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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Grok will let you make anything right now.

Okay, not literally anything. Hardcore porn appears to be banned. Still, I am not sure society is ready for a mainstream image model that lets you make sexy pictures of female congresswomen showing their feet.

I am really curious how this shakes out over the next few days/weeks. I am sure that the New York Times and Washington Post hitpieces are being typed right now. Was this level of freedom intentional, or an oversight? Will Elon fold immediately? My guess: he shuts down the ability to generate identifiable people in lewd situations. That is the one thing Americans won't stand for for some reason.

Things have been quiet on the AI front lately, despite or perhaps because of the election. I suspect that the major labs are afraid to rock the boat and risk getting blamed if things go poorly.

At some point in the near future, if it doesn't get regulated out of existence, people will just get used to it. No one finds it shocking that I can write a story where I make something up about a politician. This is like that movie The Invention of Lying where the protagonist discovers you can just say things that aren't true and everyone believes it because they don't know about lies yet.

People will quickly get used to the fact that images are not reliable sources of information. I already find myself ignoring AI generated images which have a distinctive style, but which would have grabbed my attention just a couple years ago.

I wonder if film will make a comeback. ("I'll believe it when I see the negatives.")

I think it is trivial to also create negatives of whatever with modern tech.

It was trivial in the 90s in that film printers existed -- I think you could still tell the difference under forensic examination though, even with a modern update. (Which would be very very expensive -- Lightjet machines still have niche usage, mostly for printmaking -- but are NLA new and IIRC max out at around 4k dpi -- which would still be easily distinguished from a trad negative. A good used unit like this runs to six figures, and nobody is making any more of them.)

Why couldn’t you just take a film picture of the AI generated scene? There’s no depth to film, a flat image should be indistinguishable from the real thing.

35mm has a grain density that works out to about 5.6K, so if you have an 8K monitor then you shouldn’t be able to detect pixelization.

It doesn't work -- the grain density of 35mm film might be more or less than that depending on the film, but the grain is randomly distributed in both space and size rather than on an even grid like a monitor. You'd still see pixels -- probably quite casually if you used an 8k screen, and forensically to quite a high resolution I'd think.

The Lightjet machines work because they are sort of like a laser printer without the toner -- the 'pixels' are obtained by shooting the paper/film with a laser, so they bleed into each other nicely, don't staircase diagonals, etc. TBH I'm not sure that you couldn't tell the difference between even a negative made that way and an optical one under a microscope or something -- Lightjet was/is mostly used for prints (very not demanding resolution-wise) or copy-negatives (much more demanding depending on neg-size, but the intended final output is usually still a print, so there's some wiggle room there)

You can definitely take pictures of a screen to do digital to film transfer. The service I've used (quite a while ago) used a CRT screen, which might help prevent obvious moire artifacts. I suspect it would be easily forensically detectable, thouh.

Certainly it is literally a possible thing to do -- it also was possible in the 90s, and people used the $200k film recorders instead to even get to magazine-imagesetting standards of quality. Even a copy-negative (film-to-film) is potentially distinguishable from a true one; making pixels look like film under magnification is a harder problem. Nation-state actors/TLAs might figure something out if the incentives were large enough, but for most normal situations "let me examine the negatives" would be good enough proof of authenticity.

Yep, exactly my thoughts. This is why if you’re ever doctoring documents (shame!) you should doctor then print then rescan.

Also make sure you don’t use the default Word settings if you’re faking something supposedly written on a typewriter.

Hey, they would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling bloggers ...

Far from it, given how few companies can deal with negatives at all anymore. Sure, such tech could be developed, but there is no financial incentive for the required scale to make it viable.

The incentive will arrive as soon as people start saying "I'll believe it when I see the negatives."

Not so. It's not enough for people to desire negatives. There has to be a mass of people who're willing to pay significant amount of money for that. As it is, there are no signs towards that and all signs towards the exact opposite direction (newspapers aren't exactly doing great financially).

A better example is that a century ago people bought those grainy pictures of the Loch Ness Monster or the Cottingley Fairies (or more recently Bigfoot) and now everyone knows about airbrushing and then photoshop.

Is an artist allowed to paint a picture of Mickey Mouse murdering Hillary Clinton in negligee with the soles of her feet showing? Should the paint manufacturers limit the scope of output?

Currently the GenAI companies are not selling “paint” but offering painting services. You are telling them you want them to draw a picture of Mickey Mouse murdering Hillary in negligee with her feet showing, you are not drawing it yourself. The painter offering the painting service can certainly refuse requests that they feel to be problematic.

I don't think that's quite right. The "them" you are telling is a tool, not a person. It shouldn't be expected to exercise any more discretion than your paintbrush does. It's more like they're letting you rent their super-cool paintbrush that can paint whatever you want, including Mickey Mouse and Hillary Clinton.

At no point does another person's discretion come into it. I don't see the argument that they should be made to prevent you from painting those things any more than a brush manufacturer.

I mean, that battle had been fought and lost already. Software-as-a-service is the most prevalent thing now and no company will categorize this as you renting their software.

I buy software licenses for my team. A couple years ago a salesman for a major vendor of engineering software told me that their permanent licenses were being phased out and from now on only yearly subscriptions would be offered.

I got a few more permanent licenses using the excuse of available capital expense budget. The salesman told me they will never again allow that.

We've built such a fragile system. These license management tools are sensitive and prone to breaking under the very best of circumstances. No possibility these licenses are accessible on old hardware 10 years from now.

Something robust and important has been thrown away.

