The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.
"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".
The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.
Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power. They get to decide what viewpoints are seen or not by others. That is a very compelling wage. And of course they all think they're doing a service by advancing their ideology because of course their ideology is the right one.
> This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".
But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).
I wonder if/how a hard limit on number of communities moderated would work? Make it so one person could only mod 2-3 subreddits. Unfortunately, this would require some work from Reddit the company to keep those same powermods from just making new accounts so probably won't happen.
>"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable.
At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts.
I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods.
For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen.
I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.
And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home:
1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh.
2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out.
3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want.
Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.
I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.
The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.
It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.
The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.
I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.
And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.
Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!
Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.
Many just look like RSS feed of news outlets, except moderated by morons. And obligatory wide reaching TOS where the discussion about say how fighting games could be more accessible to new players gets removed under "no content for fun or entertainment allowed" TOS point...
For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.
It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.
But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.
On the contrary, AI will put a lot more artists in business by drastically expanding the range of artistic works than can be created and kinds of people who can create great works. Hanging a rectangle still painting on the wall is of limited appeal in the age of smartphones and VR. Imagining being able to paint walls and ceiling of entire house with aesthetically appealing, one of a kind art, for the same effort as currently required for a small still painting. A lot more people will be interested in paying for that and they will be willing to pay a lot more.
This would probably make the situation worse. You'd remove the incentive for people who moderate for the good of their own community, leaving only those who do so for the power they get (which are probably worse mods, though I don't have a citation for that).
Not sure if that would not create more problems, but there should be some accountability when they behave like a-holes. The mod in question could have asked for proof (draw live on webcam? - not an expert, just wondering) or peer analysis instead of just silencing the artist.
Then another user contacted the mod to complain, and got this reply:
https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826...
That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.
Small hobby subreddits are the best subreddits, and among the only ones I visit. I don't usually have problems with those mods. Anything front-page, or remotely popular to a wide audience, are where the worst mods (and posts / commenters) are.
Speaking on the topic of Reddit and mods and it's power structure:
In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cross posts from other UK subreddits and is created/pushed by Reddit itself.
The big issue I have is that this is just another subreddit with 15-odd random people who are the mods. These people have the unilateral power to shape discourse and be the arbiter of what is "UK" and what isn't.
Reddit is getting a bit too big, this feels very strange. On the swing-back we then have Reddit not banning the "jailbait" subreddit until it made major US news.
I have no idea what's going on with social media anymore, I'm just left with the overwhelming feeling that the people with the voice and the power are not the best of us.
Reddit has definitely started a massive push in an authoritarian direction.
I actually was permanently banned from reddit last night for saying "I didn't know shooting a guy in the nuts would kill him" for spreading hatred/violence in a video game subreddit. It kind of caught me off guard.
The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.
>"The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want."
The "just start your own" strategy rarely works, and at the end of the day you're still on a platform that can ban your little upstart for any reason it wants. That's assuming the people in the main subreddit even learn that your alternative exists, as the mods don't want people leaving their little fiefdom and can ban you for mentioning it. This mindset is also counterproductive because it advocates for completely and totally giving up any effort to address the problem in the main subreddit. It lets the troublesome moderators run unchallenged and can make things even worse.
What the parent is pointing out is that Reddit choosing subreddits for people to subscribe. Sure, I can "create the subreddit with [my] own mods and have the discourse that [I] want". But nobody will see it because everybody is automatically added to the subreddits that Reddit chooses.
That isn't necessarily an indicator of something nefarious. I've been active in a community using an account that has identifying information about me. When I joined the mod team, I did it under an alt to avoid disgruntled users becoming a personal safety issue.
I was a moderator for r/robots for awhile. I even spent a few hundred dollars hiring an artist to create a theme.
I begged them to help me pin down what the subreddit was about since the submissions were all over the place, and some people seemed to think it was for a certain type of robot content and others a different type. Most ignored the question.
