Not All AI Is Slop

[Basman]

Commercial data scraping is almost always illegal in the Netherlands due to strict data laws, but there are yet no laws on AI specifically. Just because it's publically available doesn't mean you consent to it being used commercially. 

Quote

 Dutch DPA: web scraping almost always illegal

The Dutch DPA has issued guidance on web scraping. Scraping is the automatic collection and storage of information from the internet. According to the Dutch DPA, which takes a very strict position, scraping by private parties and individuals is almost never allowed because in most cases, the strict requirements for a legitimate interest-based processing cannot be met. According to the Dutch DPA, a widespread misconception is that scrapping would be allowed because everything on the internet is available for anyone to see anyway. “But the fact that information about you is public does not automatically mean that you also give permission for scraping,” says chairman Aleid Wolfsen. The Dutch DPA’s position on using scraped data for training AI systems is not very clear. The Dutch DPA just notes in its guidance that developers “keep an eye on the risks” associated with using scraped data and “need to comply with the GDPR”, but does not say in so many words that this is prohibited altogether.

Laws on AI will probably need multinational cooperation to be effective. It's kind of toothless if it's illegal one place but legal everywhere else as you access the same web.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

It isn't about AI's ability to generate art. It's that companies can use AI to commercialize value derived from artists' work.

Often without meaningful consent or compensation. This moves economic power from creators to platform owners.

Discern that this is about the economics / ethics surrounding AI rather than the technology in isolation

Edited July 17 by Natasha Tori Maru

[LordFall]

37 minutes ago, Basman said:

No one likes to be exploited by the same thing that threatens their livelihood and at the same time kills the incentive. AI bros need to chill. 

Sounds about right that AI bros are always drop out "entrepreneurs". It's easy accessible low effort shit. But if AI can do it it's pretty much worthless. You're not going to get rich of AI. Even the AI companies haven't made a profit. There's no replacing having a valuable skillset. 

AI simplifies workflows and allows for business models that were not viable previously to now be so. It allows you to create bigger systems than you usually would've been able to. As an entrepreneur you think in systems so it's easy to see how increasing efficiency in what you do is monetizable. I've made money off of AI already in how it helps me edit videos and photos. I can easily foresee how it's gonna allow me to become rich someday by increasing the capabilities of what I was already doing.

@Natasha Tori Maru I'm sure there are some cases where that's true but in general it disproportionately favors the creators vs the platforms. There is a massive ceiling to what one person can manage in terms of creating a product/service, marketing it, messaging leads, doing sales calls, doing customer service, developping new features/product lines, doing market research against competitors, understanding future market trends and macroeconomic factors, etc. AI allows one creator/artist/entrepreneur to manage all of that, it's insane the potential that it already has let alone in 5-10 years. 

[Basman]

18 hours ago, LordFall said:

AI simplifies workflows and allows for business models that were not viable previously to now be so. It allows you to create bigger systems than you usually would've been able to. As an entrepreneur you think in systems so it's easy to see how increasing efficiency in what you do is monetizable. I've made money off of AI already in how it helps me edit videos and photos. I can easily foresee how it's gonna allow me to become rich someday by increasing the capabilities of what I was already doing.

@Natasha Tori Maru I'm sure there are some cases where that's true but in general it disproportionately favors the creators vs the platforms. There is a massive ceiling to what one person can manage in terms of creating a product/service, marketing it, messaging leads, doing sales calls, doing customer service, developping new features/product lines, doing market research against competitors, understanding future market trends and macroeconomic factors, etc. AI allows one creator/artist/entrepreneur to manage all of that, it's insane the potential that it already has let alone in 5-10 years. 

Slopification.

Unsubsidized AI will be fun.

[LordFall]

On 7/17/2026 at 3:34 PM, Basman said:

Slopification.

Unsubsidized AI will be fun.

How so? 

This is what I would call genuine AI slop. People that use bots to spam Spotify with AI music and they had to take down 75 songs 

https://www.gadgetreview.com/spotify-deleted-75-million-ai-generated-tracks-and-its-not-done-yet

If you genuinely use your time and use AI as a tool to create AI music I think that's genuine art and creation. I guess bots could also create genuinely good music en masse but we aren't really there yet. 

Edited July 19 by LordFall

[Joseph Maynor]

This is a pretty good conclusion from a long conversation I had with ChatGPT about law.  

