How online do you have to be where "people dunking on AI "artists" is like Kristallnacht" doesn't sound completely fucking deranged?
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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This shows why it's so easy for conservatives to reverse Uno the language of social justice, painting themselves as the victims of oppression and liberals / women / minorities / immigrants / LGBTQ+ people / anyone else who exists without their consent as oppressors. They refuse to admit that words mean things, and that things are more important than words.
It's not a lack of reading comprehension. It's a lack of reality comprehension.
It’s also why the right can’t meme
I think it's the other way around. The right is incredibly good at memes - because memes presume underlying facts without having to prove those facts, and, by portraying them humorously, imply that anyone asking for proof of the underlying facts is taking the meme too seriously.
Remember last summer when the internet was flooded with memes about Haitians eating people's pets? That whole vicious racist slander based on a single false report that in any other context would have been absolutely unacceptable, but anybody who pointed out "hey, this is vicious racist slander based on a single false report and is absolutely unacceptable" got accused of being humorless wokescolds taking a joke too seriously?
It's why the Trump White House posts so many viciously racist and contemptuous memes on Twitter. It's why the fucking Department of Homeland Security likes to hide the numbers 14 and 88 in its social media posts. Because it puts the left in a Catch-22: if they call out the memes, they look like humorless enemies of free speech, and if they don't, it normalizes racism even further.
The right has mastered the art of the meme. The left may be winning the meme Olympics, but the right are fucking professionals.
I think it's the other way around. The memes are incredibly good at left vs right because left- and right-leaning people presume underlying facts and the memes reassure people that those facts are true and good (or false and bad, etc.) without doing any fact-finding.
When we say "the right can't meme" what we mean is that the right's memes are about projecting bigotry. It's like saying that the right has no comedians; of course they have people that stand up in front of an audience and emit words according to memes, tropes, and narremes, such that the audience laughs. Indeed, stand-up was invented by Frank Fay, an open fascist. (His Behind the Bastards episodes are quite interesting.) What we're saying is that the stand-up routine is bigoted. If this seems unrelated, please consider: the Haitians-eating-pets joke is part of a stand-up routine that a clown tells in order to get his circus elected.
In my understanding: they aren’t making jokes with the expectation that their audience laughs at the joke itself. The audience is laughing at the target of the joke. In this sense, you might say the right doesn’t meme, and further speculate that they can’t meme.
So yeah they post and repost a lot of “memes,” but it’s never really to be like: “look at this clever meme I made,” it’s just “look at this meme that makes fun of x people”. Their accusation of humorlessness is just a confession.
Yep.
Oh, your strategy is... invent a new vocabulary to describe yourselves and your stuggles?
... and then do nothing other than 'promote discussion' and 'raise awareness'?
Well, what are fascists, historically, really good at?
Oh, right, its uh, perverting language and also pretending to be something they actually aren't, so as to be more soundbite palatable, basically, more broadly appealing, more difficult to counter argue / "debunk" without exhausting yourself.
Sure would be neat if anyone learned anything from history, ever, but nope, thus the tragicomedy goes on.
Wait. Hold on. Are you blaming marginalized groups for inventing language to describe their marginalization? And then talking about it?
You know, like how democracy is supposed to work, where you 'promote discussion' about a problem until you've convinced a critical mass of voters that there is a problem and they need to vote for policies that fix it?
Is the implication here that fascists, these experts at manipulating language in dishonest ways, would be helpless if they didn't have new words from marginalized groups to pervert?
Because I doubt fascists have any problems with attacking the people they hate, whether those people make up new terms or not, or, for that matter, whether those people talk about their marginalization or stay quiet to try and avoid fascist attacks.
Wait. Hold on. Are you blaming marginalized groups for inventing language to describe their marginalization? And then talking about it?
Nope.
I am blaming any of them them, and/or their allies, who seemingly think / thought that that alone would be sufficient to stop fascism.
This is an immensely naive way of thinking.
You know, like how democracy is supposed to work, where you 'promote discussion' about a problem until you've convinced a critical mass of voters that there is a problem and they need to vote for policies that fix it?
The entire strategy of fascists is to pervert how democracy is "supposed to work", thus revealing the state as its true nature, a monopoly on 'legitimate' violent force, that can be made to do nearly anything with that force, once it is fully perverted.
Is the implication here that fascists, these experts at manipulating language in dishonest ways, would be helpless if they didn't have new words from marginalized groups to pervert?
