Mozilla’s slowly creeping in the surveillance with adding integrated crap like Pocket and AI driven Fake Spot. I’m really glad Librewolf’s made a privacy focused fork of their browser without all that nonsense.
TLDR: Mozilla wants your data and it’s opt out. If you’re on FF 128 it’s already on and you will have to turn it off manually. Shame how they have fallen this low. The LEAST they could have done is show a pop up announcement when the user upgraded to 128.
Also: +1 to Librewolf. Mozilla is definitely going to try more scummy crap like this in the future. Definitely the better option over Firefox.
Looks really cool. I hope we don’t have the overreliance on one rendering engine in the future. Once one or the other comes out I’ll definitely try it out.
You joking? 😆 I don’t want to discourage you from giving rust a try but come on. Have you ever talked to a developer that spent any real time with rust, anyone that got as far as multi threading?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I just read that whole article and it sounds like a good implementation? Companies want to know how effective their ads are, and I like their approach of trying to find a way to provide this without wholesale personal data collection. They even say at the end that they don’t get the data either. It sounds like a reasonable thing to try and standardize.
I’m not commenting on implementation itself but rather on how Mozilla went about with an opt-out approach into the collection program (even if it was for testing) to a community they have cultivated with the promise of privacy.
Collecting my data is a big deal. It doesn’t matter how it is used. I should at least consent to it.
I’ve read the announcement. Sounds reasonable and sufficiently private to me. So saying “Mozilla wants your data” sounds misleading and like an overreaction to me. Also might help to mitigate the arms race in privacy protection versus tracking for ads and worse stuff.
Mozilla is definitely going to try more scummy crap like this in the future.
How do you know that?
Even if, there will still be alternatives. But right now, Firefox is the best browser with regards to privacy and security. It even passed minmum ratings by the german IT security authority, contrary to other widely used browsers.
I’m with you on the opt-out vs. opt-in part. That’s not a nice move. Regardless of that, Firefox is still the best choice. I hope they will continue to improve.
A lot of sites? Or more like just a few? Personally, the ratio of working vs broken sites is like 100 to 1 and when a site is broken, its usually one of those shit pile SEO listicle sites or some absolute trash heap of ads. Every time I’ve disabled the protections I’ve regretted it.
A lot of the web is useless trash nowadays and Librewolf has done a good job of filtering that for me.
Does it seem a little sketchy to anyone else that so many people were tested in China? Do they really have that many athletes or are they trying to skew the numbers?
If China tested fewer athletes than the US, you’d call them lax. But they test more than anywhere else and that’s sketchy because it makes this particular metric look better.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
The most mediocre dining experience (for the money) I’ve ever had was at a restaurant called “Smallwares.” Emphasis on small, it turns out. Case in point, we ordered duck breast, which cost a fair bit. I was picturing at least a fair amount, but it was the smallest smidgen slivered up with a dollop of sauce. It was the same with every dish, high prices for not much food.
Sure there were other places that had worse food. One remote dinner lacked any fresh food, but you can’t really help that when you’re in the middle of nowhere. But never have I felt like I was being fed by Famine from Good Omens.
I think AI art is comparable to photography. Photographers do a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything set up, the equipment, lighting, angles, lenses, etc, But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button, it’s not nearly the same amount of work that a painter or a musician puts into their art. So I think the idea of “capturing” art is still a valid thing. Sometimes a photographer can capture an award-winning masterpiece with a spur-of-the-moment photo on some shitty disposable camera. Maybe it took them 1000 bad photos to get that one photo, but they still just captured it from somewhere else, they didn’t create the work.
Similarly with AI, a person may have to work with the AI software to setup and craft the prompt that will eventually generate the art, then there may be dozens of iterations of that and fine-tuning to get the result they’re imagining, and even after that there may be some photoshopping involved to get it to where they want it. They’re capturing artwork from a source that may not be their own creation, just the same as photographers. I think AI art is just as legitimate as other forms of art, it’s just open to a wider range of people that can participate because many of the physical hurdles (equipment, space, time, lighting, etc) are not as much of an issue.
I think what you’re describing is more like 3d rendering.
IMO using AI is more like directing in a film. You’re not the one creating the art, and the level of control you have is restricted to providing guidance and retrying.
Agreed, the process is very non-artistic. There are too many layers that remove the creator from the process of creating. It’s more of a science than an art, and unsurprisingly an artistic spirit is usually lacking from it.
The results are better when in the hands of artists, but many artists don’t enjoy using the tools because they are so removed from an artistic work flow and are such a black box most of the time. It’s not artistically fulfilling to press a button and see what comes out.
