Visual creativity requires experimentation - trying things that shouldn't work, and teasing out some measure of emotional or intellectual interest. Systems that are increasingly only capable of outputting marketing visuals are caught in a blandness spiral. They're just going to get worse, so long as they filter out all the weird things artists might actually want to generate (six-fingered hands, off-center subjects, nude bodies). Imagine training an artist solely on magazine ads, or only allowing them to produce that kind of work. No figure drawing, no sketching from life where a pen slip produces a unique texture that becomes a signature element.
I say this as someone who's generating smut-adjacent, art-adjacent images almost every day. It's amazing what image models can produce, but (as with my traditional skills) they'll always be held back by a refusal to embrace holistic study of the world. Sometimes you gotta draw a lamp or weird sculptures or a vacuum cleaner or a dick. Sometimes you have to paint an empty sky or a nipple and do your damnedest to find an epic novel in them.
First, they came for the people who wanted to make kinky art, and I did not speak out, for I am a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition kinda dude...
Then, they came for the people who wanted to reverse-engineer video games, and I did not speak out, for I find no amusement in seeing Mario take down Elden Ring bosses...
Finally, they banned me for a politically incorrect/inconvenient prompt (like asking for help defending Luigi in a debate or something), and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Why was there no one left to speak for you. Did the AI apocalypse actually happen and it is just you and a rack running an instance of "Claude" left on earth?
UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.
Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).
You asked me to respond to more than just the UBI concept raised.
I 100% agree people need a culture of looking out for each other. I'd argue that has only successfully happened sustainably in smaller communities, and from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Take care of your neighbors, and ask them for help when you need it. You aren't proposing this here so I'm not arguing with you, but it never works for long when the "help" comes from the top down. For a short period we may actually see the government take resources from some to help others, but eventually that is corrupted and they stop at the point of taking resources and power.
A UBI will never work, the Soviets tried effectively that and it fails miserably.
You end up with the government deciding how much bread each person needs, how much the bread will cost, how much to pay a person so they can pay the defined price for the allocated amount of bread, etc.
Either utopian claims of an AI and robot-powered future are right and we don't need money because you can just have what you want, or money and resources will still be scarce and we will continue to compete amongst ourselves for resources.
2) America in 2026 is not the USSR in the 20th century, so even if they did, our circumstances are very different from theirs.
3) UBI was only the first suggestion; you completely failed to address the other and then jumped to a black-and-white conclusion.
The general thrust of my proposition was that people shouldn't have to submit to an artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary "productivity" in order to access goods that are objectively abundant. When people realize that and make the necessary compromises, they won't have to worry about shipping useless AI-assisted slop for "income security" and can focus on using AI to build consequential and useful software.
Please do not get bogged down in whatever kneejerk anti-UBI thought-loop your misaligned amygdala is screaming at you.
1) you'd have to expand on your refutation here. The soviets absolutely did decide top down how much bread each person deserved and how much it cost. They used that type of data to help decide how much grain to have farmers grow, where and when to ship it for bread production, and in part how much to pay people so they could buy their allocation of bread. Not directly a UBI, but functionally very similar with the caveat being they forced people to work in predefined jobs for a set pay rate.
2) I didn't say the US is the USSR. I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed. Feel free to call out specific differences that may help it work better today in the US, I'm genuinely curious despite my skeptism.
3) I can respond to the others as well, but that isn't necessary to have an interesting debate or discussion on any one topic. If one was required to respond to all raised ideas they could try to shut down all conversation by threading together a long list of hard to discuss topics, avoiding responses to any one topic.
I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though. We ultimately all make our decisions, some more impactful than others, and if we end up in a dystopian future with no jobs and AIs/robots in charge of the world we made that bed for ourselves.
I'm not bogged down in any kneejerk reactions and I'm not parroting what I've heard air bags saying elsewhere. I've read up on the topic, the history of the USSR, and read Marx writings (well the translations, I speak some Dutch but no German). We may disagree, but my views aren't uneducated reactions.
