Hell yeah it’s back!!!

Also the OP slaps. KANA-BOON is great!

No, I still keep ublock enabled and still use revanced on my phone (RYD, sponsorblock, qol improvements). None of these actually prevent youtube from tracking your view, since the view counter still goes up and the video appears in your watch history.

Yes. This is 100% true for youtube and really any proprietary service with paid tiers. The greed is obvious and premium is only a little better than the alternative because creators are still being screwed over but slightly less. I only partially blame it on a large amount of people getting used to free content. But until there’s something clearly better, I’d rather do this at least since it’s still a net positive. In the meantime, I’ll participate in FOSS communities and try to contribute to alternatives so that it doesn’t stay this way.

I don’t know how popular this take is, but I pay for premium and feel like it’s worth it. Granted, it’s super cheap in my region and I get the student discount on top of that. I’m not a creator but last I checked, premium revenue is a little higher than ad revenue and isn’t affected by demonetization.

There are multiple factors that convinced me to get premium and ads weren’t one of them, since I’ve been using ublock and Vanced/ReVanced for years.

• Many creators I watch make excellent, high effort content but get demonetized for not being brand safe.
• I use youtube a lot. I’ll be the first to try fediverse alternatives of anything, but unfortunately, youtube isn’t something replaced so easily simply because the creators still need money to make the content I enjoy. That’s reality.
• I can afford premium but not Patreon/merch/memberships/superchats frequently enough to matter if at all.

Content on the internet hasn’t been free for a long time. It’s been funded by shady and user-unfriendly means like ads, harvesting data and affiliate links. It’s just that the money from these sources has started to dry up recently and people are panicking. I think the web monetization api has great potential if made easily and widely accessible, since I’m sure that a significant portion of people are perfectly willing to pay a little bit monthly for a better experience and to support the content they consume. I’m looking at using it in a project of mine as well.

Agreed. Even if technically it’s probably maybe fair use, it’s not in spirit. Taking Copilot as an example, it doesn’t matter if the training data was open source (and some of it most likely wasn’t), the AGPL is copyleft and people choose it to propogate free software. Even if the AI may or may not be in violation of the licence legally, it’s 100% not in the spirit of foss since the model is proprietary.

I wholeheartedly believe this too. There’s something so amazing about the feeling of creating things with your own hands and seeing what the rest of the world says about it. But the moment you rely on this to literally not starve, any unfairly advantaged competition becomes that much more dangerous.

I think the slew of flops at the box office is a sign that people are rejecting this. Putting aside what AI could do, right now everything that’s generated feels vapid in a sense, and I don’t think that’s entirely because it came from a machine. The creators were just that uninspired.

I’m personally happy that the film industry is struggling while works like Spiderverse and Helluva Boss and going against the status quo.

I mean, there’s a reason that Marvel/DC comics are nowhere near as popular as they used to be while manga gets several aisles at the bookstore.

It still hurts to see people around me lose motivation because of AI though.

Considering the amount of processing power needed to make a decent AI model, I’m pretty sure it’s already solely controlled by large companies. Plus, if it becomes legally required then people can’t exactly reject it.

In my personal opinion, I don’t think AI art is inherently bad and I’d put it on the same level as that particular style of soulless corporate art. I’m confident that people who actually care about the quality of whatever it is they’re making will commission real artists. And the existence of AI art wouldn’t take away the enjoyment of creating something with your own hands. But I’m not a professional artist so I think my opinion is irrelevant anyway. If actual artists have a problem with it, then it needs to be addressed.

While I mostly agree with you in that there’s no way most people would be on board with C2PA, it’s an entirely different matter if it becomes legally required. I don’t know how likely it is but it doesn’t seem impossible.

(Also the impersonation argument feels contrived to me. Just get your info from the source 4Head)

Well, it just bothers me that I know many people who still think art and other creative pursuits should be relegated to hobby status and I should get a “real” job. And the fact that AI is doing things that humans are supposedly meant to do for fun just doesn’t sit right with me.