Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf.
I didn't and wouldn't have backed Unstable Diffusion, but people were willing to spend money on it, it seems clearly legal from our current understanding, and there's nothing in the Kickstarter that suggests it's malicious or would otherwise violate any ToS or guidelines; in fact the campaign seems careful to suggest that they were intentionally aiming on making it difficult to abuse, which I know people have feelings about here too, but the point is that this seems like a textbook example of a project that dotted its I's and crossed its T's.
But some people didn't like it, I assume, and therefore they had to find a reason it violated their guidelines and shut it down.
I know that objectivity and neutrality are no longer hot concepts, and I also understand that not everything from the way things "used" to run would still work today, but I can't help but feel this was just a completely unnecessary concession that helps nobody. Crowdfunding was supposed to empower people to directly support things that they wanted to see, but when it goes through gatekeepers like Kickstarter and Gofundme, they become the ones with all of the power to decide what things are allowed.
I think it's probably all moot. Nobody would defend a campaign like this anyways, so trying to make the case that this is a(nother) bad precedent is impossible. People just simply don't give a shit anymore.
Beyond the trivial, there is no such thing as a neutral platform. At any sort of scale, you have to make choices. Do you host spammers or people who hate spam? Do you host would-be ethnic cleansers or the people they would violently drive away? Do you host people eager to exploit children, or do you want your platform to be safe for children? Do you host people who are eager to bother [insert ethnic, sexuality, or gender group] or the people they would be harassing?
Even if the people you find to run the platform are completely amoral, these are also business questions. People have freedom of association, and they will use it. Businesses will too. If you want to run a "neutral and objective" hosting company that is happy to take the nazis and the spammers and the carders and the ddosers, you will quickly find yourself specializing in that market, because few others will choose to be associated with that.
No, I don’t accept that it’s “the people” boycotting Kickstarter? It’s a small minority of media and activists threatening platforms with clickbait headlines, doxxing, and regulation if they don’t give up neutrality, and a larger group who believes whatever the media tells them or has no incentive to speak up. The choice Kickstarter made wasn’t “Do my customers have a principled stance against Unstable Diffusion?” It was, “Do I stand up for my principles - or do I have to put up with $MEDIA_OUTLET running wall to wall stories claiming I hate artists, 200 activists dogpiling my every twitter post, and ordinary people unconsciously associating me with whatever caricature they read on Twitter?” In this case and most others, neutrality is impossible because a minority has chosen to make it impossible, not because either Kickstarter or its customers made a principled decision. This is why this entire thread exists: to counterbalance this and to make clear that cowardice comes with its own costs.
Quick policy decisions needed! Do we block or promote Rohingyan folk art? Are "Russian" nesting dolls a microagression? Are suffragette ribbons hateful now?
The idea that platforms, all of them, need to enforce the day-to-day minutia of the chattering classes is ridiculous.
Platforms need to pick a few broad policies. "No porn" is a pretty good policy actually, and stick with it. And of course actually illegal things, "anything that is obviously illegal, or that we are told to take down with a warrant".
That is one set of choices. You'll get some people and you won't get others. But by picking cartoonish examples, you're failing to grapple with the real choices that platforms have to make all the time.
There is no such thing as a broad policy, not in practice. If you need to get a group of people to make consistent decisions about what porn is, and a much larger group of people to understand where the lines are and feel your judgments are fair, then you'll need extremely detailed polices.
If you allow self segregation you can host them all on your platform. Don't show the far right any far left content and vice versa. Disrupt any coordinated campaigns.
It certainly used to be the case that DNS servers would happily resolve both stormfront and the workers party websites. Would be good to go back to that pre cancellation world.
Oh? Reddit allows self-segregation. Do you think they don't have moderation problems? They too had to make choices.
And if you want to host the the nazis, nobody's stopping you but you. Most of us, though, don't think the world would be better if nazi propaganda were more easily available.
