I mean, I have no idea if she’s Margot Robbie, but I figure I might as well treat her as if she is. Doesn’t cost me anything. It’s basically the solution to the solipsism problem with lower stakes.
Personally, I think doing a goofy impression of yourself and occasionally breaking character would be a good way to fly under the radar.
Source for that? Because all I’m seeing is footage of her striking with SAG and pro-union comments she’s made online.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishabassi/margot-robbie-sag-aftra-strike-support-actors-rights
The attitude toward celebrities on Lemmy versus on Mastodon is really weird. Same thing with reddit, a lot of the time. Like, okay, I have no idea if that’s really Margot Robbie or not, but famous people do use the internet. Attention doesn’t make them a different species that forgets how to use keyboards or something.
Might as well be nice?
Europe at least has had the benefit of being able to work country-by-country, whereas the US is one massive tangled morass. Hell, even achieving the kind of restructuring and harmonious cooperation that you see in the EU had to come as a result of two of the most atrocious wars humanity has ever mustered in the span of less than half a century.
Kinda puts it a little more into perspective when you consider the absolute shit-show Europe had to turn into before it was ready to grow up.
Americans largely haven’t had much of a choice. In states where the laws are decent and political corruption isn’t heavily entrenched, things are alright and the system isn’t totally broken. But in places where it has? There’s less and less ability to vote in more reasonable laws.
The problems are systemic. The same states have shitty education systems, mass voter disenfranchisement of prisoners and anyone else they can justify taking the vote from, extensive gerrymandering, and every other form of corruption and political inefficiency. The major population centers take a very different approach, but they have to compete with these backward and broken states through an electoral system that skews the results in their favor.
Trying to take direct action outside of the official political framework is also problematic. In Europe you’ve got the benefit of an extremely high population density and a relatively small area regardless of which country you’re in. In the US everything is extremely spread out. The result is that protest is often not terribly effective. You might be able to shut down a couple of streets, but there’s no way you’re disturbing commerce for more than a single metropolitan area (of which there are many) at a time. It’s the same reason mass public transit runs into issues: we’re way too spread out for strategies that require high and comparatively uniform population density.
That doesn’t mean there’s no answer, but it does mean we’re going to have to get a little more creative.
Hi Margot Robbie! <3
If you’d read the article you might have an answer.
Something something Russublicans.
I worked at Starbucks back in like 04-06 or something like that and it was a great job for what it was at the time. The pace was reasonable, the hours were genuinely flexible, the pay was decent, and the benefits were actual. I was in the highest volume store in the metro area I was living in and I loved working there. It was busy, but the line kept it reasonable, we’d mark drinks ahead of time on cups, and half the time by the time people got to the counter we’d have their drink ready.
After unemployment ran out from COVID I went back for about a year, and it was a completely different beast. Where one line used to create a bottleneck at the register and allow us plenty of time to mark and make drinks, we now had to deal with the drive-thru and mobile ordering all at the same time, which shifts the bottle neck to drink preparation by a wide margin. Working at Starbucks now is essentially standing in the middle of the narrow point of a labor funnel. They’ve also added a lot more tasks and spread them out all over the place, so the footwork is way more than it used to be. Floor mat coverage also tends to be insufficient because of this, and there isn’t really time to slow down to a reasonable pace. Doesn’t help when you’re scheduled until 15 minutes before the hour in order to avoid having to give you another break.
Pay is basically what it was the last time I worked there plus a couple of dollars. Benefits and stock options are still left dangling as bait, but management seems to try to ensure that as few employees as possible actually get enough hours to qualify. Where previously corporate, in my experience anyway, supported positive managers who had their crews backs, they now seem to love slimy corporate boot-lickers who will rake back every bit of benefit and extract as much labor as possible.
With the drive-thru model it’s hardly surprising to see it getting worse, but it is disappointing. What was once a boon to the working class has become just another exploitative company. Not only that, but an exploitative company that’s taken their market share and has moved on to cost cutting and labor squeezing. Replacing nice little local cafes first with a polished corporate cafe and slowly turning it into an expensive McDonald’s.
I do hope the nice little cafes see the opportunity to capitalize on selling a better product and treating their employees better and take back a bit of that market share.
I think in general people would have an easier time interacting with the system and just existing in proximity to it if the stakes weren’t so artificially raised.
Honestly, I’d argue that raising the stakes via the penal system as well as through things like corporate culture and work ethic have more to do with many of our problems than anything else. We’d probably be a lot better off if we took the time to try to teach people patience by not demanding constant impossible perfection and by giving them the room to exist.
