One of my colleagues teaches Art and English as a foreign language. She’s not even poor because we’re in a country that doesn’t shit on teachers, but even she uses generative AI to illustrate her slides and create grammar posters. She’s time-poor, and she’s not giving the school any labour for free making posters in her free time when she’s got a family life to live. Nobody cares if the capybara character on the poster has 5 or 4 toes. It’s not a maths poster. The students think it’s funny and we move on. No artists are losing work, because even without the AI option there’s no budget for decorating lesson slides or making posters to take home. Unless anyone wants to work for exposure. Can pay plenty in exposure.

And on the flip side, neither of us is using AI to replace artists in situations where we use artists. She still does her own personal art, and I just wrapped a Christmas gift for a valued friend that I paid another artist friend to create. Took her seven months because she’s also pressed for time, and the chats we’ve had over the creative process are one of my fondest memories for this year.

Is this a regional thing? Is it different in your country, wherever you are? I’ve got musician friends using AI to help make music videos and artist friends using AI to make music for their comic strip posts, and nobody’s losing any sleep over it. There’s some other variable and it’s not the AIs.

Educate me: what’s terrible about it?

This, unironically! If we didn’t set some standards, then even poor people could do it! 🧐

This is why I always branch a repo before letting AI anywhere near it. Sometimes you get fantastic results (like a day’s worth of code monkey grind in 5 mins) and sometimes the results are just preposterous. You always want to be able to review the results before anything touches main.

I think any praise directed at Valve should be directed at Newell.

Valve is a private company and therefore reflects the values of its owner.

Another similar example is Larian Studios and its owner Sven Vincke (sp?).

Both of these companies have done/are doing good things. But they don’t refute the criticisms of capitalism.

1. People like Newell and Vincke can create these privately owned companies with their wealth, but where did that wealth come from? I will applaud both those men for choosing to do good things but with the caveat that those decisions don’t exist in isolation and the acquisition of the wealth they needed to do cool things with their cool companies was definitely not an exploitation-free process.

2. What happens to those businesses when their owners retire/die? Valve and Larian are reflective of their owners, and their owners are swimming against the current. Capitalism rewards shitty behaviour, and ownership of those companies can easily pass to shitty people.

Valve is a blip in the system. It’s a good blip, but it’s not indicative of any redeemability in the capitalist system.

That’s true. I have friends who were harmed during the riots in Hong Kong and I’m angry about it.

“They see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies and illusions that fascism is built upon.”

Bullshit: it just as easily supports the ‘myths, dogmas, lies and illusions’ that fascism is built on. Panzerlied was a banger of a song and carries just as hard as Bella Ciao, and Hugo Boss’ uniform designs put all the Allied uniforms to shame.

AI is a problem because the capitalists control it, and anyone who ignores that qualifying clause and calls AI ‘unconditionally’ a problem is a fucking idiot, and a useful idiot to fascists. It’s the same thoughtless lack of nuance that ACAB has when it includes police in China. Police are an arm of the state and they are a problem when capitalists control the state. That kind of myopic stupidity had so many western leftists supporting the wrong side in Hong Kong which caused such a high degree of harm that it nearly passed a catstrophic tipping point. And now they’re doing it with AI. They’re making it cultural anathema for a ‘progressive’ to touch what could be one of the most powerful progressive tools that Educators in the West have in their struggles as the fascists take their textbooks away.

It’s the Western left. You can’t raise the bar with the Western left without standing waist-deep in shit and bending down to pick it up.

I agree with all of what you’re saying, but this:

Take a breath, break the rumination spiral, and remember what a loving world that values human life is about.

Is easier said than done. You’ll maybe break out of the spiral for a few days or even months, but it’s so easy to slip into the spiral again and the further you spiral the easier it is to drop back into it, until one day even on the days where you’re mentally healthy in all other respects, you live the fuck out of those days because the realist in your mind knows those days are numbered.

And I’m willing to bet the 12 feet of rope that I ordered off the internet that OP also agrees with everything you said and won’t break out of the spiral so easily, either.

I have a few different plans for ways to check out. One of them is designed so that it’ll just take one moment of courage and then I won’t be able to back out of it. Another is really slow and painful by design. Another one is designed so that no one would find my remains - and if I quit my job beforehand, the few people I care about not hurting would never find out.

