07mk
1d ago
I'd been noticing some high profile Twitter account deletions the past few days, but I hadn't thought of it as coordinated. Your note about what you heard on the BBC makes me think that there could be a coordinated push, and it all reminds me of the mainstream narrative about a week or two after Harris won the nomination, when we were deluged with talk about how everything suddenly felt different and hopeful, that there was a real sense of on-the-ground excitement about her candidacy, along with a sense of solidarity among all the Democrats falling in line now that their candidate was decided. It was a pretty transparent attempt at bootstrapping electoral momentum and excitement, and it fizzled out as expected within a few weeks, and the election, of course, proved beyond any doubt that it was completely made up.
There have been many pushes to get off of Twitter before, even before Musk's purchase of it, and this looks like just the latest. To be fair, I do think the Twitter boycotts have been more serious post-Musk, but following this election which proved that a majority of American voters preferred Trump over Harris, manufacturing some sort of popular notion that people are fed up with the disinformation and rightwing hate or whatever on Twitter, or that they just dislike Musk, isn't likely to gain much traction.
I do worry that this push will push a few more leftist figures to more echo chambers, but at the same time, this creates an opportunity for the less extreme leftist figures to use Twitter to engage and build something sane that can appeal to the mainstream crowd that uses Twitter.
In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).
Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.
I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.
07mk
2d ago
So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
07mk
4d ago
I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.
Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.
07mk
7d ago
I would say that's likely doable, but it'd still take professional-level talent and effort to make a video that long that convincing.
07mk
10d ago
There is no way of proving or disproving it, since the claim is based around the SocJus notion of "privilege," which is fundamentally unfalsifiable. The claim that America is simply not ready for a black woman president isn't some categorical one about how no black woman could possibly win in 2024 due to there being too many sexist racists who would just refuse to vote for her. It's that a politician who is identical to Harris in every way except for being a white male would have won more points due to having to face less implicit bias from the media and the electorate, which would have translated to more votes going to this fictional man than the real Harris, with the gap accounting for the real Harris's loss to Trump.
Obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
Likewise, your history of voting for black men and/or white women would mean nothing to someone making this kind of claim, because, again, the claim isn't that you're one of the many vile American racists who would categorically vote against any black or female person. It's that, if these politicians were white and/or male, then you would have required less from them in order to convince you to vote for them. The fact that you voted for them even though they're black and/or female just proves how good of politicians they actually were, to overcome the biases you must have had against them and convince you to vote for them over someone more white and/or male. And that's before getting into the whole stuff about intersectionality where black women face bigotry in ways that are beyond merely combining the bigotry faced by black people and by women.
Again, obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
07mk
10d ago
Based on past performance, I would guess the worst case is the most likely one with a lot of confidence. However, past performance isn't always indicative of future performance, and I do have some hope that something like the best case will happen. Political success plays out almost entirely in votes, much like business success plays out almost entirely in profits, and if some tactic keeps losing you votes or profits, well, you can only keep following that tactic for so long before you run out of your accrued capital. 2024 may be the indication that this tactic has started to hit that breaking point; the sheer number and financial losses caused by the "woke" nature of a lot of media has added up to the point that some companies have begun to figure out that simply calling fans bigots isn't a viable corrective tactic. Perhaps the Democrats will also begin to figure this out about the electorate.
Depressingly, even taking into account all that, I'd still guess that the worst case is the most likely. It's so easy to see that any political party that actually cares about winning would choose the best case and avoid the worst case like the plague. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist, everyone knows that blaming people you don't like for your own failures is extremely seductive, even more seductive than blaming external circumstances, which is already very seductive, and everyone knows that blaming anyone other than yourself doesn't help much when it comes to improving oneself for the purpose of not repeating some failure from the past. Thus if people you like and respect are telling you that it's all the bad bigots' fault that you failed, you should be highly suspicious of the possibility that you're in an echo chamber that genuinely believes and tells you things that sound really nice to you, but which don't help you win in the future.
Which, I doubt the Republicans are any better on this, but the point of the Democratic party is that it's better than the alternatives. It's supposed to be the party of the educated and the empathetic, so much so that it actually knows the best interests of a significant portion of the population even better than they themselves do. If it can't even figure out its own best interests enough to know that any sort of blaming or placing of responsibility of failure outside of oneself is counterproductive for winning elections, then it calls into question why it's any better than the alternatives outside of simple sectarian allegiances.
