18 Comments
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Matt's avatar

Don't get rid of the AI graphics, they're fine

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

Of all the uses for AI, 'create a quick little picture' seems to be the least objectionable to me. This one wasn't the best or anything, but some of them come out pretty cool - like the header for https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/thoughts-on-smiths-death-of-the-internet

But apparently opinions differ! C'est la vie?

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Elisabeth K.'s avatar

See, I feel like original art for publication is one of the worst uses of AI because it’s directly replacing somebody else’s creative work. But there’s definitely room for multiple opinions.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

If I was a major publication I wouldn't be using AI graphics, but I don't have the budget to pay an artist for an original graphic 8-10 times a month. My options are creative commons images or AI generated images, so there's not any lost revenue for some artist. Mostly I go with creative commons, but I think AI can be useful as well.

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Elisabeth K.'s avatar

Shutterstock’s low-end plan is $29 for 10 images a month. (I use Shutterstock at work, and my company is cheap as fuck.) And here’s a list of 22 free image sites, most of which I’ve never heard of: https://buffer.com/resources/free-stock-images/.

AI is probably faster and more precise than wading through seas of images trying to find one that captures the vibe of “British villain stealing the internet,” but there are affordable options out there.

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Mark McGivern's avatar

Get rid of the goddamn AI graphics, good lord

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Ryan Olson's avatar

I still kinda miss one of the old paid Reddit features: I hate ads and on almost any product that will allow me to pay money not to see ads I will make the purchase. Reddit premium until a few years ago gave you coins that you could use to buy awards for posters that would give them a short amount of premium. Nothing felt better than awarding somebody for their shitpost with no ads for a week.

But I've always wondered if this "pay for no ads" concept is sustainable. Are morons like me who constantly pay for no ads also likely to be the people with disposable income that the advertisers most want to reach?

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

There's a pattern here that happens - it makes business sense for Reddit to let users purchase an ad-free experience when they're not good at serving ads. For a while Reddit ads just weren't that profitable.

But as Reddit matures they develop better ad tools and start making more ad money per user, and so the tradeoff of allowing users to buy their way out of ads doesn't make as much sense any more. What used to be a good deal for Reddit might not be any longer.

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Victor Thorne's avatar

The Female Creator Safety Tax goes hand in hand with the fact that attractive women of the type who this happens to invariably get a massive signal boost for being attractive women in the first place. A man who tried Pokimane's strategy wouldn't need security because no one would have ever heard of him.

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kr's avatar

Love KillPete too lol good background videos as well

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Cor's avatar

Isn’t Saint Claire a single mom tho? Elmo isn’t claiming her and his spawn.

These people are such utter hypocrites.

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Elisabeth K.'s avatar

Looks to me like Carla Lalli Music, who I do like very much, had a thumbnail and recipe selection challenge on top of the budget issue. Almost all of the recipes in that screen cap are either done to death (chickpeas, burgers), things many/most people won’t cook at home (clam, squid), or they just don’t look appetizing (lamb stew).

Her channel might have done better if she skipped the professional camera and food stylist and paid for market research to help her find a niche instead.

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Noah Pardo-Friedman's avatar

Haven’t finished reading yet, but I had to come here to say this is somewhat similar to when the FBI (I think it was the FBI, anyway; it was a US gov agency in any case) demanded that Apple give them a way to hack into iPhones several years back. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this; it was notable to me how resolute they were in their refusal to comply back then, and they won that fight easily, iirc. I hope that happens again.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

Yep, I think this was a fight about some terrorist/shooter situation - the government wanted to examine the dead shooter's phone and Apple stood firm and told them to forget it (and won).

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Tom Barrie's avatar

I get your point about the UK government being idiots, and I agree that it's an insane request they’ve put to Apple, but it's a bit on the nose to suggest nobody here has read 1984 when it's written by *the* most famous English defender of civil liberties, ever.

Great use of the word "ornery" in the Reddit section though.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

Orwell would weep at the current state of UK politics, for sure.

I do wonder - is this actually what the British public wants? Is there a deep yearning for the security state to have more power over technology in the UK? Or do the British political elites just have a particular obsession with encryption for some odd reason?

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Tom Barrie's avatar

As with basically everything, I get the impression 95% of people don't care either way as long as they still get their cat videos and their porn. But I would hazard that there might be a more generalised antipathy towards big tech among the public compared to the States (though that's a bit of a guess). We import the negatives with none of the value of the companies nor any real leverage as consumers.

More generally, I feel that sometimes Americans see the UK as this place where the cops come knocking on your door for “hate speech” when you've sent a rude or offensive tweet - like, say, misgendering someone. That has literally happened in a few cases, sure, but obviously they’re exceptions, and all our elites are really doing in trying to enforce that sort of thing is mimicking yours. Political elites in the UK are disproportionally obsessed with US politics and talking points, particularly those on the liberal left. We just don't have the First Amendment here so speech *can* be more policed.

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Matthew S.'s avatar

That is 100% how I consume the NBA until the football season ends, mostly through Bill Simmons pods.

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