9 ms·

Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. I didn't and wouldn't ha

by jchw 4y ago

Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. I didn't and wouldn't have backed Unstable Diffusion, but people were willing to spend money on it, it seems clearly legal from our current understanding, and there's nothing in the Kickstarter that suggests it's malicious or would otherwise violate any ToS or guidelines; in fact the campaign seems careful to suggest that they were intentionally aiming on making it difficult to abuse, which I know people have feelings about here too, but the point is that this seems like a textbook example of a project that dotted its I's and crossed its T's. But some people didn't like it, I assume, and therefore they had to find a reason it violated their guidelines and shut it down. I know that objectivity and neutrality are no longer hot concepts, and I also understand that not everything from the way things "used" to run would still work today, but I can't help but feel this was just a completely unnecessary concession that helps nobody. Crowdfunding was supposed to empower people to directly support things that they wanted to see, but when it goes through gatekeepers like Kickstarter and Gofundme, they become the ones with all of the power to decide what things are allowed. I think it's probably all moot. Nobody would defend a campaign like this anyways, so trying to make the case that this is a(nother) bad precedent is impossible. People just simply don't give a shit anymore.

baeaz 4y ago
It's not a moral problem, the morality angle is an excuse, these are just artists who don't want to be out of a job because of technological advances
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Neutrality and impartiality means you're alt-right now.
brookst 4y ago
I’d agree with you if “platforms” were automated entities that just happen, like rain. But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with. It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
- vintermann 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Kickstarter needs to put more time and attention to stop a project than letting one proceed, at this point.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  I'd be more worried about all the obvious scams that Kickstarter supports the same amount and ignores reports about because there's not enough publicity.
- jchw 4y ago
  > But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with. Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding. It's the website you go to first to try to crowdfund something. That's why unstable diffusion wound up there to begin with, not because they thought it meshed well with the website or its owners, but because Kickstarter has always marketed themselves as being the all-inclusive go-to crowd funding website. In such a place, whose moral compass should guide a decision like this? The CEO? Some angry employees? Credit card processors? etc. > But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it? I mean, yes, of course. I'm pretty much making it clear that I would do that, for the principle of it. In my opinion that's basically what you're signing up for when you decide to run something like this. Until like 2012 or so, that used to be basically how most internet companies would operate with some exception. And like I said, I understand why it's not as applicable as it used to be; some things have changed. But this decision in particular? Not seeing the point. Seems like an unnecessary concession for a perfectly above-board project. Seems like the middleman getting in the way of the will of two parties without any real valid reason to do so.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    Values are always cheap to have until you hit a case that tests them. It turns out that Kickstarter didn't really want the ones it had
flir 4y ago
Compare it to a printing press. If someone came to me and asked me to print pamphlets for [political party I dislike], I want to be able to say "no". Shouldn't we be asking more than "is it technically legal?" of the orgs we choose to do business with?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a black colleague is singled out and treated in a racist manner by your boss/admin/whoever. You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing. Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
  - flir 4y ago
    Can you rephrase your example in a way that doesn't include a protected class/characteristic?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - evandale 4y ago
      Can I try? You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a colleague is fired when your boss/admin/whoever found out she had an abortion. You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing. Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
      - flir 4y ago
        In my country she wouldn't have been fired in the first place. At-will employment is just a way to bully people into toeing the line. Putting that aside, yes: Political speech shouldn't be compelled, any more than it should be constrained. Now if you want to put some kind of further "common carrier"-style legal burden on printers (or kickstarter), then I think it's possible to make a case for it, but I'm not personally in favour. (On the other hand, in the UK we do exactly that with bank accounts - it's nearly impossible for a bank to turn away a new customer - so I guess there's a case for it in some circumstances). It's ultimately a question of regulation I guess.
pdntspa 4y ago
All this corporate activism is all fine and dandy when you agree with their politics. When you don't, they become the enemy. I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity, a day when neutral platforms would act like neutral platforms. What this is turning into is yet another case of tyranny by the moral majority. Wherever there is power there will be assholes using it to control others.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity… When were those?
