Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Sad to remove Cohost from my bio, but I do not ever use it anymore. I don't really have anything bad to say about it, it just wasn't my style.

Still love eggbug though.

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.

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.

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?

One thing I have noticed is that dogpiling and gatekeeping are major issues. People getting mad at how people share their invite codes, lots of leftist infighting since that's most common kind of user right now. Really petty semantic arguments being made in the absence of a right-wing enemy. Not a great place for rational discourse.

Still, better than X. The only reason I don't delete my accounts there is because I don't want anyone claiming my usernames later.

I've been lurking on #bluesky for the past month and here's my review:

1. Looks exactly like Twitter, but without ads.
2. All the drama-heads came over from Twitter
3. Federation has already been compromised by custom domains on the main server.
4. Moderation isn't that great.
5. Programmatic lists are pretty neat, but also seem privacy-diminishing.

I'm happy that I've slowed down on my social media consumption, but Mastodon is really my go-to place to scroll these days when I do get online.

I worry that if I had a time machine, I would go 200 years in the future only to find that all computers had been replaced by holographic AI waifus, and that coding had just been replaced with telling the waifus what to do. Nobody remembers how any of it works, the automated factory just keeps spitting out holowaifu hardware and everyone keeps using it because that's how it's always been.

Or, more realistically, I discovery that humanity is gone.

People will make stuff like this and call it "art". smh...

Generative AI really is something to behold.

I had soured on the DSA some time ago, but after their decision to endorse the slaughter and kidnapping of civilians in Israel by Hamas, they are dead to me. Lots of silence from other progressives I otherwise respect, like AOC.

You can be critical of Israel without endorsing terrorism. Absolutely disgusting to see people cheering in the streets about this. You can't be anti-war if you're cheering for death.

I just learned that FAA regulations do not prohibit packing florescent and neon lights (contain mercury) in your checked and carry-on luggage when flying on an airplane (made of aluminum).

Forgive me if I misunderstand, but this is a huge gap in security, right? Broken lights would release mercury, any even a little bit of mercury could pose a structural threat to the aircraft?

Maybe the amount of mercury isn't enough to be a problem, or aircraft are hardened against this kind of thing?