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What's your most unpopular opinion? - Printable Version

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What's your most unpopular opinion? - Sacred Jellybean - 2nd March 2024

I'll start. I don't get why everyone loves David Bowie. It's weird to me when he pops up as a meme (see: Venture Bros and Zoolander). He just seems like some generic dorky British guy (but I repeat myself). Shouldn't he have charisma or something?

I'm not a music aficionado, so I'm probably not the best judge, but his music doesn't seem that great either. Like I've only heard a few popular songs so idk maybe there's more there, but it just seems like crappy 80s pop. His collab with Trent Reznor was cool, but it was Reznor carrying that.

This is probably sacrilege but if I listen to his spotify hits:

Under Pressure: this is stained because the same sample was used in Ice, Ice Baby. Look, if just about the whitest geekiest piece of shitbait in history finds inspiration from your music, you should probably re-evaluate your artistic choices. Mercury's voice is great in this though. Now I just want to listen to Queen.

Starman: the guitar is good but his voice just sounds tepid, like he's working up the nerve to sing in front of someone in the bathroom mirror. Keep it down, bucko.

Okay, I won't go through all of them one-by-one, but... like none of this is terrible, and I'm playing it up, but it's still sailing over my head as to why this guy is exalted. You probably have to have been a kid and watched Labyrinth with the rest of the middle school drama club to fall in love with him for the rest of your life. Fuck, what's wrong with teenagers? I can't believe I used to be one D:

In closing, Space Oddity just came up, and I'll give him this one. Just one.

[edit] I just remembered Dancing in the Streets. That one's real bad too. Someone edited it to make it bearable though.



RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Dark Jaguar - 4th March 2024

Our tastes may differ on David Bowie and whether or not he sold the world, but that's alright.

I admit I don't often keep track of whether my opinions are popular, so it does often come as a shock to me to find out that, say, Final Fantasy 8 is despised as a matter of course.  Weird, considering we live in a world where Final Fantasy 13, 15, and 16 exist.  (15 in particular is a game where you have to buy a BOOK just to finish the full story because they cancelled the last chapter of DLC.)

Thing is, if I got into the opinions I KNOW are unpopular, I'm going to get political.  For example, I'm not for "open borders", I'm flat out against borders.

Oh, there's that other thing.  When someone randomly brings up that this or that actor... or cartoon character... is super "hot", I get caught off guard because I never see it coming...

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Weltall - 4th March 2024

I'm not indifferent to the plight of artists and writers who will see their skills become less marketable due to AI. AI will not make people stop wanting to create art themselves. If you feel that particular itch to take something from your imagination and manifest it upon some medium, you will do it, and you will probably want to learn techniques, hone your skills, and be better doing the thing you like to do. I find the copyright argument to have some merit, but I also feel like you surrender some practical control once you publish something for everyone to see and access. I'm not saying the gigacorps who operate these LLMs should be able to just harvest data from the plebs willy-nilly, but I do feel like getting worked up over it is kind of pissing into the wind. People who think they can "poison" their imagery to ruin AI datasets are downloading placebos. It will get better. Someone will figure out an antidote, if they care enough to try. It will be an arms race.

I also think a lot of people criticize the capabilities of AI without taking into consideration how rapidly it can improve and learn from its mistakes. The first AI image generator app I used created some funky stuff in impressionist or surrealist style, because it wasn't really capable of reliably doing any details. That was three years ago. Modern ones can fool you if you're not paying attention. You can spot the flaws and the tells, but you might not, next month. Guys, I was talking about this 15 years ago. Human civilization is reaching a moment.

I also do not care for David Bowie and his musical entertainment, though I will make the same exception for the same track.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Dark Jaguar - 5th March 2024

I developed my current opinion on deep learning AI generative content by asking the singular question: Who benefits from this technology?  Artists don't, because they go out of work very quickly thanks to this.  The public at large don't, because art that basically eats itself promises nothing new under the sun.  (Though admittedly Marvel movies have gotten so redundant one could argue we're already there.)  The only ones who benefit, presently, from this tech are the corporate executive class.  With that in mind, under our present economic system, I'm against the tech just as surely as I'm against corporations being the first to colonize space.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Weltall - 5th March 2024

I'm an artist, and I find DALL-E to be a very useful tool. I don't use any results I generate or call them my own. But, if I have an idea and I need help to properly visualize it? I'm really not the best at that, so a well-made prompt definitely helps fill in some gaps for me.

I think professional artists suffer, not artists in general. And, let's be real, think about the professional, human-made art you've been seeing in commercial spaces for the last 15 years, and ask yourself what we are really losing if human artists aren't generating mass quantities of unappealing garbage like this:

[Image: business-coworkers-cartoons.jpg?s=612x61...AtkJNJxTc=]

Just because soulless corporate goons benefit from the technology doesn't mean it doesn't benefit anyone else. I feel that it's short-sighted to dismiss the entire technology just because it's not being operated by enlightened progressive minds who don't care about making money. As you yourself pointed out with your Marvel reference, pop culture and commercial spaces have been inundated with low-quality, mass-produced art for long enough now that it's hard to even argue for the novelty of commercial human art. How many artists derive their living from generating ungodly amounts of unappealing, utterly forgettable art, for a paycheck? What culture is being lost if they aren't doing that anymore? I feel for the humans whose careers and lives will be disrupted, but I would not advocate for neutering the technology just to artificially preserve demand for their skills. As if that would even be possible.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Sacred Jellybean - 5th March 2024

Quote:AI will not make people stop wanting to create art themselves. If you feel that particular itch to take something from your imagination and manifest it upon some medium, you will do it, and you will probably want to learn techniques, hone your skills, and be better doing the thing you like to do.

