Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

This is an extremist take on a correct conclusion. Just like how “vote with your wallet” and “no ethical consumption under capitalism” can co-exist, so can the idea that there are people in these jobs who simply don’t care about the harm as well as people who do but don’t have the power to do anything about it - even something as simple as changing jobs.

An easy example is the people left at Twitter. When employees started quitting in droves after Musk started tearing the company apart, I saw people quickly theorizing that the people still working there fell into 2 groups: those who were morally bankrupt enough not to care, and those on work visas who couldn’t quit because they risked being deported.

The majority of these companies are based in the US, where workers’ rights and protections are often tenuous at best. Whistleblowers have almost no protections and, more often than not, end up serving years or even lifetime sentences in federal jails for their efforts. In most states, it is completely legal for companies to fire you for whatever reason they feel like, and even if you get severance, it can take years of legal battles to get what you’re owed. Add to that how long it can take to find a new job (the average time in the video game industry is 2 months), and it’s easy to see how that can quickly spiral into putting people into a dangerous financial situation for daring to speak out.

It’s easy to lay the blame at other people’s feet, but just like saying, “Well, just don’t use their products then,” it’s never that simple.

“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is the new “just following orders.” If you can afford the product, you can afford to buy something more ethical.

Sure, but if you really cared, then you’d put in the effort. Or are you “just following orders”?

The point is that he blames the people working for these companies with a blanket statement while not taking any responsibility for his own agency in the situation. It’s a lot more nuanced than just “why don’t these other people do x.” It’s like “vote with your wallet” vs. “no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

There are some major exceptions to that. Many people on work visas have almost no choice, like the theorized majority of people who stayed on at Twitter after Musk ruined the place. Their choice basically boils down to keep working for the company or be deported.

But how does the little spoon factor into all this? Is it being stepped on by the “big foot” like a Lego, or are there other factors at play?

3-player main campaign plus a 3-player co-op operations mode that will start out as a side story happening simultaneously to the main campaign that they’re going to add more content to going forward.

It sounds like they’re specifically catering content towards me.

You should check out this article on the attacks on paintings by Jewish American artist Barnett Newman. Especially this quote on the piece Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, which is basically just an 8’ by 18’ block of red with a blue stripe:

After the 1986 attack on Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III there was a conversation concerning who would do the restoration of the painting. Despite the work provoking a lot of anger in museumgoers due to its simplicity, the painting was incredibly intricate, and experts knew that it would be nearly unattainable to complete a faithful restoration. Although the work was mostly just an expanse of the color red, both the shade and technique Newman used were difficult to replicate. Prior to the slashing, it was almost impossible to see brush strokes on the work with the naked eye. Additionally, one of the cardinal rules of restoring paintings is that everything done to the work should be reversible, something that would be very difficult to do with such large cuts through the body of the work. The painting sat damaged for many years because no conservationists wanted to touch it.

The dude who did eventually volunteer to restore it more or less went over the entire painting with a roller and red paint, and you can tell immediately.

Me when people are lying about images being generated works and submitting them to art contests and winning stuff like college scholarships:

AI “Artists” are idea guys. They don’t care about the process or the knowledge or the experience of creation, only the Content that gets produced that they can consume. They’re middle managers claiming the work created by the skills of the workers under them as their own effort. Image generators simply allow them to do a corporation and avoid paying people for those skills or putting in the effort to learn themselves. It’s just a new form of coloring books, only created using ethically dubious methods because the companies creating the programs are likely violating fair use laws.

Edit: This isn’t to say that people who use coloring books are inherently bad or anything, but when you’re trying to pass your page from a coloring book off as a gallery-worthy exhibit and the book was made by a company tracing artwork and using it without permission to make a profit? Yeah, then you’re a bad person. Especially if you go on to talk down to artists because you made yours so quickly, etc.

Calling pieces where an artist used an “AI” to do things like touchups “AI art” is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool “Magic Wand art.” Because that’s what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That’s essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. “AI” has been used in this regard for decades now, it’s only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don’t have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of “AI art,” by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.

And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn’t matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that’s what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn’t matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.

I could see this as part of a metrics thing - if Google sees a big drop in users right after the rollout, it’s harder to brush it under the rug as having no correlation.

Ohio is what we in the US might call a “fly-over state.” Meaning, a state that you want to fly over/through as part of a trip to elsewhere, rather than a place that you want to visit.

Yep. It’s been a thing for a long time now, at least since 2001, but “it’s just a joke” became a way for bigots to disguise their hatred, and was picked up by “edgy” teenagers in places like 4Chan…which would later reveal as they got older that they were actually just bigots themselves all along or the joking had normalized that mentality in them to the point where they started believing it. It’s definitely not just an American thing, but Republicans in the US tend to be extremely sensitive and volatile emotionally (despite calling everybody else “liberal snowflakes” for how easily offended they claim they are) while being very emboldened by the events of the past decade or so to openly spew their hatred and bigotry.

There’s a great stand-up bit about it by James Acaster from 2019 called What’s Wrong? Too Challenging For You!?

Fun fact, there’s an industry term called TTP: Time To Penis. It’s the estimated amount of time before a player draws a dick in your game, whether through bullet holes in a wall or something else. It’s often measured in seconds.