Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I'm sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y'know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here's an article with screenshots (Guardian).
Anyway I'm not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a "cultural linchpin" against deepfakes.
As I've said before, Taylor Swift may be the cultural lynchpin for addressing abusive AI imitation and I think this was her personal opening salvo. Taylor Swift was previously driven to political advocacy partly by right-wing memes of her aping Hilter on genetic purity. I think she takes INCREDIBLE personal exception to herself being used as a puppet and this directly aligns with it. Directly addressed to political leaders.
Indeed that Donald Trump post isn't the first time she's been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).
The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn't made it far through congress.
* Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.
** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren't effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that's another story.
Tennessee has a new law against making LLM clones of performers without permission. It would be great to see our bullshit strike a blow for the side of righteousness, for once!
Yes, it is called the ELVIS Act. I'm sorry.
https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html
SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift)
it's some US infosec guy working at a corp, identity was figured out a couple years ago
no, it's Taylor Swift
this is like claiming dril was identified. no he wasn't. that's not true.
I find swiftonsec a tedious poster at best, so /shrug from me on this
Yeah I was being a bit tongue in cheek there. I follow them and a bunch of accounts on ActivityPub because it's the only way to keep the feed from drying up when running my own instance.
It is still real to me damnit!
Wait, why would he be Taylor Swift?
I always thought it's swift as in fast, there's nothing about his posts that would attempt a satirical impersonation even.
the original gag was that it was Taylor Swift moonlighting as an infosec advisor
Yeah, that. From the era of horse_ebooks, Riker Googling, etc
they used to run the account with a Swift avi for the first while, then switched to Cortana (iirc?) for a bit (can’t remember if this coincided with twitter having its “impersonating accounts” panic), and dunno after that because I stopped seeing it
With the private jet and all.
A story I heard, one of the problems with private jets (and private jet trackers) is that often private jets cannot be stored at normal airports. So after delivering the rich people to the airport it needs to take off again, and go to a smaller airport to stay there. This drives up the environmental costs to insane levels (now each trip is 3 takeoffs), but this also causes weirdness with the people tracking the planes of celebs, as they now overinflate the actual flights they are in, which annoys weird pedants (like me). I wonder if the celebs taking these flights are even aware of it. Anyway, remember this if you hear a story of 'celeb X took their private plane to skip traffic' stories, there is a chance they were not actually in this plane. (So put down those surface to air launchers you lunatics).
Not that the usage of private planes isn't insane and should be banned/heavily regulated.