Just my 2 cents as an artist who has experimented with the tools quite a bit and still doesn’t love them.
How far can the artist be removed from the art, and still be considered the artist?
And is it even important to ask “is this art” if art is inherently subjective? It’s probably more important to ask “who is this helping?”
I have a pretty wide definition of art, so I hesitate to say it can’t be art flippantly. I do think that for something to be art it must contain the voice of the artist, though, and for many AI generations I don’t think you can see that voice, even if a lot of work went into creating it. Maybe that will change as the tools become more sophisticated and easier to get what you want out of them.
I agree but I don’t think that has to do with AI necessarily. There are people who create images without soul, no matter the medium and tools used.
I think that people who make soulless art are just drawn to AI generators because it allows them to make something aesthetically passable without hours and years of tedious practice (which they otherwise wouldn’t be willing to do since they obviously have no care for the art).
I’d say it’s a grey area, like AI prompting
You’re not the one implementing the final result, you’re just providing guidance to other(s) who produce the final piece of art.
If there is artistry in that, it seems like it’d apply equally to directing as it does to prompt engineering.
I don’t necessarily disagree.
The style of a director is the common set of guidance that they provide to the artists who do the work of making the film (eg the actors, the grips, the editors, the lighting, the markup, etc).
Likewise someone who uses AI to make art can have common things they seek in all the AI images they generate. Common things they include in their prompts to push the images to appear in a particular way.
They’re not the same but there is enough commonality that criticism of one mostly applies to the other.
Photography is capturing something real in the physical world. Even if the action can be boiled down to “push a button” the photographer needs to have at least some presence where the real event is taking place.
AI art is not a depiction of a real event and requires no physical presence. It’s also not being brought to life by the person taking credit for it. That’s not to say AI generated images can’t be cool or useful but I don’t think they are art. If your definition of art is loose enough to apply to AI generated images then the I think the artist credit should belong to the AI itself or the team that wrote the software, not the person typing in prompts.
I think, where the real conflict comes from, is that most traditional artists are passionate about their craft and need to be able to sell their commodity art. Most people are empathetic of that and therefore not a fan of other commodity art competing with these passionate artists.
Photography was also controversial when it first appeared, because it meant traditional artists could hardly sell portraits and realistic paintings anymore.
I think, it also took a while for people to learn of and believe that some people are actually genuinely passionate about photography, too.
And well, AI is now the new thing, but it’s also kind of worse. Because it’s not just certain kinds of paintings that are affected, they’ve literally been trained to replace all commodity art.
And they’re stealing off of those traditional artists (someone snapping a photograph of the Mona Lisa and trying to sell it as art will also get heckled).
And it’s going to be hard to convince people that typing words into a box is something to be passionate about.
It’s a tool in a box. Maybe an artist can use it get some inspiration and not actually use any of the generated images. Or generate a backdrop for their portrait drawing. Or generate a composition they like and then draw over it.
But at the end of the day, the only action they’re taking to capture the art is they press a button.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex. I’m not a photographer at all and even I can understand that. It’s the photographer’s tastes and years of learning and practice that ultimately creates an impactful photo. You must think playing drums is just hitting tubes with plastic lids with sticks then, right?
I struggle to believe that you have put any thought into this opinion of yours.
Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex.
I think that’s exactly the point. Anyone can use AI, but that doesn’t make then all artists. But there is a place for AI in art, like many other tools. Same as for other tools, jusy knowing how to use them doesn’t make you an artist. Just look at all the bad Photoshop stuff everywhere. Does that mean that using Photoshop makes you a talentless hack? Or just that a lot of hacks use it to pretend they’re artists? Same for AI.
Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? People might spend a lot of time learning the different AI tools, how to supplement them with post processing and manual edits, how to combine them and how to nudge them in the direction they want, and then spend countless evenings trying to get the result they want. And people are going to say “they just AI generated it, they are not artists”, just like people might say photographers are not artists, they just take a photo.
But we know it’s far from “just” taking a photo or “just” generating it with AI. Sure, you can “just” do both, but the result will be far from real art without all the preparation and extra work.
But it’s easy to take a random shitty AI image to laught at, just like it’s easy to take a random shitty photo.
AI “art” is theft. Doesn’t matter how much time they spend setting up the perfect prompt. It’s not their viewpoint. It’s not their aesthetic or style. They made no decision to go one direction or another. It’s an aggregate of someone ( or many someones) else’s work.
There was a place like this near my old work and my boss would often offer to pay. I naturally ordered a couple mediocre burgers and overly seasoned truffle fries with sage for some reason.
Thankfully there was a similar coffee place next door, but that’s a good thing in their case (that coffee was fire)
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