Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

@jmaris A little bit off topic, but interactions like ours' are a really good example of why I love the Fediverse. We disagreed, I admittedly got a be terse in response, but we end up still having a meaningful conversation.

This would never happen on X, or Threads, or Bluesky. We'd be tearing each other's heads off.

Just followed you back. I never mind a difference of opinion, and you are ultimately right, opinions on this subject are extremely dependent on personal context.

@jmaris I can accept that. No bad blood here, I am happy you shared your opinion, I was just a little on guard since you opened with a rather confrontational "what you fail to see here" statement that felt more like a scold than a conversation.

@jmaris I agree, being a dogmatist is a bad move, which is why I avoid stating my opinions as fact, and making condescending statements to people I disagree with as if my opinion were the only right one.

@jmaris That is entirely your own opinion. You are free to believe that "AI art has no positive impact", but that isn't a statement of fact. I'm not "failing to see" anything here, I just don't agree with you.

Personally, I see lots of positive impacts generative AI could have. Generative art has been a passion of mine since well before the AI era, and I never devalued it. I don't see the reason to start just because the new tech is especially profound.

But, again, I don't fall for the "All AI art is art theft" argument, because it just doesn't make sense.

If I type "a moonlit beach, painting by [living artist]", It could be argued as infringing on that artist, but If I just type "a moonlight beach, oil painting", who does it infringe on? Every artist the model was trained on?

If a work infringes on every artist at once, it's safe to say that it doesn't infringe on any artist at all.

I also agree that copyright law, as currently interpreted, does not support the copyrighting of AI art. I enjoy playing around with Stable Diffusion, and I would say that I have gotten pretty good at it, but I don't take ownership of the images that I generate, and I don't believe that I should be allowed to legally claim ownership over something that wasn't actually created by me.

But I still find the technology impressive and useful.

Not to say that I don't understand people's arguments. I think that being able to type a living artist's name into a prompt and emulate their style could represent an infringement, but there needs to be a sense of nuance. I don't think that training models on copyrighted materials is infringing at all. The data a model was trained on doesn't exist inside the model, so it doesn't really count as a copy.

And prompts that don't evoke a specific artist don't produce works that infringe on anyone.

I worry that #AI is leading otherwise progressive people to argue against their own principles. Many of the same people that I previously knew to argue against strict Intellectual Property laws are suddenly demanding the expansion of IP protections because of AI. People that I thought would embrace broadly permissive fair use are now arguing against it under the pretense of fighting "art theft".

I'm won't fall for it. I hope Generative AI helps to invalidate IP laws and expand fair use.

@esvrld@octodon.social yes, please!

@timbray You might find this useful: https://opensource.contentauthenticity.org/

One of my favorite aspects of Mastodon is that hardly anybody wants to fight. On other social networks, being disagreed with often comes with being harassed, but I hardly ever see that here. People are way more open to discussion when there's a disagreement, and are far more level-headed when somebody does something that the community dislikes. Even when I've seen "dogpiles", people remained civil, despite being blunt.

I've pretty much sworn off of all of social media except for here now.

Really wild watching conspiracy theories start taking root on the left. Not a great sign that this is happening...

At least it's a little entertaining. Currently amused by the theory that electronic music is state-sponsored psyop to eliminate lyrics from music so that we don't think for ourselves.

Curious to learn what these people think of Classical Music.

Yeah, I use X.

@kizaing It will be interesting to see how that plays out. I suspect it will cause a lot of problems not acclimating users to federated social media and opening the floodgates on the current user base. It really doesn't seem like they're ready for it. I also don't know how well the flashship Bluesky server is going to handle moderation once they open the doors.

Random observation since I started this thread:

The people that are here on Mastodon are a mix of the early adopters starting in 2016, and every Twitter exodus since. Mostly people that got tired of the drama a long time ago

The people that exist on Bluesky are mostly recent Twitter expats who haven't fully left Twitter yet. Mostly people who either tolerate or thrive in an environment with drama.

So my money is still on Mastodon being a more pleasant place than most other alternatives.

One thing I will say is that a lot of the same issues Mastodon had during it's first major growth spurts reminds me of what's happening on #bluesky right now. I have also seen Mastodon and the larger fediverse mellow out over the past year and become and really pleasant place to exist.

I hope, for the sake of the Internet keeping a multitude of pleasant non-corporate social spaces, that Bluesky sees the same mellowing out effect over the next year or so.

If you want to follow me (full disclosure: I have never posted), you can find me at "vran.as", which is kinda neat that I can use my own domain as a username, but I wonder if this functionality might impede the multi-sever federated network that #bluesky hopes to become. I can only do this here because I run my own private Mastodon server, but what would happen now if I pivoted to AT Protocol over ActivityPub on my own domain? Would that represent a conflict to the Bluesky flagship server?

@paulgolder Threads already has enough corporate content without adding advertisements! I soured on Threads within a week.

Bluesky does definitely feel like early Twitter. I think it has a fighting chance at replacing Twitter to some degree. It also might be a long-term strength for federated social media for there to exist competing standards, as annoying is it is.