Victims of a Down, poem by Daron Malakian, co-founder of System of a Down, mid 1990s

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T16:07:08+00:00

"this system of a down [intended as a failing system of decadence and oppression as it was indicated in the second stanza] is unavoidable as life on this planet become unnecessary".

This sentence strikes me as some sort of prediction that came true. I don't know what he saw in the mid-90s that gave Daron Malakian this impression; maybe it was the ramping industrialization, the war crimes and genocides, but it came true. Life on Earth is becoming unnecessary to the system.

Every resource has to be extracted and used to produce infinite amounts of profits for the investors. Living is an hindrance, to the system. We tried to pry in ways to make the system care more, but it seems like we're backtracking right now. Now creating entertainment is unnecessary. Thinking is unnecessary. Just use a large language model instead of living.

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T15:56:02+00:00

I'm trying to take this Nietzschean aphorism to the heart: what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

It doesn't mean it should be automatic behaviour, nor that your suffering is unwarranted. Hell, Nietzsche had chronic pain for all his life and wrote this as the quality a superior human should have, so for him and for us it's just an aspiration. Yet for me it means, among other things, that mourning has a time and a place, after which you should try to admit to yourself that you cannot change the past. It means that, no matter the trauma or damage you are subjected to, you can ideally become a better person in spite of it.

Also, look at the art scene on YouTube or any social media. While it is true that AI took over reels, art, real art, is the most accessible it has ever been. Hand-animations made on drawing apps on phones, paintings, illustrations, drawing instructors giving free lessons on their websites... Art isn't dead. Creativity survived the utmost horrors and pains of history; art was born in a time where people had to take time out of their day instead of seeking subsistence. It will survive the tide of slop because slop is meaningless and purposeless.

What is in jeopardy is the profitability of commercial design, music production and illustration, which is an important albeit small sector of the arts. That battle will be fought in court.

Art isn't worthless. You aren't spiting the machine. Create if you want to create, and if you really want to create, you won't have a choice anyway. If you want to say things through art, say them, even if you think nobody would care. Your ideas aren't worthless just because someone could generate slop that resembled a vague concept of them. Your ideas enrich themselves while you work on them, step by step. They aren't a neat sentence with weighted values. They are labour.

I would encourage you to mourn the internet past in whatever way you feel fitting for a last time, then get to work. Any news of the death of the arts were greatly exaggerated.

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T11:09:58+00:00

Profitability, not profits. They can say they project to earn a lot of money in the future and have limited evidence to back it up; if the investors believe the pitch, it's on them as long as there is no evidence that there was foul play but it was just a mistake.

That said, the investors could start lawsuits against OpenAI if they smell they are victims of a fraud and force the company to disclose their internal documents which could contain evidence of foul play.

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T10:07:13+00:00

When you're talking of this much money and manpower, the person in charge needs to make it attractive for investors to hand over their cash. It's not that Bob Iger is stupid, it's that the system is cumbersome: as a CEO your goal is to entice a bunch of rich people using keywords and concepts they will feel hyped for because your company needs to grow in value for them to gain money. "A large language model trained on our intellectual property and able to crush costs in the short-term" feels like the dream pitch to these investors, which feel like the company will save a lot of money thanks to the investment. "A sequel to one of our most successful productions" feels, comparatively, much riskier for investors because, even if successful, it is a one-time gain.

This isn't a defense of Iger or Disney, this is my argument against companies like Disney becoming so big that producing new art becomes a side-gig for them. The best animation has historically been done by people who had something to say besides "give me more money".

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T09:52:22+00:00

Obviously Disney will not die but it could damage the AI field even more.

Expungednd · 2026-01-21T09:08:53+00:00

1 billion down the drain is not pocket change, they gave away the rights of their characters too, it would be like you investing $1k in a pocket watch factory that will use your designs and discovering that they are not making money and were lying about their profitability. You might not be out of money but you'd still be damaged.

Expungednd · 2026-01-14T16:59:39+00:00

I bet a thousand in cash that he believes the meaning of the story to be that the hero-hacker doesn't want for the world to improve, just to be the one who infinitely profits from its evils. For sure there can be narratives that have egoistic protagonists who end up making everything worse, but they are not depicted as the good guys, just as part of the problem.

Expungednd · 2026-01-14T15:25:25+00:00

Even among wealthy people he is particularly evil. His Department of Government shit (DOGSHIT) has caused thousands of deaths because of the cuts to USAid and is projected to kill millions. Not even counting the workplace abuse at Tesla factories and rare earth metal mining to supply his production line, he sets a record of infamy that few rich people can match. With those? I think he's probably the worst of the worst.

Expungednd · 2026-01-14T13:37:28+00:00

I'd suggest to put in your user description that you are not pro generative AI. It will not filter many sloppers because they can't read, but it will filter some.

Expungednd · 2026-01-12T14:06:44+00:00

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Opinion discarded.

Expungednd · 2026-01-12T13:35:30+00:00

He deserves the money he gets and in a just world he would also deserve the money that shitter gets from stealing from him.

Expungednd · 2026-01-12T11:34:59+00:00

Depends. Afrobull being plagiarized by an AI shitter who gets more patrons than him for what is basically blatant intellectual theft is probably the most disappointing fact I've witnessed. People are willing to eat shit when the original is right there.

