Cookie Thread Act 1: A Cookie in Time

General
#681

it costs a metric crapton of money, which does in fact need to come from somewhere*
inflation is a thing
UBI being universal means that some fraction of the money is going to stupidly rich people who don’t actually need it
could increase exploitation of elderly/vulnerable people

most of the other arguments against it are worse imo, e.g. some people believe that people working is like inherently good and that them being able to choose not to work is therefore bad

* some people say “just tax billionaires and fund it that way.” I am unclear if this is a serious policy proposal but assuming it is, even if you could tax 100% of the wealth of all American billionaires no matter how illiquid it is, that gets you about $4 trillion dollars, which works out to around $12,000 a person. Which could maybe work for, like, a year? But then you need to figure out how to pay for it the next year, and … you already took all the billionaires’ money.

(to be clear I am in fact pro-UBI, I just think it’s important to acknowledge the actual challenges with implementation)

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#682

yeah fair
not me checking how much the united states spends on the millitary each year

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#683

i had intended to respond to the quote with a different thing
this did not happen

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#684

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okay yeah not enough for the whole world but pretty good for the United States i think?

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#685

nevermind then

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#686

(its about 2.2k dollars per person if you take EVERYTHING from it so)

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#687

in 2021 it was about $801 billion/person, which works out to about $2400 when distributed evenly among the US population

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#688

er

I put the /person in the wrong space.

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#689

all of this reminds me of the joker

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#690

persona 5

#691
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#692

wowee people would spend free money to buy things that they otherwise would not buy such as an alch of hall

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#693

some mayoral candidates take bribes from big money
I’m skipping the bribes part and just taking the money

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#694

I’m not LIKE a socialist
I am a socailist.

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#695

i am now reminded of James from Team Rocket
his backstory is that he was rich but hated being rich so he fled being rich to go be not rich and steal pokemon

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#696

The joker makeup is flying on now, I am going to murder someone.

#697

anyways my actual position on AI art is:

  • training image models is, like, fine. there’s nothing wrong with a human looking at a bunch of pieces of artwork and learning how to do art. if a human could somehow look at millions of artworks, that would still be fine. AI models obviously don’t “learn” in the same way that humans do, but in terms of broad ethical principles it seems to be basically the same sort of thing, ethically speaking.
  • it’s probably unethical to have the model generate something deliberately in the style of a real artist who is alive – that does seem more-or-less like theft.
    • if they’re dead it’s fine, if they gave explicit permission it’s fine
  • I saw a paper today on ‘memorization’ by image models, and it does look like if you prompt them hard enough and run like 500 versions of each prompt, it’s possible to get them to output at least one example that looks ~copied. this seems bad probably? I, uh, do think that ~1/500 with deliberate cherrypicking/discounting prompts where it didn’t work is a copying rate that’s more like “maybe run a reverse image search before using your images for anything serious” than “clearly this is intrinsically unethical.”
    • also the posts you see sometimes that are like “AI art is just collaging!” with a “helpful image” of a bunch of famous artworks stitched together are misleading – AI models don’t actually just cut-and-paste (you can see this by running random outputs through https://haveibeentrained.com/, which compares them to the training images), and the illustrative images were typically just edited by a human.
  • it seems ~unambiguously fine to use the model for non-commercial projects where you would otherwise have just not hired an artist at all – e.g. flavor for a mafia game (hi), profile pictures on social media, etc.
  • with anything where you might have actually hired an artist it’s a little trickier; I have mixed feelings about this, but I think it’s probably fine if it’s like, an indie company making a tiny game or something, and probably sketch if it’s an AAA studio that could easily afford to hire an artist.
  • you shouldn’t try to pass AI art off as wholly your own. duh. (this does include some amount of necessary interpretation as to what constitutes ‘passing it off’ vs. ‘other people making wrong assumptions.’)
  • the lawsuits that have been filed so far seem legally ~meritless – to be clear I’m not a legal expert, but I think it’s relevant here that most of them have targeted Midjourney and StableDiffusion (smaller, can’t hire as good lawyers), and not targeted OpenAI (great lawyers, doing the same thing that Midjourney and StableDiff are).
  • it’s really cool and great how people can just … have art on demand now. art is really great! therefore more art is more great. we live in really amazing times.

anyways I’m convinceable on most of these probably but since it came up here’s where I stand

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#698

“Since it came up”
my gal
you were the one who brought it up

#699

not a gal :joy_cat:

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#700

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This meme

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