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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16086 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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NSFW AI-art project Unstable Diffusion has been axed by Kickstarter, despite already hitting their funding goal. This one isn't too suprising, as KS doesnt allow NSFW and a DIY pornomaker probably was never gonna slip by that filter even if it didn't ship with visible nipples.

Kickstarter took it a step further, however, formally amending their ToS and affirming that "Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work."

It now appears that Unstable Diffusion is being driven off Patreon too, who dont have a no-NSFW excuse. Almost certain to follow the same pattern, at this point; there are too many established artists on that platform who are willing to boycott.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targetting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

Ks:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unstablediffusion/unstable-diffusion-unrestricted-ai-art-powered-by-the-crowd/community

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/unstablediffusion

Current fallback:

https://equilibriumai.com/index.html

I am a human. I have creativity. What I don't have is the talent/skill to bring the things I imagine to life without it looking incredibly misshapen, distorted, and low-quality.

Kickstarter is against the side of my creative work and me as a human who would be behind that work if I had AI assistance. This seems like the classic problem of the existing industry have superior lobbying power against potential future industry which doesn't yet exist as an organized group and doesn't have lobbying power.

Kickstarter must, and will always be, on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work.

Reading the first paragraph, I thought it was the work of some anti-porn feminist group. My second guess was some woke "sex work is work" group; trying to protect only fans girls or whatever. But this really is the most clownish outcome. This is in defense of porn artists!

First time I am seeing a group of people cementing themselves on the wrong side of (cultural) history so garishly. There is no world where they don't lose long term.

There is no world where they don't lose long term.

It is remarkable that they staked out a such a clearly doomed position. Keeping in mind that this whole model for supporting artists ("crowdfunding") has only existed for barely 10 years.

Either they don't actually see and notice the sea change, or this is literally them trying to squeeze a few more shekels out of their current customer base before changing up the business models to meet the new demand in the relatively near future.

Patronage is a pretty old business model, though. Commissions, too, which is what I’d think are really threatened by seizing the means of artistic reproduction.

Patronage is a pretty old business model, though.

Arguably one of if not the oldest.

I wanted to work a worlds-oldest-profession line in there, but couldn’t decide if harems counted.

Seeing all of these progressives turn into luddites in this instance, and free speech advocates after the Musk journalist bans in another, I think it's fair to say that there are no principles. There is no political theory of friend/enemy anymore. It's a law. And anyone who pretends to, in any instance, be above that law or exist outside its scope is just, through the act, a self described moron.

I get that abstract principles are having a tough time right now, I'm curious what goes into identifying friend vs. enemy. It's certainly not as simple as demographics, so it's not like we've gone directly from principles to its crudest opposite.

I want to say something like egregore-fueled "essences" or something. Resistance to AI art can be tied to a tech bro "essence" of some kind, which actually does make it somewhat demographically-informed. But at any time a good tech bro may be identified, because it's short-term politically useful. That time-dependent aspect is linked to the egregore dimension.

My two theories:

-the fine arts are extremely Blue Tribe-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is presumptively a Red-Tribe action.(even when it's pretty clearly a Grey tribe thing)

-the fine arts are (more weakly) female-coded, and as such any assault on their priviliges or status is inherently anti-feminist.

Either way, 'this means war'.

My priors are that porn artists are a mostly progressive crowd that is disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of prog activism, thus they’re paying back the favor.

You would be surprised about that. The ones who actually produce and get popular are more likely to be apolitical or moderately conservative. There's zero tolerance for prog crap in any artist chat I've been in, because they've all faced the "how dare you, attention all mutuals, yikes!" thing.

The fakers and hangers-on in public discords are all progs, of course, because they're the kind of people who hang out on discord as a lifestyle.

How do you mean by "disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of progressive activism"? Hentai Foundry users don't strike me as the type to organize phone-call campaigns or canvass neighborhoods. The most they do is put pronouns in their Twitter bios, draw futa dragons, and as of recently, rail against AI art. I'd be an idiot to not recognize the general power that art can have over people, but I'm not seeing how Morrigan Aensland fanart actually gets you to "Drag Time Story Hour" or whatever, outside of "shifting the Overton Window by way of re-coloring the semi-conscious social noosphere through art."