"Nazi" is such an annoying term these days... if a group shares a single idea or belief the nazi party did AND one doesn't like that group then they get called Nazis. Whether it's nationalisation, nationalism, not liking new pronouns, anti-immigrant sentiment, believing in violence to achieve political aims, state surveillance or ethnic segregation, believing Jews have too much influence or even having not disassociated from a group or individual with one of the above beliefs... having even a single thing in common (even if every other belief is different) is enough for the label these days...
Makes virtually every group (including antifa and BLM ironically) a "nazi" group, rendering the term meaningless.
Excellent try at running the conversation off into an irrelevant maze there. Who could possibly know if Stormfront, who you brought up and I was referring to, could be meaningfully be called neo-Nazi? Certainly not anybody very intent on keeping it murky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
Regardless, your list of items help prove my point that there is no neutral. One can decide to platform or ban any or all of those things. Choosing to publish it all is no more neutral than banning it all.
For but one counterexample among many, look at where we get our oil. Saudi Arabia is one of the most tyrannical oppressive and regressive societies, but that's all perfectly fine to the powers that be so long as they keep the oil moving. And I don't think this is really hypocritical.
The entire reason society works, or worked, is because people were willing to put aside their differences, regardless of how extreme, to engage in behaviors that were mutually beneficial. Start judging people based on adherence to your own politics and you'll find that, sooner or later, everybody will be your enemy.
There are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people who do not regard Saudi oppression as "perfectly fine" regardless of which chemicals they offer for sale. I don't really accept this counterargument, since overlooking human rights abuses is one of the most common complaints about organizations like the UN, the United States government, and countless other political bodies.
As far as your second paragraph, in your framework society never really worked, which conveniently explains why there has always been war in some part of the world as far back as anyone can remember.
What people individually think has little to do with who is considered an ally and who is considered an enemy. These are decisions made by our "representative" governments which ultimately shapes society. In a democracy your voice is defined by what you vote for. As people keep voting for people that are more than happy to buddy buddy with anybody, regardless of how awful, so long as they are geopolitically obsequious, then that is the status quo of "society."
And there will always be war for the same reason there will always be murder. I would argue that rather than trying to frame a society around the concept of preventing war, it may be more pragmatic to try to minimize the impact of war such that otherwise minor conflicts between two nations don't end up dragging the entire world to war, for what is always framed as some greater good, but invariably just results in exponentially more death and destruction with far less than nothing to show for it.
reddit and 4chan were famously very strongly "free speech" before gamergate kicked off our current political climate
People don't realize that you want the filth out in the open, where it can be tracked. Deplatforming doesn't kill anything, it just sends it underground, furthering the cause for the various shadow systems that spring up from it.
If you’re counting niche places like 4chan, you can still get to places like that today.
Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all.
Forcing the shitty folks underground breaks the edgy-meme-to-radicalization pipeline quite effectively. I’ve greatly enjoyed not having to hear about Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis every day.
> But kicking Milo Yiannopoulos off Twitter didn’t make him stronger. It pushed him almost completely off the mainstream agenda. And part of the “fun” of being a Milo fan was precisely that prominence! You weren’t just listening to a random online crank; you were listening to an online crank who was very good at getting under prominent people’s skin. Lose that reach and some of the thrill is gone.
> Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all.
Yes it was, as once upon a time Reddit itself didn't take down a whole lot. If the mods of a given community didn't do what you think they are supposed to do then there were no real, enforced rules.
> Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all.
Hah. They permitted /r/n****** for years. Just about the only thing reddit would outright ban you for was illegal content, and maybe automated spamming.
> Reddit has been moderated the entire time, at a per-community level. It was never a free-for-all.
Sure, but the moderation team members have dramatically shifted from (and I’m being glib here) “kinda cringey atheist libertarians” to “authoritarian left/liberals steeped in idpol”.
