Mezentine

lol the comments are savaging them.

A video from Washington Post on Instagram with the headline “Protests escalate against ICE agents in Chicago” while a famous video of an ICE officer violently assaulting a heckler and tackling him to the ground plays.

What a strange headline to place over this video.

Please stop sharing the photo of the toddler being handcuffed. That photo has nothing to do with the ICE raids in Chicago. It was a child and their father or other family member playing.

Stop trying to incite Black people. You should have listened to us.

I would find extended time spent with that person distressing. I would wonder if they were okay.

Yeah exactly.

If I try to imagine the experience of a person who would outwardly present just like these fantasy women, it’s probably someone in a prolonged disassociative episode.

I think it’s because the fantasies are always women who are *impossible*, women who exist only to be exactly as unapproachable or eager as you want while always, fundamentally, being *accessible*. Women who are incapable of being alive because they only experience existence for other people.

It would be easier, I think, if it was just porn. I mean you still have all the horrific abuse concerns, the “unclothing tools” and stuff, but I understand wanting to look at naked people. I *really* don’t get this fantasy personality stuff.

This is the opening to one of the linked Free Press pieces, and I’m somehow still slightly taken aback at how…open and enthusiastic a lot of people are about using AI to fantasy women with carefully calibrated fantasy personalities?

Also while I can only see the contours of the discourse, it feels like some people are trying to establish “See! This is what hostility towards AI and AI users becomes!” in a way that I actually do think is insincere and that I bristle at. There is an oppish character to some of this.

The people that clocked the tone as 4chan are spot on, and I think we should keep that in mind when we react, because the ironic performance of that style, while not, *insincere*, is absolutely intended to fuck with people who take it at face value.

Like, I kind of feel that the reaction people are having now is, in fact, precisely what the people pictured are hoping to provoke. There’s a layer of reactionary absurdity to it that, in making us take it seriously, plays a joke on us.

There is something bad going on here (although I have questions about incidence) but I actually think it has more to do with social media then LLMs and robots specifically.

Okay I admit that this was weirder than I was expecting.

NEW: Extraordinary scenes in Amsterdam this afternoon (Sunday, Oct 5).

An estimated 250,000 bring the city to a standstill; people all wearing red to show solidarity with Palestine 🇵🇸

(🎥 Ahmed Zantac)

About the incident where ten cars supposedly blocked ICE and they had to shoot someone because she had a semiautomatic weapon:

“The criminal complaint makes no mention of any firearm in the possession of either motorist, in contrast to an earlier statement from the Department of Homeland Security.”

It’s hard to describe the feeling that something has woken up in Chicago in the last 72 hours. There is an energy in the air.

Social constructivism is one of those things that, on some kind of level, is so obviously true to me that I struggle to understand people who don’t grasp it sometimes.

Idk you know how you can just tell somebody is fucking with you sometimes?

Also while I can only see the contours of the discourse, it feels like some people are trying to establish “See! This is what hostility towards AI and AI users becomes!” in a way that I actually do think is insincere and that I bristle at. There is an oppish character to some of this.

No yeah exactly this is why I was going sort of nuts trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I think there’s conflation going on here attempting to tie hostility to GenAI to this bullshit.

Yea

This totally reads to me as 4chan-style, that-one-Sarte-quote giggling provocation and I don’t think we should take it seriously as a new form of bigotry so much as people who already delight in finding ways to deniably say slurs discovering a new avenue.

This stuff. Which I do actually think is bad but also I think a lot of the moralizing about it is totally missing what is going on here.

My best theory for what is going on with Taylor Swift is that we are watching a 35 year old billionaire have an extremely public midlife crisis.

Okay, sure, let’s do this. I absolutely think conservatives should loudly whine about one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of the year. They definitely won’t look like huge fucking losers.

I think the moralizing response to all of this is either, unintentionally or deliberately, misunderstanding what is going on here and who the kind of people likely to giggle at finding plausibly deniable ways to say slurs are. They are *delighted* that this has become a way to scold people.

Like yes the people doing it are clearly shitheads but the moralizing response is completely missing the mark vis a vis what the actual problem is and what is going on here.

It took me forever to find examples of what people were actually talking about and the stuff that’s reworking actual real life slurs to be about bots is just so obviously 4chan style provocation in a way that’s making me lose my mind.

To whit: how much of this is people transferring a desire to be racist onto, nominally, bots (although notice how at least one post is directed at an actual human) and how much is people enacting a play at that desire to be outrageous?