Do people not already reply then block to get the last word? (genuine question, I do not use twitter, but I know people do this on Reddit a ton)

The only hoop you have to jump through is using a Nitter instance. And the most dangerous abusers are most likely going to be determined enough to where doing this or creating a new account is not a deterrent.

False security is worse than no security. If people trust that the block function is reliable at stopping people from seeing your posts, and then those people post things publicly that they wouldn’t share otherwise, that is leaving more people vulnerable than having no way to stop people from seeing your posts.

I literally have been using the majority of my spare time to work with AI-generated images for almost two years now. I have a very thorough understanding of what exactly you’d need to pull off a stunt like this.

The background is part of the image, the obviously given clothing is part of the image, both of those things are fairly consistent across all of the images and look like what would be used for facial recognition, which is something that we know most countries do when they have the technological means to do so, China included. If you want that consistent background and clothing, it needs to be part of the training images. Otherwise, your next best option is a lot of tedious manual editing, which would be more effort than it is worth if the images are to look plausible.

I also have looked at the images myself, and vividly remember GenZedong trying to point out skin lesions as proof that an image is AI generated (definitely not their proudest moment, though they may have thought otherwise). If you’d like to dig yourself into that hole, then show some examples. Most that I’ve seen pointed out can be more easily explained as skin lesions, markings on the background wall, something moving when the picture is taken. This is what real NN artifacts look like, I never saw anything like these in those images, and what I see far more of is consistency in details that neural nets struggle a lot with.

that’s penalizing it, though, unless I’m misunderstanding something?

Had to review my notes on discord from when I was initially investigating this.

You’d need to specifically train a model to output images that look specifically like these photos. If they had enough real images of prisoners to even try to finetune an existing model trained on a broad range of faces, they would have enough real images to make whatever point they’re trying to make. That’s a mark against these photos being synthetic on practical grounds, in that there is no point in using synthetic image generation to inflate the count.

That database has around 2800 images on it. If we’re proposing that a substantial portion are synthetic, then that leaves only a couple hundred that could be used to actually train, which isn’t enough, you would severely overfit any model large enough to generate sufficiently high quality images. And the images shown are clearly beyond something like the photos on thispersondoesnotexist. Everything in the background of all images shown, for example, is coherent, including other people in the background. There are consistent objects across different pictures - many subjects were having pictures taken on the same background, and many have similar clothing. The alleged reason for these pictures is facial recognition (which is entirely believable since yeah, China does that, as does everyone else, and isn’t notable), having dark clothing on hand to ensure contrast makes sense, as does taking pictures in the same spot. This is all another mark against the photos being synthetic, on the grounds that even current image generation technology can’t fully do what is shown in these pictures to the same degree. “But they have special technology that we don’t–” no, we have no reason to believe they do, this is unsubstantiated bullshit. Higher quality models generally are larger and require even more data, which would just get you an overfitted model faster with your few hundred photos.

The only thing they really directly claim that these photos are is photos used for facial recognition. They show that at some point, Chinese police took photos of about 2800 people in Xinjiang, which isn’t surprising at all and doesn’t really prove much. That won’t stop them from trying to portray it as proof of an ongoing genocide, though, especially when they know that like 90% of people won’t question it at all. The base unit of propaganda is not lies, it’s emphasis. The most plausible explanation is that the photos are real, but are being misrepresented as something unusual.

If we’re talking about FTL, might as well mention Multiverse: https://subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35332

I’m pretty sure this outright has more new content than the base game did.

I remember looking over those at the time, at that time the images both seemed a bit beyond then-current image generation technology and there never really seemed to be a compelling explanation over why “some RFA source went through great effort to fabricate images for this story” is more likely of an explanation than “some RFA source is misrepresenting pictures of what is actually mostly just boring normal prison stuff”.

Just something that I feel like I have to remind people of whenever it comes up: mainstream psychology does not recognize porn addiction as a real thing, based on the lack of evidence/lack of consensus to support a consistent diagnostic criteria. The only actually recognized related condition is compulsive sexual behavior disorder, which is not using an addiction model.

I’m quite sure that there has to be at least someone who has problematic pornography use habits which aren’t just a symptom of another issue, but without anyone being able to pin down a consistent set of diagnostic criteria, then there’s barely any way to identify who those people are separately from people who report it but whose distress is coming from something else. One study done on self-reported pornography addiction found that the strongest predictor was moral objection to pornography, not amount of porn use. Another two studies found that antagonistic narcissism is an even better predictor (might read it when it isn’t 3AM). Your analysis is actually touching on this somewhat – a narcissist’s interest in “addressing their pornography addiction” is mostly that they think that it will elevate them above the porn addicts, or whatever other target.

There is a third option you forgot.

One of Ukraine’s officials claimed that a Patriot missile took it out.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-f16-crash-2755b4fd1a5dcf1e95ae975d44427b9b

don’t forget the absolutely inexplicable platform-specific bugs:

this is a different attack from the ones people are usually talking about with Assad, that report is about a mustard gas attack (which ISIS has/had access to) and the notable attacks people accuse Assad of perpetrating were sarin gas attacks (which ISIS never had access to afaik)

there are some wonderfully salty threads on /r/neoliberal about this

Honestly, if I was trying to manipulate online discourse to deliberately cause as much political turmoil as possible, not only would I do agitprop for the far left and far right to anger the other side, I would also make sure to post a large amount of centrist propaganda that is callously dismissive of legitimate issues and suggest that foreign manipulation is part of it. That would both piss off at least one side (depending on the issue) and cast doubt on the idea that foreign manipulation is actually even happening in the first place.

They’re fine as long as they’re not in my house. I have grown up with large black flying roaches and cannot stand them, if I spot one I will literally not be able to relax at all until it is dead.

At least in my experiences it hasn’t been that bad here compared to other places? We’re not passing Project 2025 shit at the same rate that Texas or Florida are, for instance, probably partially because there’s no concern at all that we will become a swing state any time soon and therefore not nearly as much urgency to do things to try to drive people who would likely vote for Dems out of the state.

I think you forgot to include the part where he thinks this needs to be done so that we can, essentially, kill all of the dumb people who would get tricked by a rising superintelligent AI.

There are so many cranks in “AI safety” stuff to the point where it is legitimately difficult to talk about what should be done that isn’t very obviously slanted for some industry’s benefit. You’ve got people like this, you’ve also got people like Gladstone that are LITERALLY EX-PENTAGON PEOPLE SPONSORED BY LOCKHEED MARTIN (who I am sure are very concerned about AI safety – the only way I could be more convinced is if it was Boeing), who have suspicious demands that the publication of open-source models should be made illegal (probably out of concerns about China, as if half of the papers I read on new developments aren’t already from them or the Noah’s Ark lab in Moscow). There is no well that is unpoisoned here.

that person’s comment history has it all. 821 mentions of the words “woman” or “women” (they insist they are done with dating), a bunch of posts in r/europe r/england and r/AskAnAmerican (they’re probably american i think), and futurology posts. what an interesting and well-adjusted person.

If you go further down the thread, he is arguing back and forth with someone, and is basically proposing historical racism as an alternative to historical materialism.

deservedly so, there’s enough Loona shit out there that I very regularly see people complain about there being too much of it. I think there’s more stuff of her than of any other single character relative to the age of the source media.

basically this: https://www.theonion.com/hell-now-a-thriving-epicenter-of-gay-culture-1819575618