How do you mean by "disproportionately involved in doing the grunt work of progressive activism"? Hentai Foundry users don't strike me as the type to organize phone-call campaigns or canvass neighborhoods.

But they do strike me as the sort of people who would join a twitter mob, and show up to "drag queen story hour" or a black bloc protest.

Seems like lots of the people organizing no-platforming campaigns, doxxing, and running DOS attacks support themselves by drawing porn.

To try and address both you and Hlynka in one go, I'll say that I'm not aware of evidence/don't have the perception that there is significant overlap between activists and porn artists. I would assume maybe 20% of porn artists moonlight as activists (or, inversely, are activists who moonlight in NSFW art). I'd put the threshold for a strong overlap at at least 60%.

That’s fair, and I will register that if what @Bernd is saying is true, then it is simply that I don’t know how to tell the fakers and hangers on from the producers.

It could be there's very different cliques, and I have a very narrow view of the scene; I only know one furry artist, and he's a dissident.

More comments

Wow, is hentai foundry still a thing? I haven't heard of anyone using it in years.

It's maybe not as active as it might have once been, but ever since Tumblr banned porn, well...

Bit of a stretch to make this a target for ranting about progressive hypocrisy.

With that logic you might as well sneer against progressives being against a literal Doomsday Device. "Oh it's just a little progress and science (and it is), why do you hate it?" Or wonder why don't conservatives want to conserve literally everything that ever existed.

You could just as easily say

  • "Progressives are the party of labor unions, of course they'd support the interests of established creators."

  • "AI art is exactly the kind of capitalist infringement on creative spaces that inspired [insert any counterculture movement here]"

  • "The deep-seated progressive distrust of technocratic solutions has led them to insist on keeping humans in the loop."

  • Counterpart to the above, "Human involvement is a natural offshoot of the progressive desire for a commissar class."

  • Or my personal objection, "Just because they're whining on Twitter doesn't mean they were ideological progressives in the first place!"

These are interesting subjects for political analysis, and they are worthy of comparison. Each begins from a different slice of the big-tent term "progressives."

The OP elides such a step. He has implied a specific categorization, one antithetical to "luddites," and labeled it "progressives." This is assuming the conclusion. Whatever his reasons, we miss out on the interesting discussion and skip straight to the booing.

I’ll definitely agree that “twitter cancel mob goes after Stripe” has historically been very left-aligned. It’s really hard to imagine KS or Patreon adopting an explicitly conservative or reactionary stance—partly because they would certainly be faced with mass progressive outrage.

Further, anyone still using Twitter for coordination at this point is less likely to be a vocal conservative. Source, if anyone needs it. So a priori, this particular mob is probably mostly Democrats, at least.

My original objection is probably wrong; it would be better to say I don’t think these are particularly ideological at all. If they were, I’d expect to see different language, different appeals. Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity boring financial incentives. I recognize this is a weak no-true-Scotsman!

Instead I get the impression that it’s horny solidarity.

I largely agree with you, but I think it's less horny solidarity and more recognition that sexy art sells. AI drying up the demand for erotic commissions is likely to hit the discretionary spending parts of a lot of amateur artists' budgets pretty hard, to say nothing of the income streams of third-party sites whose business model is acting as an intermediary between those artists and their clientele.

luddites

Have some sympathy for the Luddites! You've got to remember the context: it was the early 1810s. There was the technological unemployment, which always sucks. But there were lots of exacerbating factors. Britain was engaged in a wild spending binge, driving heavy inflation. And more than that, it was embroiled in an expensive, elective war in Eastern Europe, causing a supply shock that spiked prices of essential commodities (i.e. food) at the worst possible time. Obviously people are going to be pissed in that situation.