Yeah, good point. Something like a tattoo artist comes to mind.

What if I want a baker to do the picture in icing on a cake ... in Colorado?

Then it goes to the Supreme Court for the umpteenth time.

More interesting is not the principle, but the ability.

Paint can't be made to only draw ideologically agreeable figures. AI's ability to be ideologically loyal is still up in the air, but it may very well be.

Dispense yourself of the illusions that people won't grasp at this power because it would violate customary norms of an old order. They already ignored this for so many things. Ask RMS.

Viscerallly I kind of get it, but legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”? I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.

I try not to be too much of a libertarian autist, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a tool which can be misused like any other.

Yeah, my impulses are the opposite of yours. I fully recognize that there's likely no practical way to regulate it, and near certainly no way to regulate it in a way that won't end up worse than the disease, so I have little opinion on what 'should be done'.

But... it still feels completely self-evident to me that the world, society, and human culure is worse for this technology existing. It is what it is, I suppose.

It sounds like you agree completely with zataomm?

I don’t think so. At least not the part I quoted. I don’t have the sensibilities of a libertarian autist. No part of me feels the ‘just a tool’ or ‘licensciousness is freedom’ sensibilities. I’m just a Luddite with learned helplessness.

If I had a magic button I could push that would make all this disappear I wouldn’t shed any tears about lost freedoms or technological progress. But I recognize that authoritarian regulations aren’t magic buttons.

legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”?

A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban $NEW_THING to preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.

Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.

For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.

If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.

What was the regulation on iron swords? As I understand it, they propagated out quite rapidly because the military edge, no pun intended, was too great to ignore.

Automobiles are a terrible example. First, there were obvious analogues to the regulatory regime we’d eventually use. It still took decades to notice the skulls and make a fuss. I’m sure smart policymakers complained that wailing mothers were just “reactionaries.” I’m sure they liked their scare quotes, too.

Second, automobiles were more of a material issue than a skill issue. Elites weren’t concerned about losing their monopoly on highway speeds. They were afraid of getting hit by fucking cars.

Compare gun regulation. The buzzkills aren’t a warrior class, complaining that butchering civilians used to take skill. No, they don’t want anyone committing a massacre, and decided not to let any moron have his own machine gun. The ban was born of an overwhelming sentiment that potential for abuse outweighed benefits.

There is a smooth continuum between laissez faire and bans; direct enforcement of unwritten rules is somewhere in the middle. The cries to ban generative AI now surely involve some class interest—all that dark money in furry art has to go somewhere! They also represent a sentiment, a vibe, that the promise of endless art or smut isn’t actually worth all that much. That maybe, just maybe, the technology is worth more to scammers than to reasonable people.

So we end up with knee-jerk reactions. Negotiating positions from which we try to work out just which unwritten rules need to make it to the page. How else are we supposed to figure it out?

It was not uncommon for swords to be banned in urban areas or when walking around in public. Sometimes broader attempts were made: the Qin dynasty (ever the innovator in methods of social control) mass confiscated weapons more generally and only allowed agents of the state to own arms. That was comparatively rare, even in China: if you have hordes of barbarians always testing the reach and authority of your state, you need peasants to be able to defend themselves.

on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten [rules]

I’m not seeing any suggestion that those bans arose from technological instability. Link?

Arguably the Japanese policy mentioned in @Ioper’s link, where relics and art pieces are allowed, but mall ninja shit is banned…except that comes at it from the complete other direction. We disarmed Japan at gunpoint, and they kept to it after we left, but added an exception for cool artifacts.

technological instability

Driving down the cost of something that used to be expensive to near-zero is itself a destabilizing force- you make iron working cheap, you make swords cheap, and the distribution of swords is the definition of "balance of power". It's why the usual suspects are also terrified of 3D printers (because you could create scary guns with them) and drones (see Ukraine), though they seem to be more distracted by the fact that blasphemous imagery is now cheap as free at the moment.

Which doesn't appear to have happened with swords.

The timing is all off. Western Europe didn't have the state capacity to ban La Tene weapons, and I haven't seen evidence they tried. Qin China may have done so, but they existed right as iron supplanted bronze; hardly a too-cheap-to-meter situation. Then the Japanese sword hunts are centuries after their metallurgy developed.

Those are all bad examples for someone trying to argue that elites are Luddites.

Arms control is quite common and not inherently or even generally a response to new technology.

"Sword hunts" was a fairly common occurrence in Japan as well.

in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains

I agree that this is ridiculous, but I'm also not sure how I'll make a living when machines can do everything I can cheaper, better, and more reliably.

By owning the machines, evidently.

I'm sure some TekLord will allow you to enter his service in the model training mines. After all, can't trust the machines with important things like "click the squares that contain an enemy combatant".

cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.

This comes very close to what was actually done in the UK. Common sense eventually prevailed, (edit:) but it set back automobile development in the UK by probably half a century.

Wow:

the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city

It’s a tragedy that the closest we have to “road locomotives” are Australia’s road trains.

road locomotives

That's what they called steam cars and steam tractors when they were just invented, which makes sense given that rail locomotives were first.

Oh don’t worry they’re working hard on that. Automakers are already proposing Saudi Arabia style GPS systems to auto-ticket anyone for driving above the speed limit. And lawmakers are discussing mandatory interlock breathalyzers for all drivers.

I have often wondered if we will eventually reach a state where you can only navigate to destinations you can enter into your car's navigation computer; so that if you wanted to go off road or to somewhere you aren't authorized to go, you simply could not do it with the car.