1) You are describing something that is not UBI, and calling it UBI anyway. A rationing system that is not fungible and that varies allocation is not universal, and not income as capitalism knows it. The Soviet planned economy was categorically not UBI. Full stop.
2) >I pointed to a clear example where a UBI-like structure was tried and failed.
You did not.
3) That's not applicable here. Why did you respond to the UBI issue only?
>I do agree people can avoid having to submit to AI or ML systems though.
I didn't speak to this at all. The "artificial system of manufactured competition and unnecessary 'productivity'" is independent of AI and ML and has existed for several decades.
>my views aren't uneducated reactions.
See 1.
My conclusion is that you actually aren't interested in a conversation. You haven't responded earnestly or considerately to anything in my initial post except the portion suggesting UBI, which you dismissed with a faulty presence.
Here is my suggestion: talk about something else from that post. Anything else. Do not revisit the UBI topic.
The only reason the Soviets didn't have a true UBI is because they realised they still needed people to work and they wouldn't if you gave them what they needed for free. That's why I said they had what was effectively a UBI, they decided what people needed or were entitled to and created a system that would give them only that. The fact that they forced people to work is an implementation detail that we'd likely run into in the US today as well, we couldn't afford for the government to cut checks and no one work.
I did respond earnestly, whether you accept it or if I'm explaining myself poorly. You have yet to propose how a UBI would actually work, or pointed to an example of it ever having worked in the past. Socialism and Marxism have been tried, the don't work. And yes, UBI is an idea that goes back to Marx's writings.
Per Claude: On the central factual dispute, fuzzythrowaway is right and _heimdall is wrong. The Soviet system was not a UBI, and the claim that it was “tried and failed” doesn’t hold up.
1. “The Soviets tried a UBI-like system and it failed”
The Soviet system was the opposite of a UBI in almost every defining respect.
It was conditional on work. During the 1929–35 rationing period, rationing applied only to people employed in state-owned industries and their family members, and politically disenfranchised “lishentsy” were deprived of rations entirely. There were four ration tiers, and the lower ones couldn’t get basic items like meat and fish. That is a tiered, employment-linked allocation, not a universal one.
Work was legally compulsory. The 1936 Constitution made work an obligation of every able-bodied citizen, on the principle that those who don’t work don’t eat. It also defined the system’s distribution principle as payment according to one’s work. A 1961 RSFSR decree went further and targeted people avoiding “socially useful work.” Joseph Brodsky was tried for “parasitism” in 1964. A system that punishes people for not working can’t be called a UBI.
It wasn’t cash, and it wasn’t the standing system. Rationing was in-kind and episodic. Bread rationing ended in early 1935 and all food rationing by October 1935, then returned in wartime and again during perestroika.
_heimdall’s fallback (that the Soviets lacked a “true UBI” only because they needed people to work, which was “an implementation detail”) concedes the point. Unconditionality is the defining feature of a UBI, not a detail. His causal logic also fails. The Soviet economy’s problems came from state control of production and prices, and a cash transfer leaves prices to the market. That is why Milton Friedman backed a negative income tax: he thought it would address poverty without expanding the state bureaucracy he opposed.
His claim that UBI “goes back to Marx” and so shares socialism’s failures is also unsupported. The histories I found trace the idea through Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796/97), Thomas Spence, Joseph Charlier, and later Friedman and Stigler’s negative income tax. In 1968, more than 1,200 economists, including Tobin, Samuelson and Galbraith, signed a call for income guarantees. Marx isn’t in that lineage. Even if he were, a policy’s origin doesn’t determine whether it works.
2. “No one has shown a UBI working”
Alaska is the best long-run case. Residents have received a universal, unconditional dividend since 1982, and a peer-reviewed study found no effect on employment and a 1.8-point (17%) rise in part-time work.
3. Other claims
_heimdall’s AI/ML reply: fuzzythrowaway’s point was about an economic system that forces people into manufactured competition. _heimdall answered a different claim, about submitting to AI and ML systems.
