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Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

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Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#341

Post by iamsaitam »

prox wrote: post #69
andrewstuart wrote: post #47

>> “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.

Good luck buying any* kind of products when China is out of the picture.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#342

Post by jpgvm »

tekknik wrote: post #336
jpgvm wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I just feel this sort of nuance is lost on primarily American audiences. The world isn't homogenous and at least here in Thailand values are significantly different for better or worse. So why not reduce functionality in the foreign versions and allow the rest of the world to have this functionality?

I think it depends on if the output space is shared.

In the case of MidJourney the output is in Discord for all to see. Setting community standards like no-porn is about creating a space where the most possible people will feel welcome. I would like to think a policy of "no disrespectful imagery" of legally-protected deities or figures wouldn't be that burdensome as a whole. It also helps to avoid drama. There is probably places that such drama would be a welcome addition but I get the feeling MidJourney is not one of those places.

I'm not saying we should bake such constraints into the models, that I think is in poor taste and unnecessary. If people can run the model on their own machine where the output is private to them they should be allowed to generate whatever they want and they can post that in venues where that sort of content is acceptable.

But when images are emitted into a public shared space I do think some rules on what is and isn't appropriate are fair game. At the end of the day it's meant to be an AI art community that is about the fusion of technology and creativity. It's not setup to be a place for political discourse.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#343

Post by rldjbpin »

as an outsider who doesn't even use MJ, they are private entitty and are free to do whatever they please. it is not that they are the only GANs capable of generating images.

if your only complaint about this topic is that you want winnie the pooh a certain way, go use the other ways possible to express your freedom of easel drawing.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#344

Post by adolph »

alkonaut wrote: post #292
adolph wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Ok

How would one determine if this statement is true or not "when doing business?"

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#345

Post by joemazerino »

flappyeagle wrote: post #218
joemazerino wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is worth a flagging. I'm not on this site to look at pedo nonsense. Try making a point without actually linking a source.

It’s not pedo nonsense. Twitter doesn’t allow that. It’s just women. If women make you uncomfortable don’t click.

These aren't "women" pal sorry to inform you. They are clearly underage girls.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#346

Post by staticman2 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #339
staticman2 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

You can say you wouldn't mock the prophet Mohammed because you fear some Islamic terrorists might come after you. I understand that. But you can't say that's why someone else is choosing not to, as I explained - I wouldn't depict the prophet simply because I think it's disrespectful to Muslims. You shouldn't impose your reasons on someone else. Personally, I don't think you can point to 1 terrorist incident almost a…

You can explain why you personally would not draw the prophet Mohammed but we're not talking about you, we're talking about a company in the business of generating A.I. drawings I believe.

Or maybe we're more generally talking about a hypothetical media company, I'm not sure.

We know for a fact that high profile media companies avoid drawing Mohammed due to death threats, not out of sensitivy to people of faith:

"South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were threatened in 2010 for the prior depictions of Muhammad. That prompted Comedy Central to remove voice and visual references in the episodes, and eventually to pull the entire episodes from streaming."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadline.com/2020/06/south-park...

That incident I linked to wasn't the only terrorist incident so I don't think your characterization of why I linked to that attack is reasonable, you seem to be implying that I drew a wild conclusion based on one incident, as if I couldn't possibly have been aware of other attacks.

I'm confused about your reference to Putin. As far as I know he only orders assassinations of Russians and Russian ex-pats and non- Russians making fun of him have been perfectly safe.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#347

Post by tekknik »

jpgvm wrote: post #342
tekknik wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just feel this sort of nuance is lost on primarily American audiences. The world isn't homogenous and at least here in Thailand values are significantly different for better or worse. So why not reduce functionality in the foreign versions and allow the rest of the world to have this functionality?

I think it depends on if the output space is shared. In the case of MidJourney the output is in Discord for all to see. Setting community standards like no-porn is about creating a space where the most possible people will feel welcome. I would like to think a policy of "no disrespectful imagery" of legally-protected deities or figures wouldn't be that burdensome as a whole. It also helps to avoid drama. There is pro…

Discord is banned in China. If any Chinese who agree with Chinese law are on Discord they are violated said law. So no, not this.

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#348

Post by CapricornNoble »

mjr00 wrote: post #318
alkonaut wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it matters to their business or customers. So while they may well be taking a stance without even knowing - no one cares. Few are demanding they leave either country (which is the interesting threshold here).

> I don’t think it matters to their business or customers. So while they may well be taking a stance without even knowing - no one cares. If Google came out and said "Dokdo is Korea territory" I absolutely guarantee there would be a complete shitstorm in Japan, probably ending with Google getting banned from Japan. You have absolutely no clue what a hot-button issue that is between those countries. Your initial asser…

Another example of how these two countries get pissy about naming things:

We were using Agile Client as our Common Operational Picture tool during a joint exercise with the ROK Marine Corps. The default map layer in Agile has labels on bodies of water in white text built into the imagery. The body of water between Korea and Japan was labeled "Sea of Japan". The Koreans were ADAMANT that we either remove the text or change it to "East Sea". I think we dropped a blue rectangle layer over the text and then another text layer with "East Sea" on top of that. But they repeatedly pestered us about this seemingly-small detail. We're about to get our asses chewed by flag officers for not executing the Commander's Update Brief in timely manner, while also struggling to manage the info flow about the battlespace, but the #1 issue to you is the damn text label on the map mentioning Japan?!?!

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#349

Post by CapricornNoble »

aenvoker wrote: post #240
pmoriarty wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, Midjourney lets users invite the Midjourney bot to their own private Discord server/channel, where no one else can see the images they generate using that bot. There's no reason that Midjourney couldn't allow whatever content the user wants to be generated there, as other Midjourney users would not be able to see it. But they insist on censoring Midjourney even in channels/servers inaccessible to the wider…

Hi. I’m a volunteer Midjourney content moderator. They don’t pay me. I’m under no obligation to make them look good. The team behind MJ are a bunch of overly-nice people. The work very hard night and day to help people bring art into the world. When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on. It’s not what they w…

>> When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on.

This seems like a fundamental failure to understand humans. One of my favorite Renaissance artists arguably produced gore/gross-out material for his time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

Re: Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping

#350

Post by aenvoker »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #349
aenvoker wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. I’m a volunteer Midjourney content moderator. They don’t pay me. I’m under no obligation to make them look good. The team behind MJ are a bunch of overly-nice people. The work very hard night and day to help people bring art into the world. When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on. It’s not what they w…

>> When they see their hard work resulting in porn, gore, gross-out or hate material, it is very discouraging. It’s not material they want to collaborate on. This seems like a fundamental failure to understand humans. One of my favorite Renaissance artists arguably produced gore/gross-out material for his time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_Death

I handle most of the moderation of violence and gore. That painting would get a user a message about the violence and gore guidelines, but that’s all. The guidelines are all about avoiding visceral reaction from the viewer. Not visceral like “The war my people endured was horrible”. Visceral like “oh god my face is torn off”, “me punching my girlfriend” or “politician I don’t like not just in hell, but explicitly burning and screaming and suffering painfully in hell.”

We get a lot of death metal fans, 80’s schlock movie fans and a few horror artists that I get to talk to regularly. Pretty much everyone is pretty chill and agrees the guidelines are a good thing for the community. And, the few that don’t agree with MJ’s terms of service are free to do whatever they want elsewhere using Stable Diffusion.

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