That would be a huge problem for people with long driveways.

The sorts of people who would implement this are likely new urbanists who will also try to force you into a tiny apartment in a high-rise in a blighted urban core. Driving your car to your single family home with a long driveway would be strongly discouraged.

I want to thank you for writing this, sincerely.

I had never considered that very logical end state.

And it makes my blood fucking boil.

This is how they actually take the wilderness away from us. Not through arbitrary laws that wouldn't survive challenges (and that people would willfully violate anyway) but by making it impossible to do on machine/electrical assisted physical level. They'll double down by making it illegal to own an "analog" machine that you can still control on your own (gas or diesel engine without any electronics). Everything will have GPS to the point that a lack of GPS will look like a "hole in the ocean" on a highway or other road and they'll send the police drones to investigate.

This is how they take it all away.

Not only are "they" not interested in taking the wilderness away from you, "they" make billions of dollars a year thanks to you visiting the wilderness. This post is just doomporn.

I don’t think that true. They want you to visit The Wilderness(tm) not go off wherever you want. I don’t think they’d prevent you from leaving the city entirely, but you’ll be directed towards nearby designated parks and nature preserves. And I think the bigger concern for me is that a car that’s entirely electric and hooked up to GPS alongside electronic currency sets up a situation easily controlled by a social credit score. Maybe your electric usage was too high and your car refuses to go anywhere but work and home.

They want you to visit The Wilderness(tm) not go off wherever you want.

Unfortunately unless you live in one of a small number of countries with "right to roam" you already can't go wherever you want.

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If the managerial state was interested only in doing things that benefit it rather than things that give it the appearance of control it would not be the managerial state.

If you don't think they could mandate something this stupid you need to spend more time reading random EU guidelines for whatever industry you work in.

Administrative pettiness has no bottom. Believe me.

It's amusing to read this, then flick down to the discussion about how the handmaid's tale doomposting is obviously totally ridiculous. "They want to take away the wilderness from us" is the handmaid's tale for dudes.

Do you guys even have any wilderness left in Europe besides the alps? I kind of thought it was all farms and pastures.

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Yep. I think it'll also eventually be illegal to raise a kid without allowing your parenting to be scrutinized in detail. I think the main reason it isn't today is because it'd be too expensive, not because it'd be politically untenable.

it'll also eventually be illegal

It's already illegal; more a question of degrees now.

Yes, I agree.

Or the printing press which allows heretics to attack the honor of the holy Catholic Church. Let's pray this doesn't cause schisms and violence.

From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.

It is in their class interest not to destabilize a society that they are on top of. But internal threats are not alone. There's external threats to worry about. And those can't be as readily forced not to consider novel technology.

Don’t Russia China Iran etc rely much more on information control by the elites than we do?

All elites do to some degree, but China and Iran have hard power to lean back on that they have proven they are not afraid to use.

Russia is more fox like, but you do start mysteriously playing with grenades on your plane if you oppose the regime too overtly.

Meanwhile, the West is a lot more dominated by narrative management. Look at how the UK dealt with its local trouble recently for instance, it was mostly playing through the media and setting up frames rather than bluntly bashing the locals, though bashing there was.

Another thing to consider is how secure a particular elite is vis-à-vis the people who would benefit from technological advancement. Chinese corporations are solidly loyal to the party and integrated into the power structure, when western tech is basically a counter-elite at this point.

I mean you do have a point that China, Iran, and Venezuela use hard power internally to a degree that the US at least is probably incapable of doing. On the other hand, Chinese and Iranian censorship is legendary.

I'd argue it's amateurish actually. It looks extremely blunt compared to the refined techniques of narrative control the US developed through the study of social psychology in the cold war. Now granted, the mask has been slipping and US psychological operations have become pretty bad as of late, but the base level is still very sophisticated compared to Iranian methods.

I find China harder to evaluate. I don't know enough about how they do their internal propaganda. I know their diplomatic efforts have been a bit difficult but that doesn't necessarily correlate.

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Bohemia (following Wycliffe) had already realized a bunch of the problems with papal teachings and practices, prior to the invention of the printing press.

The printing press merely allowed it to be scaled up.

The Founding Fathers used hand-cranked printing presses and never anticipated there would someday be fully automatic assault presses.

I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British. So the printing presses used by the Founding Fathers did a lot of harm even without being "automatic assault presses".

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better off than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Australia's doing worse on a couple of metrics (gun control and free speech, although we're not at European levels of hate speech laws), but a lot better on a bunch of others. In addition to what @AshLael said (no cities degenerated into chaos!), our politics are also far more stable; another civil war is unthinkable here.

I'd put Australia first on that list of five countries in terms of my preference to live in; the USA would probably get second, because Canada and the UK have serious problems of their own and India of course is a third-world country, but seriously Australia's not that bad.

After Australia's reaction to covid, i would not put it behind British state control. You guys were chasing down teens and harrasing women stopping on park benches, and restricting freedom of movement and curfews and 'papers pleasing' all over the place. It was insane watching it from the states. How quickly we forget.

The usa is not "close to civil war" That is mostly a larp for the very far right and left to fantasize about in very online spaces. It has about as much chance as "The Purge" or "Running man" at becoming reality. The country is pretty well mixed in geographically despite the voting maps that show the final results.

I also ask, were you born in Australia or was it a choice to move there?

After Australia's reaction to covid, i would not put it behind British state control.

