What's your most unpopular opinion?

[Sacred Jellybean]

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.

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.
 

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).