Reddit = brainwash center

They aren’t wrong. It looks like AI art because it’s meaningless, derivative bullshit.

I think this may be overreach by the moderator but I basically agree with their points. This looks just like a midjourney output. It is a hodge podge of different cultural influences -- asian character, with green eyes, with grecoroman garb, and eye of sauron orbs floating around her. It would have once been technically impressive, and now is just a kind of culture diarrhea.

I agree with the moderator, AI will push artists to their limits and force them to become creative which is the most important skill of an artist. Technicality isn't enough nowadays, doesn't matter if you can paint like Raphael, you need to be creative like Picasso or Dali.

The impressionists wholeheartedly disagree with your comment.

Not only sponsored - but also automatically added to your list of subscribed sub-reddits! I only saw the "sponsored" posts when I went out of my way to unsub from this new subreddit I was unceremoniously subscribed too.

Banned for what? I've seen communities splinter off in seperate subreddits and none were banned.

Sounds like there is more to it, Daystrom institute is fine and a great alternative.

Let me guess, they were brigading the main Star Trek sub in some "anti-woke" crusade, right?

Likely for not thinking Burnham was the bestest ever.

Eh, the problem with this idea is everything appeals to the lowest common denominator eventually. All subs (and even HN) would fall to Sturgeon's law if lead to its logical conclusion.

Smaller forums in the past tend to deal with this by having some groups that were strongly moderated with a strict set of rules and no/low tolerance of them being broke. Then more 'general' discussions where the rules were lessoned.

What he wanted was a community with a specific theme and purpose. What he got was a bazaar of randos showed up to share softcore pornography.

If a bunch of people showed up tomorrow on Hacker News, who mostly wanted to discuss Pokemon, they'd probably be shown the door. I don't see why a person running a subreddit shouldn't be able to do the same thing.

They wanted the clickbait and trash.

Erm. I can't agree. How is this different from be the first person that invent something, or be the first person that organize people around some new idea, or first person to create company?

I do miss the slashdot style meta moderation in a lot of places … I like the idea of running stuff past a screening group of users to temper the ability to wildly push around the moderation system by newly created accounts or low engagement users or bots. It seemed to work pretty well. But no such system is perfect so I’m sure there were flaws I just never noticed.

I'd say that's a feature, not a bug. I've done it. In my particular case shortly after the beginning of covid some mods wanted to ban all discussion of hobbyist medical 3D printing, things like 3D printed masks and even those Prusa face shields.

I didn't think that we had the expertise to be the judges of truth in that area (it was during those few weeks where the governmentwas saying "don't use masks", and these moderators agreed with that), and the relationship quickly deteriated.

> everybody is automatically added to the subreddits that Reddit chooses.

No? That’s not how Reddit works, you join the subreddits you want to join

The users being a horrible part of the echo chamber stems from echo-chamber-promoting moderation. Mods instaban (shadow ban) anyone and everyone in an extremely automated fashion based on a long list of rules and filters. You're only left with people that perfectly toe the line.

Which companies do actually own and moderate their own subreddits? I have always treated all of them as unofficial, even if there are employees of the company that post periodically.

> IRC Network administrators tend to enforce "official" names (owned by a particular group) vs "unofficial" names. For example, "#Ubuntu" is owned by the Ubuntu devs. While the unofficial ##Ubuntu is just fan owned.

I didn't realize this was a thing outside of Libera, and maybe Freenode still. But then, I haven't been on other networks in quite some time.

It feels like it. It is so single minded compared to any real group of people I know.

Maybe implement it once the community reaches a certain size/certain volume of posts?

I think it's more than just about competition. If the whole point of a subreddit is to critique each other's work and discuss process etc., someone coming in with AI-generated art isn't going to further those goals, and the risk is that the subreddit gets overrun by the AI art and no longer be focused on its original subject matter.

> Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :)

As an unpopular opinion: I don't watch races, but maybe I would watch that. I mean, Roborace is pretty cool (but it's mostly about the tech rather than racing, and IIRC it's all strictly driverless), I wonder how a man-machine pair would do.

