[HN Gopher] Kickstarter shuts down campaign for Unstable Diffusi...
___________________________________________________________________
Kickstarter shuts down campaign for Unstable Diffusion amid
changing guidelines
Author : nonbirithm
Score : 140 points
Date : 2022-12-25 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| barnabee wrote:
| This sort of thing is why, for all their faults, I think we need
| decentralisation and "crypto" to succeed.
|
| We need to replace platforms like Kickstarter with standards and
| protocols so that shutting things down because someone doesn't
| like them (or even preventing people from behaving illegally,
| _especially_ if you're not the cops) can be made impossible.
|
| Let bad ideas be rejected by society, not blocked by someone
| claiming to act for society. Because inevitably they don't
| represent everyone, and they always end up acting with self
| interest, no matter how good the initial intentions.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Kickstarter and co will continue to lose trust and their base
| and be open to disruption by other companies.
|
| However, at least some of this is due to underlying payment
| providers. Those need to be gutted and replaced. See paypal and
| their $2,500 fee for saying mean things on the internet.
| PaulsWallet wrote:
| Kickstarter will not lose any trust with this decision and if
| anything they probably gained a decent amount of goodwill
| from artist and their fanbases.
| colechristensen wrote:
| This argument boils down to "I wish everything was more like
| 4chan".
|
| If you've actually visited places with little to zero
| moderation and freedom to do anything the results are troubling
| at best. You don't see the best of things with zero
| restrictions, these places are awful.
|
| Somalia was stateless for years, was it closer to a paradise or
| hell?
|
| Go browse /b/ and tell me you wish how all social media was
| more like it.
| variadix wrote:
| That's a bit of a false dichotomy. 4chan's boards are
| distinctly different from each other in terms of the quality
| of conversation and topics discussed. Moderating things for
| being spam or off topic is different from moderation with a
| clear ideological bias.
| barnabee wrote:
| It doesn't boil down to that at all.
|
| Anyone can send me spam email, my spam filters pick most it
| up and I never see it. I'd not choose to have corporate
| moderation of my incoming email even if it meant less spam.
|
| The same applies to web sites. The web is full of all sorts
| of things you probably don't want to see. You don't need it
| to be removed by your government in order for the whole web
| not to degenerate to 4chan.
|
| I don't follow people who share objectionable things on
| Twitter, and if they start to I unfollow them. The only
| reason I'd see the crap would be if Twitter choose to show it
| to me. It doesn't need to be "moderated" (deleted) for
| Twitter not to show it to me if I'm not following the author
| or someone who retweets it (and if I am, and continue to do
| so, then presumably I want to see it, and that's up to me).
|
| It's simply not the case that the presence of objectionable
| things on the internet is the root of the problem. The
| problem, mostly, is perverse incentives for companies to
| promote it.
|
| Until we realise this we'll keep building algorithms that are
| incentivised to create division and stole obsessions of all
| sorts to keep people online and watching ads, followed by
| wondering where our moderation went wrong and what extra
| control we can impose to finally make things better.
|
| It won't work.
| waboremo wrote:
| Are you aware of the paradox of tolerance?
| jkeisling wrote:
| Are you aware of the equally common objection to "I can
| tolerate anything except intolerance": that if allowed to
| censor in the name of tolerance, our self-appointed
| guardians will simply call whatever they don't like
| "intolerance" and censor it? (Or "stochastic terrorism",
| or "micro-aggression", or "online harms", or
| "misinformation", or "trolling", or "sealioning", or
| "toxicity", etc). Certainly one must draw the line
| somewhere. But the speech debate doesn't end at the
| Paradox of Tolerance, and at this point I assume anyone
| who brings it up in isolation is doing so in bad faith.
| barnabee wrote:
| Indeed. Intolerance is one thing it's worth being
| intolerant of.
| poszlem wrote:
| Are you aware that the paradox of tolerance is a PARADOX?
| Most people quoting Popper online to promote censorship
| forget that part.
|
| It's not a carte blanche for censorship.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are
| intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant
| society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the
| tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them._
|
| > _--In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance,
| that we should always suppress the utterance of
| intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them
| by rational argument and keep them in check by public
| opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But
| we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary
| even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are
| not prepared to meet us on the level of rational
| argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may
| forbid their followers to listen to rational argument,
| because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer
| arguments by the use of their fists or pistols._
|
| The second part is often left out of the discussion.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| In Somalia you can't "block" a neighboring warlord and keep
| living your best life.
|
| 4chan isn't designed to actually be a great forum, but the
| nearly-unlimited content is not the problem. A lack of user-
| tools for sorting through it is.
| Arainach wrote:
| >Let bad ideas be rejected by society
|
| This has never worked. Society is filled with people who have
| to work every hour just to afford the essentials of life and
| can't spare a few hours to research what refrigerator will last
| the longest for the money much less understand content creation
| methodology.
|
| When you have to decide whether to pay for a dentist bill or
| your retirement you have no ability to vote with your wallet
| over something as trivial as AI art.
| __pache__ wrote:
| Of course freedom has worked, what...
|
| Yeah, you know what they say about good art: it must play by
| the rules.
| Arainach wrote:
| Laws have worked.
|
| The market never solved the fact that it's cheaper to dump
| things in rivers and lakes. It never solved the fact that
| optimizing vehicles for the safety and comfort of those
| inside them is a huge risk to pedestrians, cyclists, and
| others outside the vehicle. It never solved the fact that
| it's cheaper to just keep perishable food on the shelves
| until it sells. It never solved the fact that claiming a
| medicine solves illnesses is very different from ensuring
| that it solves them.
| __pache__ wrote:
| > Laws have worked.
|
| Huh?
|
| > The market never solved
|
| I mean do you buy products that are cleaner, better to
| their employees, blah blah...? Do most people, if the
| opportunity is there? If the opportunity is not there,
| why not?
|
| Seems like you're going off into space here. Capitalism
| and private ownership of things and ideas is great.
| Sorry?
| WASDx wrote:
| Regulations serve a purpose. I am more afraid of what would
| happen if everything became decentralized. An effort I hope we
| can agree on was when platforms started removing COVID-19
| misinformation.
| [deleted]
| barnabee wrote:
| Regulations are fine but enforcement via corporate
| gatekeepers is not, and neither is creating a world in which
| breaking the law is impossible.
|
| Regulations create consequences for breaking them, and that
| is a good thing. Pairing regulations with control that
| prevents crime and civil disobedience is something completely
| different.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| I've never been banned from as many platforms as in early
| 2020 when I was explaining that without an evidence stating
| "the virus came from the Wuhan lab" is just as unscientific
| than "the virus DIDN'T COME from the Wuhan lab". They'd
| gladly post Fauci saying "it didn't" all day long and block
| anyone (me) saying "we can't know without investigating!"
|
| I'm not part of the rep/dem "Chyna" fight. I just my
| countries to push the WHO to do the proper investigations
| because it's the only way we improve our safety standards.
|
| So no, I can't see any value in politically driven
| censorship.
| barnabee wrote:
| I don't agree that you should prevent people from saying
| wrong things in case someone happens to read/hear and believe
| them, no.
|
| If it's wrong, counter it with warning labels explaining who
| thinks it's wrong and why.
