Alongside my friends at @art_inquiry, I released an open letter calling for the restriction of AI image generators and illustrations in publishing 🧵 artisticinquiry.org/AI-Open-Letter Since the advent of journalism, illustration has been used to elucidate and add perspective to stories. With the advent of photography in the 19th century, hand-drawn illustrations continued to have their place, both as a synthesis of the artist’s vision and the writer’s meaning.

There's finally a class action lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion, the tool that big tech companies built on all our stolen artwork. I could not be more thrilled. @SarahCAnderson, @Kelly_McKernan and @kortizart, you are champions for all illustrators stablediffusionlitigation.com My own artwork, that I paid to register with the US copyright office, was stolen by LAION to use in a dataset that these multimillion dollar tech companies are using to rip off my work. Thousands upon thousands of artists are in the same boat.

Two things to remember when an AI pusher calls you a Luddite

1-The Luddites were a movement by skilled textile workers that smashed machines as a protest tactic to get better labor conditions from exploitive factories

2-The Luddites failed because the bosses had them killed The Luddite movement was not put down by the Forces of Technological Progress. It was put down because factory bosses gunned down Luddites en masse, and then got the English government to make machine-smashing a hanging offense.

Love that we are creating an entire public world that we can't enter the moment our phones run out of juice "I know what would be convenient! If you can only ride the subway, order food, or enter other countries if you're currently holding a costly, fragile slab of glass that goes dead every three hours!"

I just spent an hour hanging out with the taxi drivers from @NYTWA, who are doing a round-the-clock sit in in front of City Hall to demand that the city forgive their staggering taxi medallion debts. De Blasio's new "plan" is just a bailout for the banks who exploited them. For years, the city lied to mostly-immigrant taxi drivers, encouraging them to take on massive loans to buy medallions that were supposed to guarantee them a middle-class living. Instead, the city let in Uber and Lyft, which crashed the medallion prices. COVID was the final straw

Have you ever wondered why 780 men have been imprisoned in Gitmo, but only 8 have been convicted of a crime? One reason is that the US blanketed Afghanistan with flyers offering lots of money to anyone who brought in a "terrorist". What proof did they need? Just their good word. One flyer dropped in Afghanistan read: "You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life."

Some smart, well meaning people say daft things, like "how could some Jews have survived the Holocaust and then created an apartheid state", as if the Holocaust was not an industrial genocide, but learning experience that was supposed to teach humanistic values The implication of these statements is always that Jews are bad and depraved for not having imparted whatever heartwarming lessons the Holocaust was meant to teach. The truth is that genocide and oppression are not some sort of self-improvment courses.

I wish I could ban the word "harm", which now is used to describe everything from awkward conversations to choking a man to death. It makes innocuous nothings sound like murderous evil, and murderous evil sound like an HR violation.

Just say what happened. We need to stop speaking like therapists meets HR departments.

I'm trying to think of why I hate social justice vocabulary so deeply, when I often agree with the concepts it expresses, and I think its just the sameness of it. Its the idea that using a particular bit of jargon makes you good, inclusive, or righteous ... while failing to use that jargon makes you evil and retrograde. It's the refusal to acknowledge that this vocabulary is just the vocabulary of a specific culture, rather than the vocabulary of objective goodness