While I agree with the point being made--absolutely-- I think there is going to need to be a learning curve for many.

My bad.

message. You'd edited by the time I clicked to preview my response.

Democratic message board, and it's important that they understand that it isn't. If they won't listen to me, maybe the hundreds of negative replies to that Bluesky post will finally get through to them.

AI has its positives, but it’s likely that some of it’s consequences will be devastating for some, if not most or possibly even our specie.

Documentaries on bands, and the weird voice they use, with the strange emphases and inflections, and errors, make them worthless.

worthwhile content from humans. Making it harder for human creatives (as opposed to noncreative human AI users) to get the attention they deserve. And the monetization for their videos, if they want that.

is coming from overseas. Just some people online trying to make a buck by baiting naive Americans who keep falling for their crap.

A lot of it is really obvious, but some of it is quite advanced and it is easy for even perceptive people to fall for it. Then it even goes further with people accusing legitimate posts and videos of being AI when they aren't.

I call out AI whenever I come across it and often block the pages they come from, but it is like playing whack-a-mole. It is like being invaded with cockroaches that multiply faster than you can block them.

I noticed they use a familiar face and have them talking a mile a minute - like they are reciting something in a classroom. That usually tips me off. Also, the channel name is vague and tells you nothing about the creator.

I'll have to look for that, though I tend to avoid most videos online these days. Whenever possible, I'd prefer to read an article than listen to someone explain it to me.

Meanwhile, I've spent less and less time on YouTube. The past couple of years, I've been reading a lot of books. Helps keep me sane.

description has a disclaimer making it clear it isn't George Conway.

But despite the label/disclaimer, this sort of AI puppetry using photorealistic AI should be banned anyway. It's clear from YouTube comments that it deceives a lot of people, and the intent is to deceive.

That YouTuber is using George Conway's AI-generated image to get clicks and sell viewpoints, and it's just as objectionable as it would be if they used his likeness to sell a physical product.

Made more so by the fact that it comports with what I've learned of Conway's philosophy.

It is also confusing to me, since I don't fully understand AI or how to recognize it if there is no warning label.

I wonder if AI was used just to smooth out his delivery to make it easier to listen to.

I'd like to learn more background on this video. For instance, who added the warning that this was fake and does Conway know about it? If so, what is his reaction to it?

Was it Conway himself who used Ai?

It's made worse by the fact that the information presented about the dire consequences of an unaccountable, out of control megalomaniac playing childish power games to feed his own fragile ego, is obviously true and the news needs to be widely disseminated!
The pedo-prez could crash our whole economy, far worse than the 2008 crash.

I read them all and don't recall anything positive.
Just those taking her to task & there were dozens of those.

Did you look at the quote-reposts, too, which is a separate set of replies you reach by clicking the word quotes under the message on Bluesky?

I hit links for more posts and one post with links to those agreeing with her.

Maybe I missed something.

This one was such fun… so I am sharing

— Randi Weingarten 🖇️📚✊🇺🇸 (@rweingarten.bsky.social) 2025-12-25T15:03:54.480Z

Posting AI slop should be immediately disqualifying for union leadership.

There's a convention for AFT next year. Teachers should be seriously looking for new leaders informed on the issues of today.

— Tim Ford (@timfordwrites.bsky.social) 2025-12-29T02:25:15.192Z

I saw them all.
I grossly underestimated how many I read.

responses are incredibly valuable in showing how much anger there is about genAI, and why it's there.

I hope she learned something from the replies she got, too. If not, that union needs a new leader asap.

stolen training data, and with chatbots that pose risks to humans as they simulate conscious and sympathetic beings.

But some types of machine learning also called AI are fine.

Cancer is more likely here to stay than AI and exponentially grows. Does that mean we can't be against it?

China and others including the US are in a race to be dominant in AI. We only see the garbage which are the videoes. But the race is to for dominance with the winner being the leader in technology. The genie can’t go back.

"A race to be dominant in AI." "The race for dominance with the winner being the leader."

That is a bunch of happy horse manure right there.

China wanting Taiwan, silver prices, battery’s, energy prices, defense dominance…AI is the driver and the key to it all.

It is all a bunch of hype.

On edit: Yes, I moved "the goal posts."

type being promoted now - the type creating the bubble and the circular financing and the insane race to add flawed, hallucinating genAI to every device possible.

If it's a race, it's like the world's fastest race into a dead end at the edge of a cliff.

Can’t stand his AI bumper “music”.

I know he has used the same music for a long time. It is weird, but I think thast is because it is played backward (IIRC).

fans who are musicians to write something for him.

I remember when the Stop Online Piracy Act (sponsored and co-sponsored by 15 Democrats, including John Conyers and Adam Schiff, and endorsed by SAG, Actors Equity, the American Federation of Musicians, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Directors Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, etc. etc. etc.) was explicitly opposed by Skinner and many, many posters here.

that.

And as Democrats who hope to win elections, we need to understand how people in those unions feel.

There are Labour Party members and officials in the UK now who are pandering to the AI bros and trying to give them everything they want (including the use of British intellectual property), and they're being idiots who are probably costing Labour support.

