loriache

[loriache]

Art by Jim Musil

[loriache]

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[loriache]

[loriache]

[loriache]

by _nancy_dc

[loriache]

[loriache]

its harder being smug when you live your life as poorly as i do. but i manage

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Watching a wolf spider very carefully navigate through and around some audio cables and wondering where he believes he is right now

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i understand why some people arent into them but i personally will never be sick of internalized homophobia subplots i love shame i love it when characters experience shame

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Like, I hate Veilguard. This won't be a surprise to people who have followed me specifically for my Veilguard critical posts but I recognize I have gained a few followers since then, and those followers specifically followed me for Dorianposting with Veilguard gifs. Please don't take it personally that I hated it.

I didn't like the game mostly for its writing. I won't go into a long spiel because this post is not about that, but what I dislike about the game is mirrored in a lot of longtime DA fans who were disappointed with Veilguard, and it reflects a lot of the problems with the writing that the article touches on.

And I don't think "the DA team was mistreated" contradicts "the DA team wrote a terrible game", but…COME ON.

There's something so unjust about it. That EA and Bioware and the ME team came in at the end of development and said "this needs to be a serious and gripping narrative, fans want a serious and gripping narrative", and yes, they are correct, that's what we (fans like me) wanted and the game didn't have enough of it, but also like. As though the DA team didn't say this from the very start?

The very first version of Dragon Age 4 was going to be a serious and gripping narrative! It was going to have the worldbuilding we wanted, it was going to expand on the things we were interested in, it was probably going to have a million terrible and enraging plot points but it was going to be a Dragon Age game and it was going to have choices and conflict and everything fans of the series wanted. And it was NOT the DA team's fault that it wasn't that. Like maybe the people left behind at the end didn't know how to write a fantasy game but it wasn't their fault that they were the only people left.

Like, they argued over this. They were fired over this. People who had been with Bioware for YEARS resigned over this. The ones who were left were told to make it a multiplayer so they started designing a multiplayer. Then when they were probably half or even most of the way through making the multiplayer they were told to make it a "broad-appeal" singleplayer. Not even "restart development and make a singleplayer" but "take the game you were already making and turn it into a singleplayer". Do you know how insane this production standard is??? If you look at pretty much any other game, you are supposed to know what you are making BEFORE YOU START MAKING IT. It's like being told to paint a portrait, then told after you're done thumbnailing for the portrait to instead make an elaborate pastoral scene, and then told as you are layering paint on the canvas "actually we want a portrait".

And someone comes in and is like "why is this portrait in landscape orientation have you never made a game before in your life".

Like, yeah I get annoyed when I see comments from the DA writers that imply "this character was a two-dimensional caricature on purpose" but it's kind of like. Seeing the Mass Effect lead crowing about how "Mass Effect 5 isn't going to have a tone change like Dragon Age did" gives me the same fury, you know? Like, what do you know? You were the golden child. You got what you wanted when you asked for it.

I liked Mass Effect, but the second the story was over I stopped caring about it. Dragon Age is the thing that's endured. And the comment about the differences in ME team structure compared to Dragon Age? Yeah. I can see that. Dragon Age is a series comprised of multiple viewpoints and narratives. Sometimes this means that the narrative contradicts itself. Sometimes you have characters where you can tell they were handled with love and care by one writer only for the next one to completely change who they are. It is what it is. It's part of what makes the series so compelling and also what makes it so terrible. I'm going to miss it forever. I don't think we're ever getting it back even if they try to make another one because the people who made this series what it is, who understood what it was about, they're gone.

Anyway. I guess I'll just die mad about it.

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Every unhinged fic writer needs an equally unhinged friend who "yes ands" their ideas and encourages them to write all their most far fetched and insane stories.

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brown pigeon

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greta thunberg, liam cunningham, rima hassan, and everyone else on that ship, thank you, and i hope you succeed. i really hope you succeed. you know what you are risking, and i wish for you to come back safely, having done what you set out to do.

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forgot to turn the burner on so i just spent 15 minutes standing over my pot of noodles like

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Love watching movies with people who are autistic about different things than I am. Last week a friend and I were watching Twisters, and he said, those are going to turn out to be good guys. And I said, how do you know? And he said, because their truck brands are owned by the same equity company as the main character's.

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i love to learn about my cat i love to google “should you trim cat last claw? trim all cat claws? cat last claw called? cat fifth claw? cat claws labelled. trim cat dew claw?” and then say hi graham i learned something about you! your weird claw is called a dew claw and it will not be worn down by regular walking so it is extra important to be diligent about trimming to prevent it growing into your paw pad! and he bites me and bites me