Similarly, I find most sports boring and hardly worth watching (unless in a good company, but then it's not really about the sports), but if some day there would be Olympic Games NG+ without any doping or gear restrictions, I'd most likely check those out with great interest. I do realize there would be tons of drawbacks and nuances involved (and more than a lot of people screaming hate how this is wrong to them), but that'd be a) interesting on a personal level - watching some folks who trained for their whole life isn't really resonating with me - I'm happy for them being beyond good but I can't say I really care; and b) would produce enormous effects on society, in terms of medical and technological advances, just like the space races of the past (and hopefully the future) - I'd surely cheer for that.

Then, I'm a proponent of machine assistance in computer games, too. In my opinion, human bodies and minds are inherent sources of unfair advantage and machine assistance - if equally available to everyone - is the greatest equalizer. Though, of course, I acknowledge that a lot of games are designed solely or mostly around imperfections of human performance (mechanical or perception).

I don't think limiting and gate-keeping are good for cultural progress. The way to deal with the amount of content is building better systems (not necessarily technological in nature) for curation. Building artificial barriers to what and how things can be created will only harm "cultural progress" (put in quotes because I am not sure I like all the implications of the concept).

It's a matter of scale and frequency; people were posting significant amount of low-quality nonsense generated by ChatGPT. The average quality of ChatGPT was (is) significantly lower than the average human answer and there were thousands of those answers.

As a test I ran some questions through ChatGPT a few weeks ago; both popular ones and just some random ones from the homepage (including some not-very-good questions). In only one case would I say that it was "good enough" to post. All the rest ranged from "mostly correct but with huge omissions" to "used 5 paragraphs to explain what could be one or two sentences" to "this is not even remotely correct in any way, but at a glance it actually looks kinda correct". The "looks kinda correct" can be pretty misleading, because there have been a few answers where I went "wait, is this actually a thing? I didn't know about that!" and when investigating further it turned out it wasn't a thing at all and ChatGPT was just trolling me.

SOs answer quality was never perfect, but there are still a few differences:

- Humans actually try to answer the question at hand, whereas ChatGPT is only auto-completing text. This might lead to similar results in a lot of cases, but the goal of ChatGPT is not to produce correct SO answers.

- Related, humans will (usually) back off or correct answers if errors are pointed out to them. ChatGPT (at the moment) doesn't.

- Humans will (usually) not attempt to answer questions they don't feel like they are qualified to answer. ChatGPT will.

I'm not saying that SO is/was perfect as-is, but ChatGPT is - in my opinion - overall not likely to improve SOs quality as of now. Since it is currently banned on SO, it seems like this is not only my opinion.

I very much know that, but it is still interesting to see the differences in how the threads are. Even if it is not the same people arguing in both.

I've used Dall-e, midjourney, and stable diffusion, and given my total inability to draw anything properly its like competing in a 100m sprint in a drag racer.

Everything is a derivative of everything. What is art school? They derive their skills from other well known artists.

My comment is not an expression of a low valuation of creative intent. It is an expression of my deep concern for creative intent due to the limits placed upon it by a rigid system of ownership.

>"all of the echo-chambers"

All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

It’ll probably allow more people to be starving artists.

Celebrities and artists were not removed from the data used to train SD 2.0.

2.0 uses a new text encoder trained from scratch and it just did not capture the same famous names as the OpenAI CLIP used in 1.x.

Or get a bunch of Greg Rutkowski paintings and perform textual inversion to get an embedding of his style, which is what people are actually doing, and go back to square 1.

Artists are freaking out out of fear that AI will replace them (it has already begun doing so) and because their copyrights are being violated, and with a general disgust at the quality of the content.

Programmers are only freaking out about copyright because they naively believe AI can never automate them out of a job, whereas everyone else (artists included) deserves what's coming to them.

It's the same concern in both cases, but different interpretations of the stakes involved.

No. Reddit has too many bot accounts. There's no way to enforce one-vote per real life person.

I see subreddits the same as opensource projects in this regard - users have all the tools and rights to fork. And the mods/maintainers can run the original to the ground if they so wish

> I've had my fair share of terrible moderators on Reddit

Welcome to the internet, the same thing could be said about every web forum since the 90s.

> There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit

Yes, that's the system working as intended. You don't have any right to the subreddit any more than the people who got there first. There have been many successful offshoot subreddits that go on to eclipse their predecessors in size if the new subreddit is actually better.

> Tear down all the statues and burn the museums.

