The only thing you have to fear.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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    1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

    2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

    3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

    4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

    5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

    6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

    7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

    8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.







  • why do the author’s politics make a difference?

    In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.

    I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you’re condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.


  • Why would you assume it’s an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I’m making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It’s kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.

    It’s safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity’s limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.

    While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we’re going to get anywhere, I’m also acutely aware that they’re still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we’re going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.






  • Most people seem to be trying to pass off AI creations as their own judging by the exponential flood of AI trash websites, videos, books, news, etc. I’ve encountered people delusional enough to believe it really is their own artwork because they supplied the text prompt to Stable Diffusion. There’s a long way to go before we see transparency.

    I wouldn’t even know how to begin holding people to transparency here. It’s nice that it tends to be obvious when something is AI generated, but I’m sure the clock is ticking to the day no one can tell the difference.


  • but there’s guys out there

    Guys, you say? Don’t worry, it’s just major publications like National Geographic firing off all their writers, tech companies downsizing in the hopes that ChatGPT will code for free, a plague of nonsensical AI written books flooding the market under legitimate authors’ names, and all of Hollywood hoping their writers will work for pennies out of desperation for food and shelter.

    It doesn’t matter that ChatGPT constantly gives wrong answers and has about as much personality as a bran muffin. With the dawn of AI, us humans don’t need humans anymore.


  • I did. He assured me in more professional terms that they don’t give a shit. I do a lot of business with them and have been a client in good standing since I became an adult. They apparently have nothing set up to retain customers who leave over this, which would indicate that hasn’t been an issue for them. Or they might be banking on me not following through, but that just means they don’t know me very well. When it comes time for me to make those changes to my policy, I’m gone.




  • Okay, I get your point now. If all artists had your stance and felt this hobbled them, then I’d understand thinking Hasbro’s decision is wrong. But not every artist agrees with you. This is reminiscent of the argument between digital and physical art, with digital artist’s struggle to be seen as viable against oil painters and other physical media artists. Except digital isn’t any better or worse, they’re simply different mediums. You could argue pros and cons for both types, but in the end everyone is entitled to the medium they prefer. This includes AI assisted artwork. If someone prefers digital art but wants no AI influence, that’s up to them since art is entirely subjective.

    This is a perfectly valid direction for Hasbro to want to take, and they’re the ones who get to make the call. Not every artist feels hobbled by being barred from AI tools, some artists prefer to avoid AI entirely. There are plenty of people who would happily accept these jobs.