|
| Yes, the consequence might be that at the margins, more
| people believe wrong things even given the warnings (though
| despite some pretty concerted efforts it seems pretty
| conclusive to me that that's going to happen anyway, and
| perhaps the desire to stem the flow of misinformation has
| only created more conspiracy theories), but alternative of
| state control of what is acceptable thought / expression is
| far worse.
|
| (Note that I am fine with, and would even encourage
| preventing companies from profiting from furthering
| misinformation, for example by having algorithms that promote
| it beyond a account's followers or a post's organic reach
| because it produces clicks and ad revenue, but that is very
| different.)
| sschueller wrote:
| But they aren't following laws, they are following their own
| arbitrary rules that fit their business and their personal
| politics. Same goes for merchants like Visa that will deny
| you access to their system even though what you are selling
| is legal.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| I'd be okay if Visa and Kickstarted blocked porn, for
| instance, but I want them to be clear about it and make any
| card-denied messages explain this to merchant and customer.
| What I don't like is this gray area where CC companies
| won't block Pornhub for _years_ of CSAM scandals but then
| finally get the nerve when a story catches the news.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| So, is your view that there are not enough rug-pulls and scams
| on Kickstarter already so we need this pseudo-decentralization?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Crypto has been and still is successful for this.
|
| Nothing would stop this crowd fund there. Happens all day every
| day.
| Guvante wrote:
| > someone doesn't like them
|
| AI art is literally working against what Kickstarter was made
| for.
|
| AI art is about putting together the work that artists have
| done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be
| the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't
| go after someone for copyright violation as a class action
| lawsuit)
|
| If someone wanted to pay artists to create a brand new
| collection of art to train AI on that would be fine. However
| the reality is current AI art is all farmed from publicly
| "available" images. (Copyright law currently allows you to
| display images for public consumption without worrying about
| those images being re-appropriated, AI art bypasses that)
|
| > Let bad ideas be rejected by society
|
| Except society doesn't understand what is going on and
| explaining it requires expert testimony. Of course you can
| discard those complaints by just making shit up and sound
| nearly as convincing.
|
| > Because inevitably they don't represent everyone
|
| Kickstarter didn't say they were doing this for everyone. They
| explicitly said they were doing it to support artists. Artists
| haven't universally called out AI art as theft but a ton have.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Luddism has a pretty long history, by now it should be clear
| that fighting against technological advancement is such an
| impossible challenge that it's utterly pointless and a
| massive waste of time.
|
| While I understand why some artists are upset, the ones who
| succeed in the future will be the ones who use the technology
| in their work, instead of those who just complain and whine.
| Guvante wrote:
| Build an AI using copyright free work and we can talk.
|
| Stealing other's work under the guise of "advancement"
| isn't futurism...
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I disagree. Fighting against technology has a point. Some
| people are already recognizing it and using less
| technology, and trying to live simpler lives. Every dollar
| that is not spent on technology slows its progress, and if
| enough people quit spending money on it, it cannot develop.
|
| Movements can grow unexpectedly and seemingly out of
| nowhere. It may be possible that enough people will enjoy
| the idea of living a life unencumbered by pointless junk
| and if so, their actions can have the power to shut down
| companies like OpenAI and the like.
|
| If I could convince even one other person on this planet of
| the dangers of technology, I would consider the effort I
| put into talking about it worth it. In fact, I myself have
| been convinced by other people and in turn I have already
| spent far less money on technology because of it. Maybe
| it's a drop in the ocean, but drops of rain can become
| floods, and one day I truly hope that flood will come to
| completely shut down efforts like UnstableDiffusion and
| similar projects.
| kristofferR wrote:
| Honestly I think that's an absurd pipedream, OpenAI can't
| keep their servers stable due to the massive demand and
| Unstable Diffusion has over 100 000 users in their
| Discord.
|
| To hope that they shut down due to a lack of users is
| just a thought process that is only guaranteed to cause
| unhappiness.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Unhappiness? That must be a strange definition of happy
| you are using. All those people can go on to amuse
| themselves some other way. It's as silly as saying that
| people would be unhappy if no more Marvel movies were
| made. It's just a little diversion and people would go on
| to do something else.
|
| I think it's very unlikely that true happiness is caused
| by the highly specific diversions we have created in
| society. I can put myself out there -- I have hobbies
| too. And if they stopped, I would miss them a little. But
| I certainly wouldn't go far as to say that would make me
| unhappy.
| __pache__ wrote:
| I think you're whooshing here.
|
| Thinking you can control others will lead to unhappiness,
| I think is their point.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I don't aim to control anyone. Only not support AI and
| find other people of a similar mindset to do so, and
| spread this message. People can of course ignore it.
| __pache__ wrote:
| Uh huh....
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| As a content creator, I believe unstable diffusion and AI
| models is theft, at least in a moral sense. Computer
| programmers have taken all the art that humans have worked
| hard to produce, and are producing it themselves at a rate
| much faster than any artist can produce it and reaping the
| financial benefits. Because AI is so general, it operates on
| a scale not previously known in the realm of automation, and
| so it's too much of an unfair advantage -- far more so than
| someone coming up with an invention that makes a few other
| previous inventions obsolete.
|
| AI is like an alien race coming to our planet. The alien race
| is so advanced that it can do everything better than any
| human, and they use their technology to sell us perfect
| products of every nature in return for degrading acts. Such a
| thing disrupts the fabric of society, which is held together
| by people needing each other.
|
| Computer programmers and tech companies are not just robbing
| artists, but robbing all of humanity of the necessities that
| we need in order to have a fair chance at this world.
| EarlKing wrote:
| If it's not reproducing protectable expressions then it's
| not theft on any level, but merely another tool for
| producing art, albeit at an industrial scale. This happens
| in every profession eventually. It's simply your turn.
|
| For my part, I'm quite content with this state of affairs.
| Now, rather than paying exorbitant amounts of money for
| lackluster results from artists, people can use so-called
| AI to generate decent results on the cheap. On a long
| enough timeline this should result in the price of art
| assets for games dropping into the basement where they
| belong, taking the price of games with them in the process.
| The public benefits, while intermediaries lose. I fail to
| see the problem.
|
| TL;DR Humanity should not be compelled to dwell in darkness
| so candlemakers can continue to profit.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Why do you think the price of art assets for games belong
| in the basement? Do you value it so little? What about
| games themselves?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I certainly don't see how not using AI is dwelling in
| darkness. We can have a very nice and functional society
| without it.
|
| You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art
| to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the
| cost of generating a computer program to the basement
| where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum
| wage? Would you be so content then?
|
| Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but
| that is expected because the people who are benefiting
| from AI with higher salaries are currently the
| programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness,
| only selfishness.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer
| program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers
| will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?
|
| I'd be more than happy to get rid of the "programmers"
| that are generating the same quality code as Copilot.
| Engineers are employed to translate human needs into
| tangible system designs, that they have to write code to
| do so is mostly an artefact of our current system-
| building methodology. In fact, I would be immensely happy
| if I could get rid of that part.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| You clearly aren't familiar with the state of advancement
| in being able to develop an app in the last 40 years.
|
| I have a rigorous academic background in computer science
| and you don't see me throwing a tantrum that your average
| layman today can fire up unity or RPG maker to create
| games without having a firm grasp of rigid body Newtonian
| physics, game loops, asset management, graphic drivers,
| and handrolled x86 assembly.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| Nonsense. The "art" you're creating is derivative of art
| other people made which you saw and learned
| from/incorporated into your own work.
