Stuff like this is my biggest reason to believe that the current anti-ai movement is incredibly misled.

They want to stop open scraping, but if they’re successful, only companies like Twitter, Google, Disney, Getty, Adobe, whatever, are going to have their own closed systems that they’ll either charge for or keep themselves to replace workers, instead of the tech being open to all of us.

Open scraping is the only saving grace of all of this tech because it’s going to keep at least a number of options entirely free for anyone who wants to use them.

Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.

Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.

If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.

I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.

There was a time back when gas prices got kinda high when I thought Americans would finally shift down to slightly smaller cars, but now it’s practically a cultural thing for half the country to burn as much fuel as possible, so I suspect even if gas prices here hit Europe levels it wouldn’t cause them to budge much.

It does feel really odd, though, going somewhere like a school and just being absolutely surrounded by huge SUVs and pickup trucks that you know damn well like 90% of the drivers aren’t actually utilizing.

Double-sucks because it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a small car. Everything new, even most cars, are huge.

You don’t even need to order to see the difference if your local grocery store also delivers. I was curious one day and brought up my local grocery place in one tab, Instacart in the other, and realized I was spending a significant amount more on markups alone using Instacart, not even including delivery charge and tips.