Great article. I laugh at the folks who think this dude is bought into the fantasy that some folks have turned into what best represents a spirituality. As in if they haven't seen folks who go a little too hard in any one specific part of their life. Sure, gooning as a term has long since entered the cultural zeitgeist and has been used, both ironically and not, as a way to simply now refer to excessive masturbation. But to discount that there is a loneliness epidemic out there and folks who have turned to gooning as some form of extreme kink or outlet for some need for human connection and healing, going 24/7 like many dom/sub relationships or cnc, ferality, etc. shows either a lack of exposure to the vastness of this damaged world or an attempt to poke fun at the author for seriously studying a cultural phenomenon. Either way, this is a fascinating look into a weird niche subculture and a really well written article. Thank you for sharing.
Gaywallet
All it means is that the government cannot arrest you for saying somethnig
Actually, it means a lot more than that.
It means you're entitled to a platform - that you can say things into a microphone to a large crowd gathered for any reason on federal land that's open to individuals... including to talk about how other humans are deserving of hate. We don't owe them a space to spread hate speech. We can do better.
like explicitly excluding yelling fire in a theater sent us down a worse path, I'm sure
Absolutely nothing about this is surprising to me in the least. What is surprising, however, is how much people recognize this is a serious problem that seems to continue to get worse, and yet people will insist that free speech is more important. We've placed restrictions on yelling fire in a theater when there is none, because it causes harm to society to do it. Why, similarly, can we not place restrictions on obviously hateful and intolerant speech? Certainly those which have larger platforms and opportunity to sew this intolerance and erode democracy should have more scrutiny, no?
Unfortunately the world has become so divorced from reality it no longer matters whether something is true. It only matters whether you can convince someone it looks or feels true. Management wants subtle changes made by a hallucination engine because it doesn't matter if they fail, they still get their golden parachute and move on to another company they get to ruin 🤷♀️
Yea fair there is definitely the sportswashing angle on this, but they are absolutely leveraging debt for this purchase which they will put on the company. Their deck also talks a ton about AI, which is where the AI/stripping angle comes from. As to whether they can just ignore the debt because oil money, that's I suppose another question entirely.
Actually, it's pretty clear they are planning on completely gutting this company. They're taking on debt to buy this deal, which they will put on the company. Their pitch is to eliminate jobs with AI (which they probably know won't work) which means they'll cut most of the staff and "replace" it with AI, likely contracts with companies they own so that they can continue to leech off whatever income comes in from game sales. The company will continue to churn out trash and make some money by repeating last year's sports game this year but now with AI coding until it eventually declares bankruptcy and is either auctioned off to be stripped for what's left of its parts or simply shutters forever.
I love that it hinges on the affordable care act, and not trans rights, a bigger poison pill than I've ever seen in a fucking funding bill
As someone who basically doesn't use linkedin anymore, and also doesn't particularly care if they train a terrible AI model on my information, can someone explain to me why should I bother to turn off this setting (I have not logged into linkedin in months)?
I'm not writing anyone off, but historically speaking women have not done well as candidates 😞
I don't care if it moves the needle at all, we should still celebrate anyone standing up and doing so publicly. If it reaches a single privileged person who's been unplugged or oblivious or ignorant it's a win.
Also, he's suing the shit out of Disney and their stock is down almost 10% from all the folks cancelling subscriptions and the negative press. Anything that can untangle business with the administration is also a win in my book.
This is not a fair analogy for what is going on here. Video games being blamed harkens back to times when music or other counter cultural media was blamed for behavior. We have a lot of literature which shows that the passive consumption of media doesn't really affect someone in the ways which they were being blamed. From the beginning, this argument lacked a logical or hypothetical framework as well - it was entirely based on moral judgement values by certain individuals in society who simply "believed" that these were the cause.
AI on the other hand, interacts back with you, and amplifies psychosis. Now this is early days and most of what we have is theoretical in nature, based off case-studies, or simply clinical hypothesis [1, 2, 3]. However, there is a clear difference in media itself - the chatbot is able to interact with the user in a dynamic way, and is programmed in a manner by which to reinforce certain thoughts and feelings. The chatbot is also human-seeming enough for a person to anthropomorphize the chatbot and treat it like an individual for the purposes of therapy or an attempt at emotional closeness. While video games do involve human interaction and a piece of media could be designed to be psychologically difficult to deal with, that would be hyper-specific to the media and not the medium as a whole. The issues with chatbots (the LLM subset of AI) is pervasive across all chatbots because of how they are designed and the populace they are serving.
This is a valid point to bring up, however, I think it is shortsighted when we think in a broader context such as that of public health. We could say the same about addictive behaviors and personalities, for example, and absolve casinos of any blame for designing a system which takes advantage of these individuals and sends them down a spiraling path of gambling addiction. Or, we can recognize that this is a contributing and amplifying factor, by paying close attention to what is happening to individuals in a broad sense, as well as smartly applying theory and hypothesis.
I think it's completely fair to say that this kid likely had a lot of contributing factors to his depression and ultimate and final decision. There is a clear hypothetical framework with some circumstantial evidence with strong theoretical support to suggest that AI are exacerbating the problem and also should be considered a contributing factor. This suggests that regulation may be helpful, or at the very least increased public awareness of this particular technology having the potential to cause harm to certain individuals.