|
| More to the point, much of modern art is derivative
| nonsense that lacks soul - which is why it's modern artists
| who are scared of AI. Their work is easy to mimic.
|
| AI isn't going to replace a Van Gogh anytime soon.
| TheBrokenRail wrote:
| > AI art is about putting together the work that artists have
| done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be
| the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you
| can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class
| action lawsuit)
|
| How do you think humans learn art? Humans aren't magic, they
| learn to make art by looking at and being inspired by other
| art, and I'd bet quite a lot of that art is copyrighted. AIs
| are just doing the same thing but way faster, and I don't see
| any issue with that. (Same with GitHub Copilot for that
| matter.)
| layer8 wrote:
| Humans generally recognize when they are plagiarizing. AIs
| don't.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yes, and they also put a lot of effort into intentionally
| disguising the fact that they're plagiarizing. AIs don't.
|
| The real problem is that our definition of "plagiarism"
| did not anticipate, and was never intended to describe,
| anything even remotely like ML.
| analyst74 wrote:
| When I dated a musician, she would randomly point out all
| the pieces in various kinds of music that are "borrowed"
| or blatantly copied from other music. It is understood
| among musicians that almost all music are derivatives of
| prior art.
| fedorareis wrote:
| While yes a lot of music is based on prior art there are
| levels of that and there is a lot of case law on what
| doesn't break copyright. There is a lot of music that
| steals from classical but that is public domain. There
| are rules about how much of a riff from a copyrighted
| song you can borrow before it becomes copyright
| infringement and you owe the original writer royalties.
| Music also has a lot of standard conventions that lead to
| similar conclusions at least if you are using western
| music theory since that is based on western classical
| music.
|
| So an amount of this deals with scale and the copyright
| status of the prior art.
| buran77 wrote:
| > AIs are just doing the same thing but way faster, and I
| don't see any issue with that.
|
| Isn't this like saying "cars are just doing the same as
| horse drawn carriages but faster, they shouldn't be
| regulated differently"? That "faster" changes the game
| completely. Similarly, many of the laws applying to
| physical actions can't be immediately transposed to
| electronic actions.
|
| The current rules were made under the assumption that we're
| dealing with humans and "natural" laws. Like the fact that
| humans eventually die while an AI can live forever or
| transfer the entirety of useful knowledge to the next
| generation. A human doesn't have time to steal in a
| lifetime as much as an AI can do in mere minutes. A human
| can be punished for breaking the law, especially for repeat
| offenses, whereas an AI can't be even if it breaks the law
| more times than all human artists put together. These are
| all complete game changers, speed is only one of the many
| compounding factors. Scale changes things, a punch in the
| face isn't just "a gentle tap, but faster". An AI can suck
| in all of human knowledge and work with all of it at the
| speed of light.
|
| > How do you think humans learn art?
|
| Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing.
| Humans as individuals have constantly advanced it with
| original material. AI seems to be by definition derivative.
| Humans are encouraged to create something as original as
| possible and attacked if they borrow too much, AI in
| "encouraged" to copy as much as possible and as this
| discussion stands to prove, also to "borrow".
|
| This at the very least invalidates the too simplistic view
| that AI is the same as humans but faster.
| TheBrokenRail wrote:
| > Humans as a race have created art from literally
| nothing.
|
| No, they didn't? Humans don't have any magic creative
| juices that allow them to come up with ideas out of thin
| air, that's silly. Ideas are created from our brain using
| our past experiences and knowledge, why do you think some
| of our earliest art is of animals?
|
| Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn
| carriages is the best analogy to support your argument,
| considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent
| nowadays. I'd argue a better analogy would be something
| like chess or any other game. When computers beat humans
| at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make
| computers perform worse. People just acknowledged that
| computers were better.
| Arainach wrote:
| Scale enables all sorts of things in technology that
| require new rules.
|
| In theory, you could have 1000 people watching cameras
| with a list of people to watch for in 1980, but in
| practice it was too expensive and not a consideration.
| Now you can cheaply record tens of thousands of hours of
| video indefinitely and run analyses on everyone in them.
| This has huge implications on freedom and society and
| calls for new rules.
|
| Just because technology is doing the "same thing" that
| was done before at scale does not make it the same thing.
|
| AI is the same.
| buran77 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you understand my point and you're also
| undermining your own points almost as soon as you make
| them. I don't want to stop computers in their tracks. To
| this day in the interest of fairness we apply different
| rules even between humans in a lot of things. Suddenly
| bundling computers and humans under the same rules is a
| severely flawed idea.
|
| > Ideas are created from our brain using our past
| experiences and knowledge
|
| Humans experienced random things in life and some created
| art from it. Sometimes after hallucinogenic drugs they
| created art even from things that never existed. Then
| other humans created something new on top of the existing
| art. AI "experienced" already created art and was tasked
| to recombine pieces to create more art. Simply put,
| nobody gave an AI sounds of nature and had it come up
| with a symphony after some thousands of human years'
| equivalent of processing.
|
| > Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn
| carriages is the best analogy to support your argument,
| considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent
| nowadays.
|
| Not sure why this harms the analogy, it's meant to point
| out that "speed" makes a difference and changes the
| rules. Artists may also be nonexistent tomorrow. If AI is
| doing everything legitimately and creating art the same
| way as humans but faster and better, why would human
| artists continue to exist? And then what would you feed
| as training material to your AI? The dictionary
| definition of "love"? Sounds of nature? Art created by
| the previous AIs?
|
| > When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the
| rules of chess to make computers perform worse.
|
| Right, we just don't allow computers to play the game in
| official positions. Different rules, as it were.
| kgarten wrote:
| in the whole discussion, I feel you are missing a point.
| AI creates something that looks like art to humans based
| on a probability distribution.
|
| for me art is not the end product but the process. I want
| to understand the artists intentions and often a work
| that looks blant, because deep because of the artist's
| explanations.
|
| Take Agnes Martin's paintings as an example.
| Guvante wrote:
| If you use MS Paint to copy three photos you found online
| you are violating their copyright. Your personal insight
| into how it is done might provide you your own copyright
| and exactly how you use the other things might make your
| usage fair use.
|
| However the AI process does not create a copyright (there
| is no human involved) and cannot use the transformative
| exceptions for fair use due to, again, no human being
| involved.
|
| The thing to remember is AI literally copies the originals.
| While it mashes them together in a way that makes the lines
| hard to see that is in fact what it is doing.
| barnabee wrote:
| Do you agree with copyright laws?
|
| Are they the best way to reward creation?
|
| Do they serve humanity well?
| Guvante wrote:
| > Do you agree with copyright laws?
|
| In their entirety? No of course not.
|
| Certainly the duration is ridiculous beyond measure.
|
| But the idea of having no protections for your own work
| seems barbaric. At least for work that requires "work"
| for lack of a better word.
|
| I think the laze faire nature of online memes for
| instance makes sense in that space.
|
| > Are they the best way to reward creation?
|
| I think that providing a mechanism for people to share
| their work without losing control of it makes sense.
|
| > Do they serve humanity well?
|
| While I wouldn't attribute societies recent online boon
| to them. I do think that having protections of this kind
| are one of the reasons we have seen such a huge
| investment in the space.
|
| Like the current internet or not the hundreds of billions
| or trillions pumped into it would be harder to stomach if
| the internet were the wild west some would like it to be.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Honestly, I suspect creating
|
| > a mechanism for people to share their work without
| losing control of it
|
| Is impossible.