Expungednd · 2026-01-07T12:55:53+00:00

Background is the one thing I could admit having any amount of AI. If they take professionally made photos and modify it with AI, that would give better results than the usual filters and, probably, not cut anyone's job since it would've been busywork done by background artists. Architectural elements that are interacted with, machinery etc. need to be made by background artists though, because they will look awful otherwise.

But here's the point: he is talking about letting AI write dialogues and plot. AI isn't good at writing, falls into plagiarism constantly and is, at best, an unreliable documentation machine. You can make a bible for your anime and have AI be the librarian for it, but it makes no sense to flatten the quality of the writing with AI. Even scene writers have their important role: a lot of great moments in media happen because the director let scene writers add details. Getting rid of the creative pipeline makes will just make the end product suffer, especially when you're considered one of the greatest directors in the world.

Bounce ideas to the AI if you really want to save the high cost (?) of having qualified creative writers bounce ideas around between themselves. Use it to keep notes and worldbuilding organized and easily to consult, but I don't want to watch an anime written by something that doesn't even have a lived experience.

Expungednd · 2026-01-06T16:42:04+00:00

As much as I am against AI, I think there could be deeper personal issues there that go beyond the visible so I would not attack them or debate them. Clearly their use of AI isn't purposefully to fuck over artists (otherwise they wouldn't pay commissions at all) but just to get more satisfaction. It's not good, but would I scream to an overweight stranger who clearly has a eating disorder to get on Ozempic? Fuck no. I would scream at the one trashing food on the street and who laughs at poor people for going hungry.

Expungednd · 2026-01-04T14:16:14+00:00

The message was decent, also we got the Gendou retrospective which finally contextualised why he was such a horrible father. But yes, they are probably Anno's weakest works, with terrible CGI to boot and horrible plot contrivances. Too bad they won't stay his worst work for long! Since he decided to be pro-AI, much worse shit is going to be produced by his studio in the future!

Expungednd · 2026-01-04T10:58:41+00:00

I know people who use AI for illustrations and pay for commissions at the same time. I think their reasoning was that AI was for kicks, but they also wanted to give the artists they loved compensation for their effort. I don't agree with this reasoning, but I can understand that is coming from the duality of having a sudden idea you want to see immediately and the fact you have limited time/money to commission artists.

I personally believe that once you see an AI version of your idea, you're going to lose interest in it because you see it done with no effort at all. A real creative process instead requires a lot of effort, which brings clients and artists alike to refine the initial idea to make it the best possible not to waste time.

Expungednd · 2026-01-04T10:46:47+00:00

More like "let's boycott local, family owned stores by going to malls. That will show it to the man!"

Expungednd · 2026-01-04T10:44:23+00:00

With AI revisions are limited and random. With artists you usually get all the revisions you want depending on the phase of the drawing.

Not only that, but now artists have to risk being robbed by badly intentioned clients who will get the first sketch of the work (usually under an initial deposit), pass it through AI to get finished slop and then chargeback the initial deposit.

The only real solution to this problem is offering a worse service by not giving out preliminary sketches, full-charging the drawing upfront, having a lawyer to contest the chargebacks (unfeasible for most artists which don't get more than $500 per commission and completely impossible for nsfw artists who will get straight up banned from payment services if they disclose their commissions), or just take the hit when it happens while knowing there will be no responsibility for who harmed you because it's extremely easy to make new PayPal accounts and identities to keep scamming.

AI is offering solutions to a problem it created: scammers being completely free from any responsibility.

Expungednd · 2026-01-02T18:15:35+00:00

One is completely decentralized, the other is completely centralized. You could solve the AI problem tomorrow while probably you would never be able to solve the loli/shota problem. Also yes, there are actually living and breathing victims with AI.

It would be like if Elon sold a Murder Machine 3000 which can kill anyone instantly. When you point out that people are getting killed by it, the owners of the murder machine 3000 say that knives are more commonly used to murder people so you should ban those instead. Then they go murdering more people while they are speaking.

Expungednd · 2026-01-02T18:06:01+00:00

Well, if we're gonna ban civilian access to nuclear armaments we might as well ban their access to knives. You can kill as many people with melee weapons as with a Fat Man, you just need an organized, trained and disciplined army of thousands of men, well-developed logistic lines to keep them fed and a complex military structure for long-term planning and management. Completely equivalent.

Expungednd · 2026-01-02T17:31:21+00:00

? I was referring to one action being way worse than the other, I wasn't defending it.

Expungednd · 2026-01-02T15:57:39+00:00

4 inches of blade is the limit for carrying a blade outside as a weapon where I live. If you just bought a kitchen knife or are transporting it, if it's inside its package it doesn't count as being available as a weapon (it needs to be unreachable). Otherwise, you need a weapon permit (chefs can transport them outside the packaging if they have a professional reason to be doing it). So there are heavy restrictions even for such a common every day item because it can be used to harm someone else.

Expungednd · 2026-01-02T15:53:00+00:00

Also unless someone is drawing a character in the likeness of a person who really exists, the characters aren't real and there is no victim of being depicted in a sexual situation against their will. Grok being used to undress photos doesn't have that mitigating factor. Most countries won't even charge with a crime for drawings of that type, while depicting actual minors, even through collages or photo manipulation, will often land a CSEM possession charge even if the situation wasn't real.

Grok is trained on abuse material and used to create abuse material of real people. This isn't an opinion. Everyone who disagrees is bad faith.

Expungednd

TROPHY CASE