No need. Soon there will be so much AI generated "art" that human-made art will largely be pushed out of popular consciousness.

The laziest thing to do is to not do anything and let someone else moderate. While the disagreements over moderation are normal, complains about volunteers being "lazy" for not doing impossible are absurd.

Oh wow. I've effectively been off reddit for years now, didn't realize they got rid of the defaults entirely, now I'm curious.

They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If anything it'd probably be easier to enforce a "no moderating a bunch of subreddits across multiple accounts" rule since it's mainly bigger subreddits that matter, and "mod teams of big subreddits" is a smaller group of people to monitor.

And if there was really some big conspiracy to skirt around this system they'd have to organize on a platform outside of reddit, ensure everyone is always accessing through VPNs so reddit doesn't notice multiple accounts modding from the same IP, and hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.

Reddit just doesn't have any incentive to do this - you're talking about people who are doing free labor for them. Maybe it's got problems, but if you get rid of the power mods (and don't change the structure to add any incentives like pay), you probably just end up with a bunch of unmoderated communities that then die off.

I would suggest that they follow the US system of government where users can vote out corrupt or useless moderators via referendum.

Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.

Killed it's potential? It's in the top 20 biggest sites in the world with no competitors anywhere near it.

How much bigger could it possibly be?

Billion and Giga is both 10^9, so about 6/5 or 1.2 byte or 10 bits, and somehow enough to regurgitate examples from training set[0]. Oh how convincing “AI is just learning as humans do” arguments are.

0: https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490

No. The purpose of a subreddit is to let users engage. Excessive locking decreases user engagement and is harmful, not to mention that it punishes users (who are no longer able to continue a already started conversation in the comments) for violations of others.

Do people need to consent for other artists to use their work as references when painting? That seems pretty analogous to training an AI on a corpus of artwork.

I'm less interested in bad moderators per se, as much as I am more concerned about "permanently owning a major, important name on Reddit".

On IRC, if the channel goes dead, the channel name is back up for grabs. This means that the admins can kick everyone out of a room and "Reset the ownership" of a name, if necessary. (Ex: #Ubuntu suffers from a glitch and gets taken over by griefers. Admins come in, kick everyone off, and gives official #Ubuntu devs control of the channel again).

Reddit can ban redditors who are poor behaving (even moderators). But the name of the channel remains in their control. The subreddit name can be lost forever. I don't think its a good system of name management.

---------

USENET was way more ad-hoc. The alt.* distribution lists were fully unmoderated and fully ad-hoc from what I remember. I don't think it was even possible to ban anyone, and as such, a lot of those alt.* channels became filled with spam, porn, and other unfavorable material.

The comp.* moderated lists were done better. I don't fully recall the administrative structure. But I know it wasn't done like how Reddit did things.

Reddit's decisions can be discussed in light of its competitors. Be it Discord (today), or USENET / IRC (from the past).

Hate to break it to you … but the “industry” that is the “anime industry” has been quietly adopting the latest technology for years. There are notable exceptions like Ghibli but for the most part, Japanese animation studios have been pioneering the state of the art in cell shading, lighting and post processing, adjustable “cartoon physics” style automated physics tweening and basically everything else in 3d computer graphics that will allow them to make the most of their artistic efforts. They’ve still got a vibrant story boarding process helped by the obvious intersection of anime with the vibrant drawing culture that produces the manga so many are based on… but beyond the storyboards they have been relentlessly trying to eliminate the need to tediously draw anything unnecessarily. There are entire 2D (not 3d!) animation tools that serve the professional 2D “cartoon” market that have widespread adoption. The 3d market is no different, the first cell shaded graphics code I read was all written with Japanese comments… “anime studios” (except Ghibli) don’t “prefer handcrafting every single frame” they use whatever tools are available and usable by them, that are capable of executing the artistic vision of the art director of that project/show/movie.

They care about the outcome not the process. They care that it looks how they want it to look, that it conveys what they want it to convey. This is artistic pragmatism at its finest. They will composite hand drawn graphics/animation, 2D computer graphics/animation, and 3D computer graphics/animation… it’s the final results that matter. I absolutely expect that once the tooling gets better at frame-to-frame consistency, once it is good enough AI/ML based animation tools will be widely adopted by the “anime industry” and it will be praised because it will do things like let small manga creators produce short OVA or movies or YouTube style content directly whenever they want without having to spend ages working with an animation studio and the fans will love it because they love the content and for the most part that love is not dependent on how the content was made.

