DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod “Trippy-Worlds,” who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are “spiritually jewish.” So we’re off to a great start.
the first thing that drew my eye was this post from a would be employer:
not really clear what the title means, but this person seems to have had a string of encounters with the most based artists of all time.
also claims to have been called “racial and gender slurs” for using ai art and that he was “kicked out of 20 groups” and some other things. idk what to tell this guy, it legitimately does suck that wealthy people have the money to pay for lots of art and the rest of us don’t
I really enjoyed browsing around this subreddit, and a big part of that was seeing how much the stigma around AI gets to people who want to use it. pouring contempt on this stuff is good for the world
the above guy would like to know what combination of buttons to press to counter the “that just sounds like stealing from artists” attack. a commenter leaps in to help and immediately impales himself:
you hate to see it. another commenter points out that well … maybe these people just aren’t your friends
to close out, an example of fearmongering:
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These guys are simultaneously hanging out with literal Nazis and also, “are symbols against AI as hateful and bigoted as swastikas? Certainly they are. In this essay I will,”
That place is an absolute fucking cesspool.
May I suggest /r/artisthate which is Sneer Club for artists sneering at exactly this type of content, and it’s hilarious sometimes (albeit quite large at this point, so your fair share of doomsday rats have sneaked in trying to co-opt the movement and the moderation is quite lenient).
Some good posts up in that sub.
fair share of doomsday rats have sneaked in trying to co-opt the movement
There’s a group called “Pause AI” that is exactly this, EA funded (iirc) org trying to astroturf artists against AIart.
Yep, exactly the ones I was thinking about. They lobbied over there a while back with “prominent supporters” like Yud and Hinton. Luckily the general consensus was that they were full of shit, so the mod shut it down.
What does “doomsday rats” mean ? I’m new around here.
“rat”/“rats” is short for “rationalists”, which is not to be confused for the english meaning of the word but instead is a reference to the capital-R Rationalists: a de facto cult that follow the teachings originated from their
sagecreep-in-leadThinking-Really-Hard non-messiah eliezer yudkowsky, centered around his blog-and-forum LessWrong (a place named in remarkable antithesis to how frequently you can find wrong things there)one of the key things believed/feared/waffled-on-voluminously by the rationalist community is us mere mortals tampering with computers is going to lead to creating a machine superintelligence and that if we’re not super duper nice to it in advance of it existing then the big bad AI is going to kill us all (because it can make chips out of us, or whatever). for not having been nice enough to it. (they call this “alignment”, as in “it should be aligned with human values”)
you can check the sidebar in the sister community (sneerclub) for some more references, and do some reading up around the TESCREAL bundle (as named by Timnit Gebru)
advance warning: these people are real fuckin’ dumb, and you will learn some very depressing shit
you can check the sidebar in the sister community
Will do, thanks for the detailed answer.
Just from the top of my head since you mention rationalist, does it have something to do with community like star slate codex?
I stumbled upon them many moons ago because someone linked an article posted there about the nuances of neuter-ing feral cats which were written by actual vet iirc, but the rest of what written there horrifies me.
that (SSC) is one of the thonkleader outputs in the space, yes
Sounds like they’d be right at home on awful (barring the rats, of course :P)
i couldn’t resist
at least when this rhetoric popped up around crypto and GameStop stocks, there was a get-rich-quick scheme attached to it. these fuckers are doing it for free
‘thank you for pushing people further right’ is one of those really obvious 4chan attempts at psyops. I always get a bit amused when I see people pull that shit.
> “(Redditors always glom on to the absolute worst things)”
> is a redditor describing how he glommed on to a thing
“(Redditors always glom on to the absolute worst things)”
is a redditor on a sub in support of a bubble technology that runs on plagiarism, exploitation of highly vulnerable workers, and infrastructure that causes climate change, and also the sub is a Nazi bar
the aristocrats!
is a redditor on a sub in support of a bubble technology that runs on plagiarism, exploitation of highly vulnerable workers, and infrastructure that causes climate change, and also the sub is a Nazi bar
the aristocrats!
this is what Curtis Yarvin actually believes
deleted by creator
haha I’ve asked dgerard what I should do about my habit of digging up stuff like this. before I left twitter it was almost a full time hobby. definitely have thought about starting a podcast
I don’t know of any podcasts or YT channels that focus on doing this kind of thing, but I think a lot of episodes of the QAA podcast fit this mold
lol i was thinking this post was 100% my bag
DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod “Trippy-Worlds,” who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are “spiritually jewish.”. So we’re off to a great start.
loves generative AI, encourages debate, fine with having nazis around the place. it’s like someone saw our instance and wanted to make the exact opposite of it, and the predictable disaster that resulted from that decision only really succeeds at making the AI fans look even worse
These are people I know in person, not online
Okay, yeah, that sucks then :/
I haven’t had such an earnest, full-belly laugh in a while, thank you for this. 10/10, I wouldn’t have written a better sketch if I tried.