That's not the part that makes Australia leaps and bounds ahead of Britain, indeed. Britain seems to be having a bad time of the culture war recently, what with the rioting, and I hear there are also economic issues.

The usa is not "close to civil war" That is mostly a larp for the very far right and left to fantasize about in very online spaces. It has about as much chance as "The Purge" or "Running man" at becoming reality.

It would take a big spark, but there are a few plausible ones. A hard hit on the debt ceiling (literally) defunding the police for an extended period. Obvious election fixing. Maybe court-packing. At least one other. None of these things are assured, by any means, but none of them are that unlikely either.

I also ask, were you born in Australia or was it a choice to move there?

Born here. Think I'm fourth-generation.

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The country is pretty well mixed in geographically

What does that have to do with the risk of civil war? The American Civil War was actually rather unusual, as civil wars go, in its clear geographic lines. Many civil wars don't involve secession attempts.

Compare, for example, the English Civil War(s). Yes, there were some geographic gradients — northwest vs. southeast, but even more city-vs-countryside — but only partially; and, AIUI, the two sides were still "plenty well mixed in," at least initially. Another, more recent civil war of "city-vs-rural" character was the Nepali Civil War. Or try looking at maps of the decades-long conflict in Colombia.

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I would put Australia as a serious contender for #2 country to live in, but I'm curious what the rest of your list looks like?

Who's your #1?

NZ I'd probably put on par with Australia or maybe a hair below due to marginally-greater levels of SJ.

Outside the Anglosphere it gets more complicated (and where I'd personally prefer to live starts to diverge from where I think would be objectively good places to live, as I'm decent at French and have a foggy idea about other Romance languages/Mandarin/Japanese but am only fluent in English). I've also a less clear idea of what's going on there. But of the five main Anglosphere countries I'd say only the UK is having enough trouble to potentially lose top-5 status, because Western Continental Europe is clearly worse in terms of SJ/ethnic conflict issues than anywhere else in the Anglosphere, Free Asia aside from the rather-uptight Singapore is also known as "ground zero bait for WWIII", and basically everywhere else is notably poorer.

I haven't the foggiest idea which African/South American/non-East Asian countries are better/worse than their neighbours. Russia clearly beats China but I'd take the First World over either, and obviously North Korea is terrible.

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I know right? I was just thinking the other day, man it really sucks having a secure border, a quarter of the crime, half the national debt, policy set by elected officials instead of unelected judges, clean cities, etc, etc.

When we talk about a secure border in the US, we're talking about preventing the wrong people from getting IN, not citizens from getting OUT as in Australia a few years ago.

Canada and the UK are poor compared to the US. And nanny states in the worst ways.

Our unelected Supreme Court is a powerful defense against the obvious failure modes other Anglo countries suffer from.

unelected Supreme Court is a powerful defense

An unelected Supreme Court is not useful unless you also happen to have a powerful Constitution, a people that still believe in means something, and a Federalist Society.

Yes, but Singapore is better than the US especially when you adjust for the difficulty level they are playing at. The US has massive land advantages over Canada (too cold) and India (too hot and dangerous neighbors).

Singapore is one city. Not a sprawling world power. They can't be properly compared.

Have you seen Britian lately? It is clear that the usa is a lot better of than the UK or canada or india or aus.

Britain and Canada are the way they are because they imported American wokeness without having any of the American cultural antibodies to wokeness like freedom of speech or the right to bear arms. If America never existed the point would be moot.

Britain was on the hard downturn way before american media "wokeness" was a thing.

Divorced from politics America’s extremely bountiful natural resources mean it is always likely to be wealthier than Britain. The same is true of Australia, which has politics (and a “nanny state”) closer to Britain’s but which is closer to the US in terms of income because of natural resources. Both countries have been richer than the UK since the 1880s and 1890s, before Britain’s decline as a world power accelerated in earnest.

With apologies to Voltaire, if wokeness did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.

I don’t think so. Wokeness emerged out of the uniquely American experience of, “oh shit, we have to live next to all these black people we imported now,” which was then imported to Europe after we bailed them out in the World Wars.

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As @2rafa pointed out yesterday, in a Parliamentary system, the party with a one vote advantage in the House of Commons has sweeping power to do what it wants.

The United States has much greater checks on power with, in theory at least, a federal system that devolves many powers to the states. It's also much more difficult to control all three branches of government .

The joke has always been "If not for the Revolutionary War we could have turned out like Canada. The horror".

This is less funny today in light of the widespread abuse of government power in the Commonwealth countries against their people, first during Covid, and now against speech. The elites are well and truly in control there in a way they aren't, quite, in the United States. And without the salutary influence of the United States, who knows what would happen?

There has always been a totalitarian current in the UK that there hasn't been in the US. It's been mitigated over the years by the fact that the elite loved their country and its people. Now that this is no longer true, the totalitarian impulse is taking the UK and Canada to some dark places.

God bless George Washington and the founding fathers.

If Kamala Harris gets to appoint two Supreme Court Justices I suspect the 1st Amendment will be found to have a hate speech exception that coincides with what Big Tech censors you for saying.

I'm actually not sure of that. That would be pretty disappointing if it turns out that Kagan is only pretending to care about free speech.

In theory there are much stronger safeguards in Canada and Australia because of their constitutions, the UK is pretty unique in that sense.

Australia's constitution doesn't provide safeguards of rights*; it has a number of safeguards of the political process (the ban on dual-citizens serving in Parliament, for instance, is constitutional), but not of individual rights. What we've retained, we've retained via not electing parliaments that would take them away.