07mk
10d ago
I thought this comment was a one-liner that was poking fun at the types of humor-policing busybodies that would unironically use a statement like "do better" in response to a harmless one-liner. The sub-thread that followed below indicates that I was mistaken. FWIW, I thought both one-liners were funny and added value to this forum. The sub-thread that followed, less so.
07mk
16d ago
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
I could express a sort of faux-bafflement at the blatant lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy in this paragraph, highlighted by the parts I bolded, but that would be dishonest at this point. I just find it depressing.
Because what's clear to me is happening here is that many posters have, in good faith, honestly concluded that the Democratic party and the larger culture that it's a part of are bad things, and that they were hoping that Scott's experience of being burned by this would lead him to correcting his own earlier delusions that they're not all that bad. When people laugh at supporters of the leopards-eating-people's-faces party for getting their faces eaten by leopards, the point being made isn't that these supporters should tribally go against the party that hurt them, it's that they should have recognized that leopards eating people's faces is just a bad thing that they shouldn't have supported in the first place. Sometimes, the person comes to this recognition once the consequences of such support become personally unavoidable; other times, the person looks at his daughter's torn-off face and offers up his other daughter face-first to the same leopard while other people praise him for proving that he's principled by taking a costly action.
Of course, it is tribal thinking to, in honest good faith, believe that leopards eating people's faces is wrong in a world in which a significant team exists that supports the leopards-eating-people's-faces party. A less tribal conclusion to this person's continued support would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that this whole cancel culture thing is all that bad, if someone who ostensibly got burned by it is still supportive of the exact same forces that led to him getting burned."
This is isomorphic to the honest good faith belief that Trump is just that bad of a person, bad of a leader, bad of a ward of democracy, etc. that he's a bad choice for POTUS. In the presence of such a major team with skin in the game that disagrees with this, a less tribal conclusion would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that Trump is such an obviously or extremely bad choice for POTUS, or that my preferred choice for POTUS is any better."
Now, we can actually analyze these things non-tribally and try to conclude if the kinds of principles that led to the smearing of Scott is actually bad in comparison to how bad of a leader Trump is, as well as how much influences these things will have in the US depending on who's elected. I, for instance, think it's reasonable to conclude based on the fundamentals that Trump has demonstrated a lack of seriousness in how he governs through his first term, which works out mostly okay but which creates significant risk in emergencies, and this is worse than the emboldening effect that a Harris presidency would have on the people who brought forth the culture that led, among other things, to Scott getting smeared. But complaining about others being tribe-brained while also declaring that Trump is just so horrible is just trying to eat your cake and have it too. Either accept that other people can be just as tribal as you and come to the honest, good faith conclusion that [thing the other side likes] is actually horrible just like you have, or actually rise above the tribalism.
07mk
18d ago
We'd get more secure elections and, likely more importantly, the perception of more secure elections as judged by the electorate. And personally, "we," the people who agreed to take this costly action, would gain actual knowledge that wasn't there before, that we actually do care about fair elections and are not merely convincing ourselves that we care about fair elections.
07mk
18d ago
The big ones we’re missing are transparent boxes/individual envelopes and a full voting holiday. Sure, I’m in favor of both. I’m even fine with photo ID requirements. But they aren’t free, and I’d argue that they wouldn’t actually reduce the amount of bitching that goes on after an election. Trump and people like him will seize on the counting, the certification, any possible vector for sowing doubt. They have already baked into their worldview a far-reaching conspiracy against him, personally. That’s license to doubt even the most secure process.
I think this is precisely why something like this would be good to do. There are many people in power who agree with you and honestly, in good faith, believe that it won't actually appease Trump and his followers; if they went with it anyway, it would provide a truly costly signal to the electorate that they take election security seriously. So seriously, that they consider this kind of non-free step worth it even if it means submitting to demands from what they consider to be an irrational/cynical actor, thus increasing in the odds of someone irrational/cynical winning an election, in addition to both a reduction in their own status within their own peer groups and a reduction in the status of said peer group among various peer groups.