If that bill had passed, DU likely would not exist. SOPA would have replaced the DMCA's safe harbor provision and would have made owners of web communities like DU responsible for policing the posts of every single user for copyright violations. The bill would have allowed law enforcement to literally shut down entire domains if a single user posted some kind of copyrighted content on that domain.

There was broad bipartisan support AND OPPOSITION to the bill, and we were not exactly outliers in opposition to it. When I refreshed my memory of this bill from its Wikipedia page, it turned out that organizations such as EFF and the ACLU were opposed to it, as were the American Library Association, who said it could expose libraries to prosecution. Nancy Pelosi was opposed to it, as were most major Internet companies, including Wikipedia.

admin stuff elsewhere gave me less time for DU. And I was focusing on ALEC back then: https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x591230

that the “what are ya gonna do” attitude toward AI companies hoovering up petabytes of artists’ works can almost certainly be traced to the failure to pass any meaningful legislation to stem the tide of copyrighted works online. There are now at least a couple of generations who would look at you like you are crazy if you suggested paying for music, movies, or art.

Sure, it’s our life’s work, but it’s persistently “free” because no one has to take the responsibility, by law, for it being available for download. Nobody really cares unless it’s their ox being gored.

SOPA wasn't that legislation, IMO.

DU's policy has always been that the rights of copyright holders should be respected, so if we get sent a legitimate DMCA takedown request from a copyright holder, we'll comply immediately. But we still get the occasional legal threat from firms trying to extort us by demanding that we pay a large licensing fee for an image that some DU member posted -- even though they did not upload the image to DU's servers (which is not possible) but merely hotlinked it from another site for discussion on DU.

If SOPA replaced the DMCA, we could be taken to court over each and every one of those instances -- whether we won or not would be irrelevant, because the time and expense involved in defending ourselves would put DU out of business. From an administrative point of view, we would have to filter and review every single post before it was allowed to be publicly posted, to ensure that no copyrighted content was included. That in and of itself would end most online communities. The solution to avoid being sued for allowing people to hotlink images would be to disable image linking. The solution to avoid being sued for allowing people to post short excerpts from copyrighted works would be to disallow any content reposting at all.

And then what would there be to talk about? Because there is still a fair use component here -- people are allowed a certain amount of freedom to post content for discussion, and the definition of fair use is still fuzzy. The DMCA means that we are obliged to respect the rights of copyright holders by removing their content if requested, but we won't get dragged into court every single time a copyright holder wants to test whether something is fair use or not. It protects sites like DU from egregious legal threats over content that we couldn't possibly police up front. Bear in mind that the legal threats I mentioned above -- the ones we are protected from thanks to the DMCA -- do not come in the form of legitimate DMCA takedown requests, but in the form of demands for thousands of dollars, along with threats that ten times as much money will be demanded if we don't pay up.

I believe that the best outcome is to protect the rights of copyright holders in a way that also allows people the freedom to discuss that copyrighted content online, without violating people's copyrights. Currently I believe the DMCA gets us closest to that goal -- closer than SOPA would have anyway. But I'm just a reasonably conscientious regular guy -- I'm not a billionaire Internet entrepreneur who has discovered that copyright laws can be ignored if you're too big to fail. The major issue with AI companies right now is that they do not seem to be interested in following any copyright law at all -- they think that the Internet is theirs for the taking, and their scraping and reuse of the entire Internet's content is essentially completely lawless at this point. As usual, it's the richest, most powerful people who are happy to flaunt the law on a massive scale -- and can easily afford lawyers and lobbyists that would potentially allow them to end-run something like SOPA, while small businesses like DU would get quickly crushed underfoot.

Anyway, sorry, not trying to have an argument -- just wanted to put my point of view across. For what it's worth, in a former life I used to be a professional musician, so it's not like I only see one side of the argument here.

wouldn't mind posting it.

I have two brothers who play guitar. One in a garage band as a teenager but never as a paid professional when young, though he's been in his church's band for years now. The other was a professional for years - solo, and in a duo with a female singer, and in a country rock band - and he has fond memories of those days (doesn't play now, unfortunately, due to hand injuries and arthritis).

If you don't want to share your old music or don't have recordings/video, that's fine, and I don't want to pressure you. But if you do, I'd enjoy hearing it, and I'm sure others here would as well.

I remember seeing some of Skinner's artwork a while back, and liking that.

I take pride in having been involved in the "Stop SOPA" movement. I recall using a "Stop SOPA" profile picture on Facebook. SOPA had the backing of big businesses, the same foolish entities that dismantled Napster, WinMX, Limewire, Kazaa, and all those other file-sharing platforms back in the early 2000s. It was a wonderful era to be alive before it was snatched away from us, the people. Halting SOPA was our act of revenge, and I consider it one of the biggest victories of the last 15 years.

Keep up the good work. Much appreciated.

Is how so many companies are tying their data into AI platforms and then "encouraging" their employees to use them for data retrieval. I won't name any companies here, but I will say that I have experienced this. When I try to pull data, I get lots of garbage. Our old search engines do a better job.

