I read one too many examples of breathless gen-AI sycophancy today, and I needed to rant about it:
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Thanks for reading and for the suggestions!
The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include a library of wood, a dress made from bioluminescent algae and exploring Wikimedia by random sound samples. I show off another cross stitch project and a cool museum exhibit book I just got. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
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Awesome post, as always! Glad to see youāre enjoying the nun book. I really wish weād get a full translated version of the diary, I need to know more about them!
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Thatās interestingāneither you nor Annie brought up the AI angle to this (in fact she says her post was from 2019, well before all this AI nonsense) but I couldnāt help but think that all the froth around AI art was floating around beneath the surface as I read both of your posts. I saw on my tumblr feed recently someone trying to stir up drama about how an artist was using generative AI and not saying so etc etc and it reminded me of countless threads I have read about how AI art isnāt ārealā art, also how digital painting isnāt real painting, etcājust the usual gatekeeping.
Although I personally share the gut reaction to AI art that says that itās not very cool, I have to admit that occasionally I have come across AI pieces that I liked and I guess I have no choice but to make peace with that fact. So I think itās probably time to abandon arguing about what gets to count as art or not, or whether AI art is cheating, and just start evaluating the work on its merits while letting people do what they want to do, you know?
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I love your posts rina, you always See Through the Bullshit and call it like it is
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thnak you <3! im glad u like my posts
I think itās important to let people know when you use AI especially when our current models are based of off stolen work. As someone who had their really labor-intensive and extremely niche work stolen, Itās hard to be neutral. I think when people are using models based off of work thatās opted-in there should be less purity-testing. But in the current state I kinda get the frothing because itās so demoralizing for those of us trying to continue earning a living off work thatās being harvested by big tech.
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Yeah, itās a hard pass from someone who has both been (briefly) a working artist, and who is friends with people who make their living through their craft. Thereās so many reasons to be staunch in my position- as someone who holds strong environmentalist beliefs, has found joy and community in the arts, and frankly- if someone canāt spend the time and effort to make something, why the hell should I waste mine on engaging with it?
But Iāve been there, through the tears and the terror, of redundancies and broken contracts, fired departments, rent looming, food bank visits, domestic abuse survivors who had to scrimp and scrounge and panicked over the added timeline of their escape because of their income being pulled out from beneath them essentially overnight: many of these peopleās livelihoods and lives were thrown into utter chaos.
I care about my friends. I donāt want to see them go hungry. Standing in solidarity here is the least one can do for their loved ones. Itās sort of like the tipping debate- Jesus, of course in an ideal world restaurants would pay well enough for servers to make a living, but you seriously arenāt going to stiff someone who is scraping together minimum federal wage, right? Youāre not sticking it to the man- youāre just making life harder for those already at the margins.
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Yup, I get it. Nobody likes to see someone copping their style or ideas without giving credit, and laundering it through an AI doesnāt really soothe the burn.
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I wrote not one, but two blog posts to celebrate ten years of my project Botwiki, where Iāve been collecting examples of creative online bots and resources for making them.
One for the Botwiki blog:
And one on my personal blog, where I contemplate the importance of celebrating small personal wins during challenging times, when things may feel a bit futile.
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Recently I bought myself a new laptop, and I took the opportunity to start using Arch Linux for the first time. In other words, I have officially joined the āI use Arch BTWā club.
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The anti-childfree folk on the TikToks got to me.
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Kind of wild how despite the fact that our opinions are near identical opinions I never get any pushback on being child-free as a dude.
Like, my partner is as equally child free as me, but she is the only one that routinely has to worry about the questions.
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It really is a strange double standard. Men are kind of a requirement in order to make the babies women āshould beā having, but statistically and according to societyās standards, men who donāt want children should have a partner who also doesnāt, otherwise we end up with deadbeat dads?
The sense it does not make!
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I canāt believe Iāve never found your Botwiki! Iām a big fan of bots used creatively, and I even have my own little bot toy that I created using Rivescript:
I miss the creative and silly bots everyone used to make over AIM back in the day. Bots used for Discord tasks and stuff and great and cool also, but I wish there were more fun ones around. Iāll definitely be bookmarking your wiki!
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We need to normalize people responding to intrusive questions like āWhy donāt you have children?ā by telling the questioner to go fuck themselves.
Unless youāre actively harming other individuals or trampling their rights you donāt owe anybody an explanation or a justification for anything, let alone your reluctance to reproduce.
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Yes to all of this. I worked in a hospital art program and the number of children hospitalized and even dying from neglect and abuse is astounding.
And itās such a whiplash for elder millennials like me who were beat over the head with ādonāt have kids you canāt affordā and shaming poor parents. Now weāre being told weāre selfish and should have kids and just āfigure it out laterā when weāre looking at generational decline in standard of living and no steady retirement.
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Young Generation X here, and my parents did the whole āhave kids young and figure it out laterā thing. Iām still paying the price, and so are my siblings, especially since our parents told us point-blank that we were accidents and mistakes.
What Iām hearing from the pronatalists, especially the rich white ones, is āOh noes! Moloch has a hungry! The proles arenāt breeding in sufficient numbers for us to keep the wage slaves from demanding a better standard of living by dividing them against each other!ā They can all go to hell; theyāve made the economy a Ponzi scheme, and the youngest are going to get stuck holding the bag. And for what? So that people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg can LARP as supervillains out of comic books and James Bond movies? At least Ernst Stavros Blofeld and Adrian Veidt liked cats. And what the hell is Bezosā deal? Did he start losing his hair in high school and decide that heād punish the world for it by becoming a real-life Lex Luthor?
And letās talk about Bryan Johnson for a moment, and his use of transfusions from young men (including his own son) to fight aging: Maybe heās born with it; maybe itās Bathory. (Except that Countess Bathory was probably the target of a misogynistic blood libel.)
Iām glad that my wife and I didnāt have kids. I just donāt tell her that, because she sometimes still wishes that that had worked out differently for her.
Letās just say that if I ever get called for jury duty again, and Iām asked if I can convict a woman who shot a man for asking her why she hasnāt had children, I will lie with a clear conscience and then vote to acquit. Every human being should be sovereign, answerable to no one, especially women.
Any notion of the common good that demands sacrifice of you but not of everybody else is not a common good at all; itās just an all-too-common con.
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