| corysama wrote:
| > The thing to remember is AI literally copies the
| originals. While it mashes them together in a way that
| makes the lines hard to see that is in fact what it is
| doing.
|
| I see this argument a lot, but it cannot be true. The
| image database behind Stable Diffusion is 5 billion
| images resized to 512x512 each and compressed down to a
| roughly 100,000 gigabytes. But, you can run it on a model
| file that is as small as 2 gigabytes. The originals are
| not in there. They have not been compressed to 4 bits per
| image.
|
| I've studied and used AI art generators for a long time
| now and I can tell you from both a technical and
| experiential POV, the images they create are not mashups.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I think humans don't learn art like statistical learning
| AI. What did Dali steal copyright from? I think humans are
| not like this in the same way that Ramanujan was not like
| ChatGPT.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| All art, to some degree, is farmed from public imagery. That
| isn't a great argument for AI art being theft. All major
| styles of visual art came from somewhere, and people copy
| them anyway. If you study art in college, art history is
| literally part of the curriculum and you spend time trying
| out different mediums and styles pioneered by other people.
|
| Truly original art is rarer than 8' tall humans, but that
| doesn't stop the industry from existing at scale.
| jolancer wrote:
| [dead]
| Guvante wrote:
| AI art is more akin to uploading a copy of someone's work
| and claiming it is my own that inspired work.
|
| It would be one thing if the AI were actually trained like
| a human was and created unique artwork based on ideas given
| to it. The reality is it copy/pastes parts of images it
| found online.
| [deleted]
| birracerveza wrote:
| This is good for Bitcoin
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I find the technology gatekeeping to be appalling. How can people
| make the argument that this is "blatant theft from Greg
| Rutkowski" but turn a blind eye to Stable Diffusion, Midjourney,
| DALL-E, etc?
|
| At least Unstable Diffusion isn't predominantly used for the same
| fantasy/illustrations that people love to generate on the other
| services.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| I mean I have seen tons of people complaining about the use of
| those models on social media. I don't think that people are
| only objecting to this project.
|
| I don't agree with them, but I don't think its fair to say
| there hasn't been pushback on the other projects you mentioned.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Stable Diffusion removed Greg Rutkowski et al from the training
| data per their request, Unstable Diffusion is a project to
| fine-tune them back in.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Greg Rutkowski was simply very present in the unknown dataset
| used by OpenAI for training CLIP-L/14, whereas when LAION
| trained the CLIP-H model it did so on the LAION dataset that
| seems to have far fewer references to this artist.
| egypturnash wrote:
| You must not have any artists in your life, a lot of us are
| hollering that _all_ of these things are massive copyright
| infringement machines that are trained on our hard work without
| any permission, never mind giving us a single penny of the
| money the companies building these things are making off of
| them.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Would your opinion change if these models were trained
| exclusively on works in the public domain? Do you consider it
| to be infringement if new and novel art is created simply in
| the style of other artists? If so, how should we treat art
| students when they try to recreate a previous work?
|
| It's also worth noting that producing new art is only a
| subset of possible use cases. So how should we treat new and
| novel photo-realistic images? Is that infringement too?
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Silence and ableism are what we get from artists. We're
| still in the kneejerk reaction phase. "Having to do it
| yourself" is an awful precondition for art and expression.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Ableism? Isn't that a bit much? That this taking the
| victimization nonsense to a level even I didn't think was
| fathomable.
| Guvante wrote:
| The concept of AI art is fine. The implementation by
| scraping copyrighted work and claiming that their magic
| algorithm makes they immune to the consequences is where
| the complaints are.
| jkeisling wrote:
| From my perspective, our magic algorithm does indeed make
| us immune to the "consequences" of scraping copyrighted
| work. Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather
| than copying any specific piece, and copyright does not
| protect a style or give artists the right to
| retroactively restrict learning from open content.
| Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people
| out of jobs, and there's no good reason that art is
| different - simply social prestige and classism. Current
| models, even fine-tuned ones on specific artists, are not
| wrong, however sad or harmful for the artist they may be.
| There are winners and losers, that's capitalism, for
| better or worse.
|
| I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have
| a subsidy for human creativity. But for me, Twitter's
| bad-faith arguments about "stealing" or "copyright
| violation", and maximalist demands for bans on AI art,
| make compromise undesirable and probably impossible.
| Guvante wrote:
| > Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather than
| copying any specific piece, and copyright does not
| protect a style or give artists the right to
| retroactively restrict learning from open content.
|
| Unless you are a lawyer you are just pulling reasoning
| out of thin air. All aspects of Copyright with human's
| have been decided by decades of court cases. Assuming you
| understand the underlying theory enough to guess how a
| court case would go is presumptuous.
|
| > Ethically, our society accepts legally automating
| people out of jobs
|
| And society accepts paying people for their work.
|
| > There are winners and losers, that's capitalism, for
| better or worse.
|
| Capitalism is all about avoiding paying for what you did
| in order to artificially increase your profits, I agree
| there.
|
| > I am sorry for artists and think we should probably
| have a subsidy for human creativity
|
| I mean if the AI models just... Trained on purchased or
| free materials there wouldn't be a problem.
|
| Other media figured out how to handle when a "purchase"
| isn't a purchase in the traditional fashion: see
| streaming services.
|
| AI art is just the latest version of piracy. "It is just
| bytes" yet again.
| Filligree wrote:
| With the current length of copyright, there is no
| possible way to build it otherwise. Saying that AI needs
| to only train on public-domain works, is equivalent to
| saying that it shouldn't exist.
|
| Of course, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be buying art
| from artists instead. I'd simply go back to my stories
| not being illustrated at all. So from my perspective,
| this story is all about artists wanting to tear the
| ability out of my hands.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Nonsense, the claim made by those that say the end of
| knowledge work is nigh is that an AGI is coming that is
| superior to human intelligence. Humans do not need to
| train and read / consume gigabytes and terabytes of past
| solutions to produce new work and they do it at a trivial
| fraction of the amount of watts.
| Guvante wrote:
| I mean piracy is a thing and if that is your jive then,
| cool?
|
| You aren't exactly making a convincing argument saying
| that you don't have to pay an artist this way.
|
| And honestly if you don't think this style of low effort
| content creation isn't coming for books...
| Guvante wrote:
| Why are you dismissing their point because the technology
| could be used in a different way? It isn't being used as
| you hypothesized.
| egypturnash wrote:
| For a model trained exclusively on the public domain, I
| would still be unhappy about the prospect of a world where
| a lot of low-level gigs that keep artists alive have been
| replaced by spending a half hour fucking with prompts. It
| would however be free of the "this corporation abused fair
| use to create a training model which it is selling to
| people" problem.
|
| And no, it's not infringement if you work in someone's
| style - but it's also _not professional_ to do this for too
| long, especially with a living artist. One piece in someone
| else 's style is a homage, several years of pieces in their
| style starts to get you labeled a "clone" or a "style
| thief". Unless you are their assistant, in which case
| "working in their style" is _exactly_ what you are being
| paid to do.
|
| If you would like an example of this happening, read the
| 'controversy' section of Kieth Giffen's Wikipedia page,
| which sketches out the way fans and fellow artists took
| Kieth Giffen to task for doing a complete style swipe from
| Jose Munoz' shadow-drenched crime comics for several years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
| verdenti wrote:
| Every human is trained on previous "hard work". There's no
| difference and your Luddite behavior is going to go... well
| the way of the Luddites.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Yet another triumph for the bosses of the world; in the
| absence of unions, automation only profits the owners of
| the machine, and none of the people who are now performing
| much less skilled labor gets a better life.
|
| In this case, it's a labor that's _already_ a way to barely
| scrape by for a lot of its practitioners.
|
| This is the difference. Is this what you are cheering for?
| Is this the world you want?