So many people get so stressed about literally nothing. I’ll pick people up driving my cab and they’ll literally apologize for needing to be picked up or apologize for paying with cash or a card or a thousand other things. I spend more time reassuring people that everything is fine and it’s completely acceptable for them to call a taxi than nearly any other endlessly repeated interaction.
It’s not a big deal. We’re all going to die. Just take a second and let yourself enjoy your life instead of subjugating yourself to assholes and apologizing for it. Part of that is minding your own damn business and not locking people up for dumb shit.
Why does the use of AI to modify art require justification?
We seem to have this general culture of people who don’t make things coming after those who do. Every decision of design, methodology, or artistic preference treated as though the creator has an obligation to please every single person who posts their opinions on the internet.
The reality is that this simply isn’t true. Art that spends all its energy fretting about whether people will like it ends up being some bland bullshit produced by committee. Art that allows itself to be what it is doesn’t need opinions and suggestions to flourish.
If the author of that article were remotely interested in their process or what the actual practical implications of using AI on a project are, they could have had something worth reading.
Instead they went into the interview looking to push a position and badgering without listening rather than making even a passing attempt at something resembling journalism. Because ultimately they don’t care about AI, or art, or games; they care about rage clicks.
They can be binding in the sense that they can govern the licensing or potentially ownership of submitted assets. So like, for example, a ToS could have a bunch of clauses that carry no legal obligation for you, but could also include a clause that grants the company licensing to use your likeness or things submitted to the server or interaction with it. The same way any ToS can license the use of your metadata for sale to 3rd parties.
That doesn’t have any particular legally binding requirements of you, but it can serve as a shield in the event of a lawsuit if, say, Facebook uses your profile photo in some advertising materials.
It can also be useful if you’re running a small project like an independent game server. Even if there’s literally no money in it, it can be helpful to clarify who owns what in the event of something like a false DMCA. If a developer who once was doing work with you suddenly decides to take their ball and go home, some sort of agreement that outlines your ownership or usage rights surrounding code submitted to your mod can protect you when they turn around and send Steam a DMCA.
But yeah, nobody’s going to get sued for using a service in a way that the ToS prohibits unless it’s already illegal, like theft.
Artists aren’t lawyers and don’t want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn’t most of us.
Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.
Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn’t going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn’t really care.
AI art of any reasonable quality still requires significant human input. I don’t just mean prompt engineering, I mean actually having an artist using more traditional techniques to make adjustments or provide a base for the AI work. The output of raw AI art on its own can be impressive at times, but it’s not consistent enough to maintain a style for any sizeable piece of work.
If you want to be able to create a bunch of assets that look like they were designed for the same project with AI, somebody still needs to do some art.
What AI does do, though, is give those artists the ability to exponentially increase their productivity independently, with no particular need for the sort of labor-hour organization that a corporation provides.
It should be telling that the corporate media spin on this is to attack it and to publicize voices that criticize it, but never those that express nuance. That’s because it terrifies every useless corporate lackey who understands its actual potential to empower independent artists of all kinds.
You’d be making a mistake there. AI elements can’t be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There’s also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.
Like, let’s look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1097400802764664843/1110453997413867560/image.png
I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.
Who owns it?
Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.
So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn’t hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there’s some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn’t eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn’t eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.
At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it’s much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.
I’d love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of ‘AI bad!’ and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.
This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That’s a good thing.
People who haven’t used this tech really have it backward. This enables indie artists to create stuff on their own without corporate oversight. This interview was an opportunity to explore that, but they decided to follow the corporate line of attacking this actually successful four person studio instead of asking about what makes them tick with any actual interest.
What a terrible interview. The interviewer literally repeatedly asks questions that they’ve already answered and shows pretty clearly that they haven’t bothered actually researching or trying AI art technology. They certainly seemed to have read plenty of articles about how bad AI is, but didn’t even bother scratching the surface of how it’s actually used.
It reads like a hit piece coming from someone who only reads what comes up in their feed.
I’m running windows for my daily, but I’ve got Ditto and it works great. I have like 3 clipboards set up, could set up more. It just needs a different hotkey combination. It’s really simple.
Do you at least have 4 clipboards to go with them? Because I don’t think I could ever go back to a single clipboard.
It’s probably a really good time for independent creators with no connections to the established industry to make some waves and fill that void.
Right, but compare the effort to the results. People were bussing in from all over the country, but like what actually changed?