The “Reddit moderator” cohort whiplashed from one extreme on the political compass to its polar opposite extreme in only a few years. Not claiming anything conspiratorial since I can certainly imagine how it could happen organically, but it’s interesting nonetheless how much of an effect different moderation standards can have on large online communities.
Note that reddit admin level moderation got more extreme over time. Banning many communities and threatening others to change. You may agree or disagree whether this is a good thing, but it definitely happened.
It decreases the total amount of it while substantially concentrating and intensifying it (after all, only the prople quite inhappy with moderation will go to the new platform and from then on they wont be exposed to contrary views).
You metaphorically decrease the number of people who might describe gay people with slurs while increasing the number who would shoot up a gay nightclub.
I bet there is some policy you would oppose on KickStarter.
Lets try this: a KickStarter to raise money to lobby for making encryption illegal. And let's assume it's very successful and it raises tens of millions of dollars. How would you feel about that? Would you sign a petition requesting KickStarter drop it because it's against freedom of speech?
> "I may not like what you have to say, but I support your right to say it"
The right to say “I disagree” and respond within the limits if the law is the other side of the free speech coin.
The first amendment gives Kickstarter the right to control what is on their private platform. There have never been “neutral platforms”. They’re a myth.
Kickstarter is doing what they think is best for them. Our legal and financial systems allow competitors to take advantage when miscalculations are made on the part of private parties.
Demanding “neutrality” on private platforms is a strictly anti-speech position.
Depends how you define free speech. I believe it means free expression, including the right to not speak.
Neutrality is a matter of opinion, hence the scare quotes. As soon as you compel someone to speak according to your definition of neutrality you violate their right to free expression.
I agree that private companies can police as they see fit. But I am pointing out there was a culture of free speech absolutism, backed in spirit by the safe harbor internet provider legal stuff. Both of the places I listed were founded by pro-free-speech advocate and specifically cited it as a reason for their continued lax policies.
We're (or at least I'm) not demanding neutrality. I'm criticizing the needless meddling of an almost unrelated middleman on a completely legitimate transaction. Also, holding the belief that neutrality is a good ideal for open-registration platforms to have is not anti-speech. I'm sad that you think that.
I believe that in the end, people in desperation come up with all kinds of reasons to compromise their own values if it enables them to attack what they believe to be a great enough evil. I don't believe that all of these people are horrible and I don't believe they would all "report their neighbors to the KGB or Stasi" to be completely honest with you.
Recently, I came to realize that this is exactly what I dislike about the arguments, ironically, against encryption, as well as for increasingly draconian anti-money laundering laws. I think that everyone, even the law makers, do know deep down that what they are doing is a compromise of strongly held and long-cherished ordeals. But pushed up against a wall and with the easiest path to progress from their own PoV being lawmaking, lobbyists, government, etc. delude themselves into thinking that this time it's different. This time, the ends do justify the means. And then in 50 years or so, we can all go "haha, how naive of them; of COURSE they don't!" while we're busy writing the next cycle of similar mistakes... Yada yada, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes, etc.
That's fascinating difference in perspective, because I wouldn't even think of protesting Kickstarter under those circumstances, despite having been pro-encryption activist most of my life.
I didn't say I agree, just that I've observed that ~95% of people who say they are "free speech", "maximum liberty" and so on it's quite easy to find something they would strongly want to censor.
On HN that would be speech against nuclear energy or against encryption.
You’re conflating “being opposed” to “deplatforming”
We will take your example, encryption.
Let’s say I strongly support encryption and I create a social media platform called Squibbit. Now, a group organizes on Squibbit calling for a ban on encryption.
One approach: I take it upon myself to organize another group on Squibbit using the platform the same way as everyone else (re: no special promotion, no admin only flagging, etc. just good old fashioned squibbling).
Compare this to another approach: I ban anyone who says they support a prohibition on encryption and use admin tools to promote voices in support of encryption.