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem in scenario that you describe is the bosses,
| not the automation. How about we solve _that_ problem,
| instead of AI witch hunts?
| verdenti wrote:
| [dead]
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| You're relying on multiple meanings of the word "train".
| Humans produce new knowledge, art, solutions, etc, without
| consuming the full body of human created media. It's hardly
| even reminiscent of the same things. Humans produce
| solutions, at times, without ever being trained in a
| fraction of the vast body of human knowledge. This is not
| the same as a generative AI.
| itake wrote:
| I'm a professional writer that is paid for my copyrighted
| work. I welcome any tools that can help me write better.
|
| I think there are many sides to this issue and artists
| shouldn't care keep their industry.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "Artists shouldn't care keep their industry" - so how do
| you feel about the SFWA's campaign to make Disney uphold
| the contracts for tie-in novels they bought along with Fox?
| https://www.sfwa.org/2020/11/18/disney-must-pay/
| iorrus wrote:
| There are other crowdfunding platforms that they can use.
| Kickstarter glory days are long past.
| wslh wrote:
| Porn is clearly missing in the HN title to focus at this specific
| target. Porn is one of the obvious uses of these techniques. Like
| it or not. Porn is not illegal and having this discussion in 2022
| seems "puritanism" is alive.
|
| In the context of HN, it would be interesting to see how unstable
| diffusion will change the porn industry. I imagine anyone could
| contribute to the industry, if they want, modifying their
| identities. I think it was Axel Kuschevatzky [1] who said that
| the porn movie industry is the most conservative. Playing the
| same short scripts all the time.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098024/
| jackmott wrote:
| People weaponizing "non consensual porn" to attack this are going
| to also need to ban pencils, keyboards, and police thoughts. good
| luck!
|
| and merry christmas
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought that argument was a bit weird. Did the Unstable
| Diffusion folks specifically add revenge porn to their training
| model? If so I could see why people were upset, but I didn't
| see any evidence of that happening.
| kevingadd wrote:
| deepfakes and pencil sketched nudes are thoroughly different in
| multiple ways
| brookst wrote:
| Not if your whole worldview rests on reductive arguments.
|
| It's ok to look in shop windows, therefore it's ok to look in
| any window, therefore it's ok to use ultra telephoto lenses
| to photograph naked people in their homes.
|
| It's hypocritical to ban fully automatic machine guns if you
| don't also ban pillows, because both can be used to kill
| people.
|
| And so on. There is a whole personality type that seems to be
| based on holding views that depend on ignoring all context in
| order to produce absurd results while claiming to be highly
| principled.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Fully automatic machine guns are quite banned.
|
| Using a telephoto to peer into someones window is also
| illegal as they typically have an expectation of privacy.
|
| Photoshopping a movie stars face onto a nude body has been
| around a long time and much of the fake porn of famous
| people was done this way, probably mostly by individuals.
| Please give it a google if you doubt me, at your own risk.
| c0m wrote:
| > Using a telephoto to peer into someones window is also
| illegal as they typically have an expectation of privacy.
|
| In the US, in NY at least, they do not. A case about
| exactly this (telephoto lens photography through someone
| else's window, later displayed as art) didn't survive a
| motion to dismiss. This was upheld on appeal. Foster v
| Svenson (2015).
| int_19h wrote:
| > Fully automatic machine guns are quite banned.
|
| That very much depends on where you are. In US, they're
| not banned in most states, although they're quite
| expensive to get, and there's a lot more paperwork than
| usual.
| valdiorn wrote:
| I often use this as an approach to debating. Example;
|
| Can we both agree that you should be able to purchase a
| kitchen knife without a special license? (in parts of
| China, you can't). Do we both agree that allowing people to
| have personal nuclear weapons is probably a bad idea and
| shouldn't be legal?
|
| If we can agree on those two things, we're actually on the
| same side of the argument. The only difference is where we
| draw the line. I might draw it at "you can buy a sword but
| not a gun" - you might draw it at "you can buy a gun but
| not a bazooka". But we both realise that some things can be
| given to people and handled responsibly (like a simple
| knife) but other things can't (like large amounts of
| explosives)
|
| Occasionally you'll meet a person that says "no I think
| people should be allowed to have nukes" or "no, we should
| ban all sharp objects" in which case you can dismiss a
| whole like of reasoning, i.e. arguing where to draw the
| line, because the person's made it clear there is no
| bounded limit, and they are not open to debating that.
|
| Other examples of scales where, if you can't establish
| boundaries, there is no point debating that person;
|
| - can we forgive a child for accidentally killing a small
| animal? If so, can we forgive Hitler for genocide?
|
| - can I draw a caricature of a famous person? If so, can I
| make deepfake porn featuring my neighbour?
|
| - can I push a burglar out of my house when he breaks in?
| If so, can I execute anyone who enters my property?
| brookst wrote:
| Yep. It's not worth engaging with someone who insists the
| objective principles of the universe support their exact
| beliefs and boundaries.
|
| I'm also reminded of the old "would you sleep with me for
| $1m" joke:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/
| DannyBee wrote:
| I'm with you. All of society has always rested on gradients
| and fuzzy lines. "highly principled" extremism, while nice
| in theory, has never made the world much better. Pragmatism
| is what has driven most advancement. That may not feel
| great to some people because it's rarely perfectly fair
| (among other things), but it doesn't change it's success.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| The legal system is exactly the opposite in establishing
| limits: canaries in the coal mine and the exceptions
| proving the rule.
|
| Not really anybody wants to be "First Amendment auditors"
| or the guy in Warren v Brandenburg, but they forced the
| issue to establish/discover limits.
|
| If what was legal was simply "what is
| average/normal/reasonable" then that likely would mean
| much less freedom.
|
| You can also be influenced socially through media (etc)
| either direction over time to change what the definition
| of "reasonable" is. Remember that Barack Obama ran on the
| now "extreme" position (that many non-Western countries
| like Japan still holds) that marriage is between a man
| and a woman only, a little more than a decade ago.
| Conversely, gay marriage was "extreme"/fringe back then.
| jolancer wrote:
| [dead]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's like saying there's no difference between knives and
| nukes, because both kill people.
|
| The ease of it matters.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Ease, scale, and physical disconnect are all factors.
| jolancer wrote:
| [dead]
| mlboss wrote:
| Unstable diffusion started collecting donation via their website
| https://equilibriumai.com/
| kristofferR wrote:
| Thanks, donated!
