I suppose he must be a strong Trump supporter, since Trump is working to remove nuclear weapon capabilities from Iran.

I'll need it for my motorcycle.....hoping it all lasts till after I'm dead and gone, so I can enjoy the "old ways"....

I love paying $5 a gallon for high test and $7 for diesel. Although dear leader is telling me prices are lower than ever.

Just recently at Costco I paid $3.99/gallon for premium.....I live in LA in the New Orleans area.....hasn't gotten very bad here yet....

I am not wealthy by any definition, rent a flat, have no garage and no second car, just my Hyundai Inster. And will rather use public transport than get a car that burns fuel.

Aren't you tired of whining about how electric cars are bad since they are impractical in some edge cases that don't even apply to you over and over and over again in every slashdot discussion about electric cars? Or are you being paid for doing this?

With your references to living in a "flat" and taking public transport....you can NOT live in the US.

Somehow you don't understand that what you consider an "edge case" is NOT an edge case over here...it's real and widespread.

For most people

If they did (in the US), then most people would have them or be actively pursing them....

Even if I could charge at home, I'm not willing to give up the driving experience that I have enjoyed since I was a teen.....2-seater sports care with manual transmission.

I know I'll lose the transmission with EV some day...but right now, there's no such thing as an EV that is a 2 seater sports car, everything is 4 seater family car and I'm just not interested in a family truckster.

And an EV motorcycle...would just kill the experience completely....ugh....

I'm not set up to "charge at home"....so far here in southern LA, it hasn't really gotten that expensive for gas yet, I hit Costco the other day and was just now up to $3.99/gal here.

To take the strain off, I try to ride my motorcycle whenever I can, which I enjoy more anyway.....

We still had $5/gallon gas back then due to Trump's shitty economic policies.

Where the hell do you live where gas was that expensive before the Iran war?!?!?

We're just not $3.99/gallon at Costco here where I live (New Orleans area)....

Prior to this we were in the $2's.....easily.

Back then most emulators were just an executable and a couple smaller files. Throw a full library of games on a ZIP disk, head to your friend's house to play games.

It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.

I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.

In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.

is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.

Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."

And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.

The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.

Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.

The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.

AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.

Because this is feeling very pets.com

Do you not do the classic date night: dinner and a movie?

Sure...

But these days its getting harder and harder to get out on a date without the wife finding out...

But I have no idea why people pay that much money and sit through the advertising just to watch a derivative summer comedy.

....to veg out and enjoy someone else's air conditioning during the extreme heat of the summer....?

These are the same people that insist "assault rifles" must be banned, despite being unable to define them beyond "they're scary".

Well, er...let's see...they're black!! And uh....when you pull the trigger, they go "PEW"....and uh....well uh...

Right?