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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: October 3rd, 2023

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  • My grandpa passed a year ago now, COPD. Likely honestly a heart attack after all the steroid meds for his lungs created heart problems including a heart aneurysm. When he was diagnosed way back in 2006 they told us he had 5 years if he was lucky, I didn’t think he’d see me graduate HS. Well he had a lot more than 5 years in him but after about 2014 it was all shit. He started telling my grandma that he was ready to die, wanted to die, in 2018, he begged for it on hard nights. He tried to kill himself in 2021 and 2022. Both attempts left him strapped to a hospital bed “for his safety” as he struggled to breathe, he hadn’t been able to reliably breathe laying on his back for several years by then but they didn’t care as long as he lived.

    I never felt anything but sympathy for him after those attempts. As someone with chronic lifelong asthma, I know how my end will go. I know what it’s like to suffocate and struggle to breathe and in case anyone wonders, it fucking sucks. It’s terrifying, it’s slow, and you know it’s coming. Panic is inevitable. He felt like that for nearly 10 fucking years. He told me once after it had gotten bad that he’d always felt so bad for me as a kid to have asthma but now he finally understood, he said I was so brave to have dealt with it for so long but in that moment I didn’t feel brave I felt lucky. When I use my inhaler I can breathe again, for him it just made him struggle less. For a long time I wished he would die, my absolute favorite person on the planet, and I wanted them dead. It destroyed me mentally for years. When he finally did die it was horribly sad and also such a massive relief for everyone to know that at least he wasn’t suffering anymore.

    I say all this, partially to get it off my chest but mostly to say, if we are going to prolong life we need to also give people the option to check out. Life isn’t life without quality of health, it’s just suffering. Prolonging suffering makes use torturers, it’s not a saving grace. If we have the capacity to do this for our pets then people deserve the same mercy.



  • No one using AI image generation tools is making art. At best they are commissioning images or “art” from a computer program, to think otherwise is honestly silly and ridiculous. They are doing the exact same thing that’s been done for centuries. They are describing the type of imagery they would like created and then someone else is doing the work. For AI tools the “someone doing the work” is the programers of the AI tool which is spitting out the image. Trust me I’ve used these tools you could monkey slap the keyboard and still get a usable image, I’ve tried it. AI image generation is just a faster form of emailing, calling, or writing to an artist and asking for them to paint their town chaple, or their portrait, or whatever else they desire if they have the money to pay the artist or in this instance AI tool.

    The challenge is deciding if image generation tools are creating art or not and the answer is no they aren’t. Art generation takes human hands because, as you’ve said, art is many things but one you mentioned was it’s to be thought provoking. To create something thought provoking there must be themes, purpose, etc. and right now AI is not capable of injecting themes or purpose into it’s work. Maybe in the future AI can do that but until then it’s just image generation and it’s totally fine to like it but it’s not art. There are even plenty of people who are artists who aren’t in museums, wanna know why? It’s because they are just generating images they aren’t creating art. Their work is not thought provoking, it doesn’t have a theme, or purpose etc.

    It’s insanely obvious with these discussions who actually has and has not either studied art themselves or even just been to an art museum where they actually absorbed any information. Invoking emotion is like the bare minimum, barely even scratching the surface, of what constitutes art. And if you haven’t studied art or spoken with someone who has that’s totally okay! No shame in that, lots of people haven’t but maybe nows a great time to jump into art it’s really enjoyable and there’s lots of incredible museums to visit that will have lots of information to provide visitors with context to the works so you have a better understanding of why whats in the museum is art.

    Im not trying to argue with you here, I’m just giving you information so you are better informed and don’t sound like a douche nozzle in public anymore.