erin (she/her)

There is a difference between studying techniques, ideology, history, and mediums to be able to use a style created by another artist in your own creative works, and putting all the creative end products into the ideas blender and churning out a product with no creativity and no intentionality to the application of the process. What’s the end game? At what point does human creativity become redundant and AI starts eating its own slop? Do human artists need to keep creating depictions of meaning or value or whatever else they find important to endlessly feed into the machine so it can duplicate them, missing any of the metaphor, subtext, and soul present in the original? At what point is it obvious that workers are having their labor stolen by the tech bro Soylent Green idea machine to enrich them at the expense of whoever’s life work they seemed to be slop worthy of regurgitation.

AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works, and cannot be validated at the same level as human artists. I, for one, would like to see a future where artists don’t just exist to feed into their machine betters.

I own two cats, and they both have bells. They haven’t killed any wildlife since then. Cats are not native animals in Europe, they are very much invasive and devastated local populations of birds and small mammals.

Trolling, intentionally obtuse, or just dumb? Because as we all know, cats never kill anything but pests. Native animals would never become endangered because of domesticated cats. At least put a bell on them or something so they don’t kill the wildlife.

On the contrary, since growing my nails out my nails have been way more clean. There is an awkward period between no nails and long nails where stuff gets caught underneath, but once you grow them out (only two weeks or so), they’re perfectly clean because there’s just more space underneath and nowhere for gunk to get caught as the angle is wider.

(Classic guitar players have long nails)

I feel no need to be protected in my day to day life. My partner provides love, companionship, empathy, and a listening ear. Sure, some women might care about protection and toughness or whatever you’re on about, but attraction varies from person to person. Most other women I know want to be heard and loved. People are allowed to want to fuck “fragile” men. They can be hot without needing to be “manly.” You’re putting so much stock in traditional gender norms, not realizing that it’s not women that actually care about those. It’s the men that are trying to be that. Some women will, of course, but women aren’t a monolith. Want an example? Timothy Chalamet is very commonly considered to be an extremely attractive actor, and he’s far more androgynous and “fragile,” as you put it, than your traditional masculine ideal. Just as many women might be attracted to any number of different appearances, because people are different! The days of needing a strong man to support us frail women are over. Your insecurities and ideas of masculinity are clouding your judgment.

To answer your question succinctly: No, they aren’t fragile looking, they’re just slim. No, they don’t look “dehumanized,” they look like people. The dehumanization happens in industry, not with their faces. I know people that look similar. Some women find them hot, and want to fuck them, and idolize them, because they are hot! They’re very attractive people, if that aesthetic is what you’re into! If your only metric is how likely they are to win a fight, sure, they probably aren’t at the top of the scale, but the vast majority of people DON’T CARE.

They told you to look into therapy because you have an unhealthy idea of what women are attracted to and what masculinity should be. They called you insecure because you sound insecure (why do women like the weak little boys and not big manly men :(( they look so frail and weak, don’t women know they can’t protect them??). Whether or not that’s how you’re actually thinking, it’s how it comes across. Instead of realizing that some people do like strong men, you took it to a place of jealousy and defensiveness.

TLDR: Different strokes for different folks. Don’t obsess over people you don’t find attractive still being attractive to others, as it isn’t good for your mental health and isn’t a good look.

You can find that information easily. Steam reviews are by region.

My main point being: Gender is a social construct, and doesn’t fit the complex reality of lived human experience. Let people define their gender in their own terms, for those that desire a label, and otherwise abolish it.

Whether or not the statement is recursive, it is a basis. I see no valid reason to define it more rigorously. I identify as a woman, therefore I am. I identify as bisexual, therefore I am. Those are labels for nebulous social constructs, and don’t need to be rigorous definitions. Any basis beyond “because I say so” would be inherently exclusionary. The entire debate over what defines a woman or a man is a pointless affair which harms transgender people and gender nonconforming cisgender people alike. I believe we should be abolishing gender, not trying to establish a basis for what makes someone woman or man enough. It’s all made up.

In a philosophical sense of the strict definition, you’re correct. I see no good reason to use our language like that though, as it would inevitably hurt trans people. I choose to instead use gender as an identifier assigned by each individual, as it’s our colloquial definition and less harmful to trans people. In my opinion, if someone identifies as a woman, she is a woman, regardless of external perception.

And yes, I also agree that gender would be better abolished and relegated to a vibes-based, self-identified label for people that want it.

