First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I’ll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.
My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won’t budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won’t change his mind, doesn’t hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.
Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren’t displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it’s more privacy-focused and that I didn’t like Mozilla’s implementation of AI in their browser.
Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it’s fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it’s an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn’t steal jobs etc. essentially that it’s just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.
What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don’t know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don’t have any sources to prove my points so they’re essentially void.
How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with “counter”-arguments. I’ve sent him articles that he doesn’t accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don’t know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?
Thank you in advance
Edit: A thing to add: I wasn’t trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won’t ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don’t need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative “art”; that it’s used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like
For starters never shut the fuck up about books3.
Every AI company used it. They all knew where it came from. It was not hidden that the provenance was piracy. It was well known that the entirety of books3 was pirated via Bibliotik, a private tracker known for disseminating tools for removing DRM from ebooks. (Last I checked, that last part about removing DRM isn’t just a civil penalty, it’s an actual fucking crime in the US)
They can say all they want. The reality is they’re playing a game of “as long as do a bigger crime than anyone else, it’s totally okay.”
We harass the living shit out of “pirates” who do nothing but share media and don’t make a profit. We still have laws aimed at attempting at removing internet access wholesale to people accused of piracy.
But when your piracy makes a cool billion, suddenly its totes okay bro.
They always knew where books3 came from and they didn’t care. They can try to claim otherwise and stop using books3 now, but the reality is they wouldn’t have been able to grow their businesses at all without it.
Copyright is bullshit and broken, but I don’t understand how copyright violation on a mass scale is somehow okay when we put the admins of The Pirate Bay in prison for far fucking less. Like we literally saw private corporations lobby an entire country and it’s courts into changing how they worked just to prosecute The Pirate Bay admins. They went after them because they knew they didn’t have the money to fight it, even though so much of the case hinged on the “obscene” amounts of money they were making off of it. Not enough for good legal counsel.
It’s just one more example of “rules for thee, not for me.” Rich scumfucks are asking for it.
They’re happy to put us under the boot of copyright, but the big players? For them it’s fine because they’re making so much money, you see?
We live in a system built on exploitation and this is just the newest flavor.