They’re definitely risking other surrounding nations jumping in on the side of the US and Israel. Nobody wants to be the first one to do so, but who’s to say that when one of them has had enough and starts acting, it won’t greenlight the others to do the same? There’s no upper limit to how messy this can get.

seeing downvotes on what was simply a friendly introduction post is a bit disheartening.

If it’s any comfort, they didn’t even read your introduction. They saw “AI” in the title and that instantly made you the “other.”

A major chunk of users here are highly ideological and always on the hunt for the enemy. Saying non-critical things of AI is more than enough evidence for them to back up their assumptions about you.

I don’t see any reason to assume that, given enough time, our VR and AI systems wouldn’t get advanced enough that a VR world becomes indistinguishable from reality - and the AI avatars in it impossible to tell from real humans. Hell, they could even be consciouss. While I don’t think we’re there yet, it’s still conceivable that you could be living in exactly that kind of simulation right now and have no idea. We’re already completely fooled by imaginary worlds every single night when we fall asleep.

GenAI doesn’t generate anything on its own either - it too needs the intentional minuscule effort of a human being in its foundation. I don’t think the “effort” argument holds up here anyway. People happily accept as art a photograph that took me 30 minutes to capture and edit, but they reject a GenAI piece I spent 3 hours tweaking until I got exactly what I wanted.

I don’t need to tell an AI to scout the location, travel there, wait for optimal lighting, nail the composition, dial in the settings, etc. I don’t need to tell a sculptor to do that either - it’s a completely different artistic field. Nobody here is claiming AI-generated pictures are photography - they’re not. Photography is done with a camera. The discussion is whether generating pictures with AI counts as art or not - not whether it’s photography.

I’m using photography as the example because people dismiss AI art on the grounds that “it doesn’t require any skill or effort,” but the exact same argument has been thrown at photography forever. There was a time when purists said the same thing about digital photography, and they were equally saying it about film photography back when it was new and painting was still “the” way to make pictures.

A camera can’t comprehend art either - it’s just a tool a human uses to create it. AI doesn’t generate anything on its own either; it needs a human to operate it too. The camera isn’t the artist, Photoshop isn’t, a canvas and brush aren’t, Illustrator isn’t. They’re just tools. The artist is the human behind them.

The discussion is whether it is art or not. It doesn’t matter how bad someone is at it - people still accept it as art. You’d be a massive dick telling a beginner that their photography is so terrible it doesn’t even qualify as art. You can also take a great picture completely by accident, just like you can put a ton of effort into one and still end up with garbage.

Nobody looks at AI products and goes, wow, this is art.

I’ve came across plenty of AI pieces that I genuinely like.

As a hobbyist photographer, I find it pretty amusing that when I use a device I just point at a target and press a button, it counts as art - but when I spend 3 hours tweaking a prompt to get exactly the image I want, suddenly it doesn’t. Seems way more like an ideological stance than a logical one.

I disagree with the premise and find it borderline offensive to call Lego builds “minimal value”.

Video of the impact for anyone interested.

My comment isn’t off topic. It’s an issue I care about so I speak up. I do not self-censor because the room is primed to turn against me. Not a single thing I’ve said here in any shape or form is defending the extremists of the NoFap community.

and you want advocacy for those people

No, I don’t. I’m only asking people not to dismiss addiction to porn or masturbation as not being a real thing or harmful.

I just told someone that spending 4+ hours a day, 5+ days a week on it is actively harming me, and the response was that going to work is an even bigger waste of time and that I’m free to spend my free time however I want. That’s an unbelievably idiotic thing to say to someone who’s trying to kick an addiction.

“Masturbating often” isn’t the issue here. It’s 4+ hour long sessions 5+ times a week.

I’m not one to call people names with the intention of hurting their feelings, and I don’t even believe in free will to begin with. But if I were to call someone an idiot, it wouldn’t come from the assumption that they actively choose to be one or that they could choose otherwise. No, they’re helplessly an idiot - and I’m just making a factual statement about the world.

I would agree if that is how downvotes were actually used but that is not the case. More often than not when people downvote it’s because they don’t like what is being said not because it’s factually incorrect, offtopic or otherwise unhelpful. Factual information and perfectly reasonable (but unpopular) takes get downvoted here on a daily basis.

It’s just to illustrate how little effort it takes to actually read the thing instead of reacting to the headline with points the article already addresses.

They were killed in Kuwait.

That is also mentioned in the article about 12 seconds in:

politicians in Brussels recognising that it is Iranians who should choose their new leaders, and not the European Union’s job to endorse specific contenders.

I personally think the issue comes up when people say things behind each other’s backs that they wouldn’t dare say to their face. In my previous workplace there were a few people who always talked shit about our boss when he wasn’t around, but the second he showed up they’d act like everything was fine and they were best buddies.

The problem isn’t that the criticism was never valid - it’s that they showed me I can’t trust them to be genuine around me. They thought they’re damaging the reputation of my boss but it’s their own reputation that took the biggest hit.