Notices by Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)

This might be a silly question, but instructive to think about: All these billions being poured into the “AI” grift, where are they *actually* ending up? Who—or what, in the case of a corporation—is actually *receiving* them?

"Because a subject so heavily undertaken by women couldn’t be considered a consequential intellectual pursuit, a major step in this movement was to “defeminize” botany…to sever the historical association with women so that the men who did it would be taken seriously." https://lithub.com/how-lydia-ernestine-becker-was-once-central-to-then-excluded-from-the-study-of-botany/

"Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within." https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

Buffalo Springfield busts a move...and more. (Enjoy!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYNSSkOOTBk

“The plans at Automattic have been so controversial internally, that a product manager has even started pulling his own photos off Tumblr to make sure they’re not used to train AI, according to 404." https://gizmodo.com/wordpress-tumblr-plan-sell-user-content-ai-companies-1851291225

Yeah, it’s cute that the plagiarism grift machines make funny nonsense. That doesn’t mean it’s suddenly okay to use them and collude in the mass theft and ecological destruction.

Obsolete. *still fuming*

My capacious FANNYPACK it's obsolete, you fucking techbro thieves and all your bootlicking henchpeople. Go straight to whatever hell awaits joyless soulless rapacious wastes of space such as yourselves.

…nope, still irritated. If my work is SO FUCKING OBSOLETE, why are you making such an obscene profit by STEALING it?

Answer: Because it's not obsolete, you're just a petty-ass grifter thieving from someone doing the actual work.

“Obsolete” my buxom behind.

If I'm so fucking obsolete why are you still FUCKING STEALING my work?

...I gotta go fume in the corner for a bit. I'm mad as heck.

It's bloody unconscionable that Covid vaccines and things like Paxlovid are being privatized, after taxpayer money funded research and development. The correct price for a vaccine is $0. The correct price for Covid treatment in this, the fourth year of the pandemic, is $0.

"Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless..." https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/
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So that Stanford study scaremongering about Mastodon is…interesting. I wonder who paid to commission it and why it doesn’t mention that bad actors are overwhelmingly defederated by the vast majority of instances.

I also wonder why it doesn’t mention the comparable problems with that sort of content on, say, Reddit, which is run by an actual company instead of being a collection of volunteer-run, loosely affiliated instances.

From 2017: “It’s simple: people who engage in sexual harassment or assault are also likely to steal, plagiarize, embezzle, engage in overt racism, or otherwise harm their business. (Of course, sexual harassment and assault harms a business – and even entire fields of endeavor – but in ways that are often discounted or ignored.)” https://hypatia.ca/2017/07/18/the-al-capone-theory-of-sexual-harassment/