07mk
22d ago
The days of major news media sources paying generous salaries for skilled, intelligent investigators with deep knowledge of some beat and at least some sense of ethics are gone, maybe forever, with the drive to the bottom for advertising money.
I think skill/intelligence/expertise and having at least some sense of ethics are somewhat different with respect to salary levels. Certainly, it's easier to be ethical if you're well compensated, but I don't think having at least some sense of ethics when doing journalism requires some generous salary that is beyond the capabilities of these companies to pay now, and plenty of not-very-well compensated journalists (and other workers in general) can be and have been known to behave with at least some sense of ethics. If the lower budget to pay salaries means compromising on skills, intelligence, expertise, and ethics, among other things, they could have decided compromise less on ethics at the cost of compromising on other things, so that their journalists would have at least some sense of ethics, even if they weren't up to the same level of skill, intelligence, or deep knowledge of some beat as the other options.
Even the ownership seems to be mostly people who primarily want to either protect themselves from too-harsh criticism or use them as a weapon to attack their enemies, and so is willing to accept losses or much lower profits than a disinterested investor would expect.
I do think this is likely the biggest factor. It's hard to say exactly what determines how ethical any given journalist or individual in general would behave, but I think the leadership and company culture likely has a lot of influence, moreso than the budgets available for salaries.
07mk
22d ago
Well, I know there's some sort of "law" some political commentator coined, that says that any organization that's not explicitly right wing eventually becomes left wing. There are certainly enough examples that calling it a "law" doesn't seem obviously ridiculous.
The part I don't understand quite so well is why it happens to such an extreme extent like that 40% - 4% shift you say happened in journalism. From a purely cynical, selfish perspective, knowing the opposition better allows one to defeat them better - there's even a cliche saying, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," that alludes to this. So if I'm cynically running a left-wing organization in order to crush the right-wing, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers that we can learn from. From a good faith perspective of wanting to make the world a better place through leftist values and policies, it's obvious that blind spots develop when you're surrounded by people with similar values and beliefs. So if I'm a bright-eyed idealist running a left-wing organization in order to improve the world, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers to provide real, substantive criticism of the weaknesses and pitfalls of our values that I and people who agree with me can't recognize.
Which leads me to conclude that there are no real adults in the room, and everyone's just cynically aiming for the betterment of their own careers and status among peers, and if that results in their organization becoming ineffective or evil, then, well, hopefully that'll be after they've retired and the younger generations can deal with that.
This is the thought I had from seeing a related phenomenon in the field of entertainment, where over the past couple years, we've seen companies burn 8-10 figures in producing works like the films Indiana Jones 5 or The Marvels, TV shows Rings of Power or The Acolyte, video games Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Unknown 9: Awakening. I would have expected that the cynical selfish greedy decisionmakers at the top would have put a stop to it before all that money was sunk. But, well, it's not like it's their money - it's their investors' money - and even if they were to get fired, they at least gained status among their peers by greenlighting such things. That's the best I've come up with.
07mk
23d ago
I kind of agree here which is what makes this move so baffling. They know they’re not going to affect the outcome with this move, and they know that this kind of stupid reporting is only going to hurt their credibility.
Do they? What's the evidence that they're aware of the fact that this kind of thing would hurt their credibility? I remember as far back as 2016 during Trump's first campaign, I was among a tiny minority of Democrats complaining that there are more than enough honest ways to criticize and denigrate Trump, and that constantly reaching for hyperbole or even just lies would only hurt our ability to make any criticisms of him and other politicians in the future. We were shut down for "tone policing" or just ignored, and, sure enough, over the following 4 years of his presidency and continuing for 4 years after that, we've seen the trust in media keep going down. And the explanation for this has always been adding more epicycles about disinformation, Russian propaganda, low-information voters, and the like, instead of just owning up to the fact that when you don't speak credibly, your credibility declines in the eyes of the audience. At some point, when someone just keeps making the same obvious mistake over and over again that harms them, one has to conclude that, somehow, that mistake isn't that obvious or even understood by the person.
I also have to wonder if there's an evaporative cooling going on, where journalists who could recognize the constant self-destructive behavior of self-inflicted injuries to credibility that much of mainstream media engages in quit and did their own thing, and thus the ones remaining are only the most deluded ones.