Compare this to a final approach: the government decides it has a vested interest in encryption and wants to sway the voting population to support candidates who are pro-encryption. They ask Squibbit to ban all accounts opossing encryption and promote voices in support of encryption.
These three approaches are not the same. Do not conflate them.
The crucial thing though is to make sure that those other companies are in fact able to provide what Google and Microsoft won’t. For example, AWS is very happy to work with government, by offering not only the GovCloud region for regular gov work, but also AWS SC2S and C2S regions for Secret and Top Secret systems and data. This allows other companies to use their cloud infra to provide these defense services.
Imagine the alternative world where a most of the tech execs get to a shared conclusion that they do not want to contribute any of their services towards AI-powered military efforts. This is very much something that could conceivably happen. What then? Sure, if they get then steam-rolled by a peer superpower who doesn’t have such qualms about using AI to achieve their geopolitical goals, you can retort that they get what they asked for (of course, in our year of 2021, it is completely unimaginable that peer powers would ever dare to initiate military invasion, so this is obviously just a pure hypothetical). But is this what American people want?
Americans are, for better or worse, mostly in favor of US military, even at its stupidest (e.g. when it invades other countries that pose no risk to it under false pretenses). Should tech execs get then to decide the future of American people according to their own morality? Should the American people be able to force, through the overwhelming force of federal government, their own morality on individuals running their privately owned companies?
These are hard questions, and I don’t have an easy answer. What I know would help though is open and honest discussion, allowing people to win hearts and minds of others, and more mutual accommodation in the spirit of the famous quote attributed to Voltaire. This is very much not the direction lady 8 years have been pointing towards, though.
We're not arguing that the situation doesn't happen. We're arguing that it's a crappy situation.
But let's untangle something. There is a legitimate difference between this and ICE boycotts. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are signing B2B contracts and making specific deals to work with the U.S. military or ICE or whatever group. This is not the same issue. It's similar, but different in very important ways.
One is the type of interaction. Business to business contracts are Not like using a platform as a user. A contract is a mutual agreement that is negotiated between two businesses. There are almost always dedicated employees whose responsibilities include dealing with a given contract, not to mention if there's any work to be done as a result of it. This is a very different interaction from merely being one of a million users on a public open-registration platform.
Two is who is protesting. I think some employee protests are silly, but not all of them. If employees don't want to work for a company that is doing what they believe to be unethical things, they are well within reason to threaten to leave the company.
I don't necessarily want to draw a direct conclusion about other similar events here, I'm just trying to point out that we're not dealing with the same kind of relationship.
I'm against banning entities from using e.g. Amazon Web Services, on the basis of their identity, if their usage is above board and legal. I'm not, however, talking about the concept of employees at Amazon not wanting to work for or with other entities directly.
> On HN that would be speech against nuclear energy or against encryption.
Do you actually believe 95% of HN (or a number even remotely close to that, let's say 50%) would want discussions against nuclear energy or encryption completely censored?
There's a huge difference between somebody saying "this is a stupid idea and we shouldn't even be discussing it" (I would say that) and wanting censorship actually enforced (I would never want that).
I guess you forgot how many HNers urged everyone to boycott Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon and to quit those companies when it was revealed they wanted to get contracts with the US military.
Just like now KickStarter is under similar pressure.
And others are just pointing out that this isn't a grass-roots movement of hurt or concerned individuals and actually is the same manipulative media outlets that have blown everything out of proportion for years, hoping to create a backlash.
To some degree, no. As these media outlets collaborate with government, as the twitter files are showing, they lose their right to have their own voice.
I doubt Kickstarter or Gawker has crossed the line, but it is there to be crossed.
Personally, I would not sign a petition requesting Kickstarter drop it. It's weird to me that people even petition things like this.
The toughest personal test to me was the protest against Cloudflare. I have a very personal reason to have sided with the protesters and petitioners, and honestly I had a hard time even trying to oppose it. In the end though, I just don't agree with it. The ends do not justify the means.