That's the thing though, a it's not uncommon for ML-generated images have major elements that are almost 1:1 copies of existing pieces, especially if the prompt includes an artist's name or a style that's closely tied to a particular artist, going well beyond an artist using existing pieces for reference/inspiration.

I could learn to mine pigments and create paints too but we have better options now

> what really matters in art is the process

You don't get to define what is art. Art can and does move people who have absolutely no idea of what the process to create it was.

You have your way to experience art, it isn't the only way. In fact you have a limited ability to learn about the process, how much of it are you making up in your head?

> what really matters in art is the process, not the result; intent, not content

in the fine art world, for now, that's been whats driven value. and when I am in that world to move cash around reliably, thats what I consider and I almost don't consider the aesthetics at all.

outside of the fine art world, there basically is no art market and it is purely aesthetics. the process and intent is irrelevant, only the result and content. I just want cool looking things.

Since it is not possible for you to invalidate my view, then its also what really matter.

> what really matters in art is the process

AI art has its own process. It can be quite therapeutic.

That may be true of the big subreddits. I moderate a small, niche one simply because I was visiting it every day for years and then they needed a mod. I saw it as a chance to improve an online space that I liked.

That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit?

It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"?

I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical."

The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?

13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.

I see the logic, however I don't think an analogy with physical product industries is in place here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277750)

Even if AI were to disrupt entire industries the way delocalization did, until local lawmakers catch up, I think creatives will keep creating regardless, will organize together, form new streaming services and keep creating, because a creative job is something you want to do, not just have to do, like any other assembly line manual job.

I still think passion will make a difference in a post-AI world, even in the worst-case scenario of no legislative action against AI (which is unlikely, looking even just at the current anti-delocalization movement in global politics and lawmaking).

More exclusively commercial and product-driven creative jobs like programming may be impacted more by AI competition than purely creative jobs though (still, I still would've gotten into programming as a kid even with AI competition, simply because it's fun to come up with solutions to problems).

There is no collective or democratic management, unless the tyrannical overlords choose to allow it. "Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority" is correct. What it leaves out is that anybody else can make a competing subreddit, dedicated to the same issue, where they have control.

The only thing getting there first does is prime realestate in the namespace and network effects of having an existing community.

It's a web forum for shitposting, not a government for a country. Using hyperbolic language like "private tyranny" to talk about unpaid moderators curating a stream of news articles and posts typifies the terminally online madness of the current zeitgeist.

Yes, it's total private tyranny if the person who started the subreddit chooses to keep it that way. But if Reddit (the company) doesn't like the way you're running your sub, they can and will replace the people in charge.

It does not "presuppose a Foucaultian worldview". You have centuries of this sentiment permeating culture at the very least.

One example of many:

> Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

~ John Stuart Mill

I highly doubt such a button exists.

> I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.

If one or more people decided to mass downvote new submissions (which isn't exactly uncommon), or the submissions are controversial, they will show as 0 even if they're actually -/+ 2 (for example).

If you decided to mass upvote them you will initially see the total increment by one, however, subsequent refreshes will show you fuzzed numbers. I believe the more active you are (e.g., upvoting 30 posts in the span of a minute), the more aggressive the fuzziness will be.

Sounds like the perfect activity for botswarms controlled by a couple guys

We're not talking about forum moderators, really, but power moderators. Someone who mods a random topic they like is probably decent at it and not trying to push something. Someone whos gotten themselves in a position to mod 10+ of the largest subreddits on reddit is probably not doing very much actual modding and is very much trying to push something.

> Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.

What is your useful definition of "ideology"? Why isn't "subjective" included in your definition? Why would including "subjective" in your definition make it less useful?

Before hearing your response, I'm going to guess that you're thinking ideologies need to be "significant" for them to be an ideology. I'm guessing you don't think that subjective opinions are ideological because you don't think they're important enough to get that label.

Please don't troll or make bad-faith arguments on HN. This post contains two instances of moving the goalposts and using extreme language for strawman attacks.

