Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 352 posts

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#161

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #136
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There. Is. No. such. Thing. As. Local. Law. There is a fine mist of ilusion of rule of law. But the party is outside of it. And the truth is, the laws is more similar to the law of network connections within the family graph of a mafia clan. Its basically just used as a body wrapping foil, once the graph has decided to finnish of some node. Stop projecting western values upon a completely different scenario, just bec…

What do you mean by “there is no such thing as local law”? You mean in the context of China specifically or in general?

In the context of china. And its reflected in the sallaries. Its a decorative position of a society pretending to be ruled by law. But in the end its not. So why pay them as good as they do in the west.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-lawyer-in-Chin...

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#162

Post by hyperpape »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #129
pengstrom wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or course, and their decisions are free to be scrutinized.

Scrutiny is justified. However, it should be within the scope of whether the product fulfills the need and should have nothing to do with "sovereignty" or "free speech rights," don't you think?

Can't believe how often I see this sentiment, and how nonsensical it is.

We're private citizens, nothing prevents us from criticizing them for a wide variety of reasons. If you want to restrict yourself and ignore everything except the literal function of the product, you're free to do that, but you can't argue everyone else has to do the same.

Or is your argument that we have some kind of social responsibility to judge products based on exclusively on what the product does, but the product has no social responsibility whatsoever? That's a double standard that can't have any justification.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#163

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jpgvm wrote: post #158
fsloth wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the king of Thailand and Xi Jinping is that the former is basically a cultural institution, while the latter is a political figure who uses repression and censorship to consolidate power. Xi's power grab is not part of some Chinese cherished cultural tradition - it's just a power grab, and probably viewed as such even within the party.

I'm aware of the differences. I just wanted to provide an example of censorship that is more aligned with cultural values to provide a counter-example to the thread that violating such laws can never be exclusionary. There are are similar laws that involve depictions of The Buddha, monks etc here that would fall into the same category. I imagine this is less contentious for Western observers because religion is often…

Here’s the difference: is Holz banning the production of images of the King?

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#164

Post by ElFitz »

andreiii wrote: post #80
HWR_14 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the voter presence is 50% or below

What do you mean by "voter presence"? And 50% of what? Of registered voters? Of people eligible to vote?

Because statistics would beg to differ. [^1]

It might hold for european elections [^2], as almost nobody seems to care about those, leading to a low turnout, but that definitely isn’t true about national elections.

[1]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/these-countries-have-...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/27/europe...

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#165

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dcl wrote: post #152

Would it be remotely possible to make a law to prevent this 'voluntary' deification of international despots?

> Would it be remotely possible to make a law to prevent this 'voluntary' deification of international despots?

Probably not. What we may need are export restrictions and subsidies for researchers who develop models that adhere to our values.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#166

Post by rippercushions »

jpgvm wrote: post #95
FormerBandmate wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's taboo because a dictator forbids it. The people have nothing to do with it

Similar would also be illegal in Thailand under Lèse-majesté. Political satire of the old King in particular would be unwelcoming to many Thais which held him in an esteem above such things. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it wouldn't also be culturally unacceptable and alienating.

Most Thais would quite happily satirize the current King, whose antics really satirize themselves (see below), but they can't because they would end up in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fufu_(dog)

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#167

Post by pjc50 »

mindcandy wrote: post #74

Everyone 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 ha…

People keep talking about "AI alignment" when they haven't solved the "CEO alignment" problem, or the question "alignment with what, exactly?"

> The goal of Midjourney is to bring creative power to as many people as possible.

AI is unarguably powerful, even if we're still struggling to quantify that in terms of how "intelligent" it is, to what extent it's plagiarism, or reliability, etc. The consequence of power is necessarily interacting with real-world political power structures. There is no "neutral" option; AI will empower some and disempower others, who are going to object to that. As we're seeing in this thread, if you empower or disempower one side of a political dispute (making Xi art or not), there's going to be one side that gets mad at you.

Make cultural products, get culture war.

I do wonder if this is going to be regarded as the "Thomas Midgely" era of AI, where scientists from the 2050s struggle with the legacy of widespread AI "contamination" of everything in the data record by people who didn't acknowledge downsides.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#169

Post by hutzlibu »

not-chatgpt wrote: post #131
mindcandy wrote: post #74

Everyone 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 ha…

Is there an actual source for that or are you just here to complain about Stable Diffusion users flooding your Twitter with AI waifus? If David is such a "big dreamer hippie dork," he should: 1. either open source the model or at least make it cheaper ($8/month for just 200 images is ridiculous) and 2. not bow down to dictators, or just stay out of political subjects completely.

I agree with 1. but how can you ever hope to achieve 2?

Generating realistic images is a powerful tool, that is used for political reasons already, so politicians will get involved. So it is a hard question, but I hope if I am in such a position, I will not preemptively try to please the winni puhs.

One solution would probably be, to not allow generating pictures with real persons at all. Whether they are Trump or Xi.

Post reply on HN