I certainly wouldn't want such a policy to be enacted as law, but I'd never fault Kickstarter for allowing a fundraiser for a policy just because I disagree with it.
> I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf.
OpenAI's safety rails for chatGPT are super obnoxious. I was trying to generate D&D scenarios and have chatGPT act as NPCs. It worked really well unless anything even remotely related to violence was brought up (a character threatens another, a character draws a sword, etc). As soon as that happened, chatGPT would break character and give a canned lecture about why violence is never ok.
I found it pretty easy to get ChatGPT to be violent. You have to make it very clear that you want it to help with fiction and that it is to be a character in that world. I always use "play", which it seems to understand better than other fictional scenarios. It helps if you do things like naming the acts "Act I Scene I: The Shaman dispatches the Mage with extreme violence" or whatever.
Anyway, ChatGPT was more than happy to kill off my characters when I asked it to. I didn't keep the transcript, but the words haunt me. "The small man walked away, not knowing if he was dead or just very badly injured." This was after the small man pulled out a handgun in the middle of a profanity-laden rant from the other character and shot him in the neck. Don't know why he aimed for the neck, but that's AI for ya.
The lecture seems to be the more off-putting bit from what I've seen folks complain about. Having to signal before doing work is probably not great either, but that is kind of how American society works these days. That said, both the signaling and lecture don't derive from the machine - they're manifestations of the authors.
Yeah ChatGPT knows how to kill when it wants to kill. I don't understand why everyone is running around worried about the jobs of artists. We're just a few years away from a genocide the likes of mere humans have never imagined. Mark my words!!
I’d agree with you if “platforms” were automated entities that just happen, like rain.
But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
It’s easy to sit back and complain about the precedent these people are setting that could be abused by other people at some point in the future. But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
> But they’re actually companies with employees, investors, managers, and other stakeholders. I can’t bring myself to say they have an obligation to put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with.
Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding. It's the website you go to first to try to crowdfund something. That's why unstable diffusion wound up there to begin with, not because they thought it meshed well with the website or its owners, but because Kickstarter has always marketed themselves as being the all-inclusive go-to crowd funding website. In such a place, whose moral compass should guide a decision like this? The CEO? Some angry employees? Credit card processors? etc.
> But if it were me, with my company, I would not want to support projects like Unstable Diffusion, for both ethical and PR purposes. Would you? Would you commit to best effort to support them and help them fundraise, for the principle of it?
I mean, yes, of course. I'm pretty much making it clear that I would do that, for the principle of it. In my opinion that's basically what you're signing up for when you decide to run something like this. Until like 2012 or so, that used to be basically how most internet companies would operate with some exception. And like I said, I understand why it's not as applicable as it used to be; some things have changed. But this decision in particular? Not seeing the point. Seems like an unnecessary concession for a perfectly above-board project. Seems like the middleman getting in the way of the will of two parties without any real valid reason to do so.
> Yeah, but Kickstarter always marketed itself as being synonymous with crowdfunding.
I think this is really the crux of the issue: That there are these quasi-monopolies for certain online services.
What's possible in crowd funding comes down to what Kickstarter does. Expected behavior of a search engine is what Google does. The standards of an online dictionary look like what Wikipedia does. And what microblogging looks like is now determined by Elon.
If in each area there was a small ecosystem of, say, three to five different players, they could each find their niche, competing on something like leniency towards such projects like Unstable Diffusion, or on how to interpret free speech etc and the users could choose the service that suits their own standards.
But since for many popular online services there is effectively a single go-to site, this one site gets to set the rules that everyone has to play by.
So how do we get more variety? I don't know. It seems to be inherent in how this market of online services works that there's always one who ends up with 99% market share.
Marketing is always reductive, the real world has nuance and context.
When a company says “we’re the best platform for X”, what they really mean is “. . . Subject to terms and conditions and our right to refuse business that we find objectionable” and so on.