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I and several other people I know have actually doubled our
| original pledges that we made on Kickstarter just as a giant
| figurative middle finger to the censorship clowns.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| The people behind unstable diffusion have created a dedicated
| means to donate to the cause:
|
| https://equilibriumai.com/index.html
|
| It's already up to the original amount that they intended to
| raise on Kickstarter. I have a feeling that all this negativity
| is just going to amplify the Streisand effect.
| mlboss wrote:
| NSFW are one use-case for the new model training. SD is horrible
| in generating photo-realistic images with correct anatomy, UD is
| supposed to fix that. They will also be working on creating a
| better dataset which is partially human curated with proper
| cropping and text. They will be bringing artists that were
| removed from latest SD models.
|
| UD is the only currently community driven alternative. I hope
| they deliver on what they promised.
| saltminer wrote:
| >They will be bringing artists that were removed from latest SD
| models.
|
| Is this referring to artists opting-out (i.e. requesting to
| have their work removed) from the datasets used to create SD
| models? Because if so, I fully support that. In fact, I think
| artists should have to explicitly opt-in to their work being
| used in ML models. You don't get to violate someone's license
| terms and then point to an opt-out form to absolve yourself of
| liability, regardless of how good your intentions are or being
| a crowd-funded venture unconnected to any corporations with
| armies of lawyers.
| dymk wrote:
| Their license terms aren't being violated. Artists give
| ArtStation and the like a license to use their uploads for
| training ML models.
|
| ML models also appear to be more fair-use respecting than
| some human artists, who blatantly trace artwork. The ML model
| does not have the physical space to trace the works it's
| trained on.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Artists give ArtStation and the like a license to use
| their uploads for training ML models.
|
| As far as I can tell from a quick Wayback Machine test,
| that only seems to have appeared in the last fortnight[1].
| None of the existing models could have been trained under
| the license.
|
| [1] https://www.artstation.com/tos has it as section 46
| "Artificial Intelligence" mentioning the "NoAI" tag. But ht
| tps://web.archive.org/web/20221214082018/https://www.artst.
| .. has neither.
| gernb wrote:
| I guess Twitch needs to die in a fire then because it's
| entire premise (live streaming video games) is doing exactly
| that. Showing off artists work without their explicit opt-in.
| verdenti wrote:
| [dead]
| dymk wrote:
| Unstable Diffusion will find another way to fund itself. From the
| article, looks like they may have already found a viable option.
|
| Artists will decry AI art for a few more months / years, then
| dust will settle, and we will still have ever-improving diffusion
| (or whatever the next iteration is) models. Slowly, people will
| realize that artists learn and copy from other artists much in
| the same way that current ML models do. Education about how these
| models work will improve, and the current mythology of "it's
| blatantly copy/pasting!" will subside, for the most part.
|
| We'll start to see a counter-protest against anti-AI artists who
| use tools like Photoshop or other digital tools, most of which
| have involved some amount of machine learning (e.g. the "heal
| brush" or "context aware fill") for a long time.
|
| AI art will start passing the "art turing test" at higher rates,
| and people will realize that whatever intrinsic spark / soul /
| whatever there is to art is mainly attributed to a narrative or
| story about the artist that exists outside of the canvas - and
| that the actual artistic contents of what lives on the canvas
| itself doesn't depend on a living, breathing thing if you make up
| a compelling narrative to support it.
|
| Artists displaced by this new ease of generating art will find
| new economic niches, and life will continue on.
| mlboss wrote:
| Related to this, there is a gofundme campaign going on which
| promises to hire lobbyist against these technologies in
| Washington.
|
| https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-techno...
| dymk wrote:
| Probably better to just give that money straight to artists by
| commissioning art
| [deleted]
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kodah wrote:
| The lecture seems to be the more off-putting bit from what
| I've seen folks complain about. Having to signal before
| doing work is probably not great either, but that is kind
| of how American society works these days. That said, both
| the signaling and lecture don't derive from the machine -
| they're manifestations of the authors.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| > 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I've been using the following starting prompt to get a lot of
| my D&d work done.
|
| Write flavor text for my d&d game. <describe situation>.
|
| Haven't had to many issues with rails getting in my way yet.
| Any examples of your prompts that you were having issue with?
|
| I'm finding ChatGPT to be so helpful as a lazy DM.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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.
| flir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can you rephrase your example in a way that doesn't include
| a protected class/characteristic?
| evandale wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Just turn the clock back to before the protected class
| was declared and their example is valid. If you don't
| like that, imagine a hypothetical future protected class
| that is currently not yet protected for surely there will
| be one.
| stonogo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| catiopatio wrote:
| It's not backwards to favor someone attempting to
| manifest objectivity and neutrality over the person
| telling you, forthrightly, that they'll trod over anyone
| and argue anything if it advances their aims and shifts
| power to their in-group.
|
| I find _your_ position to be the one that 's "ethically
| disgusting", completely without principal beyond your
| self-serving aims, and corrosive to a healthy society.
| pdntspa wrote:
| 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.
| stonogo wrote:
| > All this corporate activism is all fine and dandy when you
| agree with their politics. When you don't, they become the
| enemy.
|
| This is in fact how human society works.
| somenameforme wrote:
| For but one counterexample among many, look at where we get
| our oil. Saudi Arabia is one of the most tyrannical
| oppressive and regressive societies, but that's all
| perfectly fine to the powers that be so long as they keep
| the oil moving. And I don't think this is really
| hypocritical.
|
| The entire reason society works, or worked, is because
| people were willing to put aside their differences,
| regardless of how extreme, to engage in behaviors that were
| mutually beneficial. Start judging people based on
| adherence to your own politics and you'll find that, sooner
| or later, everybody will be your enemy.
| stonogo wrote:
| There are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of
| people who do not regard Saudi oppression as "perfectly
| fine" regardless of which chemicals they offer for sale.
| I don't really accept this counterargument, since
| overlooking human rights abuses is one of the most common
| complaints about organizations like the UN, the United
| States government, and countless other political bodies.
|
| As far as your second paragraph, in your framework
| society never really worked, which conveniently explains
| why there has always been war in some part of the world
| as far back as anyone can remember.
| wpietri wrote:
| Beyond the trivial, there is no such thing as a neutral
| platform. At any sort of scale, you have to make choices. Do
| you host spammers or people who hate spam? Do you host would-
| be ethnic cleansers or the people they would violently drive
| away? Do you host people eager to exploit children, or do you
| want your platform to be safe for children? Do you host
| people who are eager to bother [insert ethnic, sexuality, or
| gender group] or the people they would be harassing?
|
| Even if the people you find to run the platform are
| completely amoral, these are also business questions. People
| have freedom of association, and they will use it. Businesses
| will too. If you want to run a "neutral and objective"
| hosting company that is happy to take the nazis and the
| spammers and the carders and the ddosers, you will quickly
| find yourself specializing in that market, because few others
| will choose to be associated with that.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| Quick policy decisions needed! Do we block or promote
| Rohingyan folk art? Are "Russian" nesting dolls a
| microagression? Are suffragette ribbons hateful now?
|
| The idea that platforms, all of them, need to enforce the
| day-to-day minutia of the chattering classes is ridiculous.
|
| Platforms need to pick a few broad policies. "No porn" is a
| pretty good policy actually, and stick with it. And of
| course actually illegal things, "anything that is obviously
| illegal, or that we are told to take down with a warrant".
| jkeisling wrote:
| No, I don't accept that it's "the people" boycotting
| Kickstarter? It's a small minority of media and activists
| threatening platforms with clickbait headlines, doxxing,
| and regulation if they don't give up neutrality, and a
| larger group who believes whatever the media tells them or
| has no incentive to speak up. The choice Kickstarter made
| wasn't "Do my customers have a principled stance against
| Unstable Diffusion?" It was, "Do I stand up for my
| principles - or do I have to put up with $MEDIA_OUTLET
| running wall to wall stories claiming I hate artists, 200
| activists dogpiling my every twitter post, and ordinary
| people unconsciously associating me with whatever
| caricature they read on Twitter?" In this case and most
| others, neutrality is impossible because a minority has
| chosen to make it impossible, not because either
| Kickstarter or its customers made a principled decision.
