The fact that you think the only thing you’re doing is entering a prompt says enough. There’s faaaaaaaar more to the process than simply prompting. You clearly don’t want to engage with anything other than the strawman you have in your head, so you have fun with that.

AI generated art is fundamentally different from printing a reproduction of something that exists 1:1. I’m not interested in going on depth on a technical discussion on AI, anyway. I’d rather discuss the philosophy.

As far as the role of man versus machine, using AI as a tool is more like being a director or composer. You determine the composition. The setting. The subject. The style. Let the machine do the labor of simply outputting, and then you tell it what you don’t like about this output.back and forth, until you arrive at whatever finished is. It’s as much art as a conductor in a symphony, or a director on a set, simply giving direction to a machine.

The issue that people have, or should have, with AI isn’t with AI art, it’s with it being shoe horned into everything that can make a buck. Open source generative AI running on my own machine has allowed me to express myself in ways I never could before. The point of art is expression, and regardless of the tools used to create, that output is still an expression of me. More people should have access to tools to express themselves, in whatever way they can.

Art has always been limited by access. Either to the tools, or to the ability to learn and practice. AI, at least in its current form, with open source models readily available, is only allowing more people to create who never could before. Getting into any art is expensive, both in money and time. Anyone with a half decent rig can get something set up and add a touch of art to their world, and begin to express themselves in SOME way.

Who says we torture because we need to?

Man, guy behind us has a beautiful garden. Just a little plot, probably a quarter acre, but it looks so much nicer than the plots on either side. More functional, too.

Funny, for me repeat offenders somehow always had a second request I couldn’t find until 430pm on a Friday. Strange how it always happened. Oh well, sucks to suck.

Cool, I thought that was them, it’s been so long tho lol

What was this from? Was it twilight princess? I feel like it was twilight princess but I’m not sure.

No joke about a month ago I found out about that app, and now I’m obsessing over bird feeders and trying to run away house sparrows. This app is DANGEROUS, it’s probably more addictive than cocaine.

Upvote for actually coming back to the conversation, and for a bit of a sense of humor. Lol

No one asked you to be pleased about the entirety of the situation. Just look at an individual action by an individual person. It’s a step in a direction that sucks marginally less than the one we’re in. It’s a slap in the face to the ones too ashamed or greedy to do ANYTHING positive.

Should he do more? Yeah. It’s the same argument that I hold against Taylor Swift recently - She’s doing good things, and that should be acknowledged, but she’s still a billionaire, and you quite simply cannot get to that level without human rights exploitation.

Neither of these things washes the other away. We can accept them both, give praise where it’s due, and also give criticism where it’s due.

Man, I’ve had that on my life list for years… They make this god awful screeching call, and they seem to be everywhere

Would you like to elaborate? Or just gonna drop 5 words, no context, and walk away?

Don’t tell me what I do and don’t believe. We’re seeing a clear difference between your thought process and mine. I’m willing to have the humility to admit I cannot know what someone else actually believes, and you’re over here claiming to know that it’s somehow a deflection.

Let me state this in no unclear terms. I believe in objective truths where there are objective proofs. I do not believe in objective truths when there exists subjectivity, or at least relativity. I believe, personally, that morality is both subjective and relative, therefore when it comes to matters of morality, I do not believe in absolute truths.

And we’re back to the moral absolutism and posturing. This is getting old. I’m not a vegan. I do not aim to be. If you are, then fine. That’s your call. I see the difference between an absolute hard-line stance of all meat and animal byproducts are wrong, and a stance that aims to reduce use as much as is realistically possible. And you yourself have said that there are scenarios where killing and eating an animal is ok. We’re splitting hairs here trying to figure out which it is.

We both, as far as I can tell, want better conditions for animals. This is the common ground I was speaking of. I’m just not willing to say that anyone who doesn’t share my specific views is morally bankrupt as you seem to be. There exists a bunch of nuance around the subject that you seem not to want to engage with, as much as you claim I don’t want to.

Look, you keep not eating meat. That’s great, a wonderful thing to aspire to. Personally. If you come swinging at people in just a normal thread, proclaiming your moral superiority, don’t be surprised when people think you’re a hard ass with no empathy for anything outside your rather small world view. Much like penises, though, things like that are best left in pants unless someone asks specifically.

