Covering the second half:

I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.

I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.

What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.

There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.

The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.

OK. With that change we get:

AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?

Is that accurate?

The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.

I can live with that.

I’d support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.

That wasn’t intentional.

Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?

It’s an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace “not-actual-art” with illustration. People couldn’t get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they’re looking for at a lower price.

I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.

The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn’t get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We’re going to pay less to most people in those industries too.

I’m going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.

AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?

Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?

I’d love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can’t do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.

People are really awful at naming things.

Some German nerd thought it was cool while they discovered some new receptor so they called it “toll” (German for cool/awesome). Computer science is full of names that are kind of funny if you already know the particular area but are total gibberish if you’re trying learn it. We’re not even good at naming humans. The default is to either pick one of the names that’s common in your culture. When people deviate from that you get a huge number of “special” names.

We need to put this in the hands of experts. I’m gonna propose a new field, “nameology”. Those folks will do a bunch of research into names that make sense. How do we best name things so they completely and unambiguously label them in a way that’s easy to remember and use? Then they can run around and give non stupid names to all the things.

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I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.

The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.

They do it to make you spend more time browsing. Shoppers typically get the same stuff every time they get groceries. Over time people learn the layout of their local store and develop efficient patterns to move through it and get everything they want. When the store shuffles everything around they force shoppers to wander around the store and to look at all the shelves carefully for the stuff they actually want. Some percentage of them end up finding new things to buy and spend more money.

I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It’s very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they’ll define those freedoms differently.
2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it’s almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

It’s a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.

Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.

I could see that as fair as long as everyone agrees that a small symbol on their neck is an appropriate expression of their religion.

If I were to think of a Muslim country that officially embraces secularism in government what would that look like? What if they said that everyone can wear a discreet head covering. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists, Jains, etc are also allowed to wear small headscarves appropriate to their religion.

The problem is that headscarves just aren’t generally meaningful to those other religions.

I’m even more suspicious of the intent of the French law since they apparently went out of their way to create an exemption for non-Muslim head scarves. The law seems to be constructed and interpreted as, “If we can tell that its related to Islam, it’s out.” The case where a girl was sent home for wearing a skirt that was too long really just looks like they want to make Muslims (and Muslim girls, in particular) more uncomfortable.

I want to be very careful around judging the intentions of people who live 5000 miles away and speak a language I don’t understand. There’s a lot of room to misunderstand people’s intentions.

But from what I can see, it’s looking like there’s an intentional bias.

I read up on it a bit more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools

It seems like regulations on religious attire are selectively applied. Small crosses and stars of David, some variations of Sikh turbans, Fatima’s hands are acceptable and the final decision is left up to school headmasters.

It also sounds like the legislators who created it specifically intended to target Muslim headdress.

It’s one thing to keep religion out of education. It seems that they’re disproportionately concerned about suprsesssing Islam in their schools.

Do they ban other forms of religious expression? Crosses/crucifixes? Yarmulke/kippah?
Or is it just Islamic symbols?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/

It’s been documented already. I guess the next question is if there’s any reason to think it’s stopped.

Update: I guess not. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/us/politics/us-spying-allies.html

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