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At first I didn’t really care about Pizzacakes content but ever since they started bashing Nazis and AI I like their content more and more.
She makes the correct points in the least funny way possible. Every time I see her art style I brace myself, read it with a totally straight face, think to myself “yep,” open the comments expecting to see a bunch of Pizzacake haters and anti-haters, get just that, and close the page until the next time. The consistency of that interaction over the last few years is one of the most bizarre phenomena of the internet I’ve encountered.
At what point do you think the artist has become aware of this and makes these comics to just ragebait? the bare minimum amount of work generates so, so much interaction, which I assume turns into some amount of monetary value through more eyes or ads or whatever
I would guess anyone spreading the comics also does it for the ragebait
You’re right. They aren’t comics, they’re statements.
She’s a political cartoonist nowadays. Which is fine but its jarring when your looking for hahas.
She errs on the unambiguously good perspective rather than ruffling a greater amount of feathers for deeper laughs from a smaller audience. You could call that least funny, or you could call it doing the right thing.
Bots ignoring robots.txt, a tale as old as time
Doesn’t Microsoft even explicitly say their Bing bot outright ignores your robots.txt? Basically only Google honors it at this point.
I have a whole table full of noncompliant bots and their IPs by now, all of which get shunted straight into the bin.
The most amusing part is that it would be absolutely trivial for these guys to make their bot traffic blend in with regular users but they’re always too stupid (greedy, impatient, pick any three) to do so. Spoof the user agent string of a legitimate desktop browser. Run some manner of Javascript environment to pass agent checks. Don’t bombard my server with dozens/hundreds/thousands of requests per minute in behavior paths that would be impossible for human users to click through. The last one is usually where they stumble. If these dweebs had any chill it would be trivial for them not to be caught. But they don’t. No, instead they want to try to fork bomb my site by clicking on every link simultaneously in parallel.
So, 403. No page for you!
Any reason you give them an immediate failure instead of wasting their time with something like nepenthes?
Laziness. Maybe some day I’ll implement that. Not today.
Jesus christ, this comment section
I always appreciate her comics for their ability to provide a blocklist. A hit dog will holler, so just sit back and see who gets upset about spins wheel consent.
I always tag them as “PizzaCake whiner” so I know to avoid them in the future. Sometimes they have decent conversations elsewhere that I don’t mind reading, but I will not interact generally.
Its a dumpster fire alright
As is tradition for basically any Pizza Cake comic at this point
I love how some think her comics are shallow and unfunny, while others think they’re multi-layered and have some deep philosophical meaning.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone who thinks they’re deep or meaningful.
Mostly people know they’re not very good, but they agree with the point being made.
I can’t imagine seeking out stuff I merely agree with for entertainment
Sometimes, one imagines, it might be gratifying to see that at least some people share your world view in some manner. Perhaps you might even get something out of seeing who objects strongly to the content, who feels the need to ‘do it down’. Not everything you ever read has to be done for entertainment per se. There’s more to life than that.
I’m afraid I can’t relate, though I won’t judge either.
I’m happy to read a comic to learn rather than be entertained, but usually the stuff I agree with I already know about.
This comic is absolutely true: The AI companies don’t give two shits about getting consent before feeding content into their AI training databases.
But it’s also true that they don’t need it. They’re not redistributing the works, so it doesn’t matter (from a copyright perspective).
Courts have already reaffirmed our right to save stuff that gets delivered to our computers over the Internet. If we changed that rule, it would mean the end of the Internet, Lemmy, memes, etc.
AI companies suck—yes—but don’t let anger at their behavior convince you that removing everyone’s basic rights is a good idea.
- AI is loathsome in my opinion, this is not a defense of AI.
- You don’t own whether or not your work can be “used”.
Using her logic (that not only is the work hers, the use of her work is hers), nobody could use any film, book, person, etc. without their consent; I don’t need the consent of George Lucas to make fun of Star Wars, I don’t need PizzaCake’s consent to mimic her work satirically, I don’t need Hunter S. Thompson’s estate’s consent to quote HST.
