I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future. I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.
there’s nothing more painful than when capitalists think they understand cyberpunk
The Blade and the Runner: Tokyo Drift is my favorite
…ok I’m fucking saving that for an RPG campaign I haven’t written yet
…huh, you’re right (for the movie — the shitty AI image is a bad amalgamation of a trench coat and something like the shoulders of a duster). maybe the fucker was thinking of fallout or some shit.
and now I’ve convinced myself to go dig up my duster
so I just fucking realized, this asshole wasn’t originally going to bring up the duster but he panicked. here’s the original, so much better-looking photo he ripped off:
and the spinner (a VTOL car) in that, viewed from the back, looks a lot like something he knocked off for the design of his shitty cybercab, including how the doors open and its general shape and color (though the latter’s due to the scene’s color grading if memory serves, but musk ain’t smart), though the cybercab doesn’t have any of the design elements that make the Blade Runner car interesting because of course it doesn’t, it was designed by a creatively bankrupt billionaire from someone else’s work
so that spinner’s missing in Musk’s generative AI ripoff of that image, because the model couldn’t make a spinner-like car that didn’t look fucked up. and that’s why the AI image has “NOT THIS” hastily applied in one corner and he had to change his speech from “I believe we want that car” (followed by revealing supposedly “that car”) to “I believe we want that duster”
unbelievably lazy, but not unexpected
NEW MISSION: we must show Elon Musk “Naked Lunch” so his next car is a cyber cockroach typewriter
Okay, personal thoughts:
This is just gut instinct, but it feels like generative AI is going to end up becoming a legal minefield once the many lawsuits facing OpenAI and others wrap up. Between the likes of Nashville’s ELVIS Act, the federal bill for the COPIED Act, the solid case for denying Fair Use protection, and the absolute flood of lawsuits coming down on the AI industry, I suspect gen-AI will come to be seen by would-be investors as legally risky at best and a lawsuit generator at worst.
Also, Musk would’ve been much better off commissioning someone to make the image he wanted rather than grabbing a screencap Aicon openly said he was not allowed to use and laundering it through some autoplag. Moral and legal issues aside, it would have given something much less ugly to look at.
We’ve also already seen internal documents from nVidia executives directing their employees to violate the CFAA, and it would be naive to think they were the only company knowingly and willfully violating federal law to get their llms up to functionality.
Never forget that Aaron was hounded to death for doing similar, but at a far smaller scale and for the benefit of humanity
holy fuck, the event was held at the Warner Bros lot because Musk and whoever’s balls he’s buttering at WB assumed that would mean he could use the Blade Runner still without licensing it (via The Verge):
Though WBD owns some licensing rights for Blade Runner 2049, because the event would be live-streamed internationally, clearance for the images had to come from Alcon directly. And when Alcon’s legal and licensing departments were made aware of the situation, they sent back a firm refusal to the interested parties “so that there would be no mistakes in the conduct of the event.”
Along with the larger copyright infringement, Alcon also says it was never made privy to any of the agreements between Tesla and WBD that would have been necessary before the We, Robot event. Along with giving Tesla the ability to use Warner Bros.’ lot and equipment, Alcon believes that agreement also included a promotional element that “allowed or possibly even required Tesla expressly to affiliate the Cybercab with one or more motion pictures” from the studio’s catalog.
Iron man 1 came out and he had his PR team work around the clock to convince everyone he was the real life Tony Stark.
My pet theory is that Robert Downey Jr is the reason Elon musk is as successful as he is.
My pet theory is that Robert Downey Jr is the reason Elon musk is as successful as he is.
Considering RDJ’s role as Tony Stark seems to have given Musk the template he used for his public rise to fame, you may be on to something.
it’s almost definitely the reason why Musk keeps making utterly cringe cameos in sci-fi shit, starting with Iron Man 2 and continuing on to Star Trek: Discovery and (of fucking course) Rick & Morty, and a bunch of other weird shit like the Saturday Night Live episode that was just propaganda. his former PR team very likely set up whatever price point worked for the studios so Musk could pay for a cameo, and Musk loved it so much he kept doing it after he fired that team.
what’s fucking bizarre is the Iron Man writers seem to swear their version of Tony Stark was based on Musk, and we know now Musk’s nothing like that. so looking back with more seasoned eyes: how much of the first Iron Man was just propaganda too? of course there’s all the libertarian shit — whose idea was all that, actually?
what’s fucking bizarre is the Iron Man writers seem to swear their version of Tony Stark was based on Musk, and we know now Musk’s nothing like that. so looking back with more seasoned eyes: how much of the first Iron Man was just propaganda too? of course there’s all the libertarian shit — whose idea was all that, actually?
You want my suspicion, Marvel were probably taking their cues from the public image SpaceX/Tesla’s marketing and/or Musk’s PR team had put out about the guy - as an eccentric genius par excellence who’d save humanity from global warming and/or get us to Mars.
Tony Stark treats him like a Putz in Iron Man 2. Not sure that’s what Musk was going for.
Now I wonder if Musk calling the diver “pedo guy” was him thinking “yeah, this is exactly what Tony Stark would say to the bad guy” because he doesn’t understand media literacy even a little bit. (More likely, it’s just him being the regular type of weird we’ve come to expect from him)