It’s worth taking a moment to remember that PETA, despite not being perfect, has been the victim of a smear campaign by the meat industry, so every mistake they make is amplified and every policy that isn’t immediately obviously sensible is reframed to look as bad as possible. E.g. you’ll often see that PETA-run dog shelters euthanise a lot more dogs than the average shelter, leaving out the context that plenty of no-kill shelters send all their sick dogs to a PETA shelter to be euthanised so they can claim not to have killed the dog, but that skews the statistics. You’ll also see news reports about PETA abducting a pet dog and killing it, which leave out the fact that it’s one past event being reported over and over as if it’s news each time, and that it was a much more nuanced situation than most people think. A pet dog’s collar fell off while it was unattended playing with a pack of strays, which animal control had been dispatched to round up, and then sent to PETA to be put down, then a series of clerical errors meant animal control told the owners they never had the dog and told PETA that the dog had already been held waiting to see if an owner claimed it, so it was already dead by the time the owners tracked down where it had really ended up.
Smear campaign or not, their marketing and social media presence is aggressive and obnoxious on purpose. It seems to be purely focused on getting as many eyes on them as possible without actually considering what those eyes will think of them after getting the desired attention.
When I think of PETA I don’t think of an organization with strong moral and ethical principles, I think of an organization that made a bunch of tone-deaf video game parodies in the 2000s to try and get attention. Those are wounds that are entirely self-inflicted.
i played all those awful peta games as a kid, they would show all the gross shit in slaughterhouses and stuff
didnt change my eating habits one bit
Woah, we got a badass over here!
thanks 💪😎🤳
That… wasn’t a compliment.
it was and i thank you for it
Hating one side doesn’t automatically make you like the opposing side.
You can hate both PETA and the industrial meat industry. You can also laugh at memes mocking both.
At the end of the day, PETA creates misinformation and isn’t on the side of good. They milk their supporters for more money and once in a while, gets a really good talking point but then botch it because of how stupid they present themselves.
PETA is the Westboro Baptist Church of the animal rights movement: Purely focused on getting eyes at them at any cost, no matter how stupid it makes them and the people associated with them look. I’ll never take an organization that wasted their time yelling about how catching bugs in a video game is evil seriously. At this point, they’re either willfully stupid or they’ve been infiltrated by the meat industry and pushed to do things that discredit them.
PETA exists to kite misplaced public vitriol and industrial counter-propaganda away from the constellation of smaller animal advocacy groups who make the majority of forward progress on their shared mission. Some local vegan advocacy group with 30 members can do an outsized amount of good in their community but isn’t going to survive a corporate laser targeting, however PETA can shrug off an attack like that without issue. PETA is basically the main tank of a raid group, smaller orgs are the DPS, and industrial animal agriculture (Or from my social ecology perspective, our tendency to dominate the natural world in general) is the raid boss. PETA very much wants the vitriol and isn’t at all the out of touch misguided organization that they willing and strategically wear as a reputation.
Except tanks don’t go around making adventurers look bad.
To the contrary! A bumbling oafishness that sometimes makes the team look bad to outsiders is a core tank trope and a common recipe for initiating encounters. And Taunt is a cornerstone of the tank kit.
Seriously though, PETA doesn’t make other vegan activists look any worse than animal ag propaganda already does. A lot of money goes into making vegans look bad.
Yea a lot of money goes in to making activists look bad … which is exactly why it’s absolutely moronic of PETA to contribute actively to the problem.
Especially when they’re adding credibility to the slander.
And yet, it’s a strategy that has worked for decades.
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No ad hominem please, I presume we’re all adults here. I understand why PETAs strategies may seem counter-intuitive from the outside, but they’re a large organization that has been finding success in their mission for decades.
I know plenty of people who didn’t go vegetarian or vegan especially because peta made that choice look obnoxious and they didn’t want to associate with it
Peta is doing more harm than good
How many people? Tell me all the details about each of them.
This has serious 4d chess vibes to it.
