea for society's ills. In practice though, if you actually have familiarity with how systems work, you will know that this will run into a mountain of issues and be of questionable efficacy.

One classic issue someone might run into is the Scunthorpe Problem (which is ironically coined after an algorithm kept finding apparent "profanity" inside the names of locations in the U.K., such as S|cunt|horpe (Scunthorpe) and Penis|tone (Penistone), the | is there to make it easier to see how the algorithm read the words). One incident in the U.K. even had the mail filters of MPs reject emails discussing legislation regarding *sexual offenses*.

Another infamous example was when the abbreviation for Combat Power (CP) in the popular game, Pokémon Go, was presumed by an algorithm to mean Child Pornography (CP), and content was subsequently censored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScunthorpeProblem
You can read more about the general issue here.

Naturally though, you have people wandering in, ignoring all these past issues, and thinking they know better, complaining about why someone hasn't done something supposedly "simple" (which is not necessarily effective).

Someone also has to think of the context. Someone has to be able to discuss a subject without being at risk of being arbitrarily censored.

There is also silliness where someone gets mad at websites which deal primarily in fictional content without actual actors because of some silly keyword. Also, there was one where a weirdo at an American finance firm looked through the lens of his machine translator reckoned someone's joke about "abuse" in a foreign language must mean that something evil is going on and entire foreign equivalents to YouTube need to be shutdown.

#FreeSpeech