No, the implication is that you can't fight fascists with words alone and win, you have to be able to credibly match the power and force they wield, by more clever means, than just talking at or about them.
You have to cut off their funding, you have to jail them for their crimes, you have to actually present a workable solution to the the economic plight of people who are likely to become fascists (conservatives), you have to address that the root cause of fascism is the decay of a corrupt capitalist democracy, and by 'address', I again mean with actual actions, actual policy changes, or extragovernmental means like a mutual aid group.
Because I doubt fascists have any problems with attacking the people they hate, whether those people make up new terms or not, or, for that matter, whether those people talk about their marginalization or stay quiet to try and avoid fascist attacks.
They don't, but fascism is largely a cancer that grows, much more so than it is some kind of innate, unchangeable aspect of... well at least most people.
So, the cure is to start at the root and treat the causes of the problem, comprehensively.
Don't do that?
Sorry, but historically, then the fascists win, untill some later war or mass armed rebellion or resistance basically kills or jails them all, and then also literally sends them to reeducation camps.
(EDIT: Well, maybe not literally 'reeducation camps', physically isolated camps, but at least some kind of comprehensive, compulsory, de-fascizing, reeducation system)
I am not trying to say the burden of stopping fascism lies squarely on the shoulders of those most likely to be persecuted by fascists.
I am saying that any of such people (myself included) who believe that ... just raising awareness and promoting discussion alone, for its own sake, as the ends instead of means to a more actually useful ends...
Anyone who believes that alone will work is a fool.
Again, because this is what history shows us.
If we're going to focus on form instead of content, it's amusing that "if you say mean things about ai then you're a bigot" is the exact same form as "if you say mean things about Trump then you're a terrorist."
the post: https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v .
The person is a bluesky engineer.
Not only that, she introduced mass surveillance to Bluesky and is brainstorming further methods of such in response to getting clowned on so hard.
Yeah, I'm not touching bluesky's servers after this.
Migration luckily works pretty well on atproto.
Rainbow painted fascist.
Scratch the surface too hard, oops, its another shitlib.
God I am so tired of idiots confusing identity politics and virtue signalling with being left wing, but apparently, most people really are just skin deep.
Thanks for surfacing this. Holy shit.
And to think all this could have been solved by bsky simply hiring some communication specialists and treating the current events like a crisis, and acting like their users are the police.
Well. 'Engineer'. You know it's all vibes to them.
I feel certain this person could come up with even one example of someone attacking an LLM for having the wrong “bits”.
I'm so confused reading all this.
Their argument is something like this:
People might say something like "ai is incapable of thinking" or "ai is stupid", but if you replace the word "ai" with something like "women", you're saying something unacceptable.
"If you said something different you would've said something different" what brilliant rhetoric, your mom must be proud
So they're attributing personhood to AI.
Before it has come anywhere close to meaningfully mimicking conciousness.
Are they stupid?
AI believers believe that stringing random words together is equal to consciousness, they absolutely are stupid.
Perhaps because it reflects their level of consciousness.
Yeah that was my biggest takeaway is these posts seem to assume sentience in what's little more than a sophisticated "most likely next word" generator. There's tons of cool things that can be done with these new machine learning tools, but they are not sentient, they are not close to sentience and we may never invent artificial sentience.
The one thing we now know for sure is we can damn well convince people of sentience artificially far more easily than I ever suspected
Ah makes sense now! So if I change the meaning, then the meaning changes. Man, that’s brilliant!
Hoo boy. The original person being reposted continues on their original post that they believe we cannot be certain that genAI does not have feelings.
How do we have people wasting their time arguing about software having feelings when we haven’t even managed to convince the majority of people that fish and crabs and stuff can feel pain even though they don’t make a frowny face when you hurt them.
That's easy, it's because LLM output is a reasonable simulation of sounding like a person. Fooling people's consciousness detector is just about their whole thing at this point.
Crabs should look into learning to recite the pledge of allegiance in the style of Lady GaGa.
Just complete the delusional circuit and tell them you can't be sure they aren't an AI, ask them how they would prove they aren't.
I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the "(whatever that means)" hits and it all falls into place.
.Hailey.at may currently be dating an AI and feels insecure about others judging them, so they must convince themselves that their linguistic vibrator has a soul.
One of the replies talking about someone celebrating Hitler's death regularly, even if they're a survivor of the camps, is mentally ill?
https://youtube.com/shorts/aHoUPEhjbN4
The only good take I've seen on this matter.
I think everyone can agree on "this is a slur that we took from StarWars to be derogatory and justify our distaste and opposition to genAI", it's just that some people think that's a bad thing?
