Explain how I’m the product relative to Linux.

Or kids being raised on the internet. Shit heads teaching kids to behave like shit heads.

Imagine being so pissed at long dead people that you become a minor monster yourself.

I don’t have that particular condition, but what I have has the possibility of being inconvenient to others. You might be pleased to know that I’ve spent more than a decade detached from society for the convenience of normal, healthy people. May you get everything out of life that you hope to.

People need hope that they can have a future and that it’s one worth living. Without that, despair is a natural outcome. If our societies cared half as much about ordinary people as we do corporations and the military, there would be a lot less despair.

I’m not overly familiar with that aspect of Marxism, but I can certainly believe it. I can’t imagine that a philosophy with hundreds if not thousands of aspects to it, would be completely without merit, even if the whole is flawed.

I agree that Chinese women being more progressive is a threat to the conservative Chinese government.

Of note…American conservatives/confederates absolutely detest the Barbie movie.

I use git for writing. It’s fantastic. You can use branches to try different ideas and approaches and merge it into your main branch once you’re sure of the direction you want to go.

I take the approach of doing content first and styling second. For content I don’t need anything more sophisticated than a plain text editor. I like it because it removes decisions that I really don’t need to be making at that point.

I do grant completely the valid uses for the technology which pertain to individual interests. I think there’s interesting possibilities there as well.

There’s a quote from the Tao Te Ching, which says, “why must you value what others value?” I think that’s relevant here. It may be true that those with money and power will always try to force their own interests (See the app formerly known as Twitter for reference). I’m not suggesting that we can or should try to shove this technology back in the bottle so to speak. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t so easily accept corporate interests as being in the interest of humans more generally and we should be skeptical of anything that sounds like happy tech industry propoganda.

As to the latter part, it’s just my perception based on what I’ve read. It may not be accurate.

The notion of progress is too much of a catch-all positivity word here. If speed and efficiency is all we care about then, sure, ai will blow traditional artists out of the water. If however, we care about what the artist themselves brings in terms of their unique perspective, talents, and stories, ai art will only serve to muffle and homogenize that.

The notion of people with disabilities being able to use it to create something is a fair point. I think it’d be absurd to say that it’s only negatives. However, these kinds of cases, as good as they are, are often used to patch over the uglier aspects of what ai generated images is doing and will do. Kind of like how in Florida they’re talking about slavery teaching people valuable skills.

I think the people most excited about it are those who seem to have a resentment of artists at some level, likely because those artists are already doing what they wish they could do. That’s why I think there’s almost a perverse giddiness at the notion of crushing artist’s jobs and replacing them with these tech-oriented ones.

It seems like for some people, the ideal society is one in which humans have been made irrelevant and machines interface with each other in perpetuity, generating a heap of content that no one ever sees or thinks about. It’s the kind of sci-fi dystopian ending which we don’t want to acknowledge because there’s money to be made for someone and nothing is supposed to get in the way of that.

And that’s totally fine. I could see using it for that purpose too. I think there are a fair number of people who might like to be artists, but they think it’s too hard, and so they look at ai as being a shortcut.

I was awful at drawing and painting and now I’m not. I’ve walked that path, and I’m glad I spend the time learning those skills. I much prefer creating whatever I want to as opposed to pecking a word at a time, trying to coax something vaguely like it from an algorithm. That seems sad to me.

Also, all of the time that people spend tweaking their prompts could just as easily be time spent learning to create their own art. The distance between absolute beginner and competent artist isn’t as vast as some people would like to believe. It’s just intimidating to a lot of people to get up the will to even try.