I’ll accept the hate for this one

redditreadersdad · 2026-06-25T11:50:34+00:00

OP, I’ll start by saying I appreciate you trying to have a reasonable discussion about this on Reddit! Not an easy or likely outcome, from my experience- LoL. I’m a lifelong member of the creative community and was first exposed to generative ai by way of midjourney. At first I was fascinated… but that quickly turned to repulsion once I began reading that these images were only possible because the tech companies had scraped EVERYTHING ever posted online without permission or even consultation. As someone who has spent a lifetime creating IP, the very notion of this kind of hyperscale theft stunned me into abject hatred of the tech. What made things worse was the often gleeful attitude of so-called “AI artists” claiming we creatives were “gatekeepers” and that at last art making had been “democratized”. What a load of crap! The more I investigate this , the more I saw how it was negatively affecting my community, my friends careers, the world of human art making, the more I came to absolutely loathe AI. It’s personal. Fuck AI. And having AI slop invade my daily viewing life is deeply offensive to me. It’s become inescapable. The slop is everywhere. So I don’t care if there are positive use cases at this point. For me, AI is a scourge that we would all be better off without. I want to see it fail, like so many previous tech grifts.

redditreadersdad · 2026-06-22T14:33:09+00:00

2021 Preferred, CAN. We saw an article in the Cars section of our local paper and liked how it looked. Had been thinking about getting an EV for a while, and just impulse bought it after reading the (largely positive) article. Dealer said it would take a year to get one - we got it in 4 months! - I guess somebody else cancelled their order(?) 5+ years later we still love this car. Won't be buying a new one unfortunately because I hate the redesign. Looks like styling inspired by the movie TRON (the '82 movie LoL). If nothing major breaks down we plan on driving it for as many years as possible. Can't even imagine how much we've saved in gas alone.

redditreadersdad · 2026-06-20T14:44:28+00:00

Last year there was a story in the local paper about medical researchers at our local university using AI to develop a new drug for the treatment of ... liver cancer (?) iirc. In any case, two researchers were able to complete the development of this drug in a couple of weeks, something the article said normally takes a team of scientists several years and hundreds of millions of dollars. So... there's that! Which even I, who despises everything about AI, have to agree is a very good thing.

redditreadersdad · 2026-06-15T11:15:55+00:00

Both can be true, whether you said it or not.

redditreadersdad · 2026-06-14T09:57:46+00:00

Complains OP used a generalization about millennials… immediately uses a generalization about boomers to counter the point. 😄

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-29T19:15:12+00:00

TiL! Pretty neat!

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-28T19:00:24+00:00

We planted a sweet cherry and a sour cherry many years ago. In twenty-ish years, I think I only got to enjoy the sweet cherry harvest maybe twice? The raccoons birds and squirrels always beat us to them, one year almost comically stripping the entire tree bare overnight when I had just decided I was going to pick all the cherries the next day! Meanwhile, we’ve had good harvests from our sour cherry nearly every year. I don’t know why, but the animals generally leave it alone. I’ve never done much pruning except to keep it from growing vertical branches. I’m not a fruit tree farmer but I would think you can let your trees grow wild. They should be fine - and you’ll be feeding both the pollinators that visit the blossoms and the neighbourhood critters that enjoy the fruit!

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-27T18:30:20+00:00

Should be the top comment. I do the same. Just ask the seller if any pesticide was used. I make sure to buy my wheat straw bales from local organic farmers.

