cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/6888554
Inspired by: "UK and France abandon plans to recognise Palestinian state at conference"
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
274 points (90.8% liked)
Lefty Memes
5601 readers
673 users here now
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility
We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
EDIT: For files you share in the comments, a simple summary should be enough if they’re too complex.
We are committed to social equity and to reducing barriers of entry, including (digital) communication and culture. It takes each of us only a few moments to make a whole world of content (more) accessible to a bunch of folks.
When alt text is absent, a reminder will be issued. If you don't add the missing alt text within 48 hours, the post will be removed. No hard feelings.
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What kind of logic is that? The tool exists and it takes 30 seconds to achieve a comparable result to what would've taken 10-30 minutes doing manually depending on user's skills. Is it only ok to use image generation for hard-to-do stuff?
Yes, really. And I actually think I was quite conservative with time requirements.
And why can't you only judge the idea/joke aspect of the work? Sure, the execution didn't require much effort, but the point was to convey* the idea/joke.
Are holodeck programs in StarTrek automatically worthless because to create them people merely instruct the Computer what and where to put?
This IS human expression. Human had a concept and realized it using a tool. Human expression comes in many shapes and forms. How is this any less effort than adding caption to a template image, which is 80% of regular memes? IMO, you're just biased and don't treat it fairly.
I am, in fact, biased against things that destroy the environment.
not to reply to two of your comments, just hanging around town rn ig lmao.
but:
better stop browsing the internet period, then. the last time you watched youtube or streamed anything it consumed far more system resources and it produced far more pollution than the vast majority of machine learning is even remotely capable of. why pick on the data centers used for AI when they’re handily outnumbered by infrastructure for other equally, if not more vain corpo products?
i genuinely mean this question in good faith, but, are you and others who harp on the environment in this discourse just ignorant of how the entire modern technology sector is actually built and runs? if your answer is anything but yes, then, why is your position objectively inconsistent and arbitrary? are you just too in the shit to realize you actually hate corporations and companies, not artificial intelligence technologies?
I'd like to see a source on that, first of all. Second, "banning video content" isn't really a viable or realistic option, and would also put a lot of people out of work, and the existence of video content provides value in education, artistic expression, and entertainment. AI slop does not, it's wholly unnecessary, ugly, limits expression, puts artists out of work, etc.
Well, first, Deloitte says data centers as a whole only account for 2% of global energy use.
This means that while yes, artificial intelligence is hogging an increasing portion of system resources and compute globally: it is still only a very, very small fraction of the energy usage of humanity as a whole or even the tech industry alone.
According to your own source's numbers, AI's share of data-center electricity usage is roughly 82 terawatt (also your Wired article's author misspells terawatt as terrawatt the entire time, maybe it is a spelling I've just never seen?) hours, roughly similar to the annual electricity consumption of Switzerland. Sounds bad, right?
Well, yes, but actually, no.
Global energy consumption this year is around 34,000 TWh. That means that if data centers represented 2% of global energy use, data centers this year used around ~500-700 TWh total. (34,000 * 0.02 == 680)
That means that, again, using Wired's own value of 82 TWh, AI alone represents only around 12% of global data center energy usage. Keep in mind that is not 12% of global energy usage, it is 12% of the global 2% energy usage data centers are collectively responsible for, meaning AI is responsible for a fucking staggering ~0.24% of global energy use.
What is the other 88%, of data center energy usage, you might ask? A bunch of corpo bullshit, including, namely; infrastructure for social media, streaming, and all this other shitass tech everyone readily accepted with no qualms until the spooky "AI" boogeyman made people wake up about the wider environmental impacts of big tech.
Except, not really though. Because as we see, most people are like you, and have a weird laser-focused obsession with the energy usage of AI in particular. You are doing a disservice to environmentalism by being intentionally ignorant of the wider implications of these statistics and their context. Don't believe every sensationalized fucking Wired article you find after doing a Google search, friend.
Sorry to cut in, but I have to hard disagree here.
The post in question has given someone the possibility of creating an image on par quality of any other *ball meme and saved about 20-30 minutes of work. It is an artistic expression, isn't more or less ugly than other *ball memes of similar type, enhanced the expression of OP (who would had worse results for more work), and no artist can subsist on the creation of memes.
Also, it is very possible to create stuff like this on consumer grade hardware, taking not much more power than running a video game.
I agree that AI CAN be used to create piss-poor excuses for art or to push artists out of their work, but it's the corpo's doing that, not the technology. I also groan everytime AI gets shoehorned into another thing where it simply does not offer anything useful, but it surely makes a difference if a corp uses AI as cost-cutting measure, or a private person uses it to enrich their life, which - we shouldn't forget that - the technology should be there for.
This is the one thing the Anti-AI trolls can't wrap their heads around or if they can they refuse to and instead try to strawman their previous point, because without that part their argument is purely copyright apologia.
The expression is in the concept not the execution.
You massively misinterpreting what creativity is. It's not just "having a vague idea".
Would it be creativity, that instead of writing a book I just published an idea (prompt) for a book?
There's no point in trying to debate or reason with anti-AI trolls, most of them are neolibs or just regular libs anyway. If they weren't they wouldn't be barfing out the same tired ass talking points and using ad-hominem to attack logical rebuttals to their arguments.
Go make a Poland ball cartoon.
Start right now. I'm timing you.
I think you're confused. I am a human being, not your favorite slop machine. Besides, this is missing the main point of what I said.
Times a ticking and no Poland ball yet. You are losing critical seconds
Remember that the circle tool is not allowed.