No wait I'm the wide two car garage adjacent to the powder room.

I am the invisible Bedroom 1.

Check out my sick recreational MRI setup with RGB lighting

FWIW and just IMO, but I think when the smoke clears and the hype dies down artists are going to be the people who benefit from AI image gen. Autogenerated content is my ceiling for quality but it is your floor.

I love the "corporate mandates"

Mostly I think it is hard to draw useful information from fantasies because they offer complex and unpredictable stimuli and our brains are weird and often uncooperative.

There are no stray bullets or ricochets in the Wickoverse.

That's for sure part of it! And part of the fantasy is being personally powerful enough to enact that justice and for the morality to be clear that they deserve justice and only bad people get justice. The movie explicitly takes time to show John not killing neutral or innocent people.

WRT the difference is how these fantasies are handled in violence vs. sex, I wonder how much of that is the relative rarity of modern violence by comparison.

Clearly that isn't all of it or even the biggest part, but it's interesting that only one is considered an expression of personal desire.

Yeah, it's a buffet of brain candy and everyone is coming for their own particular mix even if it all comes from the same trays and there's a big warning sign saying "our food may contain Gender or nut products."

IMO something like John Wick is offering a mix of violent permission, catharsis, excitement, power fantasy, comedy, and execution. It flips lots of switches, including "murder is ok if they kill a dog" and "gun ballet" and "absurdist comedy."

SPACE POPE!

The pay is insane and if you're lucky you can get into a practice with a generous work/life balance that only expects 65 hours a week.

Contrast these ledes.

Left, NYT.

Right, Reuters.

www.reuters.com/world/us/off...

That was and is a very real thing too. One is a desire to present a facade of respectability and power. One is a desire to present a facade of personal experience and legitimacy. Many people will do both depending on circumstances.

I think the deep poverty cosplay is mostly online though.

I think there's always been a "I'm just a working class / I worked my way up / blah blah" illusion plenty of people used. "I earned this job at my dad's dealership!" etc. I do think in very lefty spaces there is a similar but distinct deep poverty cosplay, nearly identical in purpose though.

I think the concerns are twofold:
Large amounts of LLM-generated output from experienced creators will crowd out inexperienced people entering the field.
Ideological business actors will refuse to tolerate training-type costs, even if it ultimately hurts them (which is already somewhat true).

I don't think those are incompatible. The concern is that LLMs will remove the amateur-level opportunities that people need to try things, fail, and learn.

That's a longer term concern, but in 5-10 years I think it will start to manifest in noticeable ways.