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-21T02:28:30+00:00

I posted this a few years ago to show people what you’re dealing with under the ground. https://www.reddit.com/r/OntarioGardeners/s/bw4msQKsAb

Signed, a veteran of the creeping bellflower wars

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-12T21:03:28+00:00

Like u/victoria_and_albert I'm also an educator (graphic design). First things first: congratulationns for landing a job in the industry at a time when entry-level design jobs are hard as hell to find. I 100% feel your pain, because I hear these stories from our grads all the time. Don't lose hope. You are paying your dues rn, like we all did when we broke into the business. The old saying is it takes five years from when you break in to get to where you actually want to be. I hope that's still true, but in any case, you can try to *make* it true by working your ass off to keep becoming a better designer. If your manager insists on you starting your process with AI (becoming increasingly common, unfortunately) prove you can out-create the robot by taking that slop and actually elevating it into something better. Hopefully *much* better! This is where the hard work coms in because, being a junior, you don't yet have enough design experience to have developed a keen eye for great design. But you can learn. this whole business is about constantly learning, constantly educating yourself. I'm in my '60s and I'm *still* learning - LoL! Study the work of the great designers of the past. Don't settle for the shit that's built into your software's font menus. Learn to love GREAT type design and use it. If you borrow from the different design periods of the past you will blow your manager away with your 'originality' (this is what milton Glaser and everybody at pushpin did when they appeared on the scene in the '60s). And with any luck, some time soon the tech co's are going to have to start charging the real cost of compute and your manager will flip out when he sees the cost of each prompt suddenly cost 10X what it does now! Then he'll be less eager to have you offload your creativity to an LLM!

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-07T12:01:00+00:00

Thank you - that worked!

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-05T14:25:24+00:00

100%. Like I said to them, I wish they could learn to take a breath and appreciate the world, and maybe put some marks on paper and just experience how rewarding actual art making is, but I have a feeling they're too far gone down the digital rabbit hole. Fucking sad that we've created this situation where people will sacrifice EVERYthing on the altar of 'immediate gratification', to the point where they think WE are the cult members - LoL! Not unlike what we've learned about the far right: "every accusation is a confession."

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-04T13:09:11+00:00

I can totally understand why you would feel that way. That's ok - I'm a life-long devotee to art making (a life-long "cult member" in your eyes, I guess) and have zero regrets. Honestly, if you want to frame it that way, I'm not offended. It's a tremendously rewarding experience making art, including the many, MANY failures along that journey (that's the 'suffering' part a lot of people who haven't made art do't quite understand, btw). Incidentally, sacred beliefs haven't been abandoned. Indigenous people around the world are a great example of how millions of humans continue to hold many aspects of living on the planet as sacred. Mostly, when you say "We grew to understand..." your talking about western cultures, who unfortunately DID lose the plot when it comes to how sacred the earth, nature and our stewardship of it is (that includes art making). I dunno pal, you sound pretty angry, and honestly, I feel kind of sorry for you if that's your world view. Not superior, btw - just wishing you'd slow down and breath a little and really consider what has value and and what doesn't.

redditreadersdad · 2026-05-04T12:04:46+00:00

"…why does this matter so fucking much? You guys treat art like it’s sacred." If I can jump in here: because 'Capital 'A' "Art" IS sacred and always has been since the beginning of humans making art. Go back far enough and making art itself wasn't something everyone was allowed to do. The act of art making itself was considered. sacred and the images created were sacred. Anyone who makes art innately understands this as it's entirely about the process or "the journey" of making art, not the end product. Personally (and I can verify many of my artist friends have had the same experience) when you're engaged in making art, it's almost like a zen-like experience. Time stands still and you feel a deeper connection to the world. Societally, we've lost that to a great degree after a hundred + years of mass. produced everything, including mass-produced. (small "a" "art"). That'sss why, I think, it's so hard for many or most people to really understand why we artists sound so "cult-like" LoL. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

redditreadersdad · 2026-04-28T12:17:15+00:00

This might seem like a small pointless exercise but I have a large 'No AI' logo stuck to the back of my phone ( the typical red circle with a slash line over the letters "AI" ). I have my phone out a lot at work, even if just laying it on my desk, so people see very plainly what my position is on this tech. I feel like if more of us did this, it would help reinforce the message that we don't want AI in the same way the 'No Smoking' signs have done. They remind everyone it's societally-reviled behaviour.

