It’s less that they can compromise and more that the only policy that they care about is policy that hurts minorities. They’d happily jump on a grenade or march into an oven so long as they can take a liberal and an immigrant with them.

On the other hand, look at how much effort it’s taken for the fascists to get power again. The groundwork for the current administration was started under Reagan and solidified under Bush Jr. They had to take every branch of the government by force to get to where they are because there just aren’t enough of their supporters to actually get them into office without bending the rules until they break.

Also worth noting that the US is not and never has been a “Christian nation.” Not only did the Founding Fathers specifically separate church and state for that reason, but they also didn’t declare a national religion and enshrined religious freedom as well for that same reason. Plus, half of them were agnostic or atheists. Anybody who says we’re a “Christian nation” is just using religion as an excuse for bigotry.

If God truly exists, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.

-Thomas Jefferson

Not only a fake tradition, but one started by the wealthy to muddle what was a quite literal saying.

Jesus straight up said that it’s impossible for the wealthy to enter heaven.

It’s always a good time to remind people that MLK’s family proved in civil court that the government killed MLK (either through intent or negligence) to enough of a degree that the judge was convinced and awarded them restitution on the charges. And the only reason that the case didn’t go to a criminal court was because every judge who read the case refused it.

It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

-Douglas Adams

Tear out the lawn and re-wild the yard? Wild flowers, clover, etc. Less watering and mowing, and not just bees will love it - all kinds of insects and wildlife from birds to deer.

All those darn African killer bees! Stealing all the jobs!

I agree with this. Trump Delirium is a cult of personality (Trump literally speaks like Jim Jones according to my friend who has listened to the recordings of the people dying of cyanide poisoning in the background while Jones gives his last speech), and cults of personality rarely survive their leaders. Even in cases where the leader has named a successor, the magic dies with the leader and the cult often splinters into pieces led by various people from within the cult looking to grab power for themselves.

I think the Republican party would survive, as many pre-date Trump and the majority still support their hateful views, but I think if Trump died, it would be a major blow to the coherence of a unified party for some time.

Said electronic device is a requirement to hold a job in my country and ensure I don’t end up homeless. It’s the same as owning a car here. If you have neither a phone or a reliable form of transport (meaning a car in this public transit-less shithole of a country), getting and holding a job is incredibly difficult.

This is one of the reasons that the UN has considered access to the internet a basic human right as of the 2000s or so.

Owning a phone and using the orphan crushing machine to make funny pictures on the internet are not equal.

There’s no major difference between someone creating art with a computer or with a paint bush.

Good thing that this isn’t what the argument has ever been about, then. This is the exact same tactic that “pro-lifers” use to reframe the argument about abortion and women’s rights.

It’s always been about the fact that the people who create the art used to train the AI aren’t compensated for their work. The criticisms of the objective quality of Gen AI have always been about how people support the orphan crushing machine for such low quality garbage, and the OP isn’t even about that.

Imagine if the Yankees started using a modified howitzer and fired their pitchers, and somebody said that they’d rather watch 8 year old kids play baseball than a game with the Yankees. That’s what OP is talking about. AI bros and people like you would be arguing that the howitzer is the same as any other pitcher and that they just hate change.

No one is making excuses, I’m just pointing out the hipocrisy of saying that the art is less valid because of the tools used.

Good thing that’s not something I said, then. So what you’re doing is arguing a point that nobody said in order to reframe the actual argument into something different. Making excuses to avoid confronting the actual argument.

And yes, I believe a person who has an artistic idea but not the skills to represent it should be able to do it though AI

So do I. But if you’re doing that with an LLM made by a company that’s using unethically sourced training data to avoid paying the artists who made the art used for training, then you’re buying into a system that exploits workers for your own convenience and that makes the art bad. AI slop isn’t just slop because of the quality. It’s also because it’s wage theft. People respect the shitty napkin drawing more because, regardless of the quality, it shows that you were willing to put in the effort without the fancy tools while also not committing a corporation in the process.

AI bros fall into 2 categories in my experience, the “who cares, picture making machine go brrr” group and the “I can make works that rival the great artists like Da Vinci with just a few words, thus making me the winner and better than any so-called artist” group.