It’s not really that complicated a strategy for a large, well-financed team of full time activists to produce, and really it’s within a genre of “leveraging propagandized outrage” shock activism seen more frequently in the past decade from larger advocacy groups. Like those incidents of people vandalizing art with soup, or pouring products on the ground in grocery stores, or painting monuments. It generates outrage, that outrage garauntees wide news coverage, that wide news coverage reaches and activates 100x or 1000x the number of fresh new activists that traditional advocacy acts might, making the media-directed vitreol of millions who will forget and move on within a week fantastically worthwhile. It basically taps into the power of existing propaganda against a movement, using it to ultimately drive interest in the movement. I forget where I was reading an interview with a Greenpeace leader, about how they simply couldn’t pass on these tactics because of how effective they are, and they arrived at that conclusion not by prediction but by experience.
Sure. Anyone who is aligned with the mission will perceive this as an expert move. Similarly, Trump or Musk supporters do the same. Hence, 4D chess.
From what I gathered reading the interview mentioned (I’ll see if I can find it) it was the statistical results they couldn’t argue with. There was just as much skepticism and resistance to these tactics internally, until the results couldn’t be ignored. Activists are generally concerned about likability and are not analagous to nihilistic billionaire narcissists.
edit - This article by a disruptive politics researcher isn’t the interview I’m looking for but it illustrates my ideas here better than I have.
Are you referring to The credibility of shock advocacy: Animal rights attack messages
Results indicated that PETA’s attack message against abuses at corporate pig farms was effective in eroding the credibility of the corporate food-industry raising animals for consumption. At the same time, PETA’s credibility rose overall after participants viewed the PETA attack message.
That seems to align with your argument but not with the topic. The study was focused on corporate pig farm.
The 53 participants were volunteers participating for course credit from upper division communication courses at a large public university located in an area where agribusiness interests loom large.
This is a terrible sample to base any conclusions on.
The results only give clear indication that such advocacy messages intensify already existing negative predispositions
And this indicates it is not a generally useful approach.
The study doesn’t measure how long the effect lasts; outrage is fleeting.
No, but I edited my previous comment to link to an article that’s close to what I’ve been trying to explain.
PETA are their own smear campaign. Their own ignorance and skewing facts to push a narrative are all I needed to not trust what they or any of their supporters have to say about animals.
Pretty sure that’s a trout, not a salmon.
A freshwater fish that will never see a kelp forest. Because those only exist in salt water.
And trout are not full of rice
Wow, good eye. I hope that doesn’t mean the whole thing is fake
There’s clearly a photo of it. Of course it’s real
Aha! And just how do you know what the inside of a fish is like, fish-murderer?
“Sushi” refers to the sour rice, not the fish. You can have completely vegan sushi.
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Heads up for anybody like me who loves their yam tempura and avocado sushi, they almost always add Japanese mayonnaise to sushi, but you can ask them to make it without it and then it is vegan.
To wit, most sushi establishments have vegan options on their menus regardless of intent to accommodate. I had a delicious fully vegan sushi meal on my vacation just a few months ago.
Affirming the Disjunct. -10 philosophical credits.
Are we sure that’s AI and not just AI paranoia caused by a decent photoshop job? Cause it looks like a shop to me (Because of the pixels, and having seen quite a few shops in my time)
Also keep shitting on PETA, the aegis and vanguard of an ethical and ecological movement, you certainly won’t ever regret doing that.
Yes, just look at that weird tear.
I suck at image manipulation, and even I would be able to align the hand and the fish somewhat.The tear I chalked up to just weird preferences, but yeah now that I’m focusing on it the hand in the back behind the fish doesn’t make much sense, that’s not how I’d hold something I’m cutting.
I’m pretty sure that’s because the hand is holding onto the rest of the sushi roll, not the fish. It’s at least two images photoshopped together, one of a person cutting a sushi roll and one of a fish, with a weird tear added onto it
isn’t that just a photoshoped image (except maybe the fish) or am i missing something? cause i can’t really tell if that’s AI-generated
It has the ChatGPT image gen grain. Also notice the sushi slice closer to the knife, the salmon makes no sense.
