Ryan: I fully support your (possible) decision to move off Substack and think it would send the proper message to the oblivious leaders of this cursed organization.
Midjourney is just an art therapy app. I think at some point they're going to realize this and pivot. "Relax and make funny pictures of dogs skydiving for three hours."
I think an important difference between Trump and Hitler is that Hitler in the early 1930s probably didn’t come across like he had recently survived a stroke. I don’t think Hitler would have been as successful a mass murderer if he had developed advanced dementia before having done so.
Just bringing together "Substack has Nazis" and "federation will maybe save the world" and "Etsy is full of junk":
For decades, American society (and other societies) were held together culturally and economically by a handful of entities controlling everything, from news to speech to commerce. Because the entities were so few, they were generally well-regulated by the government, and they also were careful not to engage in hate speech -- you couldn't buy Nazi clothes at a department store, or hear Nazi opinions on TV unless it was a daytime talk show doing it for shock value. A handful of corporations kept destructive ideas out of the mainstream, except to vilify them.
When the internet broke up every commercial and informational channel by letting anyone create a store or a news entity, we lost these guardrails. Today you can run a profitable business for 5% of people, predicated on the notion that the other 95% should be wiped out in a genocide. As AI makes content creation ever-more effortless, we should expect all platforms to be flooded with hateful garbage designed to sell stuff.
When "fake news" became a thing in 2016, people decried the power of Facebook and Google to promote destructive content with their algorithms. They said these platforms should censor these ideas, demonetize them, or least algorithmically demote them. And so they did, kind of, not perfectly, with some collateral damage along the way. But it's clear that the more we decentralize, the more homes that destructive ideas (e.g., Nazis) will find. And with speech-based regulation essentially impossible in the US under our Constitution, we'll just have to accept that entire parts of the internet are fully Nazi, with room to grow and hook new people, and no method whatsoever to stop them.
If you bail on Substack I will definitely follow.
Ryan: I fully support your (possible) decision to move off Substack and think it would send the proper message to the oblivious leaders of this cursed organization.
I’ll obviously go where you do. Fuck this platform.
Anyway the only good AI product was Microsoft Songsmith and its legendary remixes of “Ace of Spades”: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU?si=ihICs_aCP0xFBJcR
And “In Bloom”: https://youtu.be/wHduATM-o7M?si=9CE_nyz4TcRtd5NJ
Midjourney is just an art therapy app. I think at some point they're going to realize this and pivot. "Relax and make funny pictures of dogs skydiving for three hours."
Can you watch 2059 Part II: Nightbirds without having seen the rest of Extrapolations?
I think an important difference between Trump and Hitler is that Hitler in the early 1930s probably didn’t come across like he had recently survived a stroke. I don’t think Hitler would have been as successful a mass murderer if he had developed advanced dementia before having done so.
“What is Midjourney actually for?”
Oh, you mean you haven’t noticed AI art completely take over low-end stock illustration in the last six months or so?
Personally I’ve noticed that Patrick McKenzie started using AI illustrations in place of not using illustrations at all:
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/
(Obviously his visuals aren’t photorealistic, but I could easily imagine someone choosing to go that direction.)
Just bringing together "Substack has Nazis" and "federation will maybe save the world" and "Etsy is full of junk":
For decades, American society (and other societies) were held together culturally and economically by a handful of entities controlling everything, from news to speech to commerce. Because the entities were so few, they were generally well-regulated by the government, and they also were careful not to engage in hate speech -- you couldn't buy Nazi clothes at a department store, or hear Nazi opinions on TV unless it was a daytime talk show doing it for shock value. A handful of corporations kept destructive ideas out of the mainstream, except to vilify them.
When the internet broke up every commercial and informational channel by letting anyone create a store or a news entity, we lost these guardrails. Today you can run a profitable business for 5% of people, predicated on the notion that the other 95% should be wiped out in a genocide. As AI makes content creation ever-more effortless, we should expect all platforms to be flooded with hateful garbage designed to sell stuff.
When "fake news" became a thing in 2016, people decried the power of Facebook and Google to promote destructive content with their algorithms. They said these platforms should censor these ideas, demonetize them, or least algorithmically demote them. And so they did, kind of, not perfectly, with some collateral damage along the way. But it's clear that the more we decentralize, the more homes that destructive ideas (e.g., Nazis) will find. And with speech-based regulation essentially impossible in the US under our Constitution, we'll just have to accept that entire parts of the internet are fully Nazi, with room to grow and hook new people, and no method whatsoever to stop them.