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    reddit and 4chan were famously very strongly "free speech" before gamergate kicked off our current political climate People don't realize that you want the filth out in the open, where it can be tracked. Deplatforming doesn't kill anything, it just sends it underground, furthering the cause for the various shadow systems that spring up from it.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      If you’re counting niche places like 4chan, you can still get to places like that today. Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all. Forcing the shitty folks underground breaks the edgy-meme-to-radicalization pipeline quite effectively. I’ve greatly enjoyed not having to hear about Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis every day. https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-new-data-on-trump-tweets-shows/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-n... > But kicking Milo Yiannopoulos off Twitter didn’t make him stronger. It pushed him almost completely off the mainstream agenda. And part of the “fun” of being a Milo fan was precisely that prominence! You weren’t just listening to a random online crank; you were listening to an online crank who was very good at getting under prominent people’s skin. Lose that reach and some of the thrill is gone.
      - 4y ago
Dawnyhf2 4y ago
[flagged]
dalbasal 4y ago
>>I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments. I feel like we've recently witnessed this idea fail. I think "platform" under the current convention, is at odds with neutrality. You can't have a platform like Kickstarter without opinions about what can and can't be done on their site. They're not going to allow stuff they disagree with, stuff that will get them in trouble, etc. Neutrality if that kind must be structured in one way or another. Platform plurality, with lots of options. Open protocols, FOSS. Something like ISP neutrality. Platforms are judgemental by default.
- wholinator2 4y ago
  Sure they can. We've already got a ruleset for what society allows and doesn't, namely the Law. A platform can be neutral up to the point where the law becomes involved, after which it must either capitulate to outside demands or go underground. Any other acquiescence to group instruction is an intentional decision they're making, that they did not have to make. Reddit used to operate like that, everything up to the law was allowed. It's just that doesn't happen nowadays, it's more difficult to say exactly why though. Is it that other companies make it actually not financially survivable to rebuff the mobs? Or is it more a fear of labels and moderate cuts to bottom line. I'm sure they'd lose some money with controversy but would it really destroy them?
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    What law, or prospective law, guarantees prevents Kickstarter from booting out users that they don't want? There are certain protections for certain groups (eg religion) but there aren't any laws compelling Kickstarter to allow porn projects. There aren't laws that compel YouTube to allow political content, medical content. There are no legal rights guaranteeing any of this. Half the problem here is that people don't realise where the problem is. The rights established in the past don't take YouTube and Twitter into account. If we want these rights, we'll have to establish them ourselves.
- Teever 4y ago
  Should a bank be allowed prevent a white supremacist the ability to pay their utilities? To me it isn't about whether or not platforms should do these things but if they should even be able to do them in the first place.
marcinzm 4y ago
>Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. Platforms overall don't take a stance for moral reasons but for perceived monetary reasons. If they believe they'll lose more money from users or advertisers leaving due to certain content than they gain from that content then they will get rid of that content. Whatever brings the most money will win in the end. Artists, as best I can tell, hate AI image models with a passion so presumably Kickstarter was afraid of losing a lot of campaigns from artists.
- concordDance 4y ago
  This isn't actually true. The CEO can have moral opinions or the board of directors might or Black Rock might or a large proportion of employees might. Any of these groups having a very strong opinion and the others not having one is sufficient.
egypturnash 4y ago
Cancelling this campaign is Kickstarter working exactly as it was designed. Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also happen to be synonymous with "crowdfunding" because they were the first to make it work, once that took off as a concept and KS to see a lot of gadget campaigns they started cracking down on those because that wasn't what the people running Kickstarter wanted to bring into the world. Eventually Kickstarter came to a point where they decided to make this explicit in the rules of the company, rather than become a heartless corporate machine motivated solely by whatever increases shareholder profit in the coming financial quarter: "Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015." - https://www.kickstarter.com/charter https://www.kickstarter.com/charter Deciding to kill this campaign is right in line with point 1D of their charter: "Kickstarter will engage beyond its walls with the greater issues and conversations affecting artists and creators." And with 4a: "Kickstarter will always support, serve, and champion artists and creators, especially those working in less commercial areas." Kickstarter's a machine made to fill the gap in public art funding left by the gutting of the NEA, not an "objective and neutral platform" that will happily help you build obviously evil things as long as they get their cut of the money.
