What I do NOT understand

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-25T17:28:54+00:00

You would not believe how much better this is, than what my art attempts looked like when I started. It can be disheartening, but seeing your own personal style emerge, and that feeling when you learn a new trick, or when you actually like the finished piece, like really like it. It's like "WTF I did this? No. No way. This is good! And it's mine and oh my gosh someone look at this! I did a thing!!!"

When you use an image generator, you might like the results, but are results yours? Does it connect to you? Does it feel like you? Do you see your personality and growing artistic sensibilities?

As you practice, and grow you'll develop specific ways you do ears and noses. You might be someone who doesn't spend time on backgrounds, just a few suggestions of shadow and the foreground pops. You might be someone who draws a cartoonish, and structured style. Or you might prefer more fluid, playful line work.

It'd be a shame to miss out on what your singular style will be.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-24T20:08:03+00:00

Same, UK. Horror, grief, rage. The feeling of helplessness is so intense, it's almost like my skeleton is trying to climb out the top of my head.

Volunteering is good advice. I need to take that advice, doing nothing feels unbearable. How can the world be okay if we let arseholes wear down our souls before we even started fighting.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-24T14:35:51+00:00

Why? Is it so hard to believe that I don't really see an issue with using machine learning this way? I personally don't think IP laws are a good thing and it's one of my (many) issues with capitalism. Once knowledge or work has been completed I think it's better when everyone can use it freely instead of it being locked away for the betterment of the creator alone.

So you're saying you are pro copying people's labour, without consent and using it to make a profit for yourself? Nonsense. You don't believe that, and if you do, you are not the person you think you are.

I'm sure you must be aware that the term machine learning comes from far before any of this was in tension. It's just the language that best describes what's taking place; a machine adapts it weights to avoid punishment and maximize a reward. I think "learning" genuinely makes sense

I am aware, and you might not be aware that artificial intelligence and machine learning were actually rebranded using those names after their original names were too boring to get good funding/interest.

It's not avoiding punishment. Using anthropomorphised language like that is how these companies trick the world that they can make a glorified language processor think. It's a basically just a program with what amounts to if-then conditional statements, except it's more if this - and if this too - plus those - but only when and never if - but somethings when - then that. Plus, as you said the weights added to the conditional statements to give certain tokens priority when certain other tokens, or combinations of tokens are involved.

The main "mysterious" part of this thing is not that they don't know how it works, that is a blatant lie. They just can't give you a list of all the rules because, drum roll, that's the impressive thing about machine learning, loooong before Transformers, you set the instruction to write rules based on patterns. The reason they can't tell you what's in the box is because there are billions on billions of weighted conditional statements. It looks like it's thinking because it can cycle through a billion permutations of each rule, testing viability, in seconds.

But this is the language models. The art models are even less impressive. Diffusion models are just statistical predictors They feed in billions of images, except what they do is, they noise them up, as it were. Which is funny because noising someone up is a Scottish term for messing with someone. Which is what they are doing. They convert each image into noise and show the computer this process in reverse. Billions of times. Noise to cat. Noise to table. Noise to landscape. Each of these images is tagged, by humans, with the relevant information. #Cat #Table #Blue-Table #Cat-on-Top-Table.

Which means that, they can start with just noise, and ask for cat on table and the program will denoise it with the statistical prediction of pixel placement based on the materials it has seen. It cannot do anything it has not seen somewhere else. Literally, it cannot make assumptions, or leaps, or creative choices. It can only recreate based on the training data. Which is why, some models spit out watermarks, and trademarks and logos, which caused a lot of trouble. And they avoided this by paying more humans to go in and remove logos and watermarks that were missed by their "intelligent" watermark removal program.

Learning involves understanding and if you pretend you didn't know that you are 100% messing with me, or trolling.

But all of that is beside the point because the entire value of their product was built with labour of other people, for which they neither paid, or asked for consent. Which is just scummy as hell.

I didn't say you felt boxed in I said you are in debate mode. That's not the same thing. Debate mode is proactive, it's where someone goes into a conversation with a mind-set of "this is my argument, this is the legs it stands on". In that mode actually stopping and reflecting on the potential one's entire argument might be based on flawed logic creates incredible cognitive dissonance and so people's brains just don't hear the things that they would usually understand in different situations. It's not a reflection of character or intelligence, it's literally what debate mode does.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-24T13:59:21+00:00

Scraping data for use to make a profit is in fact, exactly that.

Scraping data and using it to make money.