07mk
23d ago
I don't know the sequence of steps, but it seems like you'd want to train a LORA, which I believe can be done using the popular Automatic1111 UI. As best as I can tell, Stable Diffusion 1.5 is still the most popular base model on which to build LORAs, but I think the tech exists for the more recent versions too. There are a decent amount of resources in the Stable Diffusion subreddit about this sort of stuff.
07mk
23d ago
They’ve already been calling Trump Hitler for 8 years. Why would it finally stick?
Indeed. I remember probably as far back as 2016, and certainly by 2018, joking that Democrats were calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" was considered trite. I don't know whether to even believe that this is something that counts as an "October surprise" due to how banal this is. If it's an actual attempt at a coordinated smearing, it speaks to an incredible level of incompetence in the Democratic party and its media supporters. A level of incompetence so great that I wouldn't have believed that it was possible until this year. Unfortunately, after what I've seen this year, it actually seems depressingly plausible that the top decisionmakers for a movement that believes that this election will literally determine life and death of democracy in America, thought that this would be an effective tactic.
07mk
23d ago
I have no great overarching theory, but a couple of thoughts. One is that, at least since the 90s, and I'm guessing earlier, the idea that "separate is not equal" was taught as dogma to kids due to the history of the US, i.e. Plessy vs Ferguson & Brown vs Board of Education. We took that to heart. That meant that any difference at all in how people were treated - i.e. being "separate" - was, definitionally, unequal. So treating transwomen as literally indistinguishable from women in every single way, i.e. in their sex and not just in their "gender identity," became a moral prerogative.
Another is the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movement on the idea that it was an innate "born this way" thing. I remember back in high school, a friend of mine dated a girl who came out as gay after they broke up; when I talked about how he dated her back when she was straight, my friend "corrected" me by telling me that she was already gay when she dated him, she just didn't know it yet (I bought it at the time, but now I wonder how I could have taken this on faith when it's obvious that such a definitive statement about how sexual orientation works would require absolute mountains of empirical evidence to prove - I was very good at coming up with epicycles for this kind of stuff, I think). The movement to normalize trans people took the same tactic, hence the claim that, say, Bruce Jenner was a woman when "she" won the men's decathlon gold medal or Ellen Page was a man when "he" was nominated for best actress for Juno. This reinforced the idea that someone's "transness" is not tied to anything in physical reality but rather entirely up to the individual's personal judgment, which meant that autogynephiles were encouraged to and celebrated for transitioning, and such people absolutely want access to female-only spaces, and so discriminating against them on the basis that their sex was male despite their gender being otherwise became verboten.
07mk
23d ago
I wish I had a simple answer, but I think there isn't a pole star to follow other than the vague notions of making things "better" in some real sense by increasing prosperity and reducing suffering for each and every individual. One obvious problem there is that these things are highly idiosyncratic and difficult to measure, but I think e.g. getting rid of anti-sodomy laws or making gay marriage a thing helps to achieve that better by benefiting gay people, or having progressive taxes and welfare and socialized health care helps to achieve that better by benefiting poor people. I think stuff like "equality" or "freedom" are decent enough slogans for supporting bringing up people who were considered lesser than others or who were granted fewer rights than others, but only exist as end goals in some far flung future where we have so much prosperity that each individual is equally free to create a literal heaven in reality for themselves. In the here and now, I think the immediate goals include figuring out which of existing systems can be dismantled for easy gains (I think treating individuals on the basis of group identity is one such system that needs dismantling, which is where I diverge greatly from the modern progressive movement), or figuring out how to maintain economic growth so as both to uplift the poorest of us and to bring about that scifi post-scarcity future, or figuring out how better to advance knowledge so that we can build the tech needed to free us from our physical constraints (this, too, is where I disagree heavily with modern progressivism, as they seem all too happy to play-act at knowledge generation through a cargo cult of academics).
From a high level view, perhaps you can say that the goal is bootstrap our way into figuring out what the metaphorical pole star is, since we've been forced to contend with the reality that the pole stars that our civilization used to follow - and still follow to a great extent - were merely mirages that happened to be useful in certain contexts but also greatly harmful in certain others.
I've also said before that a progressive is someone who read Brave New World by Huxley and thought, "Hey, this seems like a pretty cool society to live in" like I did, and I think that's generally true, though that specific world probably isn't a realistic end state goal.