External perception should not be a qualifier of gender. Passing shouldn’t be required for a trans person to be a member of their gender, much as a feminine presenting man is still a man and a masculine presenting woman is still a woman, unless they say otherwise. Because it’s all made up anyways, we can allow the definition to be as flexible as gender itself is.

But yes, gender is often performative, but rather than defining that in the terms of the audience, define it in terms of the cast.

They called you a douchebag because your response was snippy and rude. “Click your own link” sounds condescending and arrogant.

That’s not what the definition has changed to. Women can be women without identifying with that traditional role. A woman is someone who identifies as a woman. I am a woman, and I certainly don’t identify with the role of a traditional woman.

That doesn’t say he was flawless, it said they couldn’t find anything to attack him on, which is true. They liked the whole “blowing up brown people with missiles” thing. That comment isn’t unilateral praise of Obama, it’s an explanation of why Republicans couldn’t find dirt they could use on him, because the dirt that was there was on their faces too.

If you think that this:

Replace “machine” with “film crew”, “rerun” with “do another take”, and “tweak the prompt” with “provide notes”. If they’re giving notes to a computer or a person doesn’t really change the nature of their work, only the language they use to provide those notes.

is what a director does? You have no clue what you’re talking about. They’re far more involved in the creative process on every level than you understand.

Your question about who AI helps is a valid one. I agree that that’s what’s important about AI use. I use AI in my work, but not to replace human beings, but as a tool to make easy mock ups or test ideas. I find trying to replace human creativity in a way that replaces jobs or the human spark that makes art, art, abhorrent. AI art cannot exist without humans to train on, so humans cannot be fully replaced, but I hope to never see a day where AI takes the positions of well compensated artists leeching off the work of unpaid or underpaid humans.

I’m not suggesting that the director has full responsibility for the art. They are part of a team, and the creative style of a director heavily influences the finished product. You can tell who directed a movie just by watching it. There are very important creative decisions and directions that point the team of more specialized artists in the right direction.

This is not analogous to AI art. That would be like the director of a movie telling a team of interns to cut together clips of other movies as best they see fit, within a general outline of the script. A person using AI to generate art isn’t part of the creative process in the same way; they tell a machine what to do, and decide whether to rerun or tweak the prompt after seeing the result. This takes some small modicum of creativity, but it isn’t creating art. It’s fine for fun, or to use as a stand in tool, or to mock-up designs, but it will never have the creative direction of a human being, or stand on the same level with true masters, regardless of how well it can copy their style. It can’t understand the art.

Directing is an art form of its own. The cinematography, the pacing, the set design, acting, and so much more is all influenced by the director’s decisions. It would be like saying a conductor or a music producer isn’t an artist. Easy to say if you don’t have an understanding of the art form, but dead wrong. There are a ton of creative choices at all levels made by directors, and there’s a reason we’ve been using them in one way or another since we first started performance art. I’ve worked under and beside directors in the past, and I have only the utmost respect for what a good director can do for the art.

A bad director however… I might agree with you.

That certainly is an opinion

My experience is so different, and so are the market statistics. A “forever mouse” is a dumb idea just looking for a subscription cash grab, but the PC mouse market is expanding year over year as more people get desktop computers, and especially for PC gaming, an expanding market in its own right. The customer base of people who use mice might be shrinking in some Linux communities, but stating that across the board is just incorrect.

It was a general assumption, and apparently not an accurate one. I don’t presume to actually know how you think from one comment. There are dog whistles on all sides, because it’s essentially a term for an “inside joke,” minus the humor (usually). It comes up most often with Nazis and racists not because they’re the center of attention necessarily, but mostly because dog whistles are needed primarily by groups that are not socially acceptable. You cannot be openly racist except with other racists, or openly a Nazi except with other Nazis. Dog whistles allow people to declare allegiance and signal to others that believe the same without needing to openly state it. Usually, we still know anyways, but it gives them plausible deniability in their eyes.

What? They used the word correctly. How are you gonna pull out “both sides” when they’re correct? It hasn’t lost its meaning, you just don’t like hearing it so often because, surprise surprise, there’s an awful lot of dog whistling going on in the current political cycle. It means a signal used to communicate loyalty or belief to an idea, group, platform, etc, that is understood by other people who agree, and not necessarily obvious to the neutral observer. In this case, the word “woke” is a dog whistle for bigots. It was applied correctly.