_heimdall’s false dichotomy: he says either post-scarcity utopia or continued competition for resources. UBI proposals assume scarcity continues, so the dichotomy doesn’t engage with them.
_heimdall’s “top-down help never lasts”: he gives no evidence. Alaska’s dividend has run for over four decades, and the Social Security Act dates to 1935.
Claude correctly understands my earlier points and expands upon them with the history I was referencing and the rationale I was constructing. Perhaps it puts it more persuasively.
We're all naked under our clothes, I don't see the problem. One of the funniest shock-bits I've ever seen was when Jon Stewart's book on American government and history included full-frontal (Photoshopped) nudes of SCOTUS, but I guess he couldn't get away with that during the current era of Puritanical panic.
It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?
None of these advances matter if the hyper-Puritan guardrails continue to be in place. If you can't make a nude, you can't make art. If you're incapable of making something that might offend someone, you can't make art. It's not just about smut peddlers; classifiers are dumb and make mistakes, so "unsafe" generations that are actually objectively "safe" get swept up with bona fide illegal ones, and become tantamount to them. These are just glorified ad and propaganda machines, literally neutered. It's a form of censorship, and these systems have a chilling effect on the output of people who use them.
I think the thing people miss is that American friendliness is a bit fake, just not malicious. It's built on our pastoral history, but has evolved into a way to smooth down the sharp edges of a very competitive society - especially when that pastoral mindset ran headlong into the immigration that made contemporary America what it is.
I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.
So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what is which.
This rings true. I came to Philly from England in 2004. I'm an outsider, but I get by socially.
Philly does not have a good rep. Sometimes people from elsewhere voice ghetto, hooligan, or snobby-suburban stereotypes. (Whatever! The worst thing is how they say the words "crayon" and "water".)
But whenever I visit California it feels superficial and fake.
> I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.
My experience is that everyone from outside the Northeast thinks those of us from the Northeast are assholes, and we think they're all two-faced sociopaths.
The US is a big place. There isn’t one “American culture”. If someone in one part of the country says we should get drinks sometime they’re just saying a nice thing. In another part of the country, that means “this weekend”.
If my main consideration in an interaction with a stranger is to avoid its escalating to violence, I'm going to be polite, but I'm going to be a bit reserved, not enthusiastic or friendly.
In these discussions, non-Americans often describe Americans as always happy, which is another quality I'm going to tend to avoid showing in the hypothetical interaction with the stranger because if he is feeling bitter or resentful, my being happy might set him off.
Yeah, i totally get that, it's absolutely not malicious, i'm not sure it's even fake, maybe only a bit exagerated. But for an unaware person, it _feels_ that way, and i guess when American visit France or the netherlands, or, to go back to the subject, China, our reactions must feel weird.
That was jut to tell the author that i think he misread how Chineese are on this specific point. It wasn't a criticism of North Americans at all. Really, i think this is charming now (as long as we don't work together, then i will find this infuriating and bitch about it to my SO)
Which is why I think the whole premise of GP is kind of suspect. China has housed a highly-developed society - not just a civilization, but a contiguous, if evolving, social order - for longer than most of the rest of the world. Even what they consider backwoods and rural is basically urban by most historical standards.
These aren't the problems of a society rising out of a state of nature; as TFA states, "The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation”". I think certain aspects of Chinese culture as we know it, writ-large, make more sense coming from people who weren't just recently struggling as a society, but who are well aware of how that condition compares to their historical one.
I like the interface; very useful for some use cases that would otherwise be quite frustrating. Dislike that it's yet another platform held back by arbitrary moderation. You can't make a bicycle for the mind that locks if you try to ride it in the wrong direction.
I say this as someone who's generating smut-adjacent, art-adjacent images almost every day. It's amazing what image models can produce, but (as with my traditional skills) they'll always be held back by a refusal to embrace holistic study of the world. Sometimes you gotta draw a lamp or weird sculptures or a vacuum cleaner or a dick. Sometimes you have to paint an empty sky or a nipple and do your damnedest to find an epic novel in them.
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