When I ask myself why I haven’t done the deed yet, I don’t actually know how to answer. But I do know that there’s no reason to hurry, so there’s also no reason to answer the ‘why’ yet.

Typing all of that out hits home how fucked up those thoughts are. But on the other hand, having those plans gives us a sense of agency over it. Whatever shit you’re dealing with, you’re making the choice to keep dealing with it and I think there’s a comfort in that. There’s also a bit of freedom in the perspective that I’m already dead and none of what I do from this point on matters.

It’s not getting worse here in Hong Kong, it’s slowly getting better. The British brainrot is taking a long time to unfuck; there are full grown adults who were babies at the handover passing down romanticised stories about British rule to their kids that they were told by their boomer parents, and the eldest generation who remember how it was practically apartheid pre-Maclehose reforms are all elderly. But the education system and the reality checks from what’s happening in the States, Ukraine and Palestine are all pushing back.

It might seem like a strange question but people tend to have wildly different pespectives and understanding about China depending on what part of the world they’re in, what the media they consume says about it, and whether they’ve lived there or not. So even if we agreed with each other it’d still be worth going through because we’re in a public forum where it’s helpful for others to be more illustrative.

“up to a point” is doing massive work here.

China has capitalism: in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Macao. When you cross the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen it’s like night and day. Shenzhen ain’t no backwater either, but the cost of living, quality of life, environment, air pollution (the prevalence of electric cars makes so much difference that despite being less strict about smoking in public, it’s still cleaner in SZ), advertising, cleanliness of public facilities, parks in walking distance of everywhere… when they say ‘take the bad with the good’ that doesn’t mean not doing anything about the bad, and the difference a government can make in dealing with the bad is huge.

but up to a point the government will allow capitalists to do the same harmful things they do in the west.

Can you please give any examples of the Chinese government allowing capitalists to do harmful things to the Chinese people?

They are against it because anything bad that could come of further adoption of AI will happen if it’s profitable for the capitalists. Even now NVIDIA is continuing to pump the bubble when everyone knows it’s a bubble, because of the profits.

The prospects are entirely different in China, because capitalists are regulated. But nobody who is vehemently against AI is aware of the difference and likely will tell you China is capitalist. So all the problems that arise from capitalist control of AI are ascribed to AI alone as well.

“starting a company in X country for dummies.”

A lot of people don’t know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It’s left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they’d have more questions…

As of 19 hours later.

I’m curious, too.

I sometimes wonder about what kinds of questions people could ask in that subreddit that would necessitate admitting Western lies and accepted mistruths, without the questions themselves being accused of ulterior motives.

If Hasan were “Thanos snapped” out of the equation, it would be a reach to think that the people watching his stream aren’t going to up and read Lenin or find their way here or join their local Marxist org.

But I agree that if we are going to basically give people pacifiers that they should had least not be laced with poison.

We’re not giving people pacifiers that are/aren’t laced with poison. Bezos is giving people pacifiers, and one of them is significantly more left than the others. If we had the means to stop Hasan from speaking, his audience are not going to get up off their couches. They would just tune into other (likely further-right) influencers. Don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.

He wouldn’t need to be defended if he wasn’t consistently attacked. The real question is why does he need to be attacked?

In terms of being a pipeline, he’s definitely not pushing his audience to the right. He’s not pushing them toward the dead-end false-left Democrats either. He actively speaks against both of those groups. And then he makes his viewers aware of efforts like The Deprogram.

It’s literally the definition of the mouth of a pipeline. His content is mild enough for the the capitalists who control all the modern public fora to allow him to draw in huge viewership numbers, and that viewership has its overton window shifted left enough for them to discover further-left materia that they otherwise would never have known existed.

At worst he’s inconsequential, at best he’s feeding left. To the real left. There’s no opportunity cost to him doing his thing. His chat is a cavalcade of lumpenproles and kids spamming ‘top kek’ and ‘goated’ and pepe emojis. They’re certainly not moving left on their own.

I don’t think either of those issues impact a command economy anywhere near as much as they do a laissez-faire system. Both issues affect the exchange value of the currency. A command economy that doesn’t rely on imports for its critical products and services can use alternative means to apportion and distribute them internally.

Empire by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand has been good so far (I’m 12 episodes in). I can’t speak for subsequent episodes and don’t know anything about the two hosts beyond this podcast, but they’re painting a very stark picture of how fucking evil the British were in India (and I think they move on to other colonized regions later).