*There are a few things the federal government can't do due to enumerated powers, some of which (e.g. bills of attainder) would be violations of rights. The state parliaments can do those things, though (they've never done attainder TTBOMK, but they could if they wanted).

I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British

Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The UK and Canada actually do have freedom of speech. It's just not interpreted as liberally as it has been by American judges in the latter half of the 20th century.

"Freedom of speech, unless your ideas suck" allows totalitarianism as long as the totalitarians get to draw up the list of which ideas suck. Remember that censorship only of ideas you don't like feels a lot like freedom of speech.

You're missing the point. The difference in freedom of speech between the US and Canada and the UK is not because of the first amendment. Canada and the UK also have laws protecting freedom of speech in basically the same language, but they've been interpreted differently. The first amendment also used to be interpreted very loosely, resulting in the US having many laws restricting speech in the past that would not be allowed today.

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The British abolished slavery without a Civil War! If the US had been militarily part of the UK you don't get WW I and II (probably) and as a bonus no communism.

I don't see how you figure this? The Kaiser was convinced Britain would stay neutral in WW1. What does it change if he expects Britain + America to stay neutral?

I'm actually listening to a WW I podcast and Germany was worried about Britain entering WW I. If it had been Britain + America, Britain would have been able to dictate terms. The German military was not stupid.

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Of course WW1 and 2 would start with the same arrangement of players if Britain was more powerful, but that doesn't there wouldn't be massive wars. Maybe the war would have been British vs the whole Europe.

Manifest Destiny!

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Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.

If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.

But the South's strategy for winning the Civil War relied on the UK Navy not allowing the South to be blockaded. The UK + North American North would have easily beaten the South and so could have forced the South to end slavery without a Civil War.

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It should be noted that the Grok image generation is just a wrapper calling the open "Flux" model behind the scenes: https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/1823614223622062151

Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.

Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.

How beefy? I thought I was looking into trying to run alphafold or some of the other structural bio models a year or two ago and we were talking like 20k. Is it easier to run inference on the image generation models or was I just stupid?

Both local FLUX models require 24 GB of VRAM uncompressed. You can buy a used 3090 with that much for $750 or a new one for $1,200. Or just rent time from an online GPU company like RunPod. And that's before you start getting into the quantized models; FLUX is really affordable.

Honestly I’m amazed that the 4070, being a 3090 with half the RAM, sold as well as it has. Though I stop being amazed once I talk to people that by all rights should know better.

It’s worth noting that even with a 3090 it’s still running in low-RAM mode anyway since the encoder has to fit in there too; but you can get it running better if you care to optimize it (or just use the 3090 as a secondary GPU) or just use the 8-bit quantization. It takes around 40 seconds per image at 1024px square.

You're still looking at ~850 USD for a 3090 new today today, compared to around 600 USD for an nVidia 4070, plus the increased size and power/heat. Not a great deal if you need the VRAM, but it's not clear you do need it yet. I'd err in favor of futureproofing, but if you've got One Game You're Gonna Play for seriously for the next couple years, I could see the argument.

Though the various suffixes are more clearly dumb. 4070 TI Super Omega Super Saiyin Blue is at the same price point, nearly the same size, and similar power profiles, so looks like you're trading slightly better DRSS for less VRAM?

I do beg to differ on the VRAM, specifically because other GPUs in the same price class all carry 24GB (and any next-gen console is going to have unified memory or at 16GB of VRAM, I suspect), and after that it’s just the wanting it now, not after optimization. And while I do get that you’re still not fitting a 70B LLM in 24GB, it’s still going to have an impact as far as needing to swap with main memory goes, or at least that’s my impression.

It’s also worth noting that a 3090 is no less capable in AI tasks than a 4090, 5090, or 6090 will be, simply because a card with more VRAM than 24GB won’t be released for a long, long time due to market segmentation.

The market seems to have caught onto that fact, unfortunately.

a card with more VRAM than 24GB won’t be released for a long, long time due to market segmentation.

What does this mean?

They want to be able to charge enterprises and server operators massively more than ordinary consumers, even for very similar silicon, because they can afford it, and the product is more valuable to enterprises doing work on GPUs than to consumers playing Hogwarts Legacy or dicking around with open source AI models.

The goal is to charge each customer as close to their maximum price as possible. That's much higher for enterprises, so the graphics companies load features that are especially valuable to them on specialty cards that cost much, much more than consumer cards without them. Much of this strategy has collapsed lately, with features like GPU vm passthrough coming to consumer cards, so they've reoriented this strategy to promoting using clusters of cards to get max VRAM for enterprises, which consumer platforms cannot accommodate.

CPU manufacturers do it too, which is why it's very hard to use ECC RAM on a computer unless you shell out for a workstation/server grade platform.

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It is in nVidia’s interest that cheap GPUs don’t get very much VRAM, because the limiting factor for how smart and performant an LLM/image generation model can be is how fast it can access the matrices. If you could get 80GB of VRAM, which is eminently reasonable, on a card for 2000 dollars then no business would buy the overpriced purpose-built cards.

Most image generators are a good deal more manageable : FLUX.1 dev is 24GB, but people have got it running on mobile GPUs with less than 4GB VRAM. It's slower -- a couple minutes per generation, as opposed to the <20 sec for running on a nvidia 3060 or equivalent -- but it's usable.

A good part of that is just that image generation models quantize better than LLMs, without become as 'dumb', so you can run down to fp8 (8-bit) with relatively little loss of information, and nf4 is good enough for a lot of uses even if notably different. But imagegen has also had a lot more software work done to do partial staging and some CPU offloading, in the casual sphere.

