Brutal. This, combined with Ottawa abandoning new pharmacare deals with provinces, will make life more expensive for all of us, to the benefit of large corporations.

Can’t wait to hear how the Carney faithful spin this one.

Even just the key combos (win+numpad) to do basic tiling in XFCE are a huge plus

Bring back the DST

This is a crisp answer, nice one.

sigh

You said it doesn’t matter if we can tell how something was made.

This conversation is over. Thanks

Ah to be fair i did misinterpret your previous statement.

But no, I am arguing that we are not able to ignore knowledge of the production process. Nothing mystical about that.

That’s not a rejection of what I said, so I assume you agree.

No, I’m saying we can no longer meaningfully separate the product and the process.

I am saying that we can no longer meaningfully separate the two things.

First you said “it doesn’t matter if we can tell or not”, which I responded to.

So I’m confused by your reply here.

This argument strikes me as a tautology. “If we don’t care if it’s different, then it doesn’t matter to us”.

But that ship has sailed. We do care.

We care because the use of AI says something about our view of ourselves as human beings. We care because these systems represent a new serfdom in so many ways. We care because AI is flooding our information environment with slop and enabling fascism.

And I don’t believe it’s possible for us to go back to a state of not-caring about whether or not something is AI-generated. Like it or not, ideas and symbols matter.

If you can tell it was produced in a certain way by the way it looks, then that means it cannot be materially equivalent to the non-AI stock image, no?

I mean, it can’t really do ‘every random idea’ though, right? Any output is limited to the way the system was trained to approximate certain stylistic and aesthetic features of imagery. For example, the banner image here follows a stereotypically AI-type texture, lighting, etc. This shows us that the system has at least as much control as the user.

In other words: it is incredibly easy to spot AI-generated imagery, so if the output is obviously AI, then can we really say that the AI generated a “stock image”, or did it generate something different in kind?

I dunno what to tell you other than that I have been consistently pointing out that AI is a process, not a tool.

If the result of that process is the same wherever it’s introduced, then your model of the world has to be able account for that.

Want to know how I know that it does?

Because the result is the same over and over and over and over and over again. Every single time!

https://restofworld.org/2025/colombia-meta-ai-education/

Look at how great AI is for Colombian students as a way to change their material conditions 🙌 https://restofworld.org/2025/colombia-meta-ai-education/

rude

Hold on though there are talking droids in the Star Wars documentaries and those happened a LONGGG time ago apparently

Edit: to be fair that was in a galaxy far, far away so it’s entirely possible that neither Karl nor Richard were aware of the technology

You think? I dunno, I could totally see Marx getting ChatGPT to generate a quick first draft of Capital, would definitely speed up the process of spreading his ideas … I mean spreading his material

Richard

edit: folks don’t like Richard Marx, hey believe me I get it