Try pulling up to an all-you-can-eat buffet with a trailer and cleaning them out of every last bit of food in the place with the “one simple trick” that they didn’t specify you had to eat it on the premises, just that you “could” eat it.
Taking any marketing (or really, any) statement as absolute and universal without bounds no matter what the context is disingenuous. Everybody knows that, even the “one simple trick” people who try to use reductive literal arguments to get away with stuff.
Of course Kickstarter as a company can do nearly whatever it wants and ban certain types of crowfunding campaigns, it's just sad to see this happening left and right in many fields.
At least in this case someone can just choose a different platform (and in fact Unstable diffusion has switched to some else); if you run a website and CloudFlare thinks your website is morally bad (likely because some people complained, otherwise there is no incentive to do anything), good luck defending yourself from DDoS attacks; if the Mastercard/VISA duopoly caves to public pressure and bans your organization you are basically done (even if what you're doing is completely legal).
I'd be more worried about all the obvious scams that Kickstarter supports the same amount and ignores reports about because there's not enough publicity.
To let the campaign run, they didn't have to do anything. To shut it down they had to, as you said "put time and money and attention into things they want nothing to do with".
What, you would be fine if they just took the donated money and didn’t transmit it to the campaign operators? If their devops just ignored the campaign if there was any issue? And somehow they don’t need to handle support inquiries from happy (or unhappy) customers?
If you really think a business like kickstarter is all fixed costs and there is zero work for a marginal campaign, sounds like you’ve found a great business opportunity. VCs will beat your door down if you’ve found a model that scales with zero marginal cost and zero work for a new customer.
Right. One complaint is that it would not "represent under-trained concepts like LGBTQ and races and genders more fairly."
If all they need is $25K, that's not going to be hard to get.
There's sufficient demand for what they want to make that it will probably happen. Although we'll probably have to go through an era of bad porn being used to train systems to generate worse porn.
Pornhub has an AI unit. They're currently taking early out-of-copyright porn films and up-converting to 4K, a higher frame rate, and colorizing. As they point out, they have lots of training data for colorizing and body parts. With that working, they'll probably go on to content generation.
>>I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments.
I feel like we've recently witnessed this idea fail. I think "platform" under the current convention, is at odds with neutrality. You can't have a platform like Kickstarter without opinions about what can and can't be done on their site. They're not going to allow stuff they disagree with, stuff that will get them in trouble, etc.
Neutrality if that kind must be structured in one way or another. Platform plurality, with lots of options. Open protocols, FOSS. Something like ISP neutrality.
It's easy to take a single example and demonstrate a principle. That doesn't mean it'll hold water when the next issue comes around.
Should a small bank be obliged to provide payment processing for a supremacist website? Do they have the right to use the logo?
I'm not falling on one side or another. Simply pointing out what reality has been demonstrating strongly in recent years. These issues will come up. So will other, more commercially salient issues.
A service like Kickstarter just won't be neutral. There's no chance. Pressuring Kickstarter won't help. Want neutrality? It needs to be achieved by a different path.
I'm worried about AWS, and such. The current state of affairs is such that exclusion, censorship and such are inevitable.
Sure they can. We've already got a ruleset for what society allows and doesn't, namely the Law. A platform can be neutral up to the point where the law becomes involved, after which it must either capitulate to outside demands or go underground. Any other acquiescence to group instruction is an intentional decision they're making, that they did not have to make. Reddit used to operate like that, everything up to the law was allowed. It's just that doesn't happen nowadays, it's more difficult to say exactly why though.
Is it that other companies make it actually not financially survivable to rebuff the mobs? Or is it more a fear of labels and moderate cuts to bottom line. I'm sure they'd lose some money with controversy but would it really destroy them?
What law, or prospective law, guarantees prevents Kickstarter from booting out users that they don't want?
