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Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

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Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#291

Post by alkonaut »

mjr00 wrote: post #272
alkonaut wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> teams tries to stay out of it. There is no "staying out of" politics or just "remaining neutral" on topics (edit: the context here is "when doing business with the one of the belligerents of a conflict, an oppressive regime and so on. Not universally). Not taking a stand for one side in a two sided topic means taking the other side. Either you are pro gay rights or against it. Or you are pro democracy or against it…

Which side are you on in the Liancourt Rocks/Takeshima/Dokdo dispute? Remember, there's no remaining neutral in politics, so I expect a well-reasoned answer on this fundamental territorial rights dispute.

I have no idea what that is, and I hope I'm not passively taking a position in that dispute due to my business involvements (of which are none).

I'm not arguing that everyone have an opinion on everything. I'm arguing that when you do business, you might be taking a side in something whether you would like to or not.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#292

Post by alkonaut »

adolph wrote: post #273
alkonaut wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> teams tries to stay out of it. There is no "staying out of" politics or just "remaining neutral" on topics (edit: the context here is "when doing business with the one of the belligerents of a conflict, an oppressive regime and so on. Not universally). Not taking a stand for one side in a two sided topic means taking the other side. Either you are pro gay rights or against it. Or you are pro democracy or against it…

> There is no "staying out of" politics or just "remaining neutral" on topics. How would one determine if this statement is true or not? If true, is the truth universal or contextual?

The context here is "when doing business".

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#293

Post by emporas »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #276
emporas wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to speech ban, is exactly like the alcohol ban which occurred in America at some point. When alcohol prohibition was happening at New York, it was Greek gangs which transported illegal alcohol, executing snitches and blackmailing cops and stuff. The Italian word mafia, started to describe that kind of situation, only after Italian gangs overthrew Greek gangs in the dominance of the black market at New Yo…

Bitcoin is 100% traceable, and lots of black markets have been shut down for using it.

Yes indeed, it is 100% percent traceable, but many black market organizations are not taken down, not because they avoid detection, but because the leaders of the operation are untouchable in some way or another.

But i think you are referring to BTC, and BTC is not Bitcoin. Btc doesn't support small enough transactions for it to function as a market of information, let alone black market of information.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#294

Post by tjpnz »

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…

If you want to operate in that country and accept all of the downsides there's nothing preventing you from offering China an inferior version of your product, as many companies already do. That they're going to force feed the rest of the world this authoritarian, fascist, shit is downright deplorable and worthy of condemnation.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#295

Post by staticman2 »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #27
fsloth wrote: post #12

> It turns out authoritarian power and capital markets can be scary effective. I don't think authoritarian systems are as dynamic and innovative as democratic ones, but a gigantic authoritarian regime can utilize external democracies for innovation and then leverage their market power to silence criticism both home and abroad. Creative tools that impede free speech are harbingers of Orwellian future. "Sorry, you are…

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.

You can already fit something like 800,000 books on a 256 GB USB stick.

An LLM isn't going to be more effective.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#296

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

That sounds great, but this is bllsht. They refuse porn explicitly (and stable diffusion as well btw, it's blocked by default but being opensource means that anyone can remove the nsfw filter) whereas there's no such policy about politics, and you can in fact generate political satires for pretty much everyone but Xi, and even the CEO acknowledge that this is done to keep access to the Chinese market (or to preserve “the ability for people in China to use this tech” as he says it).

I don't know why some people wants to keep defending the indefensible, is being a contrarian some kind of addiction?

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#297

Post by silverlake »

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…

Holz sold Leap for $30M, which is less than all the funding they raised. I’m assuming his common stock went to 0. So he’s still motivated to make money on MJ, as he should be.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#298

Post by staticman2 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #244
basisword wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand (although don’t agree with) a decision to block these things based on respecting everyone’s religious beliefs. Blocking satire of a specific religion though points towards caving to fear rather than a rational policy choice.

It rather depends though doesn't it. It's very clear in Islam that images of the prophet are forbidden, they find it offensive. So out of respect it would seem reasonable to disable that. It's not then reasonable to disable generating images of jesus or the pope. Why? Because christians don't object to images of the pope or jesus. If there were specific things that christians found offensive, I think it's reasonable…

I think you are ignoring the elephent in the room:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

I think the concern is more that someone will show up and murder everyone in your office for allowing drawings of the prophet Mohammed than concern it is "offensive" per se.

I'm not blaming a company for making the decision to not put their employees lives in jeopardy, but let's not pretend this is some benign judgement call over whether to offend someone.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#299

Post by FpUser »

Steltek wrote: post #252
FpUser wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what can happen when you ridicule Macron in France: "She currently stands accused of "insulting the president of the republic" and will stand trial on 20 June in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said. She risks a prison sentence and a fine of €15,000 if convicted at the trial." - [0] Looks like they are learning from the best. [0] - https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/03/30/heres-the-story-...

Somewhere out there is a good copy-pasta dismissal of these boring reflexive "But look! A Western country did something similar that one time so that makes it okay for us to do!" responses.

To mind reader:

>"that one time so that makes it okay for us to do"

I am not "us". I live in Canada. And I am way more concerned with what we and the West in general are doing in human rights department then what China does. When I see the case dismissed and prosecutor loosing the job I'll be celebrating.

I'll live it to China to sort their own shit.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#300

Post by singleshot_ »

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…

The right answer is not to operate your business in totalitarian states no matter how much you want to be rich.
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