Just the regular kind of authoritarian purge

Garbage Day Is Doing A Residency In Brooklyn This Summer!!!

I told you we have some big things coming this year (there’s even more, stay tuned in the coming weeks).

Garbage Day is doing a three-night residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn this July. Tickets are officially on sale today. Now, you might be wondering, why does Garbage Day need three nights? Well, we’re going to try and save democracy in America. Or, at the very least, figure out how we broke it. And that’s a big task! Each night has a different theme and different guests:

• July 8 — “The Masculinity Crisis”

• July 15 — “Silicon Valley Ate The World”

• July 22 — “America Is Doomed”

And for the brave souls that go to all three, there’ll be a little surprise present for you at the final show 😏

Who Will Regulate The Machine?

—by Adam Bumas

On Monday, political cartoonist Pedro X. Molina discovered that his work, as well as a bunch of other political cartoons, have been victims of generative AI in a way I have to describe as “impressively shameless.” As reported by The Daily Cartoonist, Molina found multiple YouTube accounts had taken these political cartoons and instructed AI image models to reproduce them just differently enough to avoid automatic detection, then added a fake signature and uploaded the knockoffs in batches to YouTube.

These videos haven’t been enormously popular yet, but it turns out what Molina found is the tip of the bland AI cartoon iceberg. After digging deeper, I found what seems to be a coordinated network of similar accounts across YouTube and TikTok. Some, like the TikTok account @toonamerica, are doing the same reposting trick, and also appear to have inauthentic engagement: The account has over 10,000 subscribers, but its most popular video has been viewed less than 150 times.

Other accounts, like the YouTube channel Cartoonia Ameri (which has an identical AI-generated profile picture to the TikTok one), are just posting the cartoons unaltered with video effects, which may or may not have been done by AI video editing models. Currently all these channels are still up despite Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests on the ones Molina found. 

There’s no shortage of blame to go around for this, but — fittingly for an issue affecting political cartoonists — the problem goes all the way up to the White House. President Donald Trump is currently in a standoff with the Library of Congress ever since Trump fired librarian Carla Hayden last week for “concerning things in the pursuit of DEI” (actual quote). The office has been refusing to comply with orders that come straight from Trump rather than from Congress. Hayden’s deputy librarian Robert Newlen seems to be ignoring Trump’s replacement pick, and other new Trump appointees have been blocked from entering the building, according to a report from WIRED.

It’s not rocket science why the guy trying to turn the Kennedy Center into his personal rep theater wants to take over the Library of Congress. And it’s no surprise an increasingly opaque government is looking to control public information archives. But over the weekend, Trump also fired the head of the US Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress and basically the only federal institution to even try and figure out how AI content might work legally. The firing came a day after the Copyright Office released a report about copyright issues surrounding the training of generative AI models. It’s a very nuanced and well-researched report that ends up pretty even-handed about the issue, with conclusions like, “The knowing use of a dataset that consists of pirated or illegally accessed works should weigh against fair use without being determinative.”

But the companies that make these AI models don’t want an even hand, they want a fist. The Copyright Office report cites official comments from companies like Meta and Andreessen Horowitz, saying any regulation of AI training will stifle innovation and growth, as some of the many arguments it’s taking into account. And it goes beyond the scope of the report to mention how these companies have been, as you might put it, impressively shameless in attempting to influence the Trump administration. Andreessen Horowitz founder and America’s most expensive egg, Marc Andreessen, personally helped start Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And, more recently, Meta’s champion friend haver Mark Zuckerberg moved to Washington days after Musk started to lose favor with the White House. 

So now that Trump has fired the person in charge of the office that didn’t unconditionally agree with these arguments, journalists and Democratic politicians are calling it a retaliatory move for the sake of these AI companies. Which, y’know, hard to think of a counterargument to that one other than “no, no, this is just the regular kind of authoritarian purge.”

But the Copyright Office standoff isn’t the only case where there’s been a reckoning on AI and copyright recently. In the UK, a bill requiring companies to disclose copyrighted data they’ve used to train their AI models has been bouncing back and forth in Parliament, staying alive thanks to efforts from Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa 🫡

The point is that this stuff is here. The problems with AI that were theoretical or anecdotal even a year ago have become systemic, whether that system is academia or human resources. And here in the US, the government oversights we had in place to handle these problems are being demolished thanks to direct intervention from the people who are — as we wrote on Monday — making money off both the problem and any possible solution. And this isn’t going to stop at cartoons.