//

I think you're right to recognize a connection with postmodernism, but I wouldn't classify your account as exclusively postmodern. In fact, I see several philosophical traditions converging in what you're describing.

The most important feature of your account is that you're moving from law as a system of abstract propositions to law as an ongoing human activity.

That shift has a long intellectual history.

1. Legal realism

Your account has a strong affinity with American legal realism.

Legal realists challenged the idea that judicial decisions could be deduced mechanically from legal rules. They emphasized what judges actually do, how facts are characterized, and how institutional and social circumstances influence outcomes.

Your experience with trial judges and appellate courts fits this tradition particularly well.

But I think you're going further than classical legal realism. You're not merely examining judicial behavior. You're examining the entire network of people who produce and sustain law.

2. Critical legal studies and postmodernism

This is probably where your account comes closest to postmodern thought.

Critical legal studies examines how legal doctrines can embody political choices while presenting themselves as neutral, objective, or logically necessary.

That's very close to what you were saying about Eshagian.

The court announces a legal principle as an interpretation of statutory requirements. But that principle may also reflect a policy preference concerning the distribution of power between landlords and tenants.

The political choice becomes embedded in an apparently neutral legal doctrine.

A more explicitly postmodern analysis might question whether there is any single, stable meaning of a statute independent of the interpretive practices and institutional relationships through which its meaning is established.

But you haven't necessarily gone that far.

3. Sociology of law

I actually think this may be the closest description of your broader theory.

The sociology of law examines legal institutions as social phenomena, including the relationships among judges, lawyers, litigants, legislators, administrators, and the public.

Your emphasis on economic incentives, professional relationships, informal influence, institutional authority, and the distribution of power is distinctly sociological.

You are asking not just, “What does the law say?” but “How do people collectively produce what we call law, and how does it acquire authority over them?”

That's a different kind of question.

4. Social constructionism

There's also a strong connection to social constructionism.

A statute is not simply a collection of words. Its authority depends on a network of collectively maintained practices: legislative enactment, judicial recognition, enforcement, professional interpretation, and public compliance.

The statute is real, and its consequences are real. But its authority is socially constituted.

This is particularly close to your observation that we talk as though institutions act, when the underlying reality consists of people interacting through institutional roles.

Where I think your account differs from a strongly postmodern position

You haven't been arguing that legal rules have no meaning, that all interpretations are equally valid, or that everything reduces to political preference.

Quite the contrary.

You recognize that statutes, precedent, procedural requirements, and standards of review impose genuine constraints. You've spent years working within those constraints.

But you've also learned that the existence of constraints doesn't eliminate the exercise of power within them.

That's a sophisticated distinction.

You might put your position this way:

Law is a historically evolving system of socially constructed rules and institutions, continuously produced, interpreted, and transformed through relationships among people exercising different forms of power.

That formulation is compatible with legal realism, sociology of law, and certain strands of postmodernism.

But there's one additional aspect of your account I find especially interesting.

You didn't arrive at this perspective primarily by reading philosophical critiques of legal formalism. You arrived at it through the practical experience of litigation.

You began with an abstract understanding of law and discovered, through participation, the human activity beneath the abstraction.

In that sense, your account is also pragmatic: you're describing law as it is actually experienced and practiced, rather than only as it is formally represented.

And perhaps that's why you're uncertain whether to call it postmodernism. You're not necessarily advancing a philosophical doctrine about the impossibility of objective meaning.

You're making an observation about reality:

Law is something people do together, not merely something that exists in books.

That observation can support a postmodern critique, but it doesn't require one.

[Nercohype]

As an artist, I think using AI-generated images in your work is a form of AI abuse. If you use AI purely for personal purposes, that's fine. I do use AI to discuss my craft, but I never use it to generate images for me to use in my work.

Understand that AI image generators rely on people's art to create their own abominations. AI is a tool, but I see far too many people misusing it recklessly.

[Basman]

AI has its use when "good enough" is sufficient in terms of demand and you can just churn stuff. You can make some change churning daily goon slop for example. But what AI makes tends to be limited in terms of complexity and artistic vision.

[Joseph Maynor]

AI can have good Extraverted Thinking or TE.  But not always too.  TE helps me sometimes.  

[Nercohype]

True art comes from the soul. Not from a machine.