I’m done with this, we’ve circled the bases a few times and we’ve ended up going through the same cycles like, 4 times. The thread is getting cumbersome and I am having a hard time physically reading it on my device. Good luck on your quest. If it’s one to change others, I advise a bit less harsh of a stance. And if it’s personal, maybe keep it that way.

They would fall into the “mental illness” category above. There’s a reason I used quotes on one lol. I honestly doubt anyone who doesn’t suffer from an actual mental illness believes the world is flat. It’s such a complete departure from any of the things we consistently observe.

If they do truly believe it, then that’s on them. I would not be able to argue with them in any kind of reasonable capacity because I myself wouldn’t be able to believe they believe what they do. And simultaneously, it wouldn’t matter. They’re free to believe it, that belief isn’t harming anything, and I’ll just keep shooting down their bad points time and again, not for my benefit or theirs, but for anyone who may be looking on, trying to form their own world view.

Cool, we’re getting to some common ground. This is the approach to animal consumption reduction that I can get behind.

I can agree with just about everything that you posted here, with the only difference being a matter of scale. I consider going against the grain that is the conditions within which you were created and brought up to be something that a lot of people realistically cannot overcome, without so much effort. Some of it is ignorance, some of it is just familiarity, and some of it is that people have priorities other than this thing.

Another angle to consider is the economical angle. Typically vegan items are SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive, or require significant effort to source, such as driving further, which may cause more damage than just eating the milk toast. This is the essence of what I’m trying to get at. It’s very rarely point for point the same, just one is vegan and one is not. If it was, then yes, you can hold the high ground over someone who chooses the one that isn’t vegan.

Ideally, we’d all live off the land, eating sustainable food sources. If you eat meat, it’s something you killed and prepared yourself. In lieu of ever getting to the point where the majority is doing that, though, we instead can choose to make small changes incrementally. Eat meat once a week, or even day, if you used to eat meat for every meal. Get used to sourcing your meat when you choose to eat some. Opt for a vegan, or at least verifiable, option when you can. One day, with enough people doing this and letting go of those attachments, societally, we may have some kind of meat revolution.

Man, I’m fine with wherever you want to reply. I just don’t want another misunderstanding based on the multi threaded nature of our conversation. I’ll assume we’re both arguing in good faith, and go from there.

Half measures are what led up to the civil war and eventually abolishing slavery, and later, the civil rights movement. We didn’t just go to war with ourselves overnight, it took a lot of discourse. Starting with (as much as you can define a starting point) a few people operating a network to liberate people, to some areas not extraditing slaves back south. I admit this isn’t my area of expertise, but it’s still pretty clear. Progress came from people starting with small steps, going “oh hey, this actually isn’t bad, in fact it’s pretty good” and going from there.

We can look back at the people of the past and say they’re abominations, but that’s just coming from the privilege we enjoy today. If you were ACTUALLY in that position in the past, in all likelihood it’d be a lot murkier, I think. You’d probably still be an abolitionist, sure, but you’d necessarily have more nuanced of a view.

Humanity is society. One person, no matter how much vim and vigor they approach the task with, can’t change the giant ocean liner that is human society. You need more people, and you win more people by asking little of them, slowly. Eventually that builds up into a civil war, or a MeToo movement. The alternative is a dictatorship, and I don’t think we need to go down that hypothetical, do we?

And my point is, those things may be absolutely massive for one person, enough that they’d rather just go with status quo, instead of trying something else. Be the light that lets them see outside of status quo.

Done with this thread, forrealz this time.

I think we’re more alike than apart, and that’s where the most heated arguments tend to arise, outside of actual warzones. I’m not going to go into much into a reply here. For one, keeping it to one thread, and two, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by your last question. I don’t think that you CAN arrive at a concrete truth, just one that the majority will agree on. There exist such vast differences in humanity, between mental illness, “mental illness”, and such vastly different cultures that the closest I think we can reasonably get is an approximation.

Edit: were continuing here, so I’ll let you reply and go from there.