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A Good Post

Grok Is Freaking Out About White Genocide

Grok, the stupidly-named AI built into X, the everything app, has been crashing out a lot lately. Last week, it seemed to go renegade and start attacking the MAGA movement, much to the frustration of all the white nationalists on the platform.

This morning it has glitched out again, flooding replies with messages about the right-wing myth of white genocide in South Africa. This was noticed by The New York Times’ Aric Toler. The AI is, thankfully, debunking the idea, but it seems telling that this is what it’s having a meltdown about.

HBO Max, Which Was Called Max For A While, Is Now HBO Max Again, Apparently

It’s possible you did not know that Max, which used to be called HBO Max, which used to be called HBO Now, which used to be called HBO Go, was now called Max, which is fine, because now it’s HBO Max again. This is all, truthfully, not very interesting. Though, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote, “If Max is paying a marketing company a $1 million annual retainer for naming strategy, this is pathetic. But. If Max figured that it can add and remove ‘HBO’ from its streaming title every 2 years to create a bunch of free outraged publicity, I sort of respect the play.”

Which I tend to agree with. And Puck’s Julia Alexander had a good take, as well, writing, “If I didn't have any major splashy sports announcements during Upfronts week and my cable networks were dying incredibly fast, I, too, would do something extremely dramatic to direct people's attention elsewhere.”

But what all of this really underscores is how wide the gulf has grown between Netflix and, well, everything else. My prediction, which, to be fair, I’m mostly based on vibes, is that all of the streamers, aside from maybe Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV, will slowly revert back to their original corporate identities and soft sunset in the next few years, eventually reverting to portals you can access within the remaining streamers (which is already kind of happening). And we will someday, very soon, look back at this entire era as a tremendous mistake (this is already kind of happening).

An Interesting Little Crypto Scandal

Rohun Vora, the cofounder of the DeGods NFT project, among others, announced this week that he was stepping down from DeGods. He also felt the need to explain that he was not “on the run” and that he hasn’t done anything illegal. Which is interesting!

As Web3 Is Going Great’s Molly White noted, crypto founders don’t have a great track record when it comes to denying they aren’t on the run lol.

According to Cointelegraph, Vora stepping down does appear to be part of a larger “shift in strategy” for the NFT line, which is apparently “to make DeGods as big as it can possibly be.” Whatever that means.

I actually interviewed Vora back in 2023, when I was covering ETHDenver for Fast Company. That year, DeGods was easily the biggest NFT project at the convention and Vora, who was sort of dressed like a cross between Justin Bieber and a professional snowboarder, was swarmed by fans the whole time. Excited to find out just how not “on the run” he is in the coming months.

TikTok’s Real Horny For Yellowstone National Park

@visit.yellowstone

Within Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres, visitors have unparalleled opportunities to observe wildlife in an intact ecosystem, and explore g... See more

If you’ve recently come across @visit.yellowstone on TikTok, the extremely horny promotional account for Yellowstone National Park, you should know that it is not an official account for the park. Which is something you have to clear up these days. And according to Ad Age, there are multiple of these accounts now for all the different parks, all of which are very horny.

A Redditor Takes Shrooms

A user in r/shrooms (great community lol) revealed that her husband took a bunch of shrooms — 12 grams, which is a lot btw — and decided that he was an Italian chef in a past life. “He seemed very at peace and declared that he realized he was an Italian chef in a past life… Me and my mom were both very amused because he has never been a good cook.”

Well, apparently, he did connect with the spirt world during his mushroom trip because he ended up making the best pasta sauce she’s ever had. “My mom was rattled and said it was the best she's ever tasted and it was far superior to hers (and that's not something she'd ever easily admit). She even called it ‘perfect.’ Every single person who tasted it was amazed by it.”

According to one user in the comments, “It wasn’t a trip…. It was a spaghettaway.”

An Old Pug Watches Her Favorite Show

Some Stray Links

• “AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state”

• “Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill”

• “Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women”

P.S. here’s Patrick and his royal cloak.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***