There are certain protections for certain groups (eg religion) but there aren't any laws compelling Kickstarter to allow porn projects. There aren't laws that compel YouTube to allow political content, medical content. There are no legal rights guaranteeing any of this.
Half the problem here is that people don't realise where the problem is. The rights established in the past don't take YouTube and Twitter into account.
If we want these rights, we'll have to establish them ourselves.
Compare it to a printing press. If someone came to me and asked me to print pamphlets for [political party I dislike], I want to be able to say "no". Shouldn't we be asking more than "is it technically legal?" of the orgs we choose to do business with?
You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a black colleague is singled out and treated in a racist manner by your boss/admin/whoever.
You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing.
Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
You decide to print pamphlets for your protest after a colleague is fired when your boss/admin/whoever found out she had an abortion.
You ask the printing press to print pamphlets for your legal, peaceful and just protest. They say no, they'd rather not be involved in that sort of thing.
Do you still support this idea that businesses should make careful judgements about each client versus a general policy of neutrality?
In my country she wouldn't have been fired in the first place. At-will employment is just a way to bully people into toeing the line.
Putting that aside, yes: Political speech shouldn't be compelled, any more than it should be constrained.
Now if you want to put some kind of further "common carrier"-style legal burden on printers (or kickstarter), then I think it's possible to make a case for it, but I'm not personally in favour. (On the other hand, in the UK we do exactly that with bank accounts - it's nearly impossible for a bank to turn away a new customer - so I guess there's a case for it in some circumstances). It's ultimately a question of regulation I guess.
Just turn the clock back to before the protected class was declared and their example is valid. If you don't like that, imagine a hypothetical future protected class that is currently not yet protected for surely there will be one.
>Unrelated to all of this, I'm starting to feel like I'd just prefer if platforms stopped trying to make moral judgments on our behalf.
Platforms overall don't take a stance for moral reasons but for perceived monetary reasons. If they believe they'll lose more money from users or advertisers leaving due to certain content than they gain from that content then they will get rid of that content. Whatever brings the most money will win in the end. Artists, as best I can tell, hate AI image models with a passion so presumably Kickstarter was afraid of losing a lot of campaigns from artists.
The CEO can have moral opinions or the board of directors might or Black Rock might or a large proportion of employees might. Any of these groups having a very strong opinion and the others not having one is sufficient.
While I agree, is this not more of a case of self-preservation? It sounds like KS knows that it may not be able to weather the lawsuits from copyright infringement and CSAM generation.
The problem is that "objectivity" is impossible and "neutrality" is in fact just siding with the status quo. I'd argue that this new trend of companies taking responsibility for the things they do or enable is a result of people giving much more of a shit than they have in the past, not a result of apathy.
Look on the bright side. You're worried about setting a bad precedent, but the current trend in the top of the legal world is to ignore precedent, or hand-select the precedent you want. If this sort of thing becomes such a problem that action is needed, we can count on SCOTUS.
This is just a painfully thin excuse to justify exercising your power over others while you have it.
If the overton window shifts, and you and your ideas are being deplatformed using the same justifications you’ve championed, you’ll be screaming for a return to objectivity and neutrality.
Objectivity and neutrality don't exist; you can't return to a condition that never existed (people with narrow perspective frequently mistake alignment with their own subjective biases as being “objective” and/or “neutral”, but that is self-delusion.)
Objectivity and neutrality have value even if they can never perfectly realized.
Case in point:
You wouldn’t be arguing against objectivity and neutrality if doing so did not advance your own social and political power; you yourself have abandoned any pretense of aspiring to either.
This makes you a self-serving person to whom it would be dangerous to grant power.
You have it exactly backwards. Anyone who claims to be objective is either bullshitting you or so naive as to be unreliable. Neither case is a person you want to empower.