- Nadya 4y ago
  This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists. As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art. In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.
root_axis 4y ago
Neutrality and objectivity have never existed in the corporate world.
Animats 4y ago
Right. One complaint is that it would not "represent under-trained concepts like LGBTQ and races and genders more fairly." If all they need is $25K, that's not going to be hard to get. There's sufficient demand for what they want to make that it will probably happen. Although we'll probably have to go through an era of bad porn being used to train systems to generate worse porn. Pornhub has an AI unit. They're currently taking early out-of-copyright porn films and up-converting to 4K, a higher frame rate, and colorizing. As they point out, they have lots of training data for colorizing and body parts. With that working, they'll probably go on to content generation.
umvi 4y ago
> I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. OpenAI's safety rails for chatGPT are super obnoxious. I was trying to generate D&D scenarios and have chatGPT act as NPCs. It worked really well unless anything even remotely related to violence was brought up (a character threatens another, a character draws a sword, etc). As soon as that happened, chatGPT would break character and give a canned lecture about why violence is never ok.
- jrockway 4y ago
  I found it pretty easy to get ChatGPT to be violent. You have to make it very clear that you want it to help with fiction and that it is to be a character in that world. I always use "play", which it seems to understand better than other fictional scenarios. It helps if you do things like naming the acts "Act I Scene I: The Shaman dispatches the Mage with extreme violence" or whatever. Anyway, ChatGPT was more than happy to kill off my characters when I asked it to. I didn't keep the transcript, but the words haunt me. "The small man walked away, not knowing if he was dead or just very badly injured." This was after the small man pulled out a handgun in the middle of a profanity-laden rant from the other character and shot him in the neck. Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya.
  - whaleofatw2022 4y ago
    > Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya. IANAD but my general understanding of anatomy/physiology is that a solid neck wound is a pretty good way to off someone in a fairly certain way. Admittedly many of the ends to it are agonizing... which says something else.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Yeah ChatGPT knows how to kill when it wants to kill. I don't understand why everyone is running around worried about the jobs of artists. We're just a few years away from a genocide the likes of mere humans have never imagined. Mark my words!!
  - 4y ago
stonogo 4y ago
The problem is that "objectivity" is impossible and "neutrality" is in fact just siding with the status quo. I'd argue that this new trend of companies taking responsibility for the things they do or enable is a result of people giving much more of a shit than they have in the past, not a result of apathy. Look on the bright side. You're worried about setting a bad precedent, but the current trend in the top of the legal world is to ignore precedent, or hand-select the precedent you want. If this sort of thing becomes such a problem that action is needed, we can count on SCOTUS.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  This is just a painfully thin excuse to justify exercising your power over others while you have it. If the overton window shifts, and you and your ideas are being deplatformed using the same justifications you’ve championed, you’ll be screaming for a return to objectivity and neutrality.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Objectivity and neutrality don't exist; you can't return to a condition that never existed (people with narrow perspective frequently mistake alignment with their own subjective biases as being “objective” and/or “neutral”, but that is self-delusion.)
    - catiopatio 4y ago
      Objectivity and neutrality have value even if they can never perfectly realized. Case in point: You wouldn’t be arguing against objectivity and neutrality if doing so did not advance your own social and political power; you yourself have abandoned any pretense of aspiring to either. This makes you a self-serving person to whom it would be dangerous to grant power.
      - stonogo 4y ago
        You have it exactly backwards. Anyone who claims to be objective is either bullshitting you or so naive as to be unreliable. Neither case is a person you want to empower. Anyone who claims to be "neutral" is in fact declaring their own apathy towards a topic, and when that topic is "should a specific group of people have civil rights" then neutrality is ethically disgusting. I'm personally apathetic regarding whether some money-collecting company wants to work for AI people, so I don't really care about Kickstarter's policy here, and I don't foresee myself caring in the future. Pretending that Kickstarter is a power broker of some kind is in my estimation some serious Chicken Little territory. "Aspiring" to either objectivity or neutrality is not the same thing as actually manifesting either quality, and such aspirations generally involve disclosing conflicts of interest or other biases, which are things every living person has. Wrapping either concept in other weasel words doesn't really move the needle.
MarcoZavala 4y ago
[dead]
jimbob45 4y ago
While I agree, is this not more of a case of self-preservation? It sounds like KS knows that it may not be able to weather the lawsuits from copyright infringement and CSAM generation.

by jchw 4y ago

baeaz 4y ago

It's not a moral problem, the morality angle is an excuse, these are just artists who don't want to be out of a job because of technological advances

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago

Neutrality and impartiality means you're alt-right now.

brookst 4y ago

I’d agree with you if “platforms” were automated entities that just happen, like rain. But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with. It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?

vintermann 4y ago
I'm pretty sure Kickstarter needs to put more time and attention to stop a project than letting one proceed, at this point.
Dylan16807 4y ago
I'd be more worried about all the obvious scams that Kickstarter supports the same amount and ignores reports about because there's not enough publicity.
jchw 4y ago
> But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with. Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding. It's the website you go to first to try to crowdfund something. That's why unstable diffusion wound up there to begin with, not because they thought it meshed well with the website or its owners, but because Kickstarter has always marketed themselves as being the all-inclusive go-to crowd funding website. In such a place, whose moral compass should guide a decision like this? The CEO? Some angry employees? Credit card processors? etc. > But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it? I mean, yes, of course. I'm pretty much making it clear that I would do that, for the principle of it. In my opinion that's basically what you're signing up for when you decide to run something like this. Until like 2012 or so, that used to be basically how most internet companies would operate with some exception. And like I said, I understand why it's not as applicable as it used to be; some things have changed. But this decision in particular? Not seeing the point. Seems like an unnecessary concession for a perfectly above-board project. Seems like the middleman getting in the way of the will of two parties without any real valid reason to do so.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  Values are always cheap to have until you hit a case that tests them. It turns out that Kickstarter didn't really want the ones it had

flir 4y ago

Compare it to a printing press. If someone came to me and asked me to print pamphlets for [political party I dislike], I want to be able to say "no". Shouldn't we be asking more than "is it technically legal?" of the orgs we choose to do business with?

vorpalhex 4y ago
You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a black colleague is singled out and treated in a racist manner by your boss/admin/whoever. You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing. Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
- flir 4y ago
  Can you rephrase your example in a way that doesn't include a protected class/characteristic?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - evandale 4y ago
    Can I try? You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a colleague is fired when your boss/admin/whoever found out she had an abortion. You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing. Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
    - flir 4y ago
      In my country she wouldn't have been fired in the first place. At-will employment is just a way to bully people into toeing the line. Putting that aside, yes: Political speech shouldn't be compelled, any more than it should be constrained. Now if you want to put some kind of further "common carrier"-style legal burden on printers (or kickstarter), then I think it's possible to make a case for it, but I'm not personally in favour. (On the other hand, in the UK we do exactly that with bank accounts - it's nearly impossible for a bank to turn away a new customer - so I guess there's a case for it in some circumstances). It's ultimately a question of regulation I guess.

pdntspa 4y ago

All this corporate activism is all fine and dandy when you agree with their politics. When you don't, they become the enemy. I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity, a day when neutral platforms would act like neutral platforms. What this is turning into is yet another case of tyranny by the moral majority. Wherever there is power there will be assholes using it to control others.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity… When were those?
- pdntspa 4y ago
  reddit and 4chan were famously very strongly "free speech" before gamergate kicked off our current political climate People don't realize that you want the filth out in the open, where it can be tracked. Deplatforming doesn't kill anything, it just sends it underground, furthering the cause for the various shadow systems that spring up from it.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    If you’re counting niche places like 4chan, you can still get to places like that today. Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all. Forcing the shitty folks underground breaks the edgy-meme-to-radicalization pipeline quite effectively. I’ve greatly enjoyed not having to hear about Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis every day. https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-new-data-on-trump-tweets-shows/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/06/deplatforming-works-this-n... > But kicking Milo Yiannopoulos off Twitter didn’t make him stronger. It pushed him almost completely off the mainstream agenda. And part of the “fun” of being a Milo fan was precisely that prominence! You weren’t just listening to a random online crank; you were listening to an online crank who was very good at getting under prominent people’s skin. Lose that reach and some of the thrill is gone.
    - 4y ago

Dawnyhf2 4y ago

[flagged]

dalbasal 4y ago

>>I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments. I feel like we've recently witnessed this idea fail. I think "platform" under the current convention, is at odds with neutrality. You can't have a platform like Kickstarter without opinions about what can and can't be done on their site. They're not going to allow stuff they disagree with, stuff that will get them in trouble, etc. Neutrality if that kind must be structured in one way or another. Platform plurality, with lots of options. Open protocols, FOSS. Something like ISP neutrality. Platforms are judgemental by default.

wholinator2 4y ago
Sure they can. We've already got a ruleset for what society allows and doesn't, namely the Law. A platform can be neutral up to the point where the law becomes involved, after which it must either capitulate to outside demands or go underground. Any other acquiescence to group instruction is an intentional decision they're making, that they did not have to make. Reddit used to operate like that, everything up to the law was allowed. It's just that doesn't happen nowadays, it's more difficult to say exactly why though. Is it that other companies make it actually not financially survivable to rebuff the mobs? Or is it more a fear of labels and moderate cuts to bottom line. I'm sure they'd lose some money with controversy but would it really destroy them?
- dalbasal 4y ago
  What law, or prospective law, guarantees prevents Kickstarter from booting out users that they don't want? There are certain protections for certain groups (eg religion) but there aren't any laws compelling Kickstarter to allow porn projects. There aren't laws that compel YouTube to allow political content, medical content. There are no legal rights guaranteeing any of this. Half the problem here is that people don't realise where the problem is. The rights established in the past don't take YouTube and Twitter into account. If we want these rights, we'll have to establish them ourselves.
Teever 4y ago
Should a bank be allowed prevent a white supremacist the ability to pay their utilities? To me it isn't about whether or not platforms should do these things but if they should even be able to do them in the first place.

marcinzm 4y ago

>Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. Platforms overall don't take a stance for moral reasons but for perceived monetary reasons. If they believe they'll lose more money from users or advertisers leaving due to certain content than they gain from that content then they will get rid of that content. Whatever brings the most money will win in the end. Artists, as best I can tell, hate AI image models with a passion so presumably Kickstarter was afraid of losing a lot of campaigns from artists.

concordDance 4y ago
This isn't actually true. The CEO can have moral opinions or the board of directors might or Black Rock might or a large proportion of employees might. Any of these groups having a very strong opinion and the others not having one is sufficient.

egypturnash 4y ago

Cancelling this campaign is Kickstarter working exactly as it was designed. Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also happen to be synonymous with "crowdfunding" because they were the first to make it work, once that took off as a concept and KS to see a lot of gadget campaigns they started cracking down on those because that wasn't what the people running Kickstarter wanted to bring into the world. Eventually Kickstarter came to a point where they decided to make this explicit in the rules of the company, rather than become a heartless corporate machine motivated solely by whatever increases shareholder profit in the coming financial quarter: "Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015." - https://www.kickstarter.com/charter https://www.kickstarter.com/charter Deciding to kill this campaign is right in line with point 1D of their charter: "Kickstarter will engage beyond its walls with the greater issues and conversations affecting artists and creators." And with 4a: "Kickstarter will always support, serve, and champion artists and creators, especially those working in less commercial areas." Kickstarter's a machine made to fill the gap in public art funding left by the gutting of the NEA, not an "objective and neutral platform" that will happily help you build obviously evil things as long as they get their cut of the money.

Nadya 4y ago
This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists. As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art. In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.

root_axis 4y ago

Neutrality and objectivity have never existed in the corporate world.

Animats 4y ago

Right. One complaint is that it would not "represent under-trained concepts like LGBTQ and races and genders more fairly." If all they need is $25K, that's not going to be hard to get. There's sufficient demand for what they want to make that it will probably happen. Although we'll probably have to go through an era of bad porn being used to train systems to generate worse porn. Pornhub has an AI unit. They're currently taking early out-of-copyright porn films and up-converting to 4K, a higher frame rate, and colorizing. As they point out, they have lots of training data for colorizing and body parts. With that working, they'll probably go on to content generation.

umvi 4y ago

> I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf. OpenAI's safety rails for chatGPT are super obnoxious. I was trying to generate D&D scenarios and have chatGPT act as NPCs. It worked really well unless anything even remotely related to violence was brought up (a character threatens another, a character draws a sword, etc). As soon as that happened, chatGPT would break character and give a canned lecture about why violence is never ok.

jrockway 4y ago
I found it pretty easy to get ChatGPT to be violent. You have to make it very clear that you want it to help with fiction and that it is to be a character in that world. I always use "play", which it seems to understand better than other fictional scenarios. It helps if you do things like naming the acts "Act I Scene I: The Shaman dispatches the Mage with extreme violence" or whatever. Anyway, ChatGPT was more than happy to kill off my characters when I asked it to. I didn't keep the transcript, but the words haunt me. "The small man walked away, not knowing if he was dead or just very badly injured." This was after the small man pulled out a handgun in the middle of a profanity-laden rant from the other character and shot him in the neck. Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya.
- whaleofatw2022 4y ago
  > Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya. IANAD but my general understanding of anatomy/physiology is that a solid neck wound is a pretty good way to off someone in a fairly certain way. Admittedly many of the ends to it are agonizing... which says something else.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Yeah ChatGPT knows how to kill when it wants to kill. I don't understand why everyone is running around worried about the jobs of artists. We're just a few years away from a genocide the likes of mere humans have never imagined. Mark my words!!
- 4y ago

stonogo 4y ago

The problem is that "objectivity" is impossible and "neutrality" is in fact just siding with the status quo. I'd argue that this new trend of companies taking responsibility for the things they do or enable is a result of people giving much more of a shit than they have in the past, not a result of apathy. Look on the bright side. You're worried about setting a bad precedent, but the current trend in the top of the legal world is to ignore precedent, or hand-select the precedent you want. If this sort of thing becomes such a problem that action is needed, we can count on SCOTUS.

catiopatio 4y ago
This is just a painfully thin excuse to justify exercising your power over others while you have it. If the overton window shifts, and you and your ideas are being deplatformed using the same justifications you’ve championed, you’ll be screaming for a return to objectivity and neutrality.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Objectivity and neutrality don't exist; you can't return to a condition that never existed (people with narrow perspective frequently mistake alignment with their own subjective biases as being “objective” and/or “neutral”, but that is self-delusion.)
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    Objectivity and neutrality have value even if they can never perfectly realized. Case in point: You wouldn’t be arguing against objectivity and neutrality if doing so did not advance your own social and political power; you yourself have abandoned any pretense of aspiring to either. This makes you a self-serving person to whom it would be dangerous to grant power.
    - stonogo 4y ago
      You have it exactly backwards. Anyone who claims to be objective is either bullshitting you or so naive as to be unreliable. Neither case is a person you want to empower. Anyone who claims to be "neutral" is in fact declaring their own apathy towards a topic, and when that topic is "should a specific group of people have civil rights" then neutrality is ethically disgusting. I'm personally apathetic regarding whether some money-collecting company wants to work for AI people, so I don't really care about Kickstarter's policy here, and I don't foresee myself caring in the future. Pretending that Kickstarter is a power broker of some kind is in my estimation some serious Chicken Little territory. "Aspiring" to either objectivity or neutrality is not the same thing as actually manifesting either quality, and such aspirations generally involve disclosing conflicts of interest or other biases, which are things every living person has. Wrapping either concept in other weasel words doesn't really move the needle.

MarcoZavala 4y ago

[dead]

jimbob45 4y ago

While I agree, is this not more of a case of self-preservation? It sounds like KS knows that it may not be able to weather the lawsuits from copyright infringement and CSAM generation.