“Just” read documentation, says someone assuming past documentation is accurate, comprehensible, and relevant.

I taught myself QBASIC from the help files. I still found Open Watcom’s documentation frankly terrible, bordering useless. There’s comments in the original Doom source code lamenting how shite the dead-tree books were.

Due to some disagreements—some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades—with how collaboration should work, we’ve decided that the best course of action was to fork the project

Okay, that was always allowed!

Programming is the weirdest place for kneejerk opposition to anything labeled AI, because we’ve been trying to automate our jobs for most of a century. Artists will juke from ‘the quality is bad!’ to ‘the quality doesn’t matter!’ the moment their field becomes legitimately vulnerable. Most programmers would love if the robot did the thing we wanted. That’s like 90% of what we’re looking for in the first place. If writing ‘is Linux in dark mode?’ counted as code, we’d gladly use that, instead of doing some arcane low-level bullshit. I say this as someone who has recently read through IBM’s CGA documentation to puzzle out low-level bullshit.

You have to check if it works. But if it works… what is anyone bitching about?

The text also being soft indicates that’s a style choice.

This is misusing a pejorative to turn specific criticism into general prejudice. Say ‘I hate slop’ and you’ll get near-universal agreement, but people who mean ‘fuck all uses of AI’ are not even the majority. The pattern of retreating from ‘I hate how it looks’ to ‘quality doesn’t matter!’ is straight-up pretense.

It’s a low-stakes opportunity to examine how language escalates tension. People in that absolute extreme position are emboldened. People merely tired of shrimp Jesus or whateverthefuck get lumped with them. All nuance is stomped out of this important new term, originally for ‘uncurated spam.’

and that ways lies a poison pill to community engagement.

… mostly due to bias-forming rhetoric like calling any generated image “slop.” People had the same kneejerk attitude toward all CGI, long after CGI looked fine. At some point it’s the monkey ladder experiment: self-perpetuating behavior through performative distaste.

What specifically is wrong with this image?

Right, should’ve stolen a frame from a cartoon. Then the text would be funny.

Honestly, the comparison with the rest of those icons was the only part I respected. It’s a suite of cult minimalist bullshit. Which still doesn’t explain how nobody went, “that’s a sperm.”

Or at least, “why isn’t it blue or yellow?”

That logo is fucking terrible. Cult minimalism produced a red sperm and a disconnected semicircle. It reads as nothing.

The ‘classic look’ in dark mode still puts 90% of the interface in light mode.

No other complaints.

“keeping our free societies ahead”

Why is my dog barking?

So could I do magic if I trained?

Your performative hatred is boring. People did the same chest-beating ingroup behaviors, whining about CGI. Oh so artists don’t need anatomy and composition? It just does tweening for you? This sucks, that’s cheating, you only used a computer. It’s not real art.

Obviously CGI is a lot better now, versus when people where declaring they’d die mad about Tin Toy. But that’s the point: this tech has existed for like three years. What it does for free will be taken for granted. Nobody’s impressed that Pixar movies are animated on-ones. Nobody will be impressed when movies animated without actors still look and sound real.

The point is the story, the visuals, the edit - the experience of watching something humans put together, using whatever tools exist. Your reasons to complain will dissolve. If the complaints continue anyway, the words never mattered.

Drama that deepens prejudice.

People insist it’s low-quality. And if it’s good, then it’s robbing artists. And if you’ve never commissioned an artist in your life, then it’s anti-environmental. And if running it locally barely warmed your video card, then it’s theft. And if you’d otherwise borrow images from online… then shut up. Shut up is why it’s bad.

I’d understand marking it, because some people still don’t recognize it. But when they do they try to un-feel whatever reaction they just had. Oh that clever idea was illustrated by a robot? Then it means nothing, lacks intent, isn’t art, fnord fnord etc. The minature version of tearing posters off your wall, insisting you never liked your favorite band.

Folks, the robot that draws anything isn’t going anywhere. Make your peace. The software is aggressively available for local use, apparently simple enough that tech-bro douchebags can figure it out, and most damningly, was immediately adopted for pornography. It could at worst be chased underground… but it won’t be. You will see people make things with this tech, when they otherwise couldn’t, and at some point your distaste has to end.

Having art is desirable. Only self-professed haters think it’s replacing much of anything, versus what I just fucking explained - it makes things that otherwise would not get made. No money is lost if there is no money.

‘People say it’s a tool, but they use it for the thing it does!’ … what?

How else could you use generative AI, except to generate a thing for you?

Most things that could be commissioned - aren’t. The money is never spent. The money isn’t real. No one is robbed when a robot does the thing instead, because what it’s instead of, is the thing not happening.

You cannot kvetch about this replacing all artists forever and still insist it’s a flash in the pan. The tech works. You can run it on your own computer, to-day. It plainly serves a desirable purpose. That alone makes comparisons to NFTs as spurious as those dolts insisting ‘people doubted the internet.’

Any visions of this blowing over should’ve vanished when it became a porn faucet.

‘Upvotes mean it’s fine’ is how you get /r/Funny with different CSS.

Web rings are eternal!

Evidently.

This is what Yahoo was, in the 90s. Search didn’t really exist yet. They made an honest effort to link, describe, and categorize every site on the internet, and for a while it seemed like they were on top of it.

Accidentally reinventing Yahoo Directory.

I mean, the cult of MBAs expecting miracles from the hot new thing is a pattern we’ve seen before. The functionality of LLMs does not match Sam Altman’s fantasies - but it does function. People are getting use out of this tech. But they’re vastly outnumbered by some mixture of optimistic experimenters and trend-chasing dipshits.

Paragraph one says things getting better is bad because what if we stop.

Paragraph two is bemoaning the abacus for ruining mental math.

Paragraph three blames a new gizmo for the system as it exists.

This year they stopped fucking trying. You search three words and it ignores two of them. “We didn’t find many results for that.” Yeah! That’s why I wrote it that way! I didn’t type “colossus of argyle” because I wanted a thousand generic pages about a statue. Gimme some damn prog.