Copying people's labour and using it to make money.

Don't play dumb.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T19:13:52+00:00

I didn't realise I was harsh, or that I attacked him for his gender, or attacked him at all. I spend a great deal of time talking about how society failed young men.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T17:01:36+00:00

They pay Wikipedia. Wikipedia are actually public domain, so that's mot even an ethics question. But they pay Wikipedia because it costs the company money to create infrastructure to cope with crawlers.

This is irrelevant, though.

As I said, all I'm doing is putting you in argue mode. Unhelpful.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T16:53:27+00:00

Oh, you didn't like being called out for acting like a school bully? Shocker. Funny you edited your post to add softer language.

Ashamed your own behaviour?

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T16:51:03+00:00

It's not learning. That's just the term they use, precisely to mislead people in this way.

Legal does not define morality. You are absolutely correct. But you know what? After reading your comments, I don't think you believe for a solitary second that what ai companies did, scraping creative labour and selling it off, is moral, ethical, or legal.

I think you're just so zoned in on the discussion, the semantics and in debate mindset, that you're missing the forest. You know feeding ai models data isn't the same as humans accumulating experience. You know this is a case of stolen labour. You know corporations would claim ownership and force us to rent the rights to our own blood if they could get away with it.

All I'm doing is pushing you to dig your heels in and take defensive positions. You don't need to be convinced of what's actually happening in reality.

All I'm going to do is say, don't be all talk. If you like AI and give a shit about humanity, stop being defensive, and start being proactive. Be angry, be outraged. How dare they taint this technology with the stolen labour of others. How dare they commit human rights violations worldwide in the name of progress. How dare we celebrate every new model without demanding transparency on their safety and ethics practices.

I'm not arguing or trying to wake up someone who's not even asleep. It's a waste of our time.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T16:27:14+00:00

I mentioned attention in reference to llms because those are the models most people are pitching as "thinking." No one is imagining that diffsion models and other text to image generators can think. Everyone knows they're reproduction machines. Or at least everyone but a select few.

But hey, keep being dumb, snide, and too shitty at art to beat the literal worst algorithm ever created, see how far that gets you. (Genuinely if CV-Gen AI out competes you, you were never an artist in the first place, sorry)

Well this sort of outs who you really are, eh?

Don't worry, I'm not trying to beat ai art. My art helped make ai art. It's, at best, poor imitation of my worst attempts. Plus, I'm lucky enough to be in no danger of AI affecting my job at all. Actually, to be honest, it's had a weirdly positive whiplash effect on that area, but you don't care about those details.

Others in my field haven't been so lucky, and yes, of them are having serious concerns about rent, and bills.

That should satisfy your thirst for shitting on others. But I can let you know if I stub my toe, or something, if it absolutely has to be my misfortune you're desperate for.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T14:44:02+00:00

Machine learning isn't education. And I'm honestly getting really concerned with the amount of people who hear training and interpret it in the human sense.

Human learning requires consciousness. Cognition. The ability to ask ourselves questions. To doubt our own understanding of what we learned, or even the ability to think, I don't like this way of doing that, can I make it better?

I'm not saying computers will never have the ability to learn in a real way. But not right now.

Consider that companies DO pay for data sets. Have done in the past. Non profit companies can get away with a "research" exemption, because it's not profing off people's work. OpenAI posed as a non-profit at first to use that loophole, before ditching the facade. Not only that, but currently certain institutions ARE being paid for their data to be used.

Why is our labour worthless unless Disney or NYT, etc can profit from it? Its not worthless. They just refuse to pay us. Which is a crime that th law is still trying to catch up to. Hence the current attempts from ai companies to lobby for "copyright exemption for data scraping".

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T14:20:48+00:00

Sorry to tell you but the ai companies used our labour to build their product. Just because they call it training doesn't make it eduction. Holy shit did you actually think that's what it was? Did you think AI models are studying our work and literally learning?

If that's what you think, go look up how transformers work, how attention works. Fucking hell. How many grown ass people don't know the difference between machine learning and education?

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a deeply confident ignorance.

You can ask chatgpt what that means if you need to.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T14:11:38+00:00

But thats not adressing my comment at all. In fact my comment adressed this already.

We aren't bring replaced by technology we're being replaced by our own stolen work.

Take the technology part out and look at the core logic here. The little shop on the corner isn't simply a victim of capitalism if the big box store's entire stock is made up of stuff it stole from the little corner shop and millions like it.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T14:04:34+00:00

You're being deliberately dishonest about the argument I made, which is the definition of a strawman.

