Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://nichegamer.com/manga-publisher-is-remaking-classic-series-eiken-with-ai/ It flattens any unique charm it had and makes it look like generic crap.

A couple of years ago, an influencer made the take that "AI images" would end child abuse and the like. But, I really think they over-estimate the capabilities of this technology. A lot of what it generates is crap. Garbage. It might have a slight novelty to it but otherwise it's just not good.

For just about anything, it would be worse than just getting a human to create the same thing by creating it by hand.

"A number of art communities have even banned AI generated content."

I can't say I'm surprised. It can be very spammy and can crowd out original content. A lot of it is just not really interesting, and how many pieces of it are there which look pretty samey (or generic / tacky)?

It's not a problem unique to diffusion models either. When someone used to feed like a million anime pics into StyleGAN to train a model, there was also an issue where it would be "cool geekery" but would otherwise look boring.

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/the-illusion-of-financial-privacy/
"It's strange how quickly we have accepted the current state of financial surveillance as the norm. Just a few decades ago, withdrawing money didn't involve 20 questions about what we plan to use the money for, what we do for a living, and where we are from. Our daily transactions weren't handed over in bulk to countless third parties."
#FourthAmendment #privacy

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-brain/201909/how-negative-news-distorts-our-thinking Another article about negativity in the media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/negativity-bias-online-news-consumption/673499/ One article about the media's tendency towards negativity.

Some journalists might identify "AI" as a "spooky new tech", so they jump on virtually everything, minor, or not, that someone might / has done with it, and speak of it in apocalyptic tones. That interest in doing so in itself says a lot.

From what I remember, there was even a study showing that the media didn't used to be as negative.

I don't see how someone can simply ignore sensationalism being a thing.

It's one thing when the algorithm has a silly fail but quite a bit of it is like complaining to Ford about how someone uses their cars.

Someone can practically take anything, add the presence of "AI" to it, and pitch it as a unique "shocking story".

There is also a very bad faith suggestion, almost certainly made deliberately as I've covered before, that someone suggested that "#AI" can never be used in a way which could be considered to be "harmful".

That, however, is quite different from pointing out that "AI" sensationalism is grossly exaggerated.

I'm working on the experimental post on and off, it'll take a while though. There is a bit of new material being surfaced, although the sections are also longer than the more bullet point based post.

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/these-strange-bedfellows-want-scotus-to-remind-the-5th-circuit-that-journalism-is-not-a-crime/
"Sylvia Gonzalez, a former Castle Hills, #Texas, city council member, plausibly alleges that she was arrested on a trumped-up charge in retaliation for conduct protected by the #FirstAmendment. So does Priscilla Villarreal, an independent journalist in Laredo, Texas."

"It is hard to say how often people engage in the conduct that police cited to justify her arrest, which involved putting a petition in her personal folder during a city council meeting. Villarreal, by contrast, was arrested for asking questions, something that journalists across the country do every day."

"To justify those charges, police cited Section 39.06(c) of the Texas Penal Code, an obscure, rarely invoked law that applies to someone who "solicits or receives from a public servant" information that "has not been made public" with the "intent to obtain a benefit." The claim that Villarreal had violated that law was absurd for several reasons."

"Villarreal, who is represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is asking the Supreme Court to uphold that principle, which her arrest blatantly violated."
#FreeSpeech

https://reason.com/2024/05/29/this-journalist-was-arrested-strip-searched-and-jailed-for-filming-police-will-he-get-justice/
"Prosecutors in #Texas last week dismissed the criminal case against a journalist who, in 2021, was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police. But his lengthy legal battle is in some sense just beginning and once again demands we probe the idea that real journalists are entitled to a different set of rights than the public."

"Last June, Judge David Hittner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas allowed Pulliam's federal lawsuit to proceed, declining to award the defendants qualified immunity"
#FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/a-missouri-police-officer-shot-a-blind-and-deaf-dog-now-hes-being-sued/
"In a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of #Missouri, Nicholas Hunter alleges that Officer Myron Woodson and the city of Sturgeon violated his #FourthAmendment rights when Woodson killed Teddy, his 13-pound blind and deaf Shih Tzu, shortly after finding the dog wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19."

"Sandy Meadows, had been fired from her job at a Baton Rogue grocery store when state inspectors discovered she had been arranging flowers without the proper license. She tragically died, unemployed and in poverty, before the case could be heard."
Wait, what.

Well, this sounds like an issue for #HumanRights.

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/louisiana-finally-fixes-americas-dumbest-licensing-requirement/
"Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in an arrangement. Going forward, obtaining a florist license will require only the payment of a fee to the state."

It's probably easier to get a company to adopt end-to-end encryption than it is to otherwise get them to stop spying on people.

I was looking into takes in this area (as a form of impromptu research), and many are better, but oh boy, there are a couple like this which come from someone who doesn't seem to have a brain.

Reading a stupid take from 2016 which talks about porn solely through the lens of being a medicine to prescribe to criminals to prevent them from committing crimes (while censoring / oppressing everyone else). From that, you should understand part of why I never really lean on that particular argument.