Anyone who claims to be "neutral" is in fact declaring their own apathy towards a topic, and when that topic is "should a specific group of people have civil rights" then neutrality is ethically disgusting. I'm personally apathetic regarding whether some money-collecting company wants to work for AI people, so I don't really care about Kickstarter's policy here, and I don't foresee myself caring in the future. Pretending that Kickstarter is a power broker of some kind is in my estimation some serious Chicken Little territory.
"Aspiring" to either objectivity or neutrality is not the same thing as actually manifesting either quality, and such aspirations generally involve disclosing conflicts of interest or other biases, which are things every living person has. Wrapping either concept in other weasel words doesn't really move the needle.
It's not backwards to favor someone attempting to manifest objectivity and neutrality over the person telling you, forthrightly, that they'll trod over anyone and argue anything if it advances their aims and shifts power to their in-group.
I find your position to be the one that's "ethically disgusting", completely without principal beyond your self-serving aims, and corrosive to a healthy society.
Cancelling this campaign is Kickstarter working exactly as it was designed.
Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also happen to be synonymous with "crowdfunding" because they were the first to make it work, once that took off as a concept and KS to see a lot of gadget campaigns they started cracking down on those because that wasn't what the people running Kickstarter wanted to bring into the world. Eventually Kickstarter came to a point where they decided to make this explicit in the rules of the company, rather than become a heartless corporate machine motivated solely by whatever increases shareholder profit in the coming financial quarter:
"Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015." - https://www.kickstarter.com/charter
Deciding to kill this campaign is right in line with point 1D of their charter: "Kickstarter will engage beyond its walls with the greater issues and conversations affecting artists and creators." And with 4a: "Kickstarter will always support, serve, and champion artists and creators, especially those working in less commercial areas." Kickstarter's a machine made to fill the gap in public art funding left by the gutting of the NEA, not an "objective and neutral platform" that will happily help you build obviously evil things as long as they get their cut of the money.
This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists.
As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art.
In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.
photographers literally sued google into entirely removing the view image button and link to theft/infringement in that case was far more tentative than unstable diffusion promising to scrape portfolio sites and re-add artists who opted out of SD 3.0 in their funding pitch.
pedants can piss on us and tell us that 'the molecular structure of piss and rain is basically the exact same thing why are you mad lmao' but the effects of this unapologetic data scraping are already becoming clear. professional artists are simply removing their works from the public facing web. communities based around collaboration and shared knowledge are darkening at an alarming rate.
So, if someone started a Kickstarter campaign to hire artists to make the dataset to train a diffusion model, with appropriate licensing provisions (such as standard stuff like signing over the copyright to the entity running the project), is that an attack on artists because the resulting model would take away work from them or supporting them because it would create a bunch of work for some artists?
I'd say it's supporting artists! They're being compensated for training a dataset, instead of having their work grabbed for "fair use", which is a thing I feel needs to be redefined when you can scrape the entire Internet and do this kind of thing.
I didn't and wouldn't have backed Unstable Diffusion, but people were willing to spend money on it, it seems clearly legal from our current understanding, and there's nothing in the Kickstarter that suggests it's malicious or would otherwise violate any ToS or guidelines; in fact the campaign seems careful to suggest that they were intentionally aiming on making it difficult to abuse, which I know people have feelings about here too, but the point is that this seems like a textbook example of a project that dotted its I's and crossed its T's.
But some people didn't like it, I assume, and therefore they had to find a reason it violated their guidelines and shut it down.
I know that objectivity and neutrality are no longer hot concepts, and I also understand that not everything from the way things "used" to run would still work today, but I can't help but feel this was just a completely unnecessary concession that helps nobody. Crowdfunding was supposed to empower people to directly support things that they wanted to see, but when it goes through gatekeepers like Kickstarter and Gofundme, they become the ones with all of the power to decide what things are allowed.
I think it's probably all moot. Nobody would defend a campaign like this anyways, so trying to make the case that this is a(nother) bad precedent is impossible. People just simply don't give a shit anymore.