People are pointing out that moderation is often biased and that the power of controlling the narrative and topics & viewpoints that are allowed is a motivator for many moderators. Your strawman argument that "all moderators" being "exclusively" motivated is just rhetoric to try to win against a claim no one is making.

No, but preventing the Nazi camel from getting its nose in the tent is now an important motivator for moderators.

Sure, it's a fun toy to play with, I don't deny it.

Like a kaleidoscope, it can be fun to recognize familiar patterns and beautiful colors, but it's nothing more than that: a toy.

What I look for in art is intent and human passion; for me, the excitement of suddenly getting a nice number out of a PRNG or a cool story out of GPT is a very different from experiencing a story passionately crafted by a human.

When I read an amazing story like the Iron Widow, I feel respect towards the skills of the author, excitement for her future plans for the sequel; I follow the author on twitter and maybe interact a bit, because I appreciate what that human made me feel.

I can't do the same for a GPT story, because even if it was generated from multiple human stories, there is no actual human intent behind it; no one to thank, and no one to blame in case of messups: it feels like an empty shell.

By inferring process I do not mean guessing what exactly was the person thinking while making that piece of art, but inferring what concepts and feelings they are trying to transmit with it; good art and good stories are good precisely when their creator is good at communicating feelings and concepts.

For example, looking at some drawn art, I can pinpoint exactly what emotions the artist was trying to transmit, not necessarily by the expression of the characters but even just by how the piece itself is drawn: that's the whole point of human artistic intent.

Another reason why human intent is important for me, from my comments below: when I read an amazing story like the Iron Widow, I feel respect towards the skills of the author, excitement for her future plans for the sequel; I follow the author on twitter and maybe interact a bit, because I appreciate what that human made me feel.

This is all part of the experience for me: I can't do the same for a GPT story, because even if it was generated from multiple human stories, there is no actual human intent behind it; no one to thank, and no one to blame in case of messups: it feels like an empty shell.

It's this true emptiness that quickly made me stop playing around with GPT when I first discovered it: anything made with it feels like an empty shell to me.

Regarding legislation, I see I have struck some chords here ;). Nothing personal, but I really think the people supporting AI models are really naive in thinking any democratic government will be willing to let entire creative industries suffocate (not to mention the potential for degradation of society as a whole) just because AI models are very cool technology and human creativity is supposedly irrelevant: just look at anti-delocalization trends in politics and legislation anywhere in the world, and draw some conclusions by yourself.

Not all people are blinded by the awesomeness of a new technology, and even those who created it will realize that they too will be eventually replaced by it.

>This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?

Apparently politics definitely leaked into that community a few years back. I recall reading stories about it back then.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/25/18234950/knitting-ra...

I am not part of that community but if it behaves like almost any other online community, any accusations of racism seem to always create a backlash that lumps the conservatives leaning folks within the group to racism whether the conservative has outright committed any racism or not. There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).

So folks just stay silent and try and just knit (or focus on whatever interest of the group), afraid to disclose any political opinion in a non-political interest group for fear of the label. Then…they get called out because if there isn’t overt acknowledgement by concerned members of the “correct” political ideology. That results in the abstaining is oppression attitude. You then find these kind of communities creating rules that don’t just discourage political conversations but rules attempting to exclude people who may fall into a political viewpoint altogether.

I don’t know if it’s distinctly American, but it definitely seems to happen here a lot. To be honest, I find it all ridiculous.

One example of the top of my head: knitting is probably one of the most heavily gendered hobbies, which carries a ton of political baggage with it wrt gender politics.

> I really don't want to punch you or any AI researcher as it would be quite pointless

But you will HAVE TO. There is no other way to enforce legislation, threat of violence is necessary. If there is no violence refusal to comply to your legislation follows.

> From your messages, I infer you do not come from a truly democratic country[...]

You are completely and entirely incorrect. I am from the EU and I wish my country would stop abiding by the inane regulations set by the EU that you seem to love.

> At the very least, I know for a fact that every member of my family also feels the same, and that gives me confidence that the majority outside of the HN/tech bubble also feels the same.

> I don't quite understand your points here,

> This is how I experience art, and I'm sure a lot of other people experience it the same way: not as a product, but as art.

My point is you ARE defining what art is, you are saying it is not art unless the viewer goes through the same experience as you. Just... why.