I tried to share articles and videos of actual leading edge robots that I though t were awesome. Generally these were ignored, along with most such things. Occasionally a video of a real robot would randomly become popular for some reason. The worst most repeated robot sketches would often receive many votes. Anything even remotely erotic went straight to the top.
They seemed to like art quite a bit, but often the voting was the opposite of what it should have been. Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.
Then there was someone who really wanted to use it for some channel that was obviously kind of a stealth marketing system. I repeatedly warned everyone about it and tried to discourage it, but the only feedback from anyone was that they liked the content and I was overreacting.
Due to the incredibly poor judgement of the people voting in the sub, I got fed up and left.
> Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.
With all Reddit-like forums, there are big secondary factors to what bubbles to the top. Just as an example, the timing can be critical [0], the current top posts [1], the current trends and even just whether the people who like that particular style are browsing new at just the right time to give the post some starting traction. It's a bit like the difference between weather and climate, you really need to sample a lot to get an accurate picture.
[0] If a lot of users are online when the post is new it will earn a lot more votes. Someone on a data subreddit actually modeled which times are the best to post content for maximum visibility. EDIT: There's even a website for this now: https://dashboard.laterforreddit.com/analysis/
[1] "Blocking" the top spots can easily happen. Just look at what stays at the top of HN on a Sunday vs. when Elon stirs something up at Twitter yet again.
With art specifically, people and especially non artists don't judge it on art-school kind of criteria. They don't care that someone somewhere else did something similar. They don't care about formal quality.
IRC Network administrators tend to enforce "official" names (owned by a particular group) vs "unofficial" names. For example, "#Ubuntu" is owned by the Ubuntu devs. While the unofficial ##Ubuntu is just fan owned.
This already is a huge step forward compared to Reddit, where you aren't even sure which subreddits are owned by the corporation / official groups, or if they're "fan run". Are you sure /r/Ubuntu is a fan-run subreddit, or does it have official Ubuntu communications?
The problem this is that historically a person will create a subreddit, add other moderators, and then vanish. The other moderators will build up the community and culture of the subreddit, and then one day years down the road the top moderator returns and decides they want to make unilateral changes that the actual moderators are powerless to contest.
I wonder if it's possible to replace mods completely with a bridging algorithm such as the one used for Community Notes. The algorithm is very clever in that, so far, there doesn't seem to be a way to game it. It aligns user incentive with a goal of quality. As a result, it tends to make high quality decisions.
It might be possible to use this method to crowdsource things like creating subreddit rules and removing comments that break those rules.
What is “ownership” in this case? Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority? Does it transition to collectively and more democratically managing the channel, as stackexchsnge does?
The weirder thing is that redditors make it possible to own categories.
The name of the subreddit shouldn't matter much at all. For each category there are several subreddits but people don't actively move to the subreddits with the best moderators.
For aggregators as a whole, it's the same. Places like https://tildes.net/ don't have many visitors even though Reddit's flaws should incentivize significant amounts of users to try other aggregators.
It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? Art is either evoking some feeling or not and it's different for everybody. An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? ChatGPT can easily say something more helpful than me, stable diffusion can easily make something I'd rather have on my wall than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (or anything more along my preferences). Why do we care so much? What's "real art" anyway?
I always like a colleague's mousepad, it said: "Is this art or can we throw this out?" Always makes me smile.
> It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices?
People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour.
It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT.
While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice.
I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community.
That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.
Well, the temporary ban at SO is entirely justified. They already saw the influx of massive amounts of new answers, generated by ChatGPT, that are essentially spam and make everybody worse off. Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. And because the submitter of those answers is only parroting what ChatGPT wrote, they probably won't be available for further discourse, or to amend the answer they submitted.
The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".
If the goal of a community is to share work, critique each others efforts, and enjoy a hobby together, then someone coming along and pretending that they're doing it while they're not is obviously going to annoy people who are genuine.
I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.
