“Not trying to defend AI art” The fuck you’re not. Just be honest about it.

My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it’s an exception when there’s misappropriation becasue it’s socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I’m not saying all memes are good, and I’m also not saying meme people who make that their life aren’t assholes sometimes either.

All of this exercise you’ve taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that’s something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that’s not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the former.

Honestly, this is lazy and unfunny.

False equivalencies, or ‘Whatabouts’ are not a form of argument, they’re a deflection debate tactic.

What you’re calling AI is a mass marketing ponzy scheme. LLMs are not even actual AI. Beyond that issue, its development is in the hands of capital exclusively, and it will only exist to serve capital interests which come at the expense of the lower and working classes by necessity given what corporations (which are essentially unregulated in current climates) are designed to do. What you’re calling AI will only be used to hurt human lives and worsen living conditions for all of us (before you nitpick, I think enabling the 0.1% and their hoarding pathology hurts them too). I personally believe you’re already aware of that and are cynically trolling, and despite that I’m giving you the honest truth and factual reality of this subject because there is nothing good about being a techno-fetishist sociopath who thinks the answer to humanity’s problems is to make humanity itself obsolete, even if it’s ‘cool’. You clearly got the wrong fucking message from Terminator.

This is why when actual AI emerges I can only hope it’ll be in the hands of a public or collective development process and designed with an intent of progression and cooperation in mind.

This just sounds like sour grapes whining paid for by Epic games who actually just want that to be them rather than Steam, despite Steam having provided the same service for free, consistently, for multiple decades now. The real offense here is PC Gamer attacking its primary consumer base (try to tell me the majority of PC gamers aren’t Steam users), so you KNOW Epic is paying a shit-ton for this manufactured consent and wish-casting. Counterpoint to this article: having more games that you want to play than you have time for, without breaking the bank, is GOOD actually, and other launch platforms only seek to enshittify YOUR experience for their own gain. Thanks!

Edit: grammar

“We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers…” OR “We welcome the opportunity to spend more money lobbying regulators than any one of us would ever have to spend on any number of titles to satisfy the goals of this initiative.”

Tim Weenie can go kick rocks, barefoot.

Completely agree with this, and also fully expecting to see that with cars too. I’ve heard of some models with onboard computers and displays showing people ads at traffic stops, it’s wild as is. But I’m certain all those CEOs and owners fully believe we should just own nothing and be happy. Everything should be rentals or subscriptions to fully cement their parasitism. And then they act surprised when people feel crushed and desperate. I my humble opinion they should fuck all the way off.

Better not miss if you’re gonna come swing at the great. As a former Rocket League enjoyer who had Epic games shit up the game I bought BEFORE they got the rights; I say it’s physically impossible for Epic to fuck far enough off, but they can fuck themselves all the way to the event horizon of off and stare whistfully at the off that cannot be fucked. Forever.