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TIL that Ray William Johnson is still on youtube
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI
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I got excited because I thought I woke up in 2011.
Ask a Ninja apparently started up again a few months ago. I'm totally fine pretending the last decade didn't happen!
My student loans would be back, but it would be worth it.
Kind of different, no? One is visual representation, and the other is impersonation?
They both use copyrighted material, whether directly or indirectly.
They both use copyrighted material yes (and I agree that is bad) but let's work this argument through.
Before we get into this, I'd like to say I personally think AI is an absolute hell on earth which is causing tremendous societal damage. I wish we could un-invent AI and pretend it never happened, and the world would be better for that. But my personal views on AI are not going to factor into this argument.
I feel the argument here, and a view shared by many, is that since the AI was trained unethically, on copyrighted material, then any manner in which that AI is used is equally unethical.
My argument would be that the origin of a tool - be that ethical or unethical, good or evil - does not itself preclude judgment on the individuals later using that tool, for how they choose to use it.
When you ask an AI to generate an image, unless you specify otherwise it will create an amalgam based on its entire training set. The output image, even though it will be derived from work of many artists and photographers, will not by default be directly recognisable as the work of any single person.
When you use an AI to clone someone's voice on the other hand, that doesn't even depend on data held within the model, but is done through you yourself feeding in a bunch of samples as inputs for the model to copy and directing the AI to impersonate that individual directly.
As an end user we don't have any control over how the model was trained, but what we can choose is how that model is used, and to me, that makes a lot of difference.
We can use the tool to generate general things without impersonating anyone in particular, or we can use it to directly target and impersonate specific artists or individuals.
There's certainly plenty of hypocrisy in a person using stolen copyright to generate images, while at the same time complaining of someone doing the same to their voice, but our carthartic schadenfreude at saying "fuck you, you got what's coming" shouldn't mean we don't look objectively at these two activities in terms of their impact.
Fundamentally, generating a generic image versus cloning someone's voice are tremendously different in scope, the directness of who they target, and the level of infringement and harm caused. And so although nobody is innocent here, one activity is still far worse morally than the other - and by a very large amount.
Unless you're generating actual random noise with an AI image generator, it's almost like buying a fence's stolen goods, since it is mainly just copying and merging rather than creating. It's the same thing as piracy, if you do it and then support the crestor no one should mind, but the creator for AI art is everyone it stole from. If I pay for the generation it's also saying to them "please steal more artwork, it is profitable."
The bigger issue is someone who might have commissioned an artist instead uses an AI version of their art because it's close enough to the exact style they wanted, so now their artwork was stolen, and the AIs only source for actual good art is less likely to be in the art business. The photographer or artist whose art they would've used or gotten flak for not sourcing is still stolen in the case of AI generation, but now it's stolen from 200 people so there's no obvious thing to point to besides maybe a style or a palette. If you tell it to replicate an artist's style, it's very obvious that it is recreating parte of images it stole, it just becomes less obvious which parts are stolen as you change the prompt.
Well you could say that about anything created from humans also.
Stealing intellectual property is stealing.
It's impersonation only if you explicitly say it's his voice in the video.
I think it’s only an impersonation if they prompted an engine to impersonate. It’s an intent thing.
I've been seeing a huge uptick in AI generated shorts and videos on YT lately. I try to avoid them as much as possible but at some point on the doomscroll they become inevitable
Yeah the ai slop has increased 200 percent. I'm seeing it too.
i just try to avoid youtube unless to watch a specific video someone shared via link.
scrolling through it i can feel my iq going down and stress shooting up.
YouTube is probably the best of all of them. So much actual good content
Fuck him. People who use AI have no right to their image anymore. They don't care what they do with the image of others.
What a greedy little piggy
What's the controversy about him? I genuinely do not know about the hate on AI-generated images beside using them for misinformation and submitting them as art.
Guy who runs a generative AI (image) company that depends on stealing from artists to generate said images is mad that a generative AI (audio) company is stealing his voice to generate said audio.
Turnabout is fair play and all that.
depends on stealing from artists to generate said images
Seriously?! Damn
Why is he even back on YT? Isnt he successful? What happened? Did he fuck it all up somehow? Did he find out that online “fame” doesn’t always transfer into real life?
Probably just bored. You seem angry at him. Don't worry, he won't reproduce. He was very vocal about not wanting kids and has been snipped.
RWJ is one of those people who every time I hear of him he's doing something I would expect from a zoomer tiktok star who's in their crash out phase and I'm like, yeah makes sense, I guess I only know that guy as a meme lord but then I remember he's in his late 30s or early 40s and him melting down like he's 22 and doesn't know any better is just embarrassing.
he did temporarily retire from youtube, but came back doing mostly shorts. kinda like how PPD came back because the money is too good.
Not angry, just generally, genuinely curious.
Whatever happen to him? I used to watch =3 and it was good for a while and then just started getting sponsor heavy.
Yeah, it's been like, 15 years since I've seen a video from him. Totally forgot he existed lol
It's weird when something suddenly pops up again that was completely lost in your brain. I used to watch a lot of small YouTubers back in that timeframe that i forgot the name and everything. Every now and tgen someone pops up and i'm like yeeeeeeah, i saw that guys backyard many times.
He’s still huge on YouTube. Seen a funny video from him a couple days ago where some girl lied and said he was her father and he abandoned her. He got flooded with tons of messages out of nowhere.
I feel like he got pretty mean with an obviously mentally ill person, buuuuut, he had the right.
i wouldnt says hes huge anymore, he has a smaller following. huge is mr beast huge, or sniperwolf huge, or one of the new influencers.
18 million subscribers is still huge. He’s doing better than he was back in the day.
mrbeast is just absurd (sub count and all of it). I doubt many people truly like his content, they just fantasize that one day he’ll throw them some money.