Not to mention, the arrogance of her thinking that her art style and/or commentary is “original” in any way. Unbelievably stupid.
thank you
This is pretty much the definition of a strawman argument.
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I don’t care much for Pizza Cake one way or the other, but damn this one really sucks.
i fuckin hate pizzacake
Then why’d you click on it?
I even tagged the post with her name in the title.
Then… don’t read it?
Imagine conflating sexual assault with AI scraping. She is such a piece of shit it’s unreal
Consent is consent. It’s not exclusive to sexual activities.
Extreme comparisons like this have been used since the dawn of time to draw attention to a smaller problems. Just because it’s smaller problem, doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.
In fact, there’s nothing in this comic that specifically compares scraping AI to sexual consent. Sure the “ugly” guy is pretty stereotypical of how we represent rapists, but that’s just a common association we share, not reality (I have no doubt the artist is fully aware of this).
If we really want to get into this, we can talk about the AI scrapping being done across social media that is adding children to the data set. Do you think everyone ai generating images of children has good intentions? Think their parents give consent for that “use case” when they posted the pictures to Facebook years ago? It’s disgusting and should not be dismissed because “its as bad as the real crime”.
So… don’t read it?
Imagine using sexual assault as a pithy justification getting upset about a webcomic.
It was about consent anyway, which apparently you can’t differentiate from sexual assault somehow.
The title of the comic is literally a play on the word rape
Scrapist is a name shared by many tools that scrape webpages and content as well. The content of the comic is not about sexual assault at all though. It’s clearly all about consent.
Want to know the fun part? She didn’t. You did that in your own head and got upset at the implications.
She absolutely is and you’d have to be incredibly bad at reading subtext to miss this.
What do you think the word “scrapist” is meant to imply here?
But I guess motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Scrapist, a person or thing that scrapes info. It’s not her creation of a word, it’s been used for years.
It’s also OP who made the title, not her. She doesn’t do titles.
Well I’ve never heard it before.
Even if it was created by OP that means they understood the message the author is sending loud and clear, even though you refuse to acknowledge it.
Imagine being unable to understand consent.
The comic doesn’t say anything about sexual assault. Why are you comparing the topic it does talk about to that?
This is about copyright infringement. 🤣
Copyright infringement is based.
Not when a corpo is doing it.
Copyright infringement is only cool for normal people, corpos should have to pay 5x the cost when they do it, cuz fuck em, they’ve got the dosh.
Eh fair. But I’d rather undermine the IP laws that allow them to claim ownership of the models created by the public rather than enforce the current IP system which is rather stacked against the little guy in favor of the mega-corps.
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Removed by mod
Why???
Because all of her comics are about her, but she pretends she’s some kind of social justice warrior.
Also, leaving personal taste aside, most of her comics (like this one) don’t even have the structure of a joke like a setup or a punchline.
most of her comics (like this one) don’t even have the structure of a joke like a setup or a punchline.
Not only is taste subjective but not all comics need to be funny.
You didn’t have to come this comment section, the post had her name in the title so you were warned.
Oh, also any criticism of her is met in the comment sections with this guy.
Consent to use and modify your work is not in any way comparable to consent related to bodily autonomy/sexual assault. Tying these two ideas together is ridiculous.
Can you point out where in the comic she ties those two ideas together? Because one of those ideas is only implied and you’re telling on yourself by getting upset at the implication.
It’s really telling that the people who are crawling out of the woodwork to brag about how much they hate Pizzacake don’t seem to know the difference between consent and sexual assault.
Who said I don’t like pizzacake? Normally I think her comics are funny. I just think this popular narrative that you’re violating someone’s consent by using their art is totally idiotic. You can’t own ideas, sorry. That’s a highly authoritarian idea created by the capitalist class to justify violence against us, and I think it should be rejected even when it’s not used explicitly in that context.