As for your argument about artists doing the same thing all the time, there’s a fundamental difference between artists and AI: a person learns the rules/reasons behind something while AI merely generates a statistical average. An AI is incapable of understanding concepts like perspective and lighting, nor can it learn anatomy. It’s much closer to tracing art than it is to going “I really like the way that guy does hands, I’m gonna learn to do that.” If you write a haiku, you’re not stealing your poem from other writers. You know the rules that make a poem a haiku. But an AI, asked to write a haiku, doesn’t know what makes a haiku a haiku, it just knows that its statistics say that x number of syllables is followed by a line break, etc.

If artists can’t exist without having artists to train on, then where did the first artist come from? Where did Impressionism come from? It hasn’t always existed as an art form. Who created the art that the Mona Lisa was generated from? I can tell you: the actual person that Da Vinci was drawing and the years upon years of study of things like anatomy and lighting that he had. The cavemen who drew stick figure horses on cave walls didn’t train on other stick figures, they drew what they saw in nature through the lense of their own interpretation and creativity.

Nobody can steal another person’s skills.

Look at your own words here: Nobody. No person. AI isn’t a person stealing the skills of another, it’s a tool using patterns and schematics created by people to make knockoffs. And just because this is a problem of capitalism stealing from workers doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem that we should address.

Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).

This is what I’m saying. Making art using digital tools? Totally fine, I do it myself and even have a side business from the stuff I make in Blender. Using the tools created by companies committing wage theft rather than paying artists a living wage because it’s cheaper and easier for you? Not okay. It’s like buying stuff from Temu. You don’t have to subscribe to Netflix and watch all the latest shows. You don’t have to use Stable Diffusion to make memes any more than you have to use Reddit.

If 2 things were to change, nobody except for the stupid “photography will kill painting” people would care: people using AI to avoid paying people a living wage, and people who think that using AI makes them better than others.

Lapis lazuli? Maybe not, but lithium mines are a constant source of criticism for those reasons, and your simplification of the world to an either or scenario is incredibly disingenuous.

If you think that people like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo had nothing to say, then you know nothing about artists. Da Vinci hated the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel so much that he painted him burning in Hell directly behind the altar. He was a gay man who had relationships with his apprentices and performed illegal autopsies on bodies to study the human anatomy during a time when it was considered descecrating the dead, which formed the foundation of modern medicine’s understanding of the human body.

You’re just making excuses so you feel better about stealing the labor of others.

No ethical consumption under capitalism doesn’t apply to “luxury” goods like art and entertainment. That’s like arguing that it’s okay for people to still use Reddit and Twitter after all the stuff from the past few years because “no ethical consumption under capitalism.” This isn’t Amazon or Wal-Mart killing off local businesses so that they’re the only place you can find stuff that we’re talking about. This is not reading Harry Potter or buying merch because JK Rowling is a TERF. It’s super easy to avoid companies like that, I do it all the time. I stopped using streaming services (and TV before that), and there’s easily a dozen video game companies that I refuse to buy from due to the way they treat their employees and customers. And protect sexual assault. Let’s not forget that Ubisoft and Blizzard both are guilty of that.

This isn’t about people making art with digital tools. I do that all the time, and AI gen can easily be a super cool tool for that. Except for the whole stolen labor part of it and people using it to do a corporation while using excuses like “no ethical consumption” to absolve themselves of stealing the skills and work of artists.

Creating art is considered a useless skill looked upon with contempt by society, yet the product is highly coveted, and AI is being used by people who want the reward but don’t want to put in the effort and don’t want to pay those who can put in the effort fair compensation for their work. It’s merely another step in the long road of devaluing artists.

That doesn’t look like Texas…

“I find the ethics involved in the creation of something to be irrelevant.”

Hating on new tools is some dumb shit.

This has never been what the issue is. The issue isn’t the tool, but how it’s made and how it’s used.

AI gen programs are almost to a fault created using art without permission with the express purpose of then using said programs to put the workers whose skills were stolen out of a job. Without artists, gen AI would have nothing to train on. They are basically the definition of wage theft in their current form.

You might as well be arguing that Temu brand fast fashion is just as good as any other kind of clothing.

And the other end that gets hate is the people who consider themselves to be better than artists because the prompt they put into an LLM created an image that they consider to be better than what artists make. They’re jealous of people creating something and want the reward without putting in the effort so they can hold it over others.

There’s been enough that “Do you play War Thunder” is a security risk question that the US military asks during job interviews.

And they just keep happening…

I mean, have you seen what we wear in the US? American flags are on basically every house and half of the shirts, hats, and pants.