Downvoters don’t know what “fair use” means. Or do, but would rather work backwards from kneejerk opposition to an outcome.

A robot read every book in the library. That’s what libraries are for. If it can’t reproduce any book more closely than a Wikipedia summary, and serves a different purpose - that’s a protected work.

Training is transformative use.

A gigabyte of linear algebra that can rap about the Silmarillion is plainly not just copying. It’s not even large enough to contain a meaningful fragment of every book that shaped it.

Protecting fair use is more important than any hate-boner toward chatbots.

Oh fuck off.

A site cannot send someone a video and then be mad that they still have it.

(via ‪Jack Bernhardt‬ ‪@jackbern.bsky.social‬)

From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Cain From The Bible
Date: March 7th, 3000BC
Subject: Re: Thinking of killing my brother? 👀👀

go for it it wouljld be extremlry sexy to invenf thr cornvept of murder snd yherefore curse mankind fur eternkity ;) ;)

Extremely relevant XKCD.

An ancient 4chan demotivator summarized FFTA as “your life sucks shit and I’m dragging you back to it.” You’d think it was fundamentally impossible to have a good story where the message is, escapism is bad, mmkay? But it would be so easy to say Ivalice only exists as a shared hallucination, with the locals they’ve befriended gradually revealed as shallow imitations of people. Or: say it’s a real place which these kids can visit any time… y’know… like players do. Put some ludonarrative assonance on the idea there’s a crapsack reality you do need to take care of, to continue enjoying this fantasy.

On the other hand, as an actual game, Penny Arcade gave it the “Oh shit, is it 3AM?” award.

An isekai where the MC is Snuffkin.

Calling Farscape an isekai took me out.

And I mean… you’re not wrong.

“If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

Some guy in a 1995 Hilux feels it touch the asphalt like he’s a fucking Nazgul, and is pulling the metal out of it before you’ve shut your front door.

That filename, though.

Would the cyclops explain Laertes being played by an actor who is Maori?

This bigot is stupid because Africa is right fucking there. But audiences at large might ask ‘what the fuck?’ if anyone in ancient proto-Greece was plainly Native American. And that mass response almost cannot be wrong. Anything that takes everyone out of the story is a failure of storytelling. Working around that is not difficult: do it early. That’s how you make people go ‘holy shit, a cyclops!’ instead of ‘why the fuck does this movie have a cyclops?’

Suspension of disbelief is not something the audience owes. It’s a trust that the story will follow its own rules. Every story has rules, and the ones it does not provide are filled in with ones you already know. That includes rules from other stories: nobody in Harry Potter bothers explaining that brooms can fly. But that made-up element is not carte blanche for someone to wield a lightsaber. The rules you know for fantasy would excuse a surprise dragon, but not a surprise spaceship. Nor could an eleven-year-old boy from jolly old England whip out a handgun, without breaking immersion, even though handguns are real. A story where that kind of character can have that kind of object takes an entirely different shape.

It is important to avoid bad arguments even when dunking on the dumbest motherfuckers alive. We don’t need to undermine the concept of criticizing fiction, just to tell a crybully racist to fuck off.

Congratulations on the worst take in a competitive field.

Just… what the fuck? What is it about this distinction that makes people lose all sense? ‘Hey bearing in mind we’re still talking about criminal creeping on children, it’s important to remember that actual touching is worse than doodling over images, so let’s not dilute a term specifically f–’ ‘There is no difference between fiction and reality because what if a crazy person couldn’t tell fiction from reality?!’

Get help.

Because of the sentence you just quoted.

I’m making an explicit argument about the purpose of the term, as a necessary component of dealing with some of the worst crimes imaginable. I didn’t figure I’d ever have to explain to someone why abusing a human child is fundamentally different from and worse than drawing on top of a fuckin’ JPEG.

If y’all manage to stomp the meaning out of “CSAM,” the same way y’did for “CP,” we’re gonna be right back here, where there’s some bespoke term for the visual evidence of actual assault that physically occurred, yet people insist that a fictional rendering is-too VEOAATPO.

Diluting the impact of these terms is antithetical to protecting children. That stupid Horses game had people lobbing the term “CSAM” at it… for a game you can buy on GOG. If you can casually say “I bought some CSAM at Walmart the other day,” then the term’s not doing its fucking job, describing the kind of imagery you go straight to jail for.

Depictions could somehow be twice as illegal as the real event, and they still wouldn’t be the same thing. It literally did not take place.

Are you honestly asking me why child molestation is worse than rendering an image?

This term was already developed to distinguish evidence of criminal events. I should fucking hope everyone here understands why preventing or punishing such events is a leading goal, but apparently that’s asking too much, if y’all really do not believe there’s a difference between pasting someone’s head onto a magazine centerfold… versus sexually assaulting them. I am fucking bewildered by this lack of consensus on the topic of child rape. Really thought it was a gimme, for everyone to go, yeah, this thing over here is bad, but obviously it’s not as bad as child rape.

Didn’t expect to fire up the computer and have Lemmings sincerely ask me, why are crimes that happened worse than crimes that didn’t?

Do you understand that’s a different thing than telling me you’ve fucked her?

How often do I have to say this is still a crime before y’all stop having a different argument inside your heads?