Consent is important when it comes to bodily autonomy. That’s why we talk about consent. If you’re demanding consent in situations that don’t involve you, that’s the behavior of a control freak.
The only thing idiotic here is that art=idea and therefore no art can be stolen. To prove this, go take some art from your nearest museum. I’ll wait.
But tell me more about how stealing someone’s art for use by AI is an authoritarian idea created by the capitalist class, and how the idea that all art is up for grabs by anyone so it’s totally okay to use it for AI is not the idea from the capitalist class. This is the kind of explanation that deserves some popcorn.
This is literally you wouldn’t download a car level logic. Stealing a physical object is not the same as creating a copy of something digital and then using that. When you deprive someone of something that obviously affects them. Creating a copy does not do this. The artist continues to have their copies to use as they wish.
I have taken photos of art in museums and strangely I was not arrested. Perhaps because that’s common sense?
Copying is not stealing. It’s insane that this anti-AI moral panic has gotten so severe that it’s infecting and degrading other strongly held and logical positions people on the left have had for literal centuries. Hopefully this will pass soon.
These laws and norms against copying and using IP only exist for rights holders to extract economic rents from ordinary people for doing normal things like copying and modifying art. People did this for thousands perhaps millions of years without restrictions until capitalism came along.
AI companies want art to be up for grabs but they also want to own the products of it. You can object to the first part if you want to preserve capitalist IP norms, or you can object to the second part if you want to overturn them. I know where I stand. Do you?
So you’re pretending you didn’t say all art are ideas so therefore they can’t be stolen now that you’ve realized how silly of a statement that was. But now you’ve moved on to other silly statements.
Scraping art for AI usage is not merely making copies. You would need to be woefully ignorant of how LLMs, AI companies, and people have been scraping work for AI usage for the past 5 years to believe that it’s tantamount to taking a photo of a painting and not used any further.
The laws and norms of copyright usage have not been properly applied to AI scraping at all either. You’re just referring to a poor understanding of copyright history as if that will magically making scraping all art, content, and IP be the justifiable thing to do, while ignoring who all are behind doing such a thing in the first place. You’re arguing that what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft are doing is actually anti-capitalist practice by stealing all content they can, while also saying they’re not stealing because art are ideas and therefore all art is up for grabs.
You should take a step back and realize you’ve sided with the capitalist companies against an independent creator here in order to suggest that it’s the artist who’s wrong and the big capitalist and it’s the big trillion-dollar companies that are correct and anti-capitalist.
I’m not pretending anything. All art does consist of ideas. Some also consists of a physical aspect and that physical aspect can be stolen. The intellectual, or idea part cannot be.
You’re the one who tried to move the goalposts to physical media with your museum analogy. So I modified that to make it as close to this situation as possible but still contain the same concepts–making a copy, and then, yes, using it however I wish after the fact. I didn’t spell that out because I thought the point was obvious but sure we can go there too.
I can take my photographs of paintings and put them into AI training data if I want to. The museum is not going to hunt me down for this because again, it obviously harms no one.
But let me make my own analogy here. If I broke into PizzaCake’s house and stole a physical print of this comic, are you asserting that’s the same as me downloading a copy of it here? Let’s say I use them the same way after the fact, for AI or whatever harmless use you find most offensive.
The entire AI industry stands on top of the IP house of cards you are defending far more fundamentally than any need to access data for free. If they were forced to follow copyright law, sure, their training data might get a bit worse, it might cost them a bit more but fundamentally they would continue to do the same things. In contrast, if they didn’t have a monopoly on the product of that training, there would be no profit model for them whatsoever. And you are defending that foundation here, no matter what you may think.
If you can’t understand subtext I’m not going to be able to teach you that skill. But it’s very obvious to those with media literacy.
The title is “scrapist” which I can’t even type without it being autocorrected to rapist. Come the fuck on. You can’t possibly be this ignorant.
