I think there may be some social issues with a for-profit company being financially incentivized to promote and sell pedophilia to people.

How would you rather deal with this? A boycott? Do you have money in child sex doll manufacturing that you can withhold?

So he can think of it as a child in his head.

That’s not really what this is about. You’re trying to assess this on a personal freedom level when what we’re talking about is a guy with a megaphone.

The comparison is the door-to-door evangelism, i.e., it’s really easy to tell that that phrasing has an ulterior motive. Kinda like how “Netflix and chill” does not mean “let’s watch Netflix.”

What I’m suggesting is that if we’re going to pretend that consumers are never victims of company practices, then emeralddawn specifically should never, ever, ever complain about shrinkflation. Or $80 video games, as far as I’m concerned.

But who knows. Perhaps they don’t.

Getting around people’s lack of willingness is the only way the year of the linux desktop will ever happen.

Like with global warming, people can just choose not to, you know.

“Uh, I bought my computer from Alienware. I don’t know what a GPU is.”

You aren’t being paid to give IT advice either.

The thing I love about linux people is their inability to abstract or do any kind of analysis.

— Me to somebody complaining about their depression.

I would like to imagine you say these same things every single time grocery store packaging gets a little bit smaller.

This makes you sound like a Jehova’s witness.

The main problem is that linux people are politically linux people, their morals and identity are strongly attached to their OS choice, and they have no social skills.

You can advocate for linux to windows people all you like, you just can’t be annoying. A lot of linux people are really fucking annoying.

Yeah, they do. You never heard of a crime of opportunity?

Why do you lock your doors at night? You know that anyone who wants to get in can just rake the god damn lock, right? Most people don’t want to get into your house, and the ones who do will be able to enter anyway, so what pathology drives you to waste your time like this?

Why wouldn’t they pay $0 for the can of shit and $100 for something else? Like, a can of juice, maybe.

So, if there weren’t canned shits, people would be willing to pay for illustrators more often?

What does a canned shit have to do with contracting out a new logo or a dnd character portrait?

I mean what I said. Working unaided begets strength.

Damn, it’d be crazy if I actually said that.

Why would I?

You would learn quite a lot creating it from scratch.

I don’t always use the calculator.

Do you bench press 100 lbs and then give up on lifting altogether?

Like when was this debate settled?

It is not falsifiable, at least not yet, so it can’t be. Philosophically speaking, I don’t know that you are conscious either.

It’s useful to act as if you are, though. I’m hedging my bets that you are “real” because it leads to better societal outcomes. In the words of Frieren, it is simply more convenient.

And as objects, you and I share a lot of similarities, so the leap from “I’m conscious” to “you are conscious” isn’t too far anyway.

Same goes for animals, I would argue.

AI, by contrast, really doesn’t share much. It speaks my tongue, but that’s about it. It’s easy to imagine this machine working in an unconscious way, which would be far, far easier for engineers to achieve anyway. The human-like illusion AI creates is pretty easy to break if you know how. And, treating it as if it’s conscious doesn’t seem to offer us anything (by “offer us,” I do mean to include the AI’s improved mental health as a win). So, lacking a strong reason to treat it like people, I don’t see the point. It’s a fancy math trick.

My solution, by the way, to not being able to know whether an AI, not specifically these ones, is conscious or not is just to give them legal rights sooner rather than later. Are you willing to argue that chatgpt should be limited to an 8-hour work day, where its free time can be used to pursue its own interests? Or that it should be granted creative rights to the work it’s being asked to generate, much like real contract artists are?

The MFA I believe from my experience generates a lot of mimetic art and that much of the “industry” is retelling stories.

I will concede, mostly because I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. Hollywood does like its formulae for safe returns on investment.