| This is why this entire thread exists: to counterbalance
| this and to make clear that cowardice comes with its own
| costs.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I too prefer the days of neutrality and objectivity...
|
| When were those?
| pdntspa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-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.
| trafficante wrote:
| > Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-
| community level. It was never a free-for-all.
|
| Sure, but the moderation team members have dramatically
| shifted from (and I'm being glib here) "kinda cringey
| atheist libertarians" to "authoritarian left/liberals
| steeped in idpol".
|
| The "Reddit moderator" cohort whiplashed from one extreme
| on the political compass to its polar opposite extreme in
| only a few years. Not claiming anything conspiratorial
| since I can certainly imagine how it could happen
| organically, but it's interesting nonetheless how much of
| an effect different moderation standards can have on
| large online communities.
| pdntspa wrote:
| > Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-
| community level. It was never a free-for-all.
|
| Yes it was, as once upon a time Reddit itself didn't take
| down a whole lot. If the mods of a given community didn't
| do what you think they are supposed to do then there were
| no real, enforced rules.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-
| community level. It was never a free-for-all._
|
| Hah. They permitted /r/n****** for years. Just about the
| only thing reddit would outright ban you for was illegal
| content, and _maybe_ automated spamming.
| braingenious wrote:
| > Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-
| community level. It was never a free-for-all.
|
| That is a distinction without a difference. Have you ever
| heard of violentacrez?
| 323 wrote:
| I bet there is some policy you would oppose on KickStarter.
|
| Lets try this: a KickStarter to raise money to lobby for
| making encryption illegal. And let's assume it's very
| successful and it raises tens of millions of dollars. How
| would you feel about that? Would you sign a petition
| requesting KickStarter drop it because it's against freedom
| of speech?
| jchw wrote:
| Personally, I would not sign a petition requesting
| Kickstarter drop it. It's weird to me that people even
| petition things like this.
|
| The toughest personal test to me was the protest against
| Cloudflare. I have a very personal reason to have sided
| with the protesters and petitioners, and honestly I had a
| hard time even trying to oppose it. In the end though, I
| just don't agree with it. The ends do not justify the
| means.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Such is the price of free speech. "I may not like what you
| have to say, but I support your right to say it"
|
| There are other, far more honorable, avenues to killing
| initiatives one doesn't like. What's to say I don't start a
| counter-lobbying campaign?
|
| That so many embrace such a pathetic weapon as censorship
| speaks loudly about just how easily we sleepwalk into
| Orwellian society
|
| I bet a lot of these folks would happily report their
| neighbors to the KGB or Stasi over falsehoods and bullshit,
| were this the appropriate era
| [deleted]
| mulmen wrote:
| > "I may not like what you have to say, but I support
| your right to say it"
|
| The right to say "I disagree" and respond within the
| limits if the law is the other side of the free speech
| coin.
|
| The first amendment gives Kickstarter the right to
| control what is on their private platform. There have
| never been "neutral platforms". They're a myth.
|
| Kickstarter is doing what they think is best for them.
| Our legal and financial systems allow competitors to take
| advantage when miscalculations are made on the part of
| private parties.
|
| Demanding "neutrality" on private platforms is a strictly
| anti-speech position.
| jchw wrote:
| We're (or at least I'm) not demanding neutrality. I'm
| criticizing the needless meddling of an almost unrelated
| middleman on a completely legitimate transaction. Also,
| holding the belief that neutrality is a good ideal for
| open-registration platforms to have is not anti-speech.
| I'm sad that you think that.
| catiopatio wrote:
| How, exactly, is an aspirational goal of free speech a
| "strictly anti-speech position"?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Doublethink.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| See Musk for a pretty great recent example of what the
| aspiration tends to mean in practice.
| [deleted]
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| jchw wrote:
| I believe that in the end, people in desperation come up
| with all kinds of reasons to compromise their own values
| if it enables them to attack what they believe to be a
| great enough evil. I don't believe that all of these
| people are horrible and I don't believe they would all
| "report their neighbors to the KGB or Stasi" to be
| completely honest with you.
|
| Recently, I came to realize that this is exactly what I
| dislike about the arguments, ironically, against
| encryption, as well as for increasingly draconian anti-
| money laundering laws. I think that everyone, even the
| law makers, do know deep down that what they are doing is
| a compromise of strongly held and long-cherished ordeals.
| But pushed up against a wall and with the easiest path to
| progress from their own PoV being lawmaking, lobbyists,
| government, etc. delude themselves into thinking that
| _this time_ it 's different. This time, the ends _do_
| justify the means. And then in 50 years or so, we can all
| go "haha, how naive of them; of COURSE they don't!"
| while we're busy writing the next cycle of similar
| mistakes... Yada yada, history doesn't repeat itself but
| it rhymes, etc.
| spikeagally wrote:
| [dead]
| dannyobrien wrote:
| That's fascinating difference in perspective, because I
| wouldn't even _think_ of protesting Kickstarter under those
| circumstances, despite having been pro-encryption activist
| most of my life.
| 323 wrote:
| I didn't say I agree, just that I've observed that ~95%
| of people who say they are "free speech", "maximum
| liberty" and so on it's quite easy to find something they
| would strongly want to censor.
|
| On HN that would be speech against nuclear energy or
| against encryption.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| You're conflating "being opposed" to "deplatforming"
|
| We will take your example, encryption.
|
| Let's say I strongly support encryption and I create a
| social media platform called Squibbit. Now, a group
| organizes on Squibbit calling for a ban on encryption.
|
| One approach: I take it upon myself to organize another
| group on Squibbit using the platform the same way as
| everyone else (re: no special promotion, no admin only
| flagging, etc. just good old fashioned squibbling).
|
| Compare this to another approach: I ban anyone who says
| they support a prohibition on encryption and use admin
| tools to promote voices in support of encryption.
|
| Compare this to a final approach: the government decides
| it has a vested interest in encryption and wants to sway
| the voting population to support candidates who are pro-
| encryption. They ask Squibbit to ban all accounts
| opossing encryption and promote voices in support of
| encryption.
|
| These three approaches are not the same. Do not conflate
| them.
| 323 wrote:
| What if a lot of programmers working at Squibbit are
| threatening to quit if the company doesn't ban the anti
| encryption group?
|
| You know, just like they did when it was revealed
| Microsoft and Google wanted to sign contracts with the US
| military.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Other companies picked up these contracts.
|
| The crucial thing though is to make sure that those other
| companies are in fact able to provide what Google and
| Microsoft won't. For example, AWS is very happy to work
| with government, by offering not only the GovCloud region
| for regular gov work, but also AWS SC2S and C2S regions
| for Secret and Top Secret systems and data. This allows
| other companies to use their cloud infra to provide these
| defense services.
|
| Imagine the alternative world where a most of the tech
| execs get to a shared conclusion that they do not want to
| contribute any of their services towards AI-powered
| military efforts. This is very much something that could
| conceivably happen. What then? Sure, if they get then
| steam-rolled by a peer superpower who doesn't have such
| qualms about using AI to achieve their geopolitical
| goals, you can retort that they get what they asked for
| (of course, in our year of 2021, it is completely
| unimaginable that peer powers would ever dare to initiate
| military invasion, so this is obviously just a pure
| hypothetical). But is this what American people want?