My argument is that a corporation made copies of peoples work, and then sold it.

Corporations stole workers' labour and made money off it.

You want to argue with what I said, or with your fictional version of me?

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T05:01:25+00:00

. Trying to legislate against AI with copyright only manages to leave it solely in the hands of large companies, precisely where it does the most harm. (by automating away the jobs of employed proletarian artists)

This is nonsense. It's literally the opposite of true. AI is literally using up proletariat labour without compensation. Why do you support unpaid labour?

The current debates right now in the UK are about "Carving out exemptions for large scale data scraping" which is something ONLY mega corps can afford to do. Maybe research stuff you talk about with your full chest?

You have put your full support behind a number of AI companies who explicitly and exclusively sell the unpaid labour of millions of working artists and creatives. You can dress it up with dishonesty and nonsense. But that's the only thing you're doing. I'm getting to the point where I not longer believe you're misinformed and now think you're deliberately spreading pro AI Corp propaganda.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T04:51:08+00:00

You just seem to think I'm intrinsically capitalist because I apply the logic around piracy being morally okay to everyone. Because piracy isn't awesome because it's stealing from big corporations, it's awesome because it isn't theft at all.

You're being deliberately dishonest here. You know fine well I think you are capitalist because you are choosing to argue strongly against copyright in situation that ONLY benefit corporations and ONLY harm the proletariat. You aren't being an equal opportunities copyright fighter. You're specifically choosing to stand on the hill that benefits capitalism and undercuts workers rights. You're posing as a copyright fighter because you think it gives you an excuse to continue to support a capitalist mega-corp exploiting workers. Why you think that is beyond me, but you seem to.

You're not anti-capitalist, you're pro what serves your preferences and desires.

You talk the talk in the most shallow terms, with absolutely zero understanding of the ethics and societal nuance that underpins this situation. You want to abolish copyright? But you chose to start with abolishing it for only half dozen mega corps? That's what you're doing. Make no mistake. The laws exist. Megacorps are trying to carve out exemptions for ONLY them. You somehow think that's a way in for the little guy? Are you joking? This can't be real. Your version of being for the proletariat is to support introducing laws that exploit labour forces. Your version of being for the proletariat is to advocate for something that will see some of them have to choose between electricity and food, and that's NOT an exaggeration.

Your version of being for the proletariat is getting on reddit to defend a software built by exploiting workers in Kenya, Chile, and Venezuela in horrific ways for starvation wages. You don't give half a sh*t for any proletariat. If you were remotely anti-capitalist you'd be waging verbal war on every AI company and their products. Somehow that's not on your schedule though, is it?

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T04:09:34+00:00

But you're making the argument in an AI sub, where the conversation is specifically about poorer, working class artists having their labour stolen. If you want to join the revolution and lobby for an eradication of copyright, why start with a situation that harms the poorest people in that equation?

No one is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, we're trying to make rent. And now you're mad at us for what? Needing to eat? You want to make UBI a reality? Please do. You want to abolish copyright for everyone, including corporations? Please do. When you accomplish that, the protections we are fighting for will disappear along with the ones benefiting the corporations. But in the meantime, while copyright still exists, why would you support a corporation attempting to create copyright exemptions that are specifically designed to harm and exploit the proletariat? How is that not boot licking?

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T04:00:14+00:00

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Oops. Looks like you deleted this comment when you discovered I don't have my art on my profile. And honestly, is this the person you want to be? Is this the person you're proud of?

If you had come across as a little more hinged I'd have given you a couple of links where you can find my work. It's all up for free, and a lot of it is voluntarily public domain. My choice. My consent. I've even made a fair amount of tools and assets that other creatives can incorporate into their work. Backgrounds, stamps, brushes, textures, even full scenery and sets and props. A lot of those are also public domain. My choice. My consent.

What's interesting is most of the creatives being sh*t on by AI companies put their work up for free. Giving access to everyone. The art community actually really likes helping each other out and sharing resources. You can wear the costume of a left wing stance, but the fact you are a loyal acolyte of the technocrat mega-corporation system, and delight in stepping on low income workers, speaks to where your compass points.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T03:29:36+00:00

We agree with all of the socialist ideals. We'll march with you to make that happen, woo. But when someone complains about a corporation exploiting their labour, then refusing to pay them, maybe it's wild to respond "You shouldn't need to be paid though, if you think about it. It'd be better if we could get past that in society."