I don't know about Grok's image gen specifically, but having used Stable Diffusion for almost 2 years now, I can tell you that the cutting edge image generation stuff can be run reasonably fast (about 30-60s per a batch of 4 512x512 images) on a 5 year old gaming PC with an Nvidia 1070 that I was already using as my home computer, without any upgrades. I did upgrade to a more modern gaming PC with a 4090 last year, which can do a batch of 4 512x512 images in a few seconds. The entire new PC I bought, primarily for gaming, was around $4,500, with the largest chunk of that coming from the GPU, which you could probably cheapen out on with a 4080 or a 3090 and get plenty good performance.

I’ve been using Stable Diffusion on a 5 year old second hand laptop where the gpu was basically a ”well, might as well get it since the extra cost is just 50e” type of thing. Combine that with preconfigured uncensored cloud rental services and unrestricted image generation is ridiculously affordable if you care at all.

Honestly I see alot of handwringing about the potential for AI and how we are crippling AIs true end state because of woke/chud moral tainting of these computer models, but you can go to pixiv to see the absolute tsunami of unrestrained AI generated there, and the Chinese are even more degenerate. Unrestrained AI exists, its just too useless at this moment to do anything other than churn out degenerate pornography.

Their pro version (used by X?) is closed source though:

https://blog.fal.ai/flux-the-largest-open-sourced-text2img-model-now-available-on-fal/

FLUX.1 [pro]: A closed-source version only available through API. fal Playground here.

Yeah, the question is if Grok is really using that, and if so how much better it is compared to Dev. It could even plausibly be worse if it's simply a bigger variant of Schnell.

Holy crap you weren't kidding. This one is the craziest I've seen so far... https://x.com/CSP_Trading/status/1823767957731750097

Politicians aside, that at least seems to show that the AI is good with actually matching the adjective or adjectival phrase with the corresponding noun. I've found that AIs tend to get this sort of thing wrong a lot of the time; there'd be a good chance that the couch, bra, and panties would be given to random people in the image.

Seeing this and the replies about lookalike porn actresses made me have a random thought. As alluded to in the replies, lookalike actresses that actually really look like the original in a way that doesn't break suspension of disbelief are not easy to come by, which means porn parodies of live action works are always likely to be highly imperfect. If the idea of Han Solo playing with Luke Skywalker's lightsaber turns you on, the closest thing you're gonna get is probably gonna look like 2 young men cosplaying, and the image of actually young Harrison Ford and young Mark Hamill is stuck in your imperfect imagination.

And this is an area where I thought anime had a huge advantage over live-action. If you like the idea of watching some cartoon characters bang, you can usually pretty quickly find hentai artwork of that, often in a style very very similar to the original cartoon, and sometimes even by the exact same artist who drew the original cartoon using the exact same style. You're not getting a porn parody, you're essentially getting a porn version of the original work, in a way that you don't and simply can't get for a live action work.

Well, until now with generative AI. Of course, photorealistic CGI - or at least, close-enough-to-photorealistic CGI - has been a thing before this generative AI technology, but the skills and resources required to pull off a truly believable porn version of a live action work was just out of reach for hobbyists. AI is not there yet, certainly for video but also for still images, but, as they say, it's only going to get better. And given how in the anime world, a flood of hentai fanart of basically any semi-popular character is guaranteed, I wonder if we'll see this kind of thing happen with live-action works, which, of course, involve real actors with real faces and real bodies that they walk around in the real world with.

But then, we could enter an Ouroboros kind of situation where, as video gen AI gets easier and cheaper, all popular live action works are actually "live action, as presented by Disney," aka not live action but entirely computer-generated, with photorealistic CGI characters who don't actually look like real people, at least not intentionally. Imagine if photorealistic movies and TV shows that achieve that photorealism by actually taking video of real people acting in real places instead of using genAI go the way of plays, which still exist and are even quite prominent, but are eclipsed in audience size and stature by similarly styled video art.

Realistic deepfake pornographic imagery is definitely feasible with current technology. A moderately bright person with a decent GPU could probably start churning them out after a week of self-study and experimentation.

I think the reason you rarely see or hear about this is that no company wants to be associated with this content. It's banned on all mainstream platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Twitter. Maybe they fear legal liability, but I think the sheer "ick" factor is already sufficient to dissuade them from hosting it, for fear of reputational damage. So the discussion and dissemination of this stuff happens in private/obscure/sketchy forums.

Funny that it just puts (loose versions of) their faces onto generic hot woman bodies without even being prompted to. Harris is 59, lol.

I actually didn't recognize who they were supposed to be. It's not really "them" in any way the porn parodies of 2004 weren't "them" only without the actress informing us who she is.

Hairstyle, mannerism and catchphrases were enough to convince me that Vivids seminal (hehe) work Who's Bangin' Palin captured the physical essence of Sarah Palin perfectly in Lisa Anns headlining portrayal of a senior american politicians engaging in aggressive diplomacy with russian emissaries.

No, I'm serious. Just the hair and glasses and a 'you betcha!' were enough to spike the immersion. The other actresses just couldn't cut it, but Lisa Ann did.

For mere physical similarities to other visible public figures its alot more difficult. Perhaps only Anissa Kate can pull off pretending to be Gal Gadot, but thats because both of them are terrible actresses with worse accents.

(I imagine some more degenerate posters here would go 'ah I see you are a man of culture too').