Fascinating to see that the politics of the old crypto hype train have carried over to the new hype train.
Full disclosure: I am one of the most prolific posters on /r/aiwars because arguing on the internet is my vice and it is an infinite source of people to argue with. The guy who posted your example of nazi shit has apparently blocked me, but I have absolutely seen it there in the past, albeit in a thread full of people shitting on the mod for not blocking the dude.
This person has been on Reddit for two years, and Reddit hasn’t taken them down. If you feel they are a Nazi or violating laws or rules, report them to Reddit. Otherwise what you are now asking the Mods to do is be the Reddit police. That won’t happen.
If users, no matter what their Reddit profile, repeatedly break rules of this Sub, they will be banned. If they don’t, they won’t.
What users post outside of this sub is not our concern.
holy fuck, there’s so much wrong
Trippy, their username counts, Trippy. They are posting their username to your sub. Even if you ignore (don’t!) that usernames are links to their other Nazi posts, they are posting Nazi phrases, to your sub. “outside of the sub”? Trippy.
Oh god, this is a coincidence:
Kerbal Space Program 2 has been going through some drama as developers are speaking out about what went wrong during the project. This person wrote a long thread arguing against them. I’m not familiar with professional game dev so I can’t really weigh in on if this is a good take or not.
But I have the author tagged as a tankie (no idea if that’s accurate), but someone pointed out they also moderate /r/DefendingAIArt. This guy has been absolutely awful in the past so I’m not that surprised, but still a little surprised with the overlap.
A pro-AI tankie? Now I’ve seen one more thing on my long journey to see everything
I want fully-automated luxury gay space communism, but not like this.
Invasion as a Service proponents
Calls it a “hostile takeover” even though he literally explains why it wasn’t a hostile takeover: Developers were way behind schedule and not making progress, Star Theory leadership tried to hold T2 hostage with the project and T2 called their bluff and cancelled the contract. They then offered developers to transfer to new studio. Some developers wanted a pay raise or didn’t transfer for other reason.
This seems like bad faith rules lawyering. The publisher didn’t literally buy out the studio, they just withheld funding, made a new studio they owned and forced everyone over. They took over, it was hostile.
The guy going full abuser logic after being refused to buy some art of somebody. Jesus. (And like the artist doesn’t know you already tried to use their name, and are only coming for them with money afterwards).
E: looking at the post on reddit, turns out they already did something like this “Yesterday I got told to off myself after someone saw filenames over a screen share while I was working out a job for UI assets.”. Typical. (Still, death wishes are not cool (ow look in their post history they express similar things on others (even if it is spez) tad hypocritical), even if he really should look for a different hobby (Which I assume they are lying about anyway, coder art is no problem if it is just a hobby, and there are a large amount of free imagesets out there, famously like kenney who has free art sets because of community donations).
This is hilarious, thank you for digging this up. I love how they’re just co-opting completely wrong words (wow, why does that sound familiar?) like “anti” and “fundamentalist orthodox” to describe the people they don’t like
There’s another one called “ArtistHate”, but I was surprised it’s actually a pro-artist subreddit.
If you want another fun read, check out Adobe’s ‘Stock Contributors’ AI artist forum. I found it by accident, and it’s full of people struggling so, so hard to understand why their puppy photos with missing limbs or physically impossible landscapes aren’t accepted. Any time someone “asks for clarification” on the submission rules I swear you can tell what the issue is at a glance but they’re stumped over it.
Like, what is this person even trying to do??? Why do people feel the need to regurgitate responses from ChatGPT for no reason. Why are they even submitting AI art to Adobe Stock at all. Are they even getting paid? These are the same people who like those photos of snowboarding babies and have to reply “thank you” to every post on their Facebook feed because they think it was personally sent to them.
I think the main issue at hand is them trying to pass themselves off as artists for typing in a couple words into a text box and letting the AI create an image for them by stitching together pieces of art that it scraped off of the internet, usually without the consent of the artists. It’s like commissioning an artist to draw something for you and then claiming that you are the artist who made it, but the artist being commissioned turned out to be someone who just takes other people’s art and traces over parts of them.
On some websites, such as Art Fight, AI generated images aren’t allowed because it falls under the rule prohibiting art theft. AI generated images also cannot be copyrighted.
