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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, right now the fight is between corporations and creators, but I feel like the future battle is going to be between corporate AIs and “pirated” ones, because Disney is going to keep a firm chokehold over what its generative AI can make, while the community ones will completely ignore copyright restrictions and just let people do whatever they want.

    Not gonna need to worry about paywalls when you can get a pirated generative AI to create the superhero mashup you always wanted to watch as a child. That said, I could definitely see Disney and other piggybacking off of AI panic to extend copyright protection into spaces that were previously fair use.






  • Aren’t AI generated images pretty obvious to detect from noise analysis? I know there’s no effective detection for AI generated text, and not that there won’t be projects to train AI to generate perfectly realistic images, but it’ll be a while before it does fingers right, let alone invisible pixel artifacts.

    As a counterpoint, won’t the prevalence of AI generated CSAM collapse the organized abuse groups, since they rely on the funding from pedos? If genuine abuse material is swamped out by AI generated imagery, that would effectively collapse an entire dark web market. Not that it would end abuse, but it would at least undercut the financial motive, which is progress.

    That’s pretty good for 2023.


  • That’s alright, I was just a little unsure about the mixed tone. As far as public funding goes, I’d much rather NASA funding go to SpaceX than Boeing, especially since unlike the cost plus development contracts that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have gotten as the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX’s payments are almost mostly contracted purchases. That package you linked pays for specific flights to the ISS, as well as paying for a propulsive lunar lander as part of Artemis Project.

    I mean, I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but none of this money is going to him. Compared to pouring money into the telecoms or aerospace companies owned by less vocal billionaires, and then watching them go back for seconds without doing anything, I’d much rather see something productive come of public funding.

    As an aside, Starlink has never received public funding, so this really isn’t the project to complain about that. It was tentatively approved for 900 million to be awarded after delivering gigabit speeds to 99.7% of rural America, but the money would only have been awarded after completion, and the funding was pulled a month after Viasat (another satellite internet company) pressured the FCC, a decision that the FCC Commissioner publicly declaimed, which was kinda funny.


  • The really annoying part of this is the author says:

    “The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”

    Only to go on and say:

    “It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”

    More than that, the study doesn’t even measure their “exposure” to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.

    Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they’re skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).

    I’m beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had “healthy” levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I’m calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.


  • Part of it is the very mechanics of gaming, they’re all built on a core of goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. When telling a story, the four basic forms of conflict are man against man, man against nature, man against self, and man against society. Violence is an easy vehicle for three of those conflicts, and especially lends itself to active gameplay loops. Mind you, I’m referring to violence as acting to cause injury, because there are a lot of games that are built around fighting with zero gore or death.

    The other thing is that violence is just very popular. If you stop to really consider it, how much entertainment is free of violence? How many shows and movies are completely nonviolent? How many books don’t have a single fight? There are genres that typically avoid violence, but even then you’ll still find members of the genre that contain physical conflict. Plenty of romance and dramas that are steeped in fighting and death.

    At any rate, not that my perspective’s any more valuable than anyone else’s but I really haven’t seen a demand for violence that’s lower that the supply.