07mk
23d ago
I think there’s room for a stable equilibrium, and it probably involves distinguishing sex from gender.
I think this was the equilibrium 10-25 years ago when I was growing up/young adult, and it's been proven to be unstable. I think the only stable equilibrium at this point would be far future scifi where literal sex change is possible.
07mk
23d ago
Are you hoping for them to have an epiphany that the progressive hivemind previously ordered them to fight for things that they now know were bad, and realise that this might be happening again? (Useless without persuading them that they themselves and past progressives actually took marching orders from a progressive hivemind, as opposed to fighting for what they themselves believe to be right.)
Genuinely having good faith belief that XYZ is right and then fighting for XYZ is how someone takes orders from a hivemind, though, whether that be progressive or conservative or any other ideology or way of thinking. And this, to me, is the sticking point of the issue I have as a progressive with the movement that's called progressive; the point of progressivism is progress, which means moving forward, not just moving in some direction and then declaring the direction as forward. In order to do the former instead of doing the latter while honestly but mistakenly believing that it's the former requires actually acknowledging this risk and finding ways to mitigate the risk. A risk which can never be reduced to zero or even all that close to zero, but which can still be reduced through things like empiricism and discourse.
As you say, though, this is useless unless progressives are convinced that they actually took orders from a progressive hivemind, or at least acknowledge the very real risk that that they are taking such orders, which seems about as likely as a snowball's chance in hell right now. The fact that this is the state of things seems pretty insane to me, akin to a world in which, say, Muslims can't be convinced that there is only one god who is called Allah or Christians can't be convinced that Jesus Christ is the son of God and died for our sins.
07mk
23d ago
Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
07mk
24d ago
A question that intruiges me as well. My guess is that that it will be entirely forgotten the same way that the pedo rights movement of the 70's was. Sure every once in a whole someone will dig out some receipts, and it will be seen as that weird thing that apparently happened in the past, but it will not be something pinnable on the progressive movement
I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.
Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.
I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.
07mk
24d ago
It was a joke.
I see, it must have gone over my head, but that's not an unusual experience for me with jokes, unfortunately. So is it that you were just being ironic, and that your meaning was the opposite, that the mysticism around art being imbued with a part of the artist's soul is still quite common in artists' circles, with a part of Duchamp's soul being in that toilet just as much as, e.g. part of Van Gogh's soul being in his self portrait?
07mk
24d ago
If your view is that we need to redefine what 'stealing' is in order to specifically encompass what AI does then yes, you can make the argument that AI art is stealing, but if you do that you can make the argument that literally anything is stealing, including things that blatantly aren't stealing.
The issue here is that when we're talking about "stealing" in the copyright/IP law sense, the only way something is "stealing" is by legally defining what "stealing" is. Because from a non-legal perspective, there's just no justification for someone having the right to prevent every other human from rearranging pixels or text or sound waves in a certain order just because they're the ones who arranged pixels or text or sound waves in that order first.
So if the law says that it is, then it is, and if it says that it isn't, then it isn't, period.
So the question is what does the law say, and what should the law say, based on the principles behind the law? My non-expert interpretation of it is that the law is justified purely on consequentialist grounds, that IP law exists to make sure society has more access to better artworks and other inventions/creations/etc. So if AI art improves such access, then the law ought to not consider it "stealing." If AI art reduces it, then the law ought to consider it "stealing."
My own personal conclusions land on one side, but it's clearly based on motivated reasoning, and I think reasonable people can reasonably land on the other side.
I'd say you owe them nothing in debt. The person who lent you the charger presumably did so without you promising him some share of the proceeds from your use of the phone that's capable of being used due to the charger. The person presumably did so out of the goodness of his heart, because lending a charger is a very low cost act, so low that they were presumably willing to do so for no expectation of payment. Let's meet that expectation.
Otherwise, then we can raise the question of how much do you owe the cafe for using their energy (freely provided from their plugs) to power your phone to make this call that led to you earning billions of dollars? What about the phone company that connected you to this client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is your monthly subscription fee? What about the phone manufacturer who sold you the device that enabled you to talk to your client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is the upfront payment for the device?
I say, these people made their bed when they decided to provide their goods or services to you at whatever price they set; let them lie in it.
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