I can't visualize this improving, as the errors seem to compound.

sell any tech as I've seen with genAI. So much FOMO leading to foolish decisions and wasted investments.

you have good reasons, you should be able to explain them.

I rec without comment plenty of things that I think are worthwhile. Commenting when something is unworthwhile slop is counterproductive since it takes it to the top of the most recent threads.

knows no limits anymore .

harm done by this tech.

... as a professional artist for 60 years, and long ago stopped counting the number of times I've been fucked over by the supposed "Smartest Guys in the Room", which is to say "businessmen and/or -women" with delusions of grandeur, and a galloping case of the Dunning Kruger Effect. Their brazen contempt for creative people, without whom many of their businesses wouldn't even exist, still enrages me. Now they're using AI to do it, but their contemptuous disregard for the rights of artists hasn't changed one iota. They actively resent people that can do something that they cannot; that's how petty and self-centered they are.

terribly resentful/envious of them. I remember producer Rick Beato doing a video some time back about a young band he knew whose very promising first album was messed up by an interfering A&R man. The same thing can happen in all the arts. If the suits have made the decision to invest in talent - if spending a lot of money on that talent seemed like a good idea - then they should get the hell out of the artist's way. They shouldn't let either contempt toward the artist, or some stupid and egotistical idea that that they'll express their own artistic creativity through directing the artist's work, mess everything up. At least not if the artist is staying true to the type of work that led to the business investment in the first place, holding up their end of the bargain.

I saw representatives of the completely misnamed Big Tech lobbying group the "Chamber of Progress" on X a couple of years ago doing all they could to try to turn people against real artists who objected to their work having been stolen to train AI. Trying to make people view real artists as nasty elite "gatekeepers" who didn't want other people to become artists, which is the reverse of the truth. I saw one of these shills for the AI companies, a lawyer, whining that his parents hadn't bought him a guitar when he was young so he never had the chance to become a rock star that those privileged real musicians had (apparently he'd never heard of any real musicians whose families were poor). So that terribly discriminated-against lawyer and AI shill wanted all the unskilled wannabes to know they were being liberated by AI companies, now that AI tools could instantly let them become musicians, visual artists and writers. I'm surprised they didn't have an AI version of We Shall Overcome for their liberation movement.

But it is not.
I am frightened for my children and grandchildren.
Yet AI is the natural offshoot of curious minds trying to make computing the best technology.
As a Luddite, I would like the tool to be mindful of us all, but I also understand experimentation and mistakes brought us to our modern world.
Art is the finest representation of a spiritual explanation. And yet, even Picasso understood copying. Folklore and a Bob Dylan modernization are linked in his library.
We are here. We have made the leap from analog to digital and HAL is sneaking into our platforms.
Renaissance masters used camera obscura to raise their techniques beyond the classics.
I still prefer a knife to all the culinary gadgetry available, but a mandolin eases my scalloped potatoes.
We already are entertained by the special effects in so many areas. Color television. Technicolor.
I go to live performances as much as possible.
Will we, the older generations, be impressed with the computer technologists who use AI to expedite their special effects? Will we be thrilled with an AI solution to rebuild cartilage in an aching knee?
Our grandchildren won't know anything different.
I spent years buying and selling antiques. The real thing was costly. The reproduction was inexpensive.
We let reproductions into our world. They are here to stay.

"I'm outraged by the possibility that the plebs may own and hold the Holy Bible produced by Satan's heretical ink and paper printing contraption. The only good Bibles are produced by Scribes, Members of the Scribe Union #383"

interesting try at mocking unions fighting exploitation by billionaire AI bros.

Could the folks who post AI crap at least be segregated into their own forum?

Or if there's another way to opt out, I'd love to know how.

for a board representing a party that traditionally backs workers exploited by corporations. There's no way around the two central economic facts of genAI - that it's built on stolen intellectual property, and that it's intended to replace human workers.

It's important that DUers be aware of AI and the harm its doing, and of how ruthless and amoral and/or crazy the AI bros are.

And DUers need to know how to recognize and avoid all the AI clickbait now flooding YouTube, and all the AI scams elsewhere - the AI-generated music on Spotify and other streaming services, the AI-generated books on self-publishing platforms like Kindle, the AI scam ads on Facebook offering to sell seeds for plants that are really exotic looking because they don't exist. The AI-created fake news sites.

AI has booby-trapped much of the internet in only a few years. And the AI bros are aligned with Trump. So we can't just ignore it and try to pretend it isn't there.

There are multiple levels:

Fully AI generated stories ("news" or opinions)
Fully AI written posts based on peoples prompts
Deepfake video or pictures about events
Deepfakes of people (which is increasingly becoming a problem)

I've seen a bunch of DUers fall for the last one, and the reason is that they are tough to detect

The AI stories might be detectable if they are linked. The posts are very hard to detect. The deepfake videos and pictures are challenging to detect, so it's important to check sources. Even with that, it is challenging.