But she didn’t write the title, OP did. She doesn’t post her comics with titles. And there’s absolutely nothing in the comic itself that even hints at anything about sexual assault etc.
It’s realy fucking funny how all you’ve managed to do is tell on yourself about your immense ignorance and idiocy.OP chose the title with the subtext in mind.
I can’t believe we’re debating this. The subtext is so obvious. I can’t tell if you people have the reading ability of a literal child or if you simply refuse to acknowledge it because you don’t want to or what?
But what exactly am I telling on here? I think sexual assault is bad and IP laws are bad. That’s no secret.
Because one of those ideas is only implied
subtext
Yeah, that’s what I said. You’re still telling on yourself.
Why does it matter if it’s implied vs stated? The message is clear nonetheless. How is that telling on myself? Your comment is incoherent, so I had to ignore that part to make any sense of it.
I am telling on myself that I’ve seen the harms of laws and norms around IP and the harms around sexual assault. Do you think I should be ashamed of that for some reason?
Shouldn’t people who imply made up crimes like copyright infringement are the same as rape feel shame? That’s what I think.
Consent to use and modify your work is absolutely not needed. Feel free to take my work, modify it, and be sure not to ask consent. My name is LibertyLizard, and I eat used diapers. What I do is not in any way comparable to consent related to bodily autonomy/sexual assault. Tying these two ideas together are seperate, but both very required. Otherwise it’s totally fine to falsely claim somebody eats used diapers while quoting someone. Which is fine. I’m LibertyLizard, and I approve this message!
Yeah, there is a reason that Weird Al, while not required by law, still gets permission from artists before using their work. If he didn’t get permission, nobody would accuse him of rape, but consent is still important.
What is that reason? Go on, explain.
There’s a reason why it’s not required even under the extremely restrictive copyright law of the USA. All art is derived from the work of its predecessors. Parody does not and should not require anyone’s permission to make.
I generally agree with their politics, but even I understand that if parody is scathing and meant to be oppositional or ridiculing then nobody expects consent.
It reminds me of that Dane Cook joke about gamers using the word rape too much. I hope the author will contribute better commentary on this issue in the future.
Dane Cook is a fucking psychopath so that’s not the best comparison to make.
What did Dane do?
https://youtu.be/BIO1BPfAu1s?is=oAp96EK1Etq279rM
I made the judgement myself when I happened to catch his act on TV and the whole thing was just brutally mocking people who cry.
So he’s a bad guy because he wrote a joke you didn’t like?
Honestly, it’s fine to dislike jokes. But he doesn’t make political content and doesn’t really perform anymore. He’s semi-retired and I find him to be a nonissue.
Edit. link the actual joke you coward!
So he’s a bad guy because he wrote a joke you didn’t like?
Oh for fuck’s sake. Is that the best you can do? Get outta here with this nonsense.
Why is it ridiculous?
Because one is extremely harmful and traumatic and one isn’t? Do you seriously think these two actions are in the same moral universe as one another?
If you don’t want people using your art don’t put it out in public. Once you do so, the public should be free to use it as they wish and doing so does not harm you in the slightest.
Why do you think consent only matters some of the time?
Should you need consent before recording the police committing a crime?
Should you need consent to cite/copy someone’s work in order to critique it?
Should you need consent before quitting your job?
Not everything needs consent and in fact, the entire concept of requesting consent flies in the face of our rights in many scenarios.
There’s a whole lot of people—in power—that would love it if everything required consent.
Consent is a complicated topic that should not be talked about like it is all black and white.
I noticed you didn’t seek my consent before making this comment. Why do you only think consent matters some of the time?
Literally everyone thinks consent only matters some of the time. If you want to have a real discussion about this, come back when you have an actually coherent point to make.
![Scrapist [PizzaCake]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/9ac42d45-d20f-4c72-ac94-1269c5dd363d.png){kind=link}