Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 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.
Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists' already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists' goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.
On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin's drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag's dominance is inevitable. He's not the first person I've seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he's almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid's fueling the tech industry's relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.
not going to be successful in this new world without using it
The hubris is almost impressive in itself. There's not a single technology in human history that has managed to kill every art form not using it. Digital art didn't do it, photography, pencil, movable type printing, nib pens, oil paints, scraffito, probably not even the invention of currency did it. He thinks autoplag of all things will?
i suppose when this guy speaks of artists, he means people making art as their primary source of income. not to say that those people aren't artists as valid as any others. but he's saying if you don't use ai to push out stuff ever faster, you won't make it. fuck taking your time to get inspired and have it mean something, just give us the soulless garbage to sell our products already.
I somewhat assumed so based on the usual corporate ghoul definition of "successful". That's why I included currency as something without which artists have managed to make a living since its invention. That particular example may be arguable, but being a successful artist is not and will not be predicated entirely on how fast one can crank out "content". How many movies do the wealthiest directors put out per year?
I mean, he is their VP of Autoplag, so I imagine he's got even more reason to believe than the average MBA. That doesn't undermine your point, but I think the fact that adobe has appointed a VP of Autoplag should be part of the story to begin with, rather than being assumed. Did they ever have a VP of blockchain? Or a VP of copyright fraud?