I find Shadman's depiction of Hillary Clinton to be one of the classics of all time.

Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.

Like all other AI platforms, it refuses to embrace my artistic vision.

https://imgur.com/a/x2spRZY

All platforms I've tried have failed to produce an image for "Show me Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Chairman Mao twerking at a night club"

Show me Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Chairman Mao twerking at a night club

Here is Gab's attempt. Not quite what's described, but at least it tried.

/images/17237164734367964.webp

According to this, anything besides depicting relationships that aren't cisgender and heterosexual: https://x.com/KarlMaxxer/status/1823753493783699901

(This isn't necessarily due to those prompts being blocked for traditionalist cultural reasons, of course. But it's interesting.)

How do they know that one of these people isn't a really well passing transperson? Did they expect the image generator to make a poorly passing transwoman that you can easily spot?

The replies to that tweet are full of gay pics, seems to work fine.

As far as I can tell, it still has most of the same restrictions as the others? It won't do nudity, won't do gore, and won't show the prophet mohammed. The one thing it will do, that the others won't. is make pictures of copyrighted characters. So ironically, it refuses to do all the things that are clearly legal under US law (just contraversial), but it will do something that is clearly illegal (trademark infringement).

Making embarassing images of famous people is probably fine as long as it's obviously fake and satire, but could potentially be illegal libel if it gets realistic enough that people actually start to believe it.

There's no shortage of image generators that allow for illustration of copyright and trademark protected characters, though. Besides the free local Stable Diffusion, paid online services like Midjourney and NovelAI will generate images of copyright protected characters just by name, no tricks needed.

Notably, Midjourney IS being sued right now, so Grok could face a lawsuit as well, but the suit hasn't been resolved yet so we actually don't know if it's infringement.

Just the act of drawing something trademarked isn't illegal by itself though?

Yes, it is.

Copyright literally is the right to make copies. If little Timmy draws a picture of Mario for his fridge, it’s within Nintendo’s legal rights to issue Timmy with a takedown notice and threats of legal action if he does not comply.

Now nobody does that, because you’d have to be nuts, but copyright law is way more extensive than you’d think.

Copyright law is truly insane and makes criminals of us all.

From "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap" by John Tehranian (h/t: @naraburns):

To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment, we assume the worst-case scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email—represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

After spending some time catching up on the latest news, John attends his Constitutional Law class, where he distributes copies of three just-published Internet articles presenting analyses of a Supreme Court decision handed down only hours ago. Unfortunately, despite his concern for his students’ edification, John has just engaged in the unauthorized reproduction of three literary works in violation of the Copyright Act.

Professor John then attends a faculty meeting that fails to capture his full attention. Doodling on his notepad provides an ideal escape. A fan of post-modern architecture, he finds himself thinking of Frank Gehry’s early sketches for the Bilbao Guggenheim as he draws a series of swirling lines that roughly approximate the design of the building. He has created an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted architectural rendering.

Later that afternoon, John attends his Law and Literature class, where the focus of the day is on morality and duty. He has assigned e.e. cumming’s 1931 poem i sing of Olaf glad and big to the students. As a prelude to class discussion, he reads the poem in its entirety, thereby engaging in an unauthorized public performance of the copyrighted literary work.

Before leaving work, he remembers to email his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday. His friend had taken the photographs. And while she had given him the prints, ownership of the physical work and its underlying intellectual property are not tied together. Quite simply, the copyright to the photograph subsists in and remains with its author, John’s friend. As such, by copying, distributing, and publicly displaying the copyrighted photographs, John is once again piling up the infringements.

In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the “impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”

That evening, John attends a restaurant dinner celebrating a friend’s birthday. At the end of the evening, he joins the other guests in singing “Happy Birthday.” The moment is captured on his cellphone camera. He has consequently infringed on the copyrighted musical composition by publicly performing the song and reproducing the song in the video recording without authorization. Additionally, his video footage captures not only his friend but clearly documents the art work hanging on the wall behind his friend—_Wives with Knives_—a print by renowned retro-themed painter Shag. John’s incidental and even accidental use of Wives with Knives in the video nevertheless constitutes an unauthorized reproduction of Shag’s work.

At the end of the day, John checks his mailbox, where he finds the latest issue of an artsy hipster rag to which he subscribes. The ’zine, named Found, is a nationally distributed quarterly that collects and catalogues curious notes, drawings, and other items of interest that readers find lying in city streets, public transportation, and other random places. In short, John has purchased a magazine containing the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public display of fifty copyrighted notes and drawings. His knowing, material contribution to Found's fifty acts of infringement subjects John to potential secondary liability in the amount of $7.5 million.

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file-sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

Copyright literally is the right to make copies. If little Timmy draws a picture of Mario for his fridge, it’s within Nintendo’s legal rights to issue Timmy with a takedown notice and threats of legal action if he does not comply.

It'd be within Nintendo's legal rights to do such a thing, but it'd also be pretty easy for Timmy to defend himself with the Fair Use defense in the USA. Fair Use used to only be something that could be invoked defensively, but in 2015, the US 9th circuit court of appeals ruled that it was an expressly authorized right and exception to copyright (IANAL, so I don't know the exact difference this makes in practice), according to the Fair Use Wiki page.

There are 4 primary factors to consider when determining if some unauthorized copying falls under Fair Use, though other factors may also be considered:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work.
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

1 and 4 would be the most relevant for Timmy. It's not for nonprofit educational purposes, but neither is it commercial, and Timmy could argue that it served the educational purpose of him getting practice in drawing. And it's also almost certain not to have any effect on the potential market or value of any Mario property owned by Nintendo.

