In the same country: overseas students from China make death threats to fellow students they consider Chinese if they hold inconvenient views, with no consequences (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593320)
Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
71–80 of 352 posts
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.
Encyclopedias exist today as well, and already fit on USB sticks. Still, Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either. Modern authoritarian states are extremely adept at controlling the spread of information. LLMs are not even a drop in the bucket for what the state apparatus can do. If sharing USB sticks with LLMs that talk about the Tiananmen massacre ever became po…
> Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either
Text versus images? China’s urban elite are comfortable. They live a first-world life. China is a middle economy because the fruits of its gains haven’t reached the periphery. I can see Beijing being fearful of visual satire that can be perceived by a farmer in a way that written text, particularly English text, isn’t an issue.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#73> It’s not just Midjourney’s China-based users that can’t satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States. I'm speechless and a bit scared...
Just looked up his bio :
After Leap Motion, Holz started wondering about what the future would look like, and what people would need in this uncertain future.
He came up for 3 pillars for what he thought would be the most important: reflection, imagination, and coordination.
Looks like he tramples on his own pillars.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#74Everyone is crying Corporate Greed in here. And, I can understand why. But, here’s another perspective based on listening to David Holz answer all kinds of questions from random users for four hours a week for over a year during Midjourney’s “Office Hours”.
AFAICT, Midjourney has no shareholders and David Holz is the farthest thing from a slick CEO. He’s a big dreamer hippie dork. He made all the money he cares to have from the sale of his previous company and now just wants to work on fun research projects. The goal of Midjourney is to bring creative power to as many people as possible.
Whenever politics or other controversial topics come up, the MJ teams tries to stay out of it. They just want a welcoming space for all sorts of people to collaborate and create. Lots of people complain that they don’t allow porn. But, as a result, a millions of people who are not just horny teenage boys enjoy hanging out on the server sharing and discussing art that is not just pics of sexy women all day every day. Looking at you, unending parade of unfathomly huge boobs on https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23StableDiffusion
David seems to think that since ridiculing politicians in China is taboo, having people ridicule Xi on MJ would make it unwelcoming to people in China. He wants them to feel comfortable collaborating with people all over the world on MJ. So, prompting Xi is blocked. That’s all there is to it.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#75What happens if you ask Midjourney for a picture of Mohammad?
I tried it on DallE and it says "It looks like this request may not follow our content policy."
Firefly returns "One or more words violate Firefly user guidelines. Please edit and try again." with a picture of a very cute monkey. However, Xi Jinping riding a bike works just fine, although, the results look nothing at all like Xi Jinping riding a bike.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#76You can make satire on Biden and Putin, but for Xi Jingping: > We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.
Principles are pretty important to some people, too.
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Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as western companies can’t do unrestricted business in China, neither should Chinese companies be able here. The earlier we break the toxic relationship, the better. But yeah, money over everything.
> As long as western companies can’t do unrestricted business in China, neither should Chinese companies be able here. Well, they can't and they don't. They have to follow the local laws. Facebook, for example, doesn't operate in China because Facebook made the deliberate decision that they don't want to follow the same laws Chinese companies have to follow. Their comment was this: “We need to figure out a solution t…
True, but it’s not like there is any parity between the laws. China now is not the China of twenty years ago.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#78>> “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.” How about "the ability for people to be free and have free systems and society is more important than the money we hope to get from doing business in China". But here we are in Silicon Valley where business and money rise above all else including national sovereignty.
As long as western companies can’t do unrestricted business in China, neither should Chinese companies be able here. The earlier we break the toxic relationship, the better. But yeah, money over everything.
Honestly this is my main problem with TikTok. I know Meta and Google spy just as much as TikTok. However it is problematic that Chinese app companies have full access to Western markets while the reverse is severely limited.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#79I think this is a time for people to realize that political satire has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the political regimes it aims to satirize. The amount of satire levied against Donald Trump, measured in tweets, art, comedy routines, scathing op-eds and every thought or public expression of ill will surpasses that of every other leader in human history by a large margin. And all in all it had little to no e…
Sure, I’ve been aware of that since the 80s when a generation of comics cut their teeth mercilessly satirising Margaret Thatcher here in the uk. I grew up on it. Had zero political effect whatsoever, but it’s still a valuable and important free speech right.
Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I may point out here that if we take the word "democracy" at face value (i.e. That the ruling entity needs to have the support of the majority of demos) then most countries are really not democratically governed: The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote - which gets even worse if you account for people who are eligible to vote but abstain.
> The people in charge get voted in by a minority of the people who go to vote Except for a couple examples in the US, I'm not aware of democratic countries where this has actually occurred. And in the US, it's not a common occurrence.
in almost any election in every European country the voter presence is 50% or below. I think that's what the comment was about... is just a small % of people that participate in voting and even smaller percentage that votes for the winner.