|
| Americans are, for better or worse, mostly in favor of US
| military, even at its stupidest (e.g. when it invades
| other countries that pose no risk to it under false
| pretenses). Should tech execs get then to decide the
| future of American people according to their own
| morality? Should the American people be able to force,
| through the overwhelming force of federal government,
| their own morality on individuals running their privately
| owned companies?
|
| These are hard questions, and I don't have an easy
| answer. What I know would help though is open and honest
| discussion, allowing people to win hearts and minds of
| others, and more mutual accommodation in the spirit of
| the famous quote attributed to Voltaire. This is very
| much not the direction lady 8 years have been pointing
| towards, though.
| jchw wrote:
| We're not arguing that the situation doesn't happen.
| We're arguing that it's a crappy situation.
|
| But let's untangle something. There is a legitimate
| difference between this and ICE boycotts. Microsoft,
| Google, Amazon, etc. are signing B2B contracts and making
| specific deals to work with the U.S. military or ICE or
| whatever group. This is not the same issue. It's similar,
| but different in very important ways.
|
| One is the type of interaction. Business to business
| contracts are Not like using a platform as a user. A
| contract is a mutual agreement that is negotiated between
| two businesses. There are almost always dedicated
| employees whose responsibilities include dealing with a
| given contract, not to mention if there's any work to be
| done as a result of it. This is a very different
| interaction from merely being one of a million users on a
| public open-registration platform.
|
| Two is who is protesting. I think some employee protests
| are silly, but not all of them. If employees don't want
| to work for a company that is doing what they believe to
| be unethical things, they are well within reason to
| threaten to leave the company.
|
| I don't necessarily want to draw a direct conclusion
| about other similar events here, I'm just trying to point
| out that we're not dealing with the same kind of
| relationship.
|
| I'm against banning entities from using e.g. Amazon Web
| Services, on the basis of their identity, if their usage
| is above board and legal. I'm not, however, talking about
| the concept of employees at Amazon not wanting to work
| for or with other entities directly.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| If you are a leader and your staff do not have the same
| values as you, then in the long run it's probably better
| that you part ways.
| evandale wrote:
| > On HN that would be speech against nuclear energy or
| against encryption.
|
| Do you actually believe 95% of HN (or a number even
| remotely close to that, let's say 50%) would want
| discussions against nuclear energy or encryption
| completely censored?
|
| There's a huge difference between somebody saying "this
| is a stupid idea and we shouldn't even be discussing it"
| (I would say that) and wanting censorship actually
| enforced (I would never want that).
| adammarples wrote:
| Well bear in mind your example completely fell flat
| before you claim it's easy to find one
| 323 wrote:
| I guess you forgot how many HNers urged everyone to
| boycott Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon and to quit those
| companies when it was revealed they wanted to get
| contracts with the US military.
|
| Just like now KickStarter is under similar pressure.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Should they _not_ be able to use their free speech to
| advocate for that?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| And others are just pointing out that this isn't a grass-
| roots movement of hurt or concerned individuals and
| actually is the same manipulative media outlets that have
| blown everything out of proportion for years, hoping to
| create a backlash.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >>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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| It's easy to take a single example and demonstrate a
| principle. That doesn't mean it'll hold water when the next
| issue comes around.
|
| Should a small bank be obliged to provide payment
| processing for a supremacist website? Do they have the
| right to use the logo?
|
| I'm not falling on one side or another. Simply pointing out
| what reality has been demonstrating strongly in recent
| years. These issues will come up. So will other, more
| commercially salient issues.
|
| A service like Kickstarter just won't be neutral. There's
| no chance. Pressuring Kickstarter won't help. Want
| neutrality? It needs to be achieved by a different path.
|
| I'm worried about AWS, and such. The current state of
| affairs is such that exclusion, censorship and such are
| inevitable.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Kickstarter apparently got a lot of artists saying exactly
| what you disagree with about this project.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| So, if someone started a Kickstarter campaign to hire artists
| to make the dataset to train a diffusion model, with
| appropriate licensing provisions (such as standard stuff like
| signing over the copyright to the entity running the
| project), is that an attack on artists because the resulting
| model would take away work from them or supporting them
| because it would create a bunch of work for some artists?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'd say it's supporting artists! They're being compensated
| for training a dataset, instead of having their work
| grabbed for "fair use", which is a thing I feel needs to be
| redefined when you can scrape the entire Internet and do
| this kind of thing.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >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.
| root_axis wrote:
| Neutrality and objectivity have never existed in the corporate
| world.
| baeaz wrote:
| 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
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Neutrality and impartiality means you're alt-right now.
| Dawnyhf2 wrote:
| Can you give me some pictures of you so I can make it into
| pornography? No? Then this is no longer a neutral platform!
| brookst wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Kickstarter needs to put more time and
| attention to stop a project than letting one proceed, at this
| point.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| brookst wrote:
| Marketing is always reductive, the real world has nuance
| and context.
|
| When a company says "we're the best platform for X", what
| they really mean is ". . . Subject to terms and
| conditions and our right to refuse business that we find
| objectionable" and so on.
|
| Try pulling up to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a
| trailer and cleaning them out of every last bit of food
| in the place with the "one simple trick" that they didn't
| specify you had to eat it on the premises, just that you
| "could" eat it.
|
| Taking any marketing (or really, any) statement as
| absolute and universal without bounds no matter what the
| context is disingenuous. Everybody knows that, even the
| "one simple trick" people who try to use reductive
| literal arguments to get away with stuff.
| tcmb wrote:
| > Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being
| synonymous with crowdfunding.
|
| I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there
| are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
|
| What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what
| Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is
| what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary
| look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks
| like is now determined by Elon.
|
| If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three
| to five different players, they could each find their
| niche, competing on something like leniency towards such
| projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret
| free speech etc and the users could choose the service that
| suits their own standards.
|
| But since for many popular online services there is
| effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set
| the rules that everyone has to play by.
|
| So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be
| inherent in how this market of online services works that
| there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.
| gioo wrote:
| Of course Kickstarter as a company can do nearly whatever it
| wants and ban certain types of crowfunding campaigns, it's
| just sad to see this happening left and right in many fields.
|
| At least in this case someone can just choose a different
| platform (and in fact Unstable diffusion has switched to some
| else); if you run a website and CloudFlare thinks your
| website is morally bad (likely because some people
| complained, otherwise there is no incentive to do anything),
| good luck defending yourself from DDoS attacks; if the
| Mastercard/VISA duopoly caves to public pressure and bans
| your organization you are basically done (even if what you're
| doing is completely legal).
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| To let the campaign run, they didn't have to do anything. To
| shut it down they had to, as you said "put time and money and
| attention into things they want nothing to do with".
|
| They proactively shut the campaign down.
| brookst wrote:
| > they didn't have to do anything
|
| What, you would be fine if they just took the donated money
| and didn't transmit it to the campaign operators? If their
| devops just ignored the campaign if there was any issue?
| And somehow they don't need to handle support inquiries
| from happy (or unhappy) customers?
|
| If you really think a business like kickstarter is all
| fixed costs and there is zero work for a marginal campaign,
| sounds like you've found a great business opportunity. VCs
| will beat your door down if you've found a model that
| scales with zero marginal cost and zero work for a new
| customer.
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