Agreed 100%. I like to write stories, and imo it's its own reward.
Quote:Final Fantasy 8 is despised as a matter of course

I thought it was pretty decent too. Are people mostly down on the characters? Squall was a bit of a drama queen (appropriate name, hah). Seemed like a solid RPG, but I'm not a connoisseur of the genre.
 
Quote:For example, I'm not for "open borders", I'm flat out against borders.

That's a juicy one. I don't necessarily disagree. Our border was apparently mostly open a few generations ago: Mexicans would come in, work their jobs, and go home. I assume you mean that territories and different jurisdictions are still okay, sort of like how we can move state-to-state. The only reservation I have is large shipments of drugs or weapons getting through (though I'm pretty ambivalent about the War on Drugs to begin with).

Re: AI art. The idea that a picture or a story is procedurally generated by a machine instantly kills its allure for me. There's no soul behind it, it's just a copy of a copy of a (copy^N). If there isn't a human* artist behind its creation, it inherently becomes meaningless, because it violates the purpose of art, which is human* expression. Dicing up earlier works and making an algorithmic composite of them doesn't count.

*Note that when true AGI takes hold, and machines can in some way simulate emotions, this might be a different story. But LLMs creating stories is some ol' bullshit.

Hot take: I don't care if companies harvest my data. 30 years ago, we didn't have free maps, navigation, competent search engines, or social media that allows us to keep in touch with loved ones at a mass scale. There are two ways of making them possible: paid subscriptions, or advertising. All the engineering and overhead costs have to be paid for somehow. idgaf if some dickhead in a monkey suit knows about my hobbies or perverted search queries, one data point among billions of others. Gimme more free shit. I can find the Jet Force Gemini soundtrack within a few keystrokes, in the same place I can watch true crime, or clips of obscure TV shows that only 300 other people remember or care about (one of which painstakingly converted an old VHS tape and uploaded them).

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Dark Jaguar - 6th March 2024

That's the thing, I can't find that Jet Force Gemini soundtrack in a few keystrokes any more.  Google kind of sucks now.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Weltall - 8th March 2024

Quote:That's a juicy one. I don't necessarily disagree. Our border was apparently mostly open a few generations ago: Mexicans would come in, work their jobs, and go home. I assume you mean that territories and different jurisdictions are still okay, sort of like how we can move state-to-state. The only reservation I have is large shipments of drugs or weapons getting through (though I'm pretty ambivalent about the War on Drugs to begin with).

I'm against borders in the same sense I'm against having a lock on my front door, in the sense that, it would be wonderful if there was no practical need for such a thing, but unfortunately, there are times you're really glad you have the security. If, for example, Russia shared a land border with the United States, would we want that open? I certainly would not. I appreciate the sentiment and ideal, but we do neighbor a nation which has serious internal stability problems and cartels are de facto governments within some parts. Addressing the root causes of these problems is necessary to solve the problem, and border security should be done in a humane fashion at all times. But, given the internal instability that Mexico faces as a nation (and kind of always has), having an open border with them would cause a lot of problems at present.
Quote:Re: AI art. The idea that a picture or a story is procedurally generated by a machine instantly kills its allure for me. There's no soul behind it, it's just a copy of a copy of a (copy^N). If there isn't a human* artist behind its creation, it inherently becomes meaningless, because it violates the purpose of art, which is human* expression. Dicing up earlier works and making an algorithmic composite of them doesn't count.

*Note that when true AGI takes hold, and machines can in some way simulate emotions, this might be a different story. But LLMs creating stories is some ol' bullshit.

Art means whatever the viewer wants it to mean. If a person sees art generated by AI, and it resonates with them on an emotional or aesthetic level, how much does it really matter if a human made it? People are evolutionarily hardwired to detect patterns and derive meanings from pretty much everything. I disagree with the apparent assertion that art must be sourced from a person to possess subjective meaning.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Sacred Jellybean - 9th March 2024

Art is subjective, and far be it from me to define what constitutes as art to another person. But a significant part for me is that another human had an experience that they want to express. For a given piece of art, most of its meaning are what thoughts and feelings it provokes in me. But at its very basis, another big part is communication.

I suppose this gets into the whole "Death of an Artist" theory by which the original intent is irrelevant to the subjective experience of the audience. I can get behind that (and have even said as much here before), but to me, part of the core concept is that the piece has a creator behind it who's trying to make sense of their world, and conveying that to their audience.

LLMs have no experience they're trying to make sense of or express. It's just an advanced algorithm with no imagination behind it. Imagination requires a subjective experience that LLMs don't and cannot have.

RE: What's your most unpopular opinion? - Sacred Jellybean - 12th March 2024

My Neighbor Totoro is Studio Ghibli's worst movie (of the 7 or so that I've seen). Hearing those two little girls screeching is insufferable. If I were in a search party for the younger one at the end, I'd do a whole lot more partying than searching.

Respect to the iconic image of the older one standing at the bus stop in the rain, though. I like that. Including this grimdark version:

[Image: pyxxNAN.jpeg]

Which brings me to my next (maybe?) unpopular opinion: grimdark stuff is fun and cool. I don't care if I'm in a state of arrested development of 16-year-old beanjo whose favorite bands were Nine Inch Nails and Marylin Manson. I still vibe with Doom and its ridiculous monsters. Shit's fun. It doesn't have to be deep. If its opposite aesthetic, twee bubble-gum fluff is legit (which it is), so's dark shit. Inject it straight into muh veins.

I imagine it's the same way professional wrestling fans feel: no one takes it seriously, they just have fun with it, esp its kayfabe elements.