As somebody who almost went into the video game industry, I look at it the same way I look at people saying that you should buy a game “to support the devs” even if the company has all kinds of issues like not paying their workers well.

With games and movies, the workers already got paid. Whether you buy the game or not doesn’t affect the devs at triple A companies - they got paid before it shipped, and the same with movie actors. They did their job and got paid, so meme away without a care. In that sense, movies and games are the exact opposite of the generative AI issue. You wanna play the latest Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard slop? Pirating it and somehow finding a way to slip the devs 20 bucks for the beer fund is far more helpful to them than paying $70+ for it at retail.

Memes are honestly the perfect content to make with generative AI. The only issue is that the software we have right now is made by companies taking the work of others and not giving them their due. We aren’t doing it with a profit incentive, but they are. Which puts us in a situation where people want the reward of making art without putting in the effort or paying somebody else to put in the effort. It’s like these companies are selling coloring books of stolen artwork. You can’t link back to the original artists (if you could even spot the style of one specific artist in the generated image), so you can’t even bring attention to them. Making a meme out of art posted on social media can actually be a great advertisement for the artist (so long as people know where and how to find them) because that’s often part of the reason why artists post their art on social media in the first place. They’re advertising their skills to people who want to commission artwork. When people repost art without a source, they can actively harm the original artist. I’ve seen tons of artists complain about how reposts of their work by bot accounts will get thousands of views and likes while the original post on their account will get like one hundred views.

The tech is great, but the companies making it aren’t. And by using it, you generate revenue for them and incentivize them to continue their malicious practices. Until we’re in a position where artists are being fairly compensated, we need to be mindful of where this stuff is coming from.

One of the companies that makes one of the big digital art programs partnered up with a website design company a few months ago that is using gen AI in their website template maker. But, this company has hired artists to make the stuff that they’re training the program on, and the artists get royalties out of it. That’s how it should be - the artists got paid for their efforts, they get the credit that they’re due, and nobody has to spend all day making stupid buttons for a website UI.

I like to view it in the context of the passage about the three people donating money. One wealthy man donates a large sum of money, while a man who makes an average living donates a smaller amount, and the last is an old lady who donates something akin to $1.50. In the end, Jesus declares that the old lady gave the most because she donated all that she feasibly could while the wealthy man gave what was a mere pittance of his money and the other man gave a noticeable portion of his salary, but not enough that he would miss it.

The effort and generosity behind a donation (whether of time or money) is more important than the donation itself, and that’s what the rich can’t understand. By the time you get to that level of wealth, you’ve spent so much energy in accruing wealth that you no longer have the empathy to see those around you who truly need aid, and to lose that empathy is to lose an essential part of what makes us human - a part of the divinity that exists within us.

Image generators are not an essential resource. They’re a luxury. Using that as justification to keep doing a corporation and exploiting the working class just makes you a class traitor for convenience who doesn’t want to feel guilty about it. Like buying stuff from Amazon or Starbucks right now while their workers are both in the middle of massive strikes.

Some consumption is less ethical than others. If you wouldn’t buy stuff made in sweatshops, then why are you okay with putting artists in the same position? Until we get image generators that are open source and pay artists to use their work, we should stand with our fellow working class in solidarity.

It’s like the TikTok equivalent of YouTube clickbait titles and thumbnails. I don’t even use TikTok, but I can hear the stilted AI lady voiceover saying, “Wait Until The End. You Won’t Believe The Transformation.”

It’s easily missed, especially in the form of text. There’s too many people who believe crazier things to not take stuff at face value, I know.

It’s a tool made unethically. Just because corporations use sweat shop labor doesn’t mean we should, too. The Screen Actors Guild has been on strike for weeks now demanding contracts for jobs that ensure that their performances won’t be used to train AI models to replace them. Would you cross the picket line and use an AI Harrison Ford?

Open source LLMs or those trained on ethically sourced data are awesome. OpenAI saying that they would go bankrupt if they can’t steal copyrighted material for their training data is not. Unless they end up getting into trouble for pissing off Disney and going bankrupt. That would be hilarious.

Made using a tool created by stealing the effort of the working class. Giving it a pass is like giving Temu a pass on working conditions and pay because it’s just cheap garbage.

Obviously. But we’re talking about a made-up saint here, not the actual man himself.

In the same way that I didn’t actually bother downvoting, I figured it was in the spirit of the meme to present it the same way people attribute their values to Jesus.

But it is important to remind people how these current iterations of generative AI are damaging to the livelihoods of working-class people. The goals of the companies making these are the same as UHC - the violence is just more silent and slower paced.

Downvoted for AI. Luigi would be very disappointed in the use of a tool built by exploiting and abusing the working class.

I think Gaijin also causes this with how they “artificially balance” vehicles based on vague or basically made-up sources and ignore direct sources when it pleases them. Look at the current fiasco going on with their new $60 tank that can’t even get smoke grenades for the launcher that’s literally on the model for a perfect example.

Or, that time they refused to buff a WW2 tank and called the Wikipedia article a classified document.

What’s a stab wound feel like?

It’s not people with rigid world views, but people who don’t know the social cues/“legalese” of job speak.

Lying by omission is still lying. And if they weren’t hard requirements, they should say so. So many job listings I’ve seen word it like those are the minimum requirements.

Fun fact that may or may not be true: The left side of a ship used to be called “larboard” (to go with starboard) because that’s where the larder was - where the food was stored, and this was supposedly changed to port because that’s also where the wine was stored and it was both easier to say and easier to identify as being different from starboard.

Another fun unverified nautical fact: The word shit originated as an acronym for the storage of cow manure during transport at sea - Store High In Transit. Dried cow pies apparently have…violent reactions to salt water.

The Trevor Project is a good place to start. I don’t know of any nonprofits that directly provide resources like hormones, but I’m sure they exist.

No worries, like I said in my edit, you fixed it while I was writing my comment. I’m just leaving mine unedited for the extra info.

How long you’ve been taking hormones is the important part. How long you’ve lived as amab only really matters until a certain point, as it’s very difficult to maintain muscle mass from before you started hormones. And afab people have to build up muscle mass even when they start taking testosterone.

And yes, not every trans person is taking hormones or even will. But I have yet to hear of a single example of a trans person in regulated sports who wasn’t competing in the division of their gender while on HRT. Even the preteen kids were on puberty blockers.

I mean incentivizing them to invest it into things like public works and other beneficial things, but I also expect that that would go about as well as the current tax incentives do. It would be the thing that requires the least effort possible from the government, though, which I think makes it the most likely to actually occur. Actually taxing them more is pretty much a pipe dream.

Accurate.

That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they’ve only been available for import to the US since 2021.

I don’t know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

It’s also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you’d potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn’t produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

Edit: You fixed your comment while I was writing this, but I’m gonna leave it unedited for the info.