The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.

They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.

The administrators only want to line their own pockets. They keep increasing class sizes and cutting programs and services, while repeatedly falling for band-aid, quick fix "solutions" pushed by corporate educational snake oil salesmen.

Parents are overworked, underpaid, and can barely enforce discipline on their kids. They've abdicated their role as parents to social media algorithhms. In this regard, social media is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In other parts of the world where social media is as pervasive, why have we not seen a similar magnitude of decline in learning outcomes?

Meanwhile, corporations and politicians are behind much of these problems. It's a societal and cultural issue, in which those in power correctly believe that they don't need to cultivate future generations of intelligent citizens. They only need some of them--their own children and friends--to be well educated, while the rest of the working class only needs to be smart enough to do whatever menial tasks their corporate overlords enslave them to do.

Can't wait until AI makes a security hole and a billion dollars' worth of cryptocurrency disappears overnight.

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.

This is how my mother consumes âoenewsâ now.
She told me everything is just so negative these daysâ¦
Ya think? I wonder why?

Voted republican her whole life.

...before Linux 7 takes over Linux XP in number of users?

He was fired from Y Combinator and the people at his start up, Loopt, ask the board to fire him because of his chaotic and deceptive behavior.

The guy is a disgusting, lying, cheating, sociopath who couldnâ(TM)t run a company if Reebok gave him all their shoes.

My partner is a price machine.
They can tell you exactly what the prices are for regularly purchased goods at every single store we frequent.
I can point to avocados and ask if thatâ(TM)s a good price or not, and they can tell me the prices of every other place they have been to.

It appears Walmart is beginning to mess with this. But if the prices go up and fluctuate then we will simply stop shopping there. We will, in fact, start going to the small discount grocery places which have sprung up in the area. The avocados might be going bad soon, but when they are half the price of the other stores in the area, itâ(TM)s absolutely worth it.

  Iâ(TM)m not saying most people will do this. Most people just want convenience. We think about the time and gas cost to procure specific goods, and do a quick optimization based on that. If Walmart starts messing with our ability to get a reasonable price, we simply wonâ(TM)t shop there anymore, and they will have lost a customer.
Other people can just blindly walk into this, and Iâ(TM)m sure they will. At this point in American economics other people can go get effed sideways⦠it means more opportunities for those who pay attention to whatâ(TM)s going on. Canâ(TM)t pay attention and have a little critical thinking? Well, I guess thatâ(TM)s your problem.

If I only got release every two weeks I think Iâ(TM)d die. Google making a bold move here.

It speaks to the propaganda going on out there that this got marked troll. At the end of the day, this will just make the streaming service as a propaganda, Outlet more than anything. You know it and I know it and everybody else knows it.

The REAL prize is CNN. It has a worldwide reach, and now it will be propaganda.
No, when terrible things happen in the United States? There will be literally no one to report on it to the wider world. You are now trapped and you donâ(TM)t even know it. That you means every one of you poor bastards that see this hand in America. Those of you in China and Russia? Well you must be pleased.

Iâ(TM)ve seen plenty of union stuff, and I have to say this is a pretty interesting and useful tank. Thanks for the awareness. That would make sense why as workers become managers in unions, and become executives, they all seem to be picked to be anti union.

Probably why Nvidia took a stake in Intelâ¦
Make sure they donâ(TM)t get any funny ideas about spinning up those old fabs again

Itâ(TM)s weird, there is a MAJOR tax scam going on involving filing millions of returns early/fraudulently using small local banks with weak security⦠stolen identities.
The IRS is the only agency with funding able to figure out how to fix it. States are dead in the water⦠returns filled out obviously using a bot with random info, actually making it much harder to detect them, oddly.

There are all kinds of things going on out there that are not getting reported in mainstream media. This is definitely one of them and it is wasting enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars at both the federal and state levels. No one is talking about it because no one wants to admit, they have no idea how to fix itâ¦

My first thought when seeing this is that itâ(TM)s somehow funneled to bad actors inside the United States, but it could be anybody.

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Thatâ(TM)s a naÃve and juvenile black and white scenario.
There are 1000 gradations of gray in between Must Profit and Collapse.
In fact, one should probably go so far as to say that corporations ought to work for humanity, not for a stock market bottom line ultimately destroying the very systems they depend on. By having different profit motives, and not having a mandate to always make profit or they are sued into oblivion, you have a vehicle which might actually help humanity.