Britain was engaged in a wild spending binge, driving heavy inflation. And more than that, it was embroiled in an expensive, elective war in Eastern Europe, causing a supply shock that spiked prices of essential commodities (i.e. food) at the worst possible time. Obviously people are going to be pissed in that situation.

I laughed.

The writers of this season of reality must be bigger hacks than the people making Star Wars content now, if they have to re-tread that kind of plotline.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I don't think the analogy actually holds (people were literally struggling to buy flour in Britain), but it speaks to the broader situation. When the economy is bad, people lash out.

I'm not unsympathetic to them. I'm unsympathetic to the people who would have, prior to this event, gloated about luddites being regressive or reactionary and used the term as a pejorative. This class of rainbow people who cheered on automation and censorship right up until those things were turned on them.

I understand the Luddites, change sucks sometimes. Uncertainty definitely sucks.

Being forced into a change, while being uncertain about what happens on the other end is perhaps worst of all. Technology tends to do that.

But it becomes obvious that most of the complaints about technological change are self-serving in the extreme, without much regard for the so called 'greater good.' It's not as if anyone is taking away their actual artistic talent, or their body of work, or the adoration of their accumulated fans.

Just so happens that they may have to retrain into a field that isn't as legible to AI, or adapt to a world where AI exists and find new ways to compete. It's not pleasant.

My point is more about you've got to look at the broader economic trends. Technological change, including in the textile industry, was rapid in the UK for decades. Why in particular were people rioting in those years (~1810-1815) in particular? It had to do with inflation and commodity prices.

Surely they must know this is impossible? This won't even buy them years.

They don't. And they may be correct.

Most artists (though not all) are bafflingly ignorant about the workings of generative models, despite hundreds of peoples' good-faith efforts to explain the situation to them in increasingly simple words and accessible illustrations. They recognize AI as an existential threat, and seem to have a purely conflict-theoretical understanding of the situation, to the extent that they just don't care about the truth and intend to gaslight everyone involved, chiefly the voters and the regulators, into accepting the narrative most convenient to them («neural networks are evil big business corporate tools to make pedophilic collages out of stolen copyrighted art») and regulating the very technology out of existence, in the same manner they use when canceling things (including AI) on web platforms and in various communities.

I suspect they have a shot at winning this. After all, generic wokeism can also be described as intellectually vacuous, yet here we are. Trans activists don't have a good case against kiwifarms, yet they've managed to drive it off the internet – now where are all those who were saying it's impossible and sensibly chuckled at doomers like myself? Any comments?

Don't underestimate the power of skin in the game, networking and pestering authorities at scale.

I know it changes by the day and I take your point as to the precarious nature of so much of the centralized risk on the internet but kiwi farms is once again back on the internet. Wokism is indeed powerful and these people are using the same strategy as wokeness, in many cases these are the same people, but this isn't really the kind of thing that is weak to that strategy. Maybe, and a big maybe, they can hamper google and western based research but they can't stop China who would jump at the chance to have a leg up on the US in this field. There just isn't any way.

Alas, if China and crypto is any indication, they will not allow anything that could potentially allow someone with insufficient faith in the Party to make a neural-blend of Esteemed President Xi Jinping with the Hated Honey-Eating Disney Bear. If anything, I expect the Chinese government to be even more vulnerable to its country's artisans lobbying against AI.

Kiwifarms has been dropped by a number of ISPs and this blockade may well escalate. Certainly they receive less sympathy than their opponents and aren't feared as much.

I wouldn't expect much from China, it took them about 3 years to stop ruining their economy with Zero Covid mandates and roughly 10 times as long to merely begin acting as if they realize the costs of one-child policy. For now they're apparently more concerned about generative AI's potential for depicting Chairman Xi as Pooh (or otherwise unflatteringly), so they're banning non-watermarked images. I've seen Western artists extol this move as a step in the direction of protecting their precious rights.