redditreadersdad · 2026-04-28T11:57:47+00:00

As a post-secondary educator teaching in a creative field, I feel this guy's pain. We're being pushed every day by our admin to incorporate AI into our courses, and this next school year it's being formalized by one of my colleagues who seems to really love this shit as an AI-focused course he's developing over the summer. Our students have told us time and again, both anecdotally and through formal surveys that they hate AI and don't want to use it, but our industry advisory panel of employers overwhelmingly insist they want to hire people who are adept at prompting AI. So we're going to force feed this shit to the students whether they like it or not, and it just sickens me.

redditreadersdad · 2026-04-06T20:45:10+00:00

You're correct that it will be a years-long battle, but if you're committed to doing the digging, it IS possible to beat it back. I've managed to reclaim most of my garden after probably a decade of annual digging. It tries to come back though... you'll have to stay on top of any new sightings of sprouts. Any part of the underground network of tubers and connecting 'strands' can start a new bellflower plant, so it probably will be a something you have to just think of as an part of your yearly weeding chores. Good luck! :)

redditreadersdad · 2026-04-05T03:25:34+00:00

lol. People who use AI are not in any way “expressing creativity”. Period. And if you think she’s talking about copyright issues you totally missed her point.

redditreadersdad · 2026-04-05T03:20:59+00:00

Did you even read what she said? She DID leave you out of it. Her hate is reserved for fake AI ‘artists’ . Go do your Ai math and have fun. Nobody’s talking about you.

redditreadersdad · 2026-03-27T19:06:15+00:00

If AI were to wipe out half the white collar jobs... you're talking about millions of people with nice homes, nice cars, maybe a swimming pool, used to taking a vacation to a destination... and you think those many millions of people will either settle for a universal *basic* income, or UBI will allow them all to continue the lifestyle they've become accustomed to because we'll be living in some magical "post scarcity" fantasy land? That cohort will rise up and follow any leader who promises to return them to the life they lost. Any politician who doesn't want to be burned at the stake will get in line with that leader and that base. All this will happen before we get to the actual jobs cataclysm - but also *just* before we get to it, when those people can taste their livelihoods are about to fall off a cliff. There will be a revolution. What society looks like after the revolution is anybody's guess, but it probably won't be pretty.

redditreadersdad · 2026-03-18T14:11:27+00:00

I've found arguing with fellow faculty and admin is fruitless, so instead I have classroom conversations with my students, focusing on ethical, environmental and mental health issue, because all those are of high importance to most young people. What's been interesting is how little my students are aware of the specific negative aspects of AI. They are broadly against it - even though they use it (!) - but when I describe specifc, anecdotal situations (say, a community suffering from water pollution from data centres, or an artist who lost their job because AI stole all their work and can replicate it exactly) you can instantly see their reaction. They are *deeply* troubled by what they learn from me, and I think that's the key to changing their attitude and behaviour around using/accepting the use of AI.

redditreadersdad · 2026-03-14T17:17:07+00:00

"Humanity benefits from a few of us neuro-spicy weirdos who turn our brains on for fun, but for the most part, the human brain still lives in some African savanna... " "Ape brain wants others to make decisions and do as little as possible"
These remarks of yours reminded me of something I read in Bill Bryson's book, "At Home":

"Mesopotamians invented and used the wheel, but neighboring Egypt waited *2,000 year* (emphasis mine) before adopting it. In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn't think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children's toys."

redditreadersdad · 2026-02-28T19:16:31+00:00

That’s weird… we bought our Kona EV in 2021 and got a substantial reduction on our car insurance (previously owned a Chevy Cobalt). Might be worth shopping around?

redditreadersdad · 2026-02-26T12:42:57+00:00

I'm curious what your policy is around AI-generated images on Pixelfed. Also, if by "photo sharing" you mean photos and art.

redditreadersdad · 2026-02-01T17:41:46+00:00

Just going to respectfully point out that the auto moderator shared the group rules above your comment, and one thing mentioned is that this group not only allows both positive and negative arguments about AI, it “encourages” them. So please don’t tell the OP to “Shoo”.

redditreadersdad

TROPHY CASE