This kind of whining and pearl clutching HAS to be funded by the shitty pretender platforms who can’t fucking hack it with their alternative business models. The market will tell, as these types love to fall back on as an argument, and the reason Steam does so well is because it’s consistent, accessible, and minimally invasive in the face of any complaints I’ve ever seen levied against it. When Epic stops shitting its pants, and Luna offers something original and competitive, we’ll see a change in this ‘monopoly’ status, but crying about it isn’t going to change the fact that Steam remains a quality product running at high efficiency. It’s Gabe’s game to lose, if he decides to exclude more producers and increase fees and profits for the company, that’ll hurt it, but this stinky rag article isn’t doing shit but telling on itself.

“Not trying to defend AI art” The fuck you’re not. Just be honest about it.

My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it’s an exception when there’s misappropriation becasue it’s socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I’m not saying all memes are good, and I’m also not saying meme people who make that their life aren’t assholes sometimes either.

All of this exercise you’ve taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that’s something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that’s not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the former.

Honestly, this is lazy and unfunny.

False equivalencies, or ‘Whatabouts’ are not a form of argument, they’re a deflection debate tactic.

What you’re calling AI is a mass marketing ponzy scheme. LLMs are not even actual AI. Beyond that issue, its development is in the hands of capital exclusively, and it will only exist to serve capital interests which come at the expense of the lower and working classes by necessity given what corporations (which are essentially unregulated in current climates) are designed to do. What you’re calling AI will only be used to hurt human lives and worsen living conditions for all of us (before you nitpick, I think enabling the 0.1% and their hoarding pathology hurts them too). I personally believe you’re already aware of that and are cynically trolling, and despite that I’m giving you the honest truth and factual reality of this subject because there is nothing good about being a techno-fetishist sociopath who thinks the answer to humanity’s problems is to make humanity itself obsolete, even if it’s ‘cool’. You clearly got the wrong fucking message from Terminator.

This is why when actual AI emerges I can only hope it’ll be in the hands of a public or collective development process and designed with an intent of progression and cooperation in mind.