This is a moronic take.

It’s just a capital gains tax

The paid subscribers subsidize the unpaid ones.

Even for paying customers, inference alone costs OpenAI several times more than revenue.

My man out here asking for $500B $1T $2T to build Datacenter God and people just keep giving him blank checks because he made a series of bad Vines.

Justice protects but does not bind.

Tyranny binds but does not protect.

Also perhaps pursuant to your interests, Three Felonies A Day: How The Federal Government Targets Innocent People

Butter, pretty dresses, seeing the world. Bitch, you are going to be living deliciously by the end of the night.

I’m any case, privacy is a spectrum. I can’t be untraceable by state agents, but I can avoid a lot of non targeted spying.

Absolutely. But then, as often as not, just using the browser feature that doesn’t cache client side data is enough.

I genuinely wonder what people think they’re using a VPN for. Do they think they’ve outwitted a trillion dollars in surveillance with an $8/mo subscription service?

It’s fish in a barrel.

You don’t always hit, but the odds are stacked heavily in your favor

• Third party service run by corpos who pinky promise not to harvest any of your data

• In-app tool that doesn’t cache your client-side data

Is the woman the negative side on this?

The important thing isn’t that your kids don’t see porn, it’s that they feel the requisite amount of shame and never talk to you about their sexuality.

Also, it’s one more thing we can criminalize in a surveillance state. So now we can more easily extort horny people with fines and prison if we feel the need

This is just the whole robot sandwich thing to me.

If home kitchens were being replaced by pre-filled Automats, I’d be equally repulsed.

A tool is a tool. Fools may not use them well, but someone who understands how to properly use a tool can get great things out of it.

The most expert craftsman won’t get a round peg to fit into a square hole without doing some damage. At some point, you need to understand what the tool is useful for. And the danger of LLMs boils down to the seeming industrial scale willingness to sacrifice quality for expediency and defend the choice in the name of business profit.

Doesn’t anybody remember how internet search was in the early days? How you had to craft very specific searches to get something you actually wanted?

Internet search was as much constrained by what was online as what you entered in the prompt. You might ask for a horse and get a hundred different Palominos when you wanted a Clydesdale, not realizing the need to be specific. But you’re never going to find a picture of a Vermont Morgan horse if nobody bothered to snap a photo and host it where a crawler could find it.

Taken to the next level with LLMs, you’re never going to infer a Vermont Morgan if it isn’t in the training data. You’re never going to even think to look for one, if the LLM hasn’t bothered to index it properly. And because these AI engines are constantly eating their own tails, what you get is a basket of horses that are inferred between a Palomino and a Clydesdale, sucked back into training data, and inferred in between a Palomino and a Palomino-Clydesdale, and sucked back into the training data, and, and, and…

I think artists could use gen AI to make more good art than ever

I don’t think using an increasingly elaborate and sophisticated crutch will teach you to sprint faster than Hussein Bolt. Removing steps in the artistic process and relying on glorified Clipart Catalogs will not improve your output. It will speed up your output and meet some minimum viable standard for release. But the goal of that process is to remove human involvement, not improve human involvement.

I will say, gen AI seems to be the only way to combat the insane BEC attacks we have today.

Which is great. Love to use algorithmic defenses to combat algorithmic attacks.

But that’s a completely different problem than using inference to generate art assets.

UwU

You know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, right?

Part of the “magic” of AI is how much of the design process gets hijacked by inference. At some scale you simply don’t have control of your own product anymore. What is normally a process of building up an asset by layers becomes flattened blobs you need to meticulously deconstruct and reconstruct if you want them to not look like total shit.

That’s a big part of the reason why “AI slop” looks so bad. Inference is fundamentally not how people create complex and delicate art pieces. It’s like constructing a house by starting with the paint job and ending with the framing lumber, then asking an architect to fix where you fucked up.

If you don’t like them, you can just chuck them in the trash and you won’t have wasted the work of an artist

If you engineer your art department to start with verbal prompts rather than sketches and rough drawings, you’re handcuffing yourself to the heuristics of your AI dataset. It doesn’t matter that you can throw away what you don’t like. It matters that you’re preemptively limiting yourself to what you’ll eventually approve.

…Now, if they ship slop into the final game

At a certain level, it is going to be a chore to determine who is or is not slopping up with AI media. Not every asset comes out with six fingers and a half-melted face.

I can see legitimate frustration with an industry that seems reliant on increasingly generic and interchangeable assets. AI just becomes the next iteration of this problem. You’ve expanded the warehouse of prefab images, but you’re still stuck with end products that are uncannily similar to everything else on the market.

And that’s before you get to the IP implications of farming all your content out to a third party that doesn’t seem to care where its base library is populated from.

We’ve had tools to manage workflows for decades. You don’t need Copilot injected into every corner of your interface to achieve this. I suspect the bigger challenge for Larian is working in a development suite that can’t be accused of having “AI Assist” hiding somewhere in the internals.

If they bring up their cultural religion, values, politics, philosophy, or social dynamics, suddenly things can become an area of controversy and even ethical debate

Italians will go three rounds in the ring over which neighborhood has the best ice cream shop. I wouldn’t even say its uncontroversial. But these also tend to be attributes that vary heavily even at relatively short distances in older communities. A certain meal prepared a certain way or a dance/music style that originated in your neighborhood becomes a unique touchstone to your community.

I might note that this is something “Planned Communities” tend to lose out on. Everyone gets a Chilis. Everyone gets a radio station franchise that plays the same six songs on a loop. Everyone gets an AMC that shows the same ten movies as everywhere else. Everyone gets a Catholic Church and a Methodist Church book-ending the local elementary school.

Then you leave your provincial cookie-cutter suburb and visit London, a city where the dialect of the language changes by intersection. Or you do a road trip in Italy and find out how every tiny township has this one kind of dish they’re all really proud of. Or you just drop into inner city Houston and get an earful of Chop’n’Screw music played by guys with spinners on the wheels of their lowered Cadalliacs. Then you find some weird old bookshop in Montrose that sells pagan bumper stickers.

OP is British

Adios, sucker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons