I used it to receive nudes and spicy pics from one girl I dated. Downloaded it for that purpose alone. Deleted it when we stopped talking

And cracking open a book didn’t demolish the environment. Weird.

I mean, I do wish there were a large competitor to YouTube. But…why this particular asshole.

Oh I thought we were having a friendly discussion. I didn’t know we were arguing. My bad, I’ll change my tone

Mind explaining what you meant then? I guess I misunderstood your point

I don’t think this is the power redistribution you’re implying it is. I’m not actually sure what you mean by that. The power to create truths? To spread propaganda? I can’t think of any other power this tech would redistribute. Would you mind explaining?

That’s exactly what I meant when I said:

It’s not a new story. In fact, it’s a very old story.

And you just kinda proved my point. As time has gone on, the great of deception has grown with new technology. This is just the latest iteration. And every new one has expanded the chances/danger exponentially.

I mean, sure, deception as a concept has always been around. But let me just put it this way:

How many more scam emails, scam texts, how many more data leaks, conspiracy theories are going around these days? All of these things always existed. The Nigerian prince scam. That one’s been around forever. The door-to-door salesman, that one’s been around forever. The snake oil charlatan. Scams and lies have been around since we could communicate, probably. But never before have we been bombarded with them like we are today. Before, it took a guy with a rotary phone and a phone book a full day to try to scam 100 people. Now 100 calls go out all at once with a different fake phone number for each, spoofed to be as close to the recipient’s number as possible.

The effort input needed for these things have dropped significantly with new tech, and their prevalence skyrocketed. It’s not a new story. In fact, it’s a very old story. It’s just more common and much easier, so it’s taken up by more people because it’s more lucrative. Why spend all of your time trying to hack a campaign’s email (which is also still happening), when you can make one suspicious picture and get all of your bots to get it trending so your company gets billions in tax breaks? All at the click of a button. Then send your spam bots to call millions of people a day to spread the information about the picture, and your email bots to spam the picture to every Facebook conspiracy theorist. All in a matter of seconds.

This isn’t a matter of “what if.” This is kind of just the law of scams. It will be used for evil. No question. And it does have an effect. You can’t have random numbers call you anymore without you immediately expecting their spam. Soon, you won’t be able to get photo evidence without immediately thinking it might be fake. Water flows downhill, new tech gets used for scams. The like a law of nature at this point.

Pssst. You could always pirate them.

Your point being…?

I mean…we can all see those are inanimate, right? But that doesn’t even change my point. If anything, it kinda helps prove my point. People are gullible as hell. What’s that saying? “A lie will get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to pull its boots on.”

A torrent of believable fakes will call into question photographic evidence. I mean, we’ve all seen it happening already. Some kinda strange or interesting picture shows up and everyone is claiming it was AI generated. That’s the other half of the problem.

Photographic evidence is now called into question readily. That happened with photoshop too, but like I said, throw enough shit against the wall—with millions and millions of other people also throwing shit at the wall—and some is bound to stick. The probability is skyrocketing now that it’s in everyone’s hands and the actually AIgen pictures are becoming indecipherable from photo evidence.

That low effort fairy hoax made a bunch of people believe there were 8in. fairies just existing in the world, regardless of how silly that was. Now, stick something entirely believable into a photograph that only barely blurs the lines of reality and it can be like wildfire. Have you seen those stupid Facebook AI pages? Like shrimp Jesus, the kids in Africa building cars out of garlic cloves, etc. People are falling for that dumbass shit. Now put Kamala Harris doing something shady and release it in late October. I would honestly be surprised if we’re not hit with at least one situation like that in a few months.

$$$$$$

Yeah, nah. I see less Night City and more…permanent night city in that were all blind and/or dead. Although maybe the rampant all-powerful capitalism of the cyberpunk lore would still happen.

It used to take professionals or serious hobbyists to make something fake look believable. Now it’s at the tip of everyone’s fingers. Fake photos were already a smaller issue, but this very well could become a tidal wave of fakes trying to grab attention.

Think about how many scammers there are. Think about how many horny boys there are. Think about how much online political fuckery goes around these days. When believable photographs of whatever you want people to believe are at the tips of anyone’s fingers, it’s very, very easy to start a wildfire of misinformation. And think about the young girls being tormented in middle school and high school. And all the scammable old people. And all the fascists willing to use any tool at their disposal to sow discord and hatred.

It’s not a nothing problem. It could very well become a torrent of lies.

Does anyone remember Xiao Xiao?

Don’t bank on it

But doesn’t it matter that the machine isn’t expressing anything? It’s regurgitating words that are a facsimile of emotion. That matters to me. Especially in the long term. Since shorthand and texting became a thing, kids’ writing became way, way worse according to TAs and teachers I know. Which, that was a byproduct of a change in writing styles, so while kinda pathetic, it’s somewhat understandable. But this is just shoving itself between us and our own feelings. Say google gets their wish, everything we write to each other that ever matters more than a simple surface level conversation is expressed via LLMs. Where will that leave us? What does that leave us? We’re closing ourselves off from the world with technology. And we’re cheering for a new tech that will allow us to retreat even further away from human experience. That’s goddamn depressing if you ask me. And to answer my own question, it leaves us work, consumption, and fucking nothin.

This tech isn’t here to free us. From work, from tedium. It’s here to relegate us only to the tedium.

Not this one. It’s 600 miles long

They may take our creative writing, they make take our digital art creation, they may take our ability to feed ourselves and our families. Hell, they may even take every single creative outlet humans have and relegate us to menial work in service of our capitalist overlords. But they will never take away clicking on boxes of pictures of bicycles and crosswalks!

Fuck round earth, fuck flat earth, I’m “Italian Sub Compact earth” all the way

It’s adorable you think “shoelace tightness” is all that app has awareness of.