I have only seen a few examples where people couldn't tell and it was for niche cases like portraits of people they don't know and low resolution landscapes. I'd be interested to see better examples.
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I will offer a few critiques.
The first is that "AI", which is really LLMs and more advanced CNNs, is oversold as a technology and does not deliver what is promised. It can make a 90% as good stocj image, sure, but it does not code well. For coding, at best, it functions as a template creator that often makes mistakes. And it does not do the actually important part of coding, which is conceptualizing and solving the challenges of the actual problem domain. This is because all it can really do is regurgitate patterns based on patternes inputs. There is not any actual understanding underneath it. In this sense, it is a parlor trick compared to what the concept of actual AI evokes. We are essentially in a tech bubble phase of overpromising and overinvestment by two camps of capital: one that buys the hype as a technology and wants to get ahead of "the curve" to cut costs (your example of automation under capitalism) and the cynical crowd that understands its limits but uses it anyways to discipline labor. Large companies already wanted to do layoffs, this just provides an excuse. And it's just that: an excuse, not really much of a variable cost capital saver for capitalists. Its best corporate use is by workers to help them craft diplomatic emails to unreasonable managers. Or maybe the 90%-as-good stock images thing.
The second critique is of the enclosure of "AI", which amounts to capitalist enclosure of publicly funded research combined with vast swaths of data from all sources. These large models require substantial up-front capital investment. They are like building a power plant: to democratize it, you need democratic control over their production, not just a free output that can run on consumer hardware. "AI" companies spend huge amounts on scraping data and training their models, two things that "the consumer" does not experience in use value and arguably does not see in value, either, as with other Silicon Valley tech schemes this bubble is fueled by financial capital pumping companies up in the hopes of getting in on monopolies later. Like with Uber being convenient and cheap for the first few years and now being much more expensive, these companies undercharge and take losses now in the hopes of gainjng "marketshare". The likely outcome if American "AI" took off in isolation would be 2-3 big companies controlling the entire process and selling an exoensive sunscription, its expense depending on whether they killed off the non-"AI" competition or not. For example, stock image generation prices would be kept below Getty stock image prices right up until they killed the actually-photos market, at which point they would charge whatever they wanted, having skipped ahead to the monopoly phase of pricing. And they would not make the models free or open source, they would use their positions to crush all such endeavors and make them illegal. The only hope there is a country like China, who could nationalize the production of these models and direct their production to be towards lower power and free/open end use. You can see this dynsmic already and the threat it poses for US "AI" companies in their response to DeepSeek: they are trying to get it and all Chinese "AI" banned under claims of national security and intellectual property. This is just their response to a lower power LLM produced by a private group, which highlights their mechanism of enclosure is the high capital barrier to entry. You mention this, but I want to emphasize that it is the entire game.
I do also want to note that part of the hype is itself disrespectful to artists. As it exists, most "AI" visual productions are a fun parlor trick but not actually good enough to even convince people they are part of, say, a narrative work you would want to personally enjoy, let alone pay for. There is a lot of "searching for the niche" where people are taking what it is already almost convincing at reproducing and trying to shoehorn it in simply because it's "AI" and cheaper than hiring artists, not because anyone actually prefers it (or doesn't notice it) aesthetically. We kind of all feel the vibes of an "AI" generated image, let alone movie. When they have to form a narrative structure with consistent character designs and a sense of place, with unique scenarios, it currently all falls apart outside of a few highly skilled individuals that can work these systems (even then you can always recognize it as "AI"). So in this context, think about what it means to artists when people around them say "AI" slop is just as good as their work, or good enough to do the job. I mean, we all know it isn't either of those things. 99% of the time it's slop and it doesn't make any interesting creative "decisions" (it literally can't). So it is really, in these cases, a way to demean the value of art and artists by exaggerating the value of "AI" "art" to equate them, even on the aesthetic output value.
To summarize: "AI" has silicon valley financial capital dynamics that threaten any open/democratic use, it is oversold, and overselling it does harm to those whose jobs and interests are meant to be displaced per techbro marketing.
With that said, there are entirely valid use cases and situations where it performs very well, usually when highly constrained by heuristic modsls that only use it for a subset of aspects. For example, text-to-speech that relies on "AI" for speech generation and only part of translation but not all of it. In that sense it operates like a traditional technology, though still with high cost capital inputs. Though in this same case, there are many slop examples out there, usually when too much is offloaded to the "AI" models, like auto-translation devices for tourists (they do NOT work well).
