I do hope that the strikers get what they are asking for however this AI stuff is inevitable. AI written scripts performed by AI Characters in full virtual space is going to happen. Oh sure it will suck Donkey Ballz for the first 3-4 years while studios get a handle on the tech but it will improve rapidly.
The porn studios are already playing with this this and I predict that in less than 10 years the people over at !aigen will be cranking out full length pr0n movies using OSS tools.
Unless computers go away this trend is unstoppable.
Folks, don’t worry, just sharpen up your pitchforks.
Here’s the bit that doesn’t get talked about much: For thirty years, money has been effectively free for these people, and they’ve been spending it all to build up this big Orwellian house of cards on the idea that people would never be able to do this without big corporate money. This was a deliberate action on the part of government and capital to “make the internet happen”.
Now the thing is, the internet was already happening. It just didn’t have video. In 1995, you still mostly got video on physical media or via cable/sat. MP3s weren’t there yet, so there also wasn’t really audio, to speak of, just little .wav clips that we swapped on irc for amusement.
But there were vibrant communities on usenet talking about every type of interest (EVERY type), there was trolling and DOS attacks on irc and even a bit of friendly chatting, and the good thing that we get from all this - more easily connecting to people we can relate to - was 100% already present for anyone who bothered to get a PC and modem. Believe me because I was there, we already had The Internet in full swing, while we played our CDs and VHS (DVDs if you were affluent).
Got that whetstone wet?
So what did they bring to the internet? Well, not music - MP3s showed up around 1998, and the music industry was taken entirely by surprise. It took them three years to figure out what was going on, by which time Napster had introduced the world to peer-to-peer file trading.
Back in the 8-bit days, we had to have swap meets, people would gather in large rooms, bring their 64s and 1541 drives and a box or two of fresh (or culled from your existing collection and freshly-formatted) 5.25" floppy disks which we had cut a notch out of so we could use both sides, and get a fresh supply of games, demos, sid files, useful software, etc, to mess around with for the next month or so. Napster and Bittorrent, however, represented a far more easy and accessible version of piracy: no need to carry 10-40lbs (cause CRT monitors, remember) of gear to a different place, just load up the program, choose your own adventure.
There was a lost opportunity to humanity around this time, because at some point around 1998, each entertainment industry conglomerate’s board of directors, either in groups or individually, had someone (probably from IT, but possibly a child in their family) sit them down and demonstrate downloading and listening to music on Napster.
If only, each time that happened, they had thought to point a video camera at the face of the executive or shareholder or CEO.
These would have been, these SHOULD have been, the world’s introduction to reaction videos.
Instead we have a bunch of video of people watching women eat poo.
Anyways the thing is they saw this happen and they found their most badass but cooperative front men to sit on their horses while they sicced the hounds on the uppity peasantry who think they are entitled to have joy in their lives without paying.
They ended up making Metallica look like landed gentry, basically, and nothing stopped, and that’s been the dynamic ever since: They have been focusing all this money, which the Federal Reserve was good enough to make available at zero interest (ie. free) on creating the infrastructure for a paid version of the internet where they control it entirely, just like they used to control access to music and movies by doling it out one disc/tape/record/cylinder/music sheet at a time, and just trusting (i’m loling as i type) that people really do want to pay what they used to charge for a single record, and we are all just waiting patiently for them to decide how much our lives they need to cut away from us, and we’ll be happy with whatever dregs they leave us, just like that vauntedly docile peasantry of old.
I hope the tines of your pitchforks are shiny like chrome now.
Cause again, we already had the internet working before they got here, 100% functional in all the ways it needed to be, before they got here. We don’t actually need them at all. I mean sure, some people can’t even pump their own gas, let alone change their own oil, so yes, some people will just need crayon-level functionality delivered with big bright icons, but most of us can figure out how to launch a desktop application and browse a discussion board, we’re all doing it right now on Lemmy.
The bottom line is that we don’t need them to manage distribution anymore - we actually never did, all we need is bandwidth for all. They are desperately trying to make us not see that.
And meanwhile, since covid, the Federal Reserve has been calling in the bill, and everyone who has a mortgage knows it’s gonna cost you more for the next few years at least, if you weren’t lucky enough to renew right before covid. But we were already paying interest and used to the idea; we are honest people trying to have a nice place to live. Those without mortgages, please, laugh at us right now because our problems don’t even approach the magnitude of the problems faced by rent-payers right now. You have a scumbag trying to skim their life off the top of yours.
I KNOW your pitchforks are ready, and you might even have a few torches in the shed out back.
But, imagine how it must feel for someone who has been pulling free money out of a bag for thirty years, and has now been told that not only is there no more money in the bag, that in fact, they must start putting money back IN the bag now?
That’s Netflix, That’s Google, That’s Elon Musk, That is Zuckerberg and the Metaverse [edit: and let’s not forget our very favorite here on Lemmy, u/Spez…].
I’m a little old for pitchfork crew, but I’ll be sitting here with my popcorn watching these bastards burn, very soon.
Honestly its quute nice seeing old bastards like you giving us the summary of shit their in, im personally hoping this shit show will spell the end of “web 3” not with a bang but with the feds calling their dues.
Either that or the whole shitshow is atleast funny, I thrive on hate and there is nothing better for a hate filled asshole like me than watching rich fucks get bent over the table by the feds.
They don’t seem to list the instances they trawled (just the top 25 on a random day with a link to the site they got the ranking from but no list of the instances, that I can see).
We performed a two day time-boxed ingest of the local public timelines of the top 25 accessible Mastodon instances as determined by total user count reported by the Fediverse Observer…
That said, most of this seems to come from the Japanese instances which most instances defederate from precisely because of CSAM? From the report:
Since the release of Stable Diffusion 1.5, there has been a steady increase in the prevalence of Computer-Generated CSAM (CG-CSAM) in online forums, with increasing levels of realism.17 This content is highly prevalent on the Fediverse, primarily on servers within Japanese jurisdiction.18 While CSAM is illegal in Japan, its laws exclude computer-generated content as well as manga and anime. The difference in laws and server policies between Japan and much of the rest of the world means that communities dedicated to CG-CSAM—along with other illustrations of child sexual abuse—flourish on some Japanese servers, fostering an environment that also brings with it other forms of harm to children. These same primarily Japanese servers were the source of most detected known instances of non-computer-generated CSAM. We found that on one of the largest Mastodon instances in the Fediverse (based in Japan), 11 of the top 20 most commonly used hashtags were related to pedophilia (both in English and Japanese).
I haven’t read the report in full yet but it seems to be a perfectly reasonable set of recommendations to improve the ability of moderators to prevent this stuff being posted (beyond defederating from dodgy instances, which most if not all non-dodgy instances already do).
It doesn’t seem to address the issue of some instances existing largely so that this sort of stuff can be posted.
I don’t think elon can afford to do that because it would look really bad for his other brands. I think he is better off trying to keep it somewhat alive
Why would anyone want to associate inane internet chatter with birdsong when they could simply associate it with porn? Elon has a very large…brain, and he wants to make sure you think of it as often as he does.
Rumor has it that our thoughts fill an aching void in his soul that can otherwise only be filled with apartheid emeralds or NFTs, but science has yet to find a way to test this hypothesis.
the funny thing is this it’s not the first article I’ve read about it this year, and tbf to them it’s really hard to talk about how some of the games we love for the NES are turning 40 while the console itself is only 38
I’m sure for the marketing it’s a lot better to be succinct with a title for the casual reader. Saying "The Famicom, the pre-cursor to the NES, turns 40: … "
engadget.com
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