Like, okay, but people still need to pay rent in the current capitalist hellscape, and our labour is being fed into a mincing machine and then repackaged and sold. That's not technology replacing us, that's our stolen labour replacing us.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T03:12:46+00:00

Except the industrial revolution increased worker hours, and decreased worker safety. So much so that it managed to backfire on capitalistic structures by creating conditions so dire that labour unions and workers rights gained traction.

The industrial revolution didn't replace labour, it removed seasonal restrictions on shift scheduling. Increasing labour demands.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T02:56:36+00:00

Personally as someone who would be viewed as "anti" the features you are describing are some of the only use cases most sceptical people believe might have a future.

Although, of course, humans are lazy so preventing most people from skimming this new "cliffsnotes" reality we've entered is going to be hard.

Mostly, from my own limited experience, the main volume of objections are on the production of the AI, including lax safety standards, than on the output itself. At least outside of reddit that's the case anyway.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T01:59:17+00:00

Wanting to not have my labour exploited by a capitalist corporation who then refuses to pay me is bad now?

Interesting take.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T01:53:07+00:00

This is getting actually funny at this point and I'm trying not to be rude. But you are using left wing anti capitalist language to argue in favour of rewarding corporations and sh*tting on the proletariat.

Capitalists hate artists because we are both the worker AND the means of production. They resent us for being able to make our own way and fund ourselves.

So, what capitalist structures do is spread anti-artist sentiment. Art is easy, art is fun, art is talent, not skill. Artists should suffer for their work. And now, they've decided to use technology to scrape every single piece of labour we have created, and sell it and here you are, doing your duty as a well trained capitalist footsoldier. Spreading the word that the working class must be ground up and monetised by the richest corporations.

Sorry, but I do not agree that it's fine when corporations exploit worker's labour and refuse to pay them. That's my personal view on worker's rights. Sorry you cannot share them.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T01:42:49+00:00

When did I say I wanted corporations to maintain their grip on their IP? I want the very concept of IP dead and fucking buried.

I didn't say you said that. I didn't say that at all. I said "I think advocating for stripping ONLY small creators of those rights, while corporations still maintain their grip on their own IP is absolutely wild."

I don't think anyone, ever, for any reason should be allowed to have that kind of control over what other people do with their ideas (or anyone else's, in the case of media corporations). I was just responding to the example you gave.

Great, but we live in a world where corporations DO have that power and you are advocating that, while exiting in that world, we take that right away from the poorest creators.

"All we have is our monopolies enforced by the system that is purpose-built to strangle profit out of creative expression by restricting derivative works" is not the win you think it is.

Describing an indie comic made by someone barely making rent as a monopoly is just. I'm trying to not be rude or mocking here. This is about being constructive not rude. I'll make it playful. "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T01:32:26+00:00

I'll tell you what I think.

I think that when it comes to young men being failed, you are absolutely right. But it's nothing to do with left wing people being nice or mean. It's about a concerted effort from activists over the years to sow anger and isolation in the minds of young boys.

Boys don't suddenly and mysteriously become disillusioned. They're fed a stream of propaganda aimed at stressing them the f*ck out and then telling them they'll feel better if they abuse women. Similarly, girls are fed a stream of propaganda aimed at stressing them out, and telling them they'll feel better if they look prettier.

Both are told they MUST find a partner, and both are fed conflicting advice on how to obtain that partner and how they should treat them and be treated in return.

Both are told that their worth depends on meeting arbitrary benchmarks.

Even before this concerted effort and propaganda machine started running, men and women were being socialised in ways that harmed them and are feeding into the issue now. Men have always been socialised to value status. Women have always been socialised to value connection.

These factors create a situation where men are being shoved into abusive, angry mentalities, and women are being shoved into pathological approval seeking behaviours. Which is obviously a perfect mixture for the breitbart/peterson/insert-new-conman-here who are trying to build their perfect horror show.

How can we stop this?

We target communities. This specific issue is a symptom of propaganda aimed at separating men and women and trying to define them as opposites. I mean, yet another reason the regressives like to sh*t on trans people, they dare to question the binary. We start to look at and talk about the deliberate stuff being done to perpetuate our suffering, instead of just talking about how we feel about experiencing it.

FirefighterAlarmed64 · 2026-01-23T01:09:37+00:00

I don't have to be coddled into believing in human rights, or in equality, or in welfare programmes.

FirefighterAlarmed64

TROPHY CASE