Ok, yeah, I can imagine if it's about competition, which it is when humans want to create the most beautiful thing purely with their bodies, that it's "unfair". There are (written and unwritten) rules in any competition after all. Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :)
Well in this case, it's the artists who care. Ie the person at risk being "replaced". Yes, ML is not there yet to actually replace artists, but we all see the writing on the wall.
I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities.
I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.
Seriously? Shouldn’t the SO example be very obvious?
If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO.
How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?
It matters to me because, to me, art is a reflection of emotional processes specific to human beings. There is meaning conveyed by the difficulty of technique, refined over hundreds of hours at great opportunity cost. It says to me that the human being has sacrificed a lot to produce this piece, and so I should give it my attention. For human-made work, complexity is something like proof of work which is itself proof of conviction. None of this applies to generated work. While I am impressed at the analogous sacrifices of the human inventors of AI, the work produced by the AI itself has not yet surpassed the level of significance of a party trick, even though I would be impressed if a human had produced the work .
> An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written?
"Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?"
The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question.
The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.
"ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question."
Playing devil's advocate here, but this also clearly applies to human answers.
This is /r/art by the way and based on the blurb and about section it seems less about art and more about fulfilling the deranged power fantasies of its moderators. What an unfriendly place.
Nice to hear the artist has gotten a more positive response in /r/drawing.
I've been keeping up with Stable Diffusion and all the tools around that for months now and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that you can just tell it to draw things accurately if you want to avoid weirdness.
For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn.
Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.
This person knows what they are talking about.
Although I have been pretty successful in obtaining realistic hands by prompting photographs and including make of a camera, lens and film [1][2]. Somehow this seems to narrow down the model to mostly produce realistic output. Still, some variants will occasionally feature Chernobyl-levels of fingers.
And that's the argument I've been making. Once you can't tell the difference between AI-made art and human-made art, the demand for human-made art will dramatically decrease, especially in the commercial areas.
If it takes a human a month to paint something beautiful, and 1 minute for AI, it's really hard to compete with AI.
The best we have is Midjourney V4, and it's getting quite close.
This is why I believe we’ll soon see a huge increase in the popularity of ‘physical’ art. Theatre, sculpture, dance… in a world overflowing with computer made images and sounds, things which can only be human-made will be all the more special.
There are AI approaches that generate images one brush stroke at a time. I can imagine that going from that to a robot arm laying them down on physical medium if it isn't already a widespread thing.
Disney uses a robot Spiderman stunt double to be able to launch it into the air and do aerial acrobatics, edging into the dance example.
Readit News
The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.
But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).
At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts.
I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods.
For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen.
I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.
And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home:
1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh.
2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out.
3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want.
Anyways, I'm off to read a book and "do email".
Cheers!!
- Greg.
I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.
The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.
I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.
And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.
Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
Or for the 30 seconds it will take you to make a new account.
According to the "dead internet theory" they already are. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of the political discourse on there is bot driven.
See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.
Dead Comment
In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cross posts from other UK subreddits and is created/pushed by Reddit itself.
The big issue I have is that this is just another subreddit with 15-odd random people who are the mods. These people have the unilateral power to shape discourse and be the arbiter of what is "UK" and what isn't.
Reddit is getting a bit too big, this feels very strange. On the swing-back we then have Reddit not banning the "jailbait" subreddit until it made major US news.
I have no idea what's going on with social media anymore, I'm just left with the overwhelming feeling that the people with the voice and the power are not the best of us.
I actually was permanently banned from reddit last night for saying "I didn't know shooting a guy in the nuts would kill him" for spreading hatred/violence in a video game subreddit. It kind of caught me off guard.
The "just start your own" strategy rarely works, and at the end of the day you're still on a platform that can ban your little upstart for any reason it wants. That's assuming the people in the main subreddit even learn that your alternative exists, as the mods don't want people leaving their little fiefdom and can ban you for mentioning it. This mindset is also counterproductive because it advocates for completely and totally giving up any effort to address the problem in the main subreddit. It lets the troublesome moderators run unchallenged and can make things even worse.