Like it appears some people think using the n-word is bad because it's Bad™, not because there's an actual dehumanising effect on a group of people. What's your argument, that we're dehumanising Grok? Ye because it's not a human! "But if it was about the Jews it'd be bad" ye and if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike, what the fuck is your point?
As for the origins I also think it is very important that the word is "clanker" from StarWars, since their droids are not sentient, whereas both "toaster" and "skinjob" are actually used as a hateful term towards sentient beings. BSG goes out of its way to drive in the fact that genociding Cylons would also be bad, actually. The sentience of "skinjobs" is like the whole point of Blade Runner.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, since I am a huge fan of Filoni's Clone Wars series, Clanker feels the most weird because it was created to be used as a slur in the same way the Allied forces had slurs for Germans and Japanese in WW2. I can understand why some people might have moral grounds against using what is ultimately a proxy of real life slurs, especially if they were ever a recipient of that kinda discrimination. Sure, it's a fantasy, and I think from a standpoint of "The Republic is experiencing moral decay" it's interesting for the story, but it was always a lil fucked up that the kids show thought hurling slurs was such a fundamental part of war that they needed to invent a new one. It'd probably be better if we didn't teach children that.
It's also kinda a weird slur to use against AI. The droids are called clankers because they clank, it's like an onomotopeia. LLMs don't clank at all.
(This comment is not really a criticism)
you would not be the first person to look at the etymology of a slur, note that it originally had a different context, and point out that it doesn’t really map 1:1 with its usage.
having not watched the clone wars I can’t comment on specifics with your example.
Anyway, regarding slurs against non-sentient things: “Lemon”, “hunkajunk”, “shitbox” get used for cars, i demand justice for cars!!!
Oh, hey, that's the "Mikhail Gorbachev Caused Skibidi Toilet" guy
I refuse to click that link and instead choose to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev caused Skibidi Toilet unironically.
It's pretty unironic. It's a legit chain of culture and economics that leads from Gorbachev straight to Skibidi Toilet as they evolved and morphed over time from external influences.
It's also the guy who insists "chat" is a fourth person pronoun. Frankly I now go out of my way to avoid his stuff because that take was so ludicrously stupid I no longer trust anything he has to say.
Based solely on the source this man doesn’t seem to deserve any ire. In fact he breaks down the statement “chat is a 4th person pronoun” quite well. What’s stuck in your craw, old fruit?
Well, folks, it deserves ire because it's a ridiculously incorrect statement delivered in an authoritative tone. Chat is a noun and it's used the exact same way as many other nouns. To claim it's grammatically a pronoun you have to either misunderstand what pronouns are or misunderstand how it's being used.
The entire thing boils down to a rhetorical trick: "here are the ways chat is not like other pronouns, so it's reasonable to say it's in a fourth category of pronoun." It entices you to accept the incorrect premise that it's a pronoun and then try to come up with flaws in the inarguable part, which is that this noun doesn't function the same way any pronoun would.
Yeah nah, that’s not what he says at all. In that video, he says: “there is no accepted definition of a fourth person pronoun, here are some concepts that are sometimes referred to as the fourth person, does the modern usage of “chat” fit any of these?” and the answer is: “in some specific ways yes, in other ways no.”
I don’t think he’s the one that started the idea of chat being a fourth person pronoun, I think he’s just discussing the statement and using it as an opportunity to communicate some linguistic concepts, which is cool and good. Also, what’s in your craw, different person?
It's not a pronoun, so if one is pretending to talk about linguistics authoritatively one should know that and clearly state it to your audience so that they're not misled into thinking that calling it a fourth-person pronoun is in any way reasonable.
I've rewatched the video in case I was being uncharitable. Nope. He accepts the premise (direct quote: "that's kind of true"). He then does the exact thing I said, which is argue that it's not acting like a normal pronoun: "the 'fourth person' can also refer to a generic pronoun [...] it doesn't refer to a specific referent, like 'he' or 'she'. [...] if 'chat' is being used to refer to nobody in particular, then arguably it is a new fourth person pronoun." This is complete and utter nonsense packaged as exciting linguistic concepts, which is not at all "cool and good."
(As a bonus bit of wrongness that I didn't catch on the first watch: he says that chat used like "y'all" is third person plural, which is another thing that maybe you shouldn't get wrong in a supposedly educational video.)
Uh, in its contemporary usage in “chat is this true,” it absolutely is a pronoun