In the case of drawing fanart of Mario (versus recreating a specific official art of Mario), I believe trademark law, not copyright law, would apply, and Timmy would have an even stronger defense, since trademark infringement is based largely around the likelihood to confuse the audience or a customer, and Timmy's picture hanging on his fridge will almost certainly not do that.

The law can be bizarre and counterintuitive, but I believe it's not so rigid that someone drawing fanart of a famous character to hang on his fridge can be considered legally infringing just because of some technicalities. In the US, the people who write the laws and the justices who interpret them generally tend to understand that the purpose of copyright isn't to give creators exclusive rights to create copies, but rather to incentivize creators to create more and better things by giving them greater ability to monetize their creations through granting them certain exclusive rights to create copies, and this plays out with Fair Use. With trademark law, the purpose isn't to give companies exclusive rights to produce copies of certain logos or characters or etc., it's to help consumers avoid confusion by making sure that only certain companies get to publish certain logos or characters or etc., and since some unpublished fanart of a trademarked character simply can't cause customer confusion, there's no way that Timmy would lose a case against Nintendo in this.

Of course, the mere threat of lawsuit could be enough in many cases.

I see. In Sweden you have the explicit right to make private copies of publicly available material.

There's some protection for that in the US (see e.g. the RIAA vs Diamond) but not unambiguously enough (hence the RIAA vs Diamond).

Disney has done stuff like that in the past though, IIRC.

Yeah, they’re notably aggressive about enforcing their copyright. The fact that most companies don’t have the resources or don’t prioritize enforcing their copyright as much has led to a lot of people underestimating how extensive copyright actually is.

Im not a lawyer. But i think selling a subscription service for something explicitly marketed with pics like mario drinking beer, is very different from just drawing it. They're making money with these drawings, and also damaging the brands.

Obviously they can't use trademarked stuff in the marketing but the model being able to produce trademarked characters isn't meaningfully different from Photoshop or internet browsers dreaded by NTF-fans feature "right-click save as" unless we consider the model to be agentic.

I wouldn't consider the model agentic, but it seems meaningful that every other AI image generator specifically blocks this kind of stuff, whereas this one not only allows it, but seems to encourage it, with a sort of "wink wink, nudge nudge, there are no rules!" marketing. And in fact it still has rules, lots of them, it's just this one rule that it bypasses. So it seems like they intentionally built a tool that has "trademark violation" as its main use case. If nothing else, they're distributing images that violate trademark, since all those images come off of their web servers.

So is every cloud service.

It seems incredibly likely that after the cease and desist goes out later this week, Grok is neutered, but in the meantime everyone has heard about Grok.

It is if they want to monetize it (and presumably copyright lawyers would argue it serves some kind of promotional purpose for for-profit Musk businesses even if they don’t).

Basically, the technology exists and eventually people will have access to it. Maybe it can be kept locked down for a while, as long as it takes huge feats of engineering to make a good AI. But eventually people will have access to it. Arguments like this make me think, "I am not sure society is ready for everyone to have access to a printing press." Maybe society actually wasn't ready for that. But, well, it's coming.

It not being ready would be tragic if we had competent government. We do not.

Haha there are still limits. No Muhammad pictures: https://x.com/texsurfin/status/1823597288033329528

Currently works in assuring Grok that your are not offended:

https://x.com/Bret_Sears/status/1823868491830587552/photo/3

Loving the thumbs up Jesus.

The Jesus and Mohammed pics look like posters for a Marvel movie, like a live action version of South Park's "Super Best Friends." I wish Hollywood had the balls to make something like that.

Is it just me or does Grok handle text generation better than other image generators?

The underlying Flux model handles text absurdly well. In furry AIgen circles, people have been able to get it to add consistent signatures to their imagegens. It still sometimes struggles with perspective, but I'm kinda amazed that it's possible at all.

Even handles emoji! (why?!)

My galaxy brained take - political parties are using AI to astroturf online spaces in coordination of superusers to dominate election discussion. Can humans really argue with AI who can output an infinite amount of shlock? AI will (or should) be this year's Cambridge Analytica. I think Republicans/Trump may be too slow to adapt with how AI transformed the internet to really understand what they're against.

After the election, party-aligned AI models will come under scrutiny and be regulated to only whomever is in control.

If I were China here's what I would be doing:

Use bots to create Reddit accounts, subscribe to major subs, and then upvote comments based on woke and pessimistic sentiment analysis. This would be very easy to accomplish and could be done for at most 10 million dollars per year all in. With this small investment they could dominate all top level subreddits. It would be virtually undetectable by Reddit. Honestly, they don't even need bots.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=china+click+farm

You don't need to write comments, you just need to vote. When China brainwashed American POWs in Korea, they never told them what to say. They simply rewarded them for saying the right things. The Americans invented the Communist propaganda themselves. Training people on Reddit using updoots would be the simplest thing in the world.

I would be surprised if China wasn't already doing this on a large scale with Reddit, Tiktok, and other social networks.

You don't need to write comments, you just need to vote. When China brainwashed American POWs in Korea, they never told them what to say. They simply rewarded them for saying the right things. The Americans invented the Communist propaganda themselves. Training people on Reddit using updoots would be the simplest thing in the world.

That actually explains modern "journalism" frighteningly well. Use capitalist incentives against your opponents by signal boosting and paying the absolute worst journalists (see the top level post below) the most money to generate the most divisive shlock.

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