I begged them to help me pin down what the subreddit was about since the submissions were all over the place, and some people seemed to think it was for a certain type of robot content and others a different type. Most ignored the question.
I tried to share articles and videos of actual leading edge robots that I though t were awesome. Generally these were ignored, along with most such things. Occasionally a video of a real robot would randomly become popular for some reason. The worst most repeated robot sketches would often receive many votes. Anything even remotely erotic went straight to the top.
They seemed to like art quite a bit, but often the voting was the opposite of what it should have been. Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.
Then there was someone who really wanted to use it for some channel that was obviously kind of a stealth marketing system. I repeatedly warned everyone about it and tried to discourage it, but the only feedback from anyone was that they liked the content and I was overreacting.
Due to the incredibly poor judgement of the people voting in the sub, I got fed up and left.
With all Reddit-like forums, there are big secondary factors to what bubbles to the top. Just as an example, the timing can be critical [0], the current top posts [1], the current trends and even just whether the people who like that particular style are browsing new at just the right time to give the post some starting traction. It's a bit like the difference between weather and climate, you really need to sample a lot to get an accurate picture.
[0] If a lot of users are online when the post is new it will earn a lot more votes. Someone on a data subreddit actually modeled which times are the best to post content for maximum visibility. EDIT: There's even a website for this now: https://dashboard.laterforreddit.com/analysis/
[1] "Blocking" the top spots can easily happen. Just look at what stays at the top of HN on a Sunday vs. when Elon stirs something up at Twitter yet again.
They care about how it makes them feel.
It doesn't seem all that different to me than whoever is first to claim a company name, a domain name, or when we go back further in time, land.
This already is a huge step forward compared to Reddit, where you aren't even sure which subreddits are owned by the corporation / official groups, or if they're "fan run". Are you sure /r/Ubuntu is a fan-run subreddit, or does it have official Ubuntu communications?
It might be possible to use this method to crowdsource things like creating subreddit rules and removing comments that break those rules.
Quadratic voting with your vote ratio being a derivative of your activity on the subreddit to mitigate bot voting, et cetera.
Dead Comment
There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit (with a less popular name), or just give up on Reddit entirely and go elsewhere.
What is “ownership” in this case? Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority? Does it transition to collectively and more democratically managing the channel, as stackexchsnge does?
The name of the subreddit shouldn't matter much at all. For each category there are several subreddits but people don't actively move to the subreddits with the best moderators.
For aggregators as a whole, it's the same. Places like https://tildes.net/ don't have many visitors even though Reddit's flaws should incentivize significant amounts of users to try other aggregators.
It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? Art is either evoking some feeling or not and it's different for everybody. An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? ChatGPT can easily say something more helpful than me, stable diffusion can easily make something I'd rather have on my wall than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (or anything more along my preferences). Why do we care so much? What's "real art" anyway?
I always like a colleague's mousepad, it said: "Is this art or can we throw this out?" Always makes me smile.
People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour.
It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT.
While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice.
I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community.
That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.
The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".
I wish 90% of real people answers were correct...
I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.
I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities.
I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.
If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO.
How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?
"Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?"
The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question.
The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.
Playing devil's advocate here, but this also clearly applies to human answers.
I don't think the average person cares at all.
Nice to hear the artist has gotten a more positive response in /r/drawing.
So either 1) It's not AI-generated art, or 2) It is AI-generated art and the artist is a master at prompting.
Either way they should be celebrated.
For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn.
Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.
[1] https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca4...
[2] https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400...
If it takes a human a month to paint something beautiful, and 1 minute for AI, it's really hard to compete with AI.
The best we have is Midjourney V4, and it's getting quite close.
Disney uses a robot Spiderman stunt double to be able to launch it into the air and do aerial acrobatics, edging into the dance example.
Human artists who are just highly skilled executors of bad taste are going to be decimated by AI.
Stuff like this never had any artistic value in the first place, so it makes perfect sense to me that a bot would create it rather than a person.