I know very little about this, but if this is in the US two things I have heard are that (1) the first claim is always rejected with a flimsy excuse and you have to keep applying and that (2) as ridiculous as it is, it really helps to have a lawyer. I've heaes of people getting pro bono help with this but I don't have any specific resources for you, sorry.
It's all very unfair and basically evil.
Consent of the governed exists basically nowhere, including so-called liberal democracies. There is no "do you consent to this government?" question that results in a major change if you or even a majority say no. All are subject to an oppressive state, the only question re: consent is whether you want that state organized for or against the ruling class.
The primary issue here is in the broad-brushing and lack of care in the post (e.g. the title), which makes it easy to leave impressions of antisemitism. In your spoiler quote, you say things along the lines of, "if a state that exists in your name commits genocide, of course you will be hated". While you are not explicitly saying so, the sentiment here has a rhetorical next step: "so antisemitism is valid and correct". I'm not saying you believe this, but it would feel natural to have seen that written next by the flow of the rhetoric. The post is playing with being on the edge of antisemitic language and possibly crosses that border depending on how you interpret it. I don't think that's a very effective way of communicating in addition to the possibilities for causing harm.
Contrast to something like this: "Zionism is perhaps the greatest purveyor of antisemitism on the planet by engaging in ethnonationalist genocide and conflating everything they do with Judaism. In addition to the inherent antisemitism of associating race hate mass violence with Judaism, it inspires antisemitism among those who sympathize with the victims, as there has always been a real risk that those sympathizers take "Israel" at their word in conflating their project with Judaism. Even just adopting and then negating Zionist language can lead to problematic statements."
Basically the same sentiments, but communicated in a way that is careful about how it is presented.
I would also disagree that Jewish people, including Ashkenazi Jewish people, are fully integrated into whiteness. They are partially integrated. Most can pass as white basically any time they want to by just not saying certain things. A lot of (most?) white people are going to treat them as white, as will others. But there is still a reactionary group that others Jewish people, follows and maintains antisemitic mythologies, and participates to one degree or another in ensuring there is always a bit of a threat in the background. In the most reactionary circles this does lead to overy antisemitic actions and violence, but the soft reactionaries and edgelords help to pipeline them. There is a dual character of whiteness and Jewishness for Ashkenazi Jews in white supremacist societies and which is dominant various regionally and on an individual basis. So on one hand most Jewish people in the US face very little discrimination due to being mostly assimilated into whiteness. On the other hand, there is still antisemitic violence and rumbles of more if reactionaries become more powerful and numerous and.
I would agree that antisemitism is not as common or extreme of an issue as islamophobia or anti-blackness and that Zionist organizations lie about what constitutes antisemitism, thus diluting it. But your thoughts that overstate Jewish assimilation into white supremacy may be a case of reacting to and negating Zionist framings too simply and on their terms. Zionist organizations call every single expression of sympathy for Palestinians antisemitic. Those organizations are lying in support of an active genocidal ethnonationalist project. But they also list real cases of antisemitism that should not be dismissed.
Re: moderation, well it's a friendly socialist instance so I don't want to exactly start a fight about it, but I would say they are quick to ban and bad at conflict resolution and explanations. They tend to describe this in terms of protecting their members, but I think it is mostly a consequence of having basically zero irl organizing experience and therefore making the mistakes of young organizers. Having no interest in listening to or guiding disagreement and being quick to drop a hammer is one of those mistakes. Communists grow out of this if they are self-critical after joining and leaving (or watching implode) a few organizations. At the same time, you should consider that your post was fairly flippant, inconsiderate, and flirted with antisemitism, so I wouldn't say they made a greater error.
Socially it is nothing but good that the US is openly hostile and lashing out at China. In China, this works against liberals there trying to emulate elements of US economics that are a capitalist road. In the US, this undermines the anti-China sentiment that propagandists have been provoking for over a decade.
No. There is nothing as dynamic or independent going on in the US as in the Weimar Republic. In the Weimar Republic there were actual organized factions taking actions against one another using various levera of power. SPD, KPD, Freikorps, monarchists, liberals, Nazis, etc were literally fighting in the streets, taking over cities, protecting or attacking marginalized groups.
