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Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

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Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#171

Post by skrebbel »

andrewstuart wrote: post #86
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…

So it just happens that hippy values and western greed kowtowing to authoritarian regime values purely for the sake of money happen to be exactly the same thing. A story too convenient for my taste but everyone is free to believe whatever they want.

What would you do?

Remember, there’s really only two options: run a service in a country and abide by the law and norms of that country, or don’t run a service in that country (ie IP geoblock the entire place).

I mean, sure, you can run a service that abides by the law but not the norms (eg Onlyfans is available in the US despite the US being a country founded by prudes), but it’s hard and you need your full focus to get it just right. And, worse yet, in China the border between law and norms is notoriously blurred.

I’m for freedom of speech and against Chairman Xi, but I can’t really fault the Midjourney team for choosing to operate in China regardless. It’s a hard choice and there are no right answers.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#172

Post by ricochet11 »

nirui wrote: post #146
taylorius wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. I clicked on the link, thinking "Oh come on, it can't be THAT bad", and was presented with a literal endless gallery of slightly Manga-ish women with unfathomably huge boobs. Maybe, instead of turning the whole world into paperclips, the AI apocalypse will consist of the filling of every last speck of hard disk storage space with a trillion boringly similar synthetic jpegs of such charming ladies.

Such innocent hashtag as well, #StableDiffusion. Don't even need to clear the browsing history.

I recently got into CNC machining, so tried searching twitter to find some accounts to follow. boy was i surprised by that #cnc hashtag.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#173

Post by jpgvm »

rippercushions wrote: post #166
jpgvm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I know, which is why I specifically said the old King. The two rulers are viewed very differently in Thailand but the laws apply equally to both.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#175

Post by pjc50 »

secondcoming wrote: post #148
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…

It really perplexes me that there isn't any Internet Outrage about fetishisation of young Japanese girls; cartoons or otherwise. As far as I can see it's the one area of DEI that gets a free pass. It's really creepy.

You occasionally see some discourse, but generally that's fairly far down the list of priorities of Asian or Asian-American women themselves. There was more discourse in the Anglosphere about the anti-Asian mass shootings. Tends to get subsumed into generic pro/anti porn discourse. I suspect the discourse from Japanese women themselves is conducted in Japanese and therefore invisible to us.

I don't think in a professional DEI environment you'd get a pass for having a fetishy anime desktop background.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#176

Post by michaelt »

lewhoo wrote: post #127

Maybe I'm naive but I think it's a strong argument on why China won't catch up with the tech of LLM's and diffusion anytime soon. Half of their effort goes to censorship.

If you browse https://paperswithcode.com you'll find when you look at the highest performing models on a given dataset, you're as likely to see Nanjing, Shanghai or Tsinghua as you are to see Stanford, MIT or UCLA.

IMHO there's a good chance China already has the lead here.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#177

Post by darepublic »

taylorius wrote: post #123
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…

Lol. I clicked on the link, thinking "Oh come on, it can't be THAT bad", and was presented with a literal endless gallery of slightly Manga-ish women with unfathomably huge boobs. Maybe, instead of turning the whole world into paperclips, the AI apocalypse will consist of the filling of every last speck of hard disk storage space with a trillion boringly similar synthetic jpegs of such charming ladies.

[flagged]

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#178

Post by prepend »

skrebbel wrote: post #171
andrewstuart wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it just happens that hippy values and western greed kowtowing to authoritarian regime values purely for the sake of money happen to be exactly the same thing. A story too convenient for my taste but everyone is free to believe whatever they want.

What would you do? Remember, there’s really only two options: run a service in a country and abide by the law and norms of that country, or don’t run a service in that country (ie IP geoblock the entire place). I mean, sure, you can run a service that abides by the law but not the norms (eg Onlyfans is available in the US despite the US being a country founded by prudes), but it’s hard and you need your full focus to…

I could have a set of values I believe in and not run my service in countries that violate my values. Seems pretty simple.

Not simple if you want to make money from a huge percentage of people in China.

Also, it seems like the principle of giving into bullies isn’t just an immediate decision but a precedent for future decisions where the rule is to capitulate to authoritarian regime demands.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#179

Post by pell »

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…

>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.

Under Xi's dictatorship hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been imprisoned. There's plenty of evidence of forced labor, mass internment and forced sterilization. I don't know how a "hippie" attitude would support this?

Blocking prompts of Xi seems like bowing down to a terrible dictatorship to ensure that this giant market stays open to them. I can easily create prompts for various other dictators that don't allow ridicule in their countries. Try everything from al-Sisi to Museveni to Putin. All of those work easily.

Plenty of companies are adjusting their businesses so they can operate in China. At least they openly admit why they do so.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#180

Post by vidarh »

ElFitz wrote: post #157
vidarh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this may be true in a general sense in that most companies have bylaws that does not set out another purpose, and that in theory shareholders could go after a board, and so indirectly a CEO, that does not seek to maximise profit, this is overly simplistic. The CEO is beholden to the directions of the board. The board has wide latitude to act within the rather wide remit of acting within the best interests of th…

What board? Midjourney has no investors. No shareholders. He’s only beholden to himself. And proud of it.

Midjourney is an incorporated company. It has a board and at least one shareholder. Whether or not they're all the same person is irrelevant to the point made, which is that this annoying notion people keep bringing up when a CEO makes a choice that they're somehow inherently required to do what maximises profit is false.
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