A Dislike of PvP Zones

Social media can really be such a PvP zone sometimes. I try to avoid contributing to that. I don't think social media should be without conflict--that would be entirely unrealistic. But I do think it's full of a lot of unnecessary escalation. People start fights just because they think it makes them look cool.

Why I Don't Support Generalized AI Bans

In light of Pillowfort's recent decision to ban AI art, I thought I would write up some reasons I don't support generalized AI bans despite having major issues with companies that make software like ChatGPT. I'll also state what kind of AI ban I do think is reasonable.

* AI is a very general term that whose usage has only recently been focused on this particular type of software. It has widespread applications, including in digital art and photography (there's AI software built into digital cameras on phones even). This is not just an issue of semantics, either, but could get into tricky questions of which of these applications is "not the kind of AI we're talking about" in terms of functionality as well.

* Disproportionately punishes the harmless, does nothing against the companies creating the AI software or the companies using it to harm creatives (like those news articles putting up AI-generated art instead of paying an actual artist for their work). My impression is that this will mostly punish the people who are not making any money from this grift but just generating and posting it for their own entertainment. I don't think most the artists actually selling their work on Pillowfort are actually AI-generating it.

* Undermines fair use. Having a position that AI is bad because posting excerpts or works based on other works is stealing is to have a position that fanworks and even general fair use is theft. This is a position that megacorps like Disney have historically been very much in favor of supporting as a means to disenfranchise regular writers and artists like the kind who join platforms like Pillowfort. These megacorps are not friends to creatives and engage in contant theft and exploitation of their workers, whose work is *their* IP, and not owned by the creatives themselves.

So, what kind of ban on AI would I support? For me, this would be a ban similar to the spam ban a lot of sites implement, possibly customized to address specifics of these types of AI's. Obviously anything becomes a problem if it is being used to spam a site. 

I also very much support sites discouraging AI scrapers by altering their robots.txt (I was happy to see that Pillowfort had done this) and giving their users the option to make posts site only. These measures aren't an AI ban on the site, but rather put up some roadblocks against the companies who are creating this AI in order to try to generate profit for themselves at the expense of all of us.

AI-Generated Articles and AI Bans

Going to admit, I don't think there's any good way to handle AI-generated materials in external articles with a generalized AI ban.

* If the policy is that a person can't link to AI-generated material such that it gets captioned on Pillowfort as an image or text, you're expecting them to have way more dilligence than can reasonably be expected. Sometimes caption images don't even show up in the original article, and this is one of those times where people don't always look closely at the content. 

It's also not doing anything to address the root problem of this material, namely that artists and writers are not getting paid to create it. Even if this was something I thought could reasonably be enforced, it's far too separated from the actual wrongdoers in this equation to be doing any good. None of the places writing these articles are going to have their bottom line affected by Pillowfort's AI Ban policy. The people who should be preventing this kind to exploitation from happening are the government, but realistically speaking, it's often organizations like unions who do the real work in pushing back on this kind of exploitation (eg. the terms negotiated by the WGA).

* And if the policy is that AI-generated articles can be linked to show these kind of AI header images or AI-produced headlines, then the policy is tacitly unfair and by and large targeting people who have no real place in this exploitative dynamic. Saying that people who are mostly just using AI to generate and post images or text they have no intention of selling for a profit are banned, while saying that people who are absolutely involved in this dynamic don't need to be held to the same standard.

I think this is a case of some very exploitative people being nigh untouchable, so instead, for people to feel like they are doing something, they demand punative action on easy targets, despite the fact that this does nothing to actually address the core issue.

Baked Apples Are The Best

Time to bake apples!

Cut Strings and The Theme of Righteous Anger

The theme of rightful anger being exploited for harmful ends is one I explore in my Star Wars story Cut Strings. I think it's a perrenially relevant topic, as I believe this dynamic to so often be involved when things go wrong in our real world. But I don't think there are actually any easy answers to this problem. If someone never gets very worked up about anything, chances are they will do nothing to stop injustice. But anger by its nature tends to close off more analytical thought, which can lead one to actions that do the very opposite of what they are intended to.

The Inexorable Passage of Time Has Happened Again

Time just keeps passing. Things just keep happening...and now it is October 2023. Where did this year go?

I Would Like To File A Complaint With the Spacetime Continuum

My complaints about time:

• Too Fast when I want more
• Too slow when I want it to be over with
• No Undo Button