Administrative Note: Drinking The Free Beer Not Mandatory
Reports of the death of the internet grow daily in volume and stridency. The participatory internet, AKA Web 2.0, is indeed a pale shadow of its former robust glory, and although too much can be made of the so-called Dead Internet Theory, sites like this one, that aren’t completely moribund stale pages or big-tech social media silos, do seem increasingly rare. Spanking Blog doesn’t have a huge audience any more, and I might have enough fingers and toes to count the regular commenters, but anybody can read here, and almost anybody can comment. It’s all free, even if new comments by first-time commenters do get held up in moderation for vibe-check and spam clearance.
The vibe check, honestly, is hard to describe the limits of. It’s been a long time since I tried to write down any specific rules for commenters. But for starters, I don’t usually pass creepy stuff, such as comments that try to leer directly at the photographic models as if they were present in the comment thread. Likewise I don’t usually allow comment references to real-world nonconsensual situations, and I’m not partial to rudeness. If you’re swearing at me or another commenter, that’s right out, and it’ll usually get your commenter info blacklisted.
I’ve also, always, been super touchy when people try to tell me what I should or should not publish here. Folks, the beer is free. If you don’t like it, don’t drink it!
This post is brought to you by somebody who tried to leave a comment swearing quite viciously at me about a series of images I published many months ago that he decided were AI-generated. To me they looked like fifteen-year-old Poser art — remember when people did Poser art? If it was AI, the creator used a shitty model. But that’s immaterial. The beer was free. You don’t want it? Don’t drink it! But don’t come swearing at me for offering it.
Nevertheless: if I wanted to make Spanking Blog “all AI all the time” (don’t worry, I don’t!) nobody would be welcome to try to police that decision rudely in my comments. None of you pay my server bill. The beer is free. AI “art” is very polarizing, and I’ve only knowingly posted a few pieces of it. But, and this is key, it’s my call to make. The scrollbar is right there. So is the back button. This is not A Clockwork Orange, and nobody’s forcing anybody’s eyeballs open or making you look!
There are presently something like 5,800 posts here on Spanking Blog. There’s a curatorial reason (good, bad, or indifferent) behind every one of those fifty eight hundred posts. Some of the posts contain good art, some of them bad art, some of them no art at all. In the art posts you’ll find everything from ASCII art to medieval illuminated manuscripts to bathroom stall graffiti to prison tattoos, probably. The fact that a particular image may or may not have been generated by an ethically-controversial technology isn’t even going to blip my should-I-or-shouldn’t-I post-it radar. There are 100 more important things that go into any given posting decision.
And that’s before we get to the problem of: I’m officially an olde pharte. Some things are “obviously AI” to me when I look at them, but they’re not always the same things that are “obviously AI” to other people. Just like, 25 or 30 years ago, some of the things that were “obviously Photoshop” to some people weren’t “obviously Photoshop” to everybody. I certainly don’t have any surefire tool for knowing, and neither does anybody else. So, no matter how you feel about AI, you’ve got no cause to be swearing at anybody else about a particular image or publishing decision. They may not see it how you see it, and — heaven forfend — you might even be incorrect!
Regular readers are of course always welcome to give me feedback (polite, civil, friendly feedback) about the overall course of Spanking Blog and what they think of how my editorial policies are evolving over time. In fact, I welcome it! But for somebody who never commented before about anything to come swear at me about old Poser art (or whatever) because it pushed some tech-activism button that this blog isn’t even a little bit about? Naw, screw that. Daddy don’t play. Move comment to trash, ban commenter IP and email, so long, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye.
Thank you for this blog. Do I like every post? Of course not. But as you say, the beer is free. And free beer is my favorite kind of beer.
I’ve been regularly reading this blog for YEARS (like, I think I discovered you in 07 or 08, and check in about once or twice week).
I usually just lurk – this may only be my 3rd or 4th comment over in all that time. But I appreciate the work you’ve done. Finding consistent, decent material is a pain in the ass – and not the fun kind. So, THANK YOU!
Thank you for all your work.
All y’all are welcome! And Dioneo, not even I like every post, I can’t see how anybody else would!
Years long lurker here… I appreciate your hard work and expense maintaining this blog, I have some experience what it takes to post routinely week in and week out.
And Um… being an old pharte too, I have not noticed any postings that raised AI flags – what did I miss?
I suppose AI generated images are fake and all those highly posed images which are not AI generated are so very natural that they can never coexist? Or is the problem some ethical dilemma on training AI on unpaid artists’ work?
Peter, I didn’t specify which images so outraged my foul-mouthed abusive commenter, because I didn’t want to make the conversation about a specific post. Sufficient to say, I honestly don’t think that specific post actually did contain any AI images — but I might be incorrect. At the end of the day it’s not important; there are a couple of other AI images on Spanking Blog for sure, at least one of which I generated myself. Controversial or not, it’s something that readers here are going to have to be prepared to encounter, at least occasionally.
The “is it immoral and/or distasteful to use AI to make art” conversation is huge and contentious; comments under this post are probably not the best place to have it, nor am I the best person to have it with. There are environmental issues, there are issues concerning the fundamental relationship between capital and labor, there are aesthetic issues that some people consider quite dire, there are purely legal issues having to do with an existing corpus of intellectual property law that wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting authors and artists before LLMs came along and may (or may not, depending on who you ask) be implicated by the training of LLMs, or by using them; and there is an entirely different set of issues (beyond all legal questions) going to authors’ and artists’ moral rights, where people have never heretofore fully agreed on the philosophical basis or extent of those rights as well as the present factual extent to which LLMs impinge on them.
Complicating all of this is the fact that the underlying mathematics of LLMs are only comprehensible to most of us through a series of analogies, which are perforce imperfect — the map is not the territory. So when people start trying to reason about what LLMs do and how they work and how existing laws, rules, ethical principles, and economic arrangements should apply to them, the reasoning is often wonky because the analogies are imperfect.
To put it more simply, the whole conversation is a big old ugly hairball of a mess. Utterly fascinating, but messy beyond my ability to express. Anybody who thinks it’s simple enough to have a hardened position worth yelling about probably — how can I put this most kindly? — has not even begun to grapple with the nuances involved.
Lurker come by every once in a while. Mostly because of just so much to do ,so litle time. But i love the sight, and thank you.
I’ve been lurking here for many, many years. It’s your site. I like the way you run it. Ignore the haters, and thank you so very much for your years of toil from the quieter depths of the ‘net!
I don’t comment often but I’ve been drinking your free beer for over 20 years, and have much enjoyed it.
I appreciate the work it takes to keep this up, so to speak.
Your website has always been and remains brilliant. It is so eclectic.
You’re doing god’s work. Keep it up!
Thank you for your continued effort.
Thank you for your continuous efforts, really love the content here! And to be honest, this also gave me the courage of submitting post somewhere.
Not as frequent a visitor now but this still amongst the few websites I can type directly into a browser’s address bar!