Maybe, and a big maybe, they can hamper google and western based research

I do not think any but the most rabid artists are seriously banking on this kind of fundamental triumph (some are very rabid though). They're more or less okay with OpenAI's work and do not notice Google Imagen etc. at all. Their winning scenario has more to do with denying their clientele the opportunity to cut them out, introduction of royalties for centralized AI corporations using datasets with artistic content, prohibition of independent (especially local) end user content generation, and its stigmatization on par with CP content; probably some certified-artist-only subscriptions (in the same vein as access to some scientific data is limited to only .edu emails).

This can succeed and go beyond the domain of art, especially if aided and abetted by other parties interested in centralizing AI tech (e.g. longtermists, national security).

Kiwifarms is back up on the clearnet now I think. But yeah it's an absolute case of:

https://rdrama.net/e/marseyitsoverwereback.webp

So basically woke is trying to shut down AI art? Not super surprising considering the woke activist class is usually super-sympathetic to porn artists.

It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. People who pay for custom porn presumably don't care if it offends anyone(and real world, this is probably the first use of AI art that's going to blow up).

Is it actually a woke phenomenon? I don’t see any of the usual language.

It doesn't seem like a particularly woke campaign, except to the extent that the tactic being used is a common tactic used for any pile on. I could imagine an anti-AI woke campaign, but it'd be flavored "anything that doesn't implement anti-discriminatory AI ethics filters needs to be shut down."

Luddite would be a better characterization.

Luddite would be a better characterization.

I think (small-c) conservative is even better. Anything new is threatening, and people fundamentally being able to do things they couldn't before could deal a blow to society's acceptance of the inherent rent-seeking properties of that conservatism (either by pissing it off enough, or financially displacing it- and AIs that aren't crippled by that conservatism trivially outcompete those that are).

Wokes may be Progressive, but their revealed preferences aren't progressive; it's all about collecting socioeconomic rent from the power structure they built over the last 40 years or so. The actual Progressives were busy enjoying the social boom that came in the social transition between power structures; this is just the consequences of them not paying enough attention to extend that power vacuum for as long as possible.

Stereotypically, this fits with the Big 5 tendencies of left-wing people, who tend to be higher in agreeableness (= conflict aversion and ingroup empathy), openness (= enjoying spontaneity and diversity), and neuroticism. Openness makes them keen on change that indicates variety, but neuroticism and agreeableness encourages aversion to a lot of actual change, which is uncertain and uncomfortable.

Porn finds a way.

The fun part, here, however, is that the swarm isn't fighting to keep one small person or group deplatformed and defunded.

They might have a shot at succeeding (for a while) if they were.

What they're doing is trying to hold back a technology that is:

A) Already out of the bottle; and

B) backed by billions of dollars and incredibly smart and motivated people at the end of the day.

So the task of preventing AI art from largely displacing human artists is just as doomed to failure as, say, trying to prevent BitTorrent software from allowing people to pirate movies. The new equilibrium is coming, but one can make a huge show of resisting it for a while.

If they want to have a ghost of a chance at success it's going to require levels of authoritarianism that would at least require them to go full mask-off.

The twitterati taking responsibility for the bannings are targeting payment processor Stripe next. Seems like a textbook swarm governance action.

I can already smell the grifts from here. On the other hand, these people might actually believe this tech is an existential threat to their careers. And they might be right.

backed by billions of dollars

This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.

I'd not worry too much, since as mentioned people can still use BitTorrent to download movies despite there being billions of dollars going into creating such movies.

Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money,

Probably, but not for any reasons that are unique to AI, I think.

I wonder if a better example is 3D printed weapons - the full might of the state is cracking down on them, yet it's still possible. BitTorrent is technically simple, there's no capital cost AFAIK. Models need to be trained, expensively.

But trained models are not so hard to distribute and I'm not sure it is trivial to detect when someone is in the act of training a model, there's just so much compute in the world.

So go after general-purpose GPUs. We're already deploying more and more DRM tech everywhere, and AI/ML loads look sufficiently different from graphics ones that it should actually be quite easy to force (or coordinate) GPUs to require a signature with a key stewarded by Microsoft (like with UEFI) before they load and evaluate anything that looks like an ML model.

Training the latest models already requires something that is far from consumer-grade.

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