In the US, it is important to understand that it is already essentially a Nazi country, it is just hegemonically so and presents itself as liberal. The Nazis themselves wete inspired by the US, its genocides, its racial segregation and oppression, its ethnonationalism. In policy it was more Nazi than the Nazis. The distinguishing feature of Nazis was that they wanted to claw back power for Germany using similar strategies under somewhat different conditions. In a more crowded space, imperially, with surrounding countries already posed for large scale war and a timeline of years and not decades or centuries.
Trump is just the "mask off" moment of American liberalism. His policies are not actually particularly different, they just lack liberal veneers. Biden did much more mass deportation, he just had people in uniform do it and crossed his Ts and dotted his Is legally. The genocide of Gaza was laundered primarily by the Biden admin. The war on Ukraine was stoked by decades of liberal policy and broken agreements to push push Russia into a corner rather than allow them regional influence. They wanted war and they got it. The US has been mass killing civilians and invading other countries for over a century and has always rationalized it through nationalism and racism. The US killed over a million in Iraw alone since 2003 and yet you are meant to care far more about a smaller number of dead in Ukraine - because they are white and becauae they are against the US' designated enemy. The US maintains global white supremacy via its military, but also through finance. Far more die from US-based capitalism than from any war. Deprivation the world over is a product of imperialism, of the various evolutions of colonialism. You know the articles about USAID funding cuts leading to deaths? In a void this is peddled to you as the virtue of USAID, but its actual function is to threaten countries with that starvation. The US creates dependencies, not food secure nations, and it targets the non-white global south to do it. The US marks such countries for death when they pursue food sovereignty. Nothing puts a target on your back like land reform.
So anyways, the US is already a well-oiled Nazi machine. It has a massive state apparatus by which to already do anything a Nazi could ever want. There is no substantial left formation to oppose it, just ineffectual collaborationist liberals. There is no need for a Freikorps or similar. People call ICE the Freikorps, but they are not. ICE are cops. They are fully integrated agenta of the state. They do not need to be purged to do Nazi things or consolidate power, they are already beholden to it. No Reichstag Fire is needed, Trump can just say "fentanyl emergency" and do whatever he wants because Congress already consents. This has already been the case previously, they just applied a liberal veneer. The War on Terror was a series of largely undeclared wars executed by the executive based on a combination of Congressional blank check (which Trump is using, this is why he calls everyone he targets terrorist) and emergency powers.
Nazis have been here.
Sorry that was a typo, it was supposed to say Nazi. Here's a UA propaganda outlet describing the reorg: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51054
UA has integrated neo-Nazis into the upper levels of their military and seem to make decisions based on their ideas. They have increased funding for groups like Azov, who have been running little Hitler Youth camps for years, and have recently integrated them into a larger and more powerful Nazi force.
You could've been cool like that horshoe crab. But you just had to be difficult and be a smart monkey.
Of course. Our precious political class has delicate sensibilities and nedds time for self-care.
Oh and Dem voters, no need to join organizations or take direct action. Just sit around being a little stressed out and blaming everyone else is plenty. You did your part! If you must do something, go to a one-off police escorted protest with no feasible demands or threats to do anything that would ever exert pressure.
Here is a complete list of my crimes and home address:
It also still almost worked. This is how subservient and propagandized the US political electorate is. The idea of supporting mass murdering children was only a dealbreaker for a small minority, but enough to do most of the work in tipping the scales.
Kamala probably would've won with false promises to end "the war", some token Arab speakers, and "I see you and hear you" pandering.
The capitalist party that writes its own rules and does not adopt literally any positions via bottom-up mechanism? No, nobody can take it over except other capitalists. So in a sense you are correct, as US progressives are still fundamentally of the political ideology of capitalism.
The party works against you but, ironically, convinces you to help it for your own and others' interests. Instead, we must work together against capital if we want liberation and justice.
I agree with everything except the "it's working!" part. Unfortunately, Bernie and AOC are very much insiders that prioritize their capitalist party over common people. They go to bat for their "backstabbers" every time, they tell you to support Biden and then Harris, they shy away from the word "genocide" while voting to materially support one. The function of the Bernie-AOC tour is to keep the disillusioned from leaving the party behind. Which is what is actually needed to fight fascism. We already have civic fascism, we export the worst effects of it to other countries. It's just making a little visit home and there's a risk people will understand this violence as a normalcy of the system and that we must organize ourselves against it rather than just spend 30 minures every four years for a certain flavor if genocidal racist.
"Anime girls" is one of their other niches, lol.
Both look "AI" to me, honestly. They both fuck up their hands and have non-stroke, non-pen-looking accents and outlines despite being watercolor + pen outlining style.