Yeah the closer the sushi got to the salmon the more the AI confused it as part of the fish to the point that the closest roll has spots on the wrap that match the fish lol
I don’t think that was “confused”. I think it was the point of the image. Trying to create an association between the fish in sushi and the live fish it comes from (even though that doesn’t look like a salmon)
It does seem easy enough to whip together in photoshop, and partially I’d guess that’s what happened because of the way the fish casts zero shadow on the hand behind it and the way the salmon skin is layered over one sushi piece and no others, but perhaps it’s simply become easier for companies to use GenAI for even simple photoshop tasks.
The salmon look like a picture of a salmon trophy that’s been cut out with a pen tool selection without a feather.
Though the meat looks a little bit suspect…
imgdetector.ai says it’s AI. I guess it’s good OOP has all those extra fingers to compensate for the way they use a knife.
Magic 8 ball also says it’s AI
AI image detection is a crapshoot at best, just fyi. They are poor indicators of whether something is actually AI, and shouldn’t be trusted any more than a coin flip.
And yet you participate in society - curious.
Why did you post this 3 times?
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It’s not hard to imagine destroying the environment directly affects a lot of animals?
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And farming lots of animals directly affects the environment!
A farmed salmon would use / pollute orders of magnitude more water then an ai image. Even if peta was willing to buy salmon there wouldve been way more resources used to create this in real life then via ai. Just the rice in the sushi would’ve required more water to grow and then prepare compared to the AI image.
How about- egads!- using an actual image or picking up a fucking pencil
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If that human is being paid a fair wage to do it I don’t see the problem. I also don’t see how paying a single artist is going to “keep capitalism viable for an extra year”. Sounds like you just want artists to starve so you can have some AI vomit pixels at you and call it art.
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Lol go troll somewhere else
Translation: I have no argument
(Edit:formatting)
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Yet again discounting the training costs…
the training costs are real
Estimates for how much an AI image costs in water varies widely, estimates from 0.4 liters to 50 liters with the median I’m seeing at about a 1-5 liters. Even taking the 50 liter estimate which we can assume includes training and electricity generation to get a number that high that is far below a serving of rice which costs 276 liters.
Malthus would be proud of you…
Even with the training costs, it is very little water compared to mass scale agriculture.
Except agriculture puts food on the table, and ai data centers just spits out soulless art and tells people to kill themselves. I would not consider them to be comparable.
We produce food in such a vast excess compared to what we need that we feed most of it to animals so we can have beef instead despite being vastly less efficient.
And I support degrowth. I do not see how this helps you. I never said we don’t have an excess, I just said we need agriculture and we dont need ai data centers.
Yeah, a process required to make food and a process to make an image that could have easily been done by an artist or simply pulled from one of the countless sites full of existing free images, are totally comparable.
How much energy would have been taken in the time it takes you to draw a poster on a computer?
I would actually be interested in the comparison, how long is a typical model trained for and how much is it used. The actual generation usage is typically a few seconds of a normal gaming PC. Training is more, but its then used by many.
Performative activism was a fucking mistake, but somehow it worked for the right with the satanic panic and the groomer panic.
AI bad AND Peta bad, right guys!
yes
Do these people really think the use of AI for that photo outweighs the positive impact from that sort of ad campaign??
PETA is weird because they’re not so much “pro animal rights” or “pro eco friendly” as they are “anti domesticated animals” including pets.
As a result a lot of their messaging is desperate propaganda, like spreading the pseudoscience that milk causes autism, or trying to imply that shearing sheep for wool hurts them somehow.
They’ve also done some pretty evil things because they believe animals are better off dead than domesticated.
The OP and its traction are the perfect encapsulation of the kind of dumb most people are… sadly.
PETA’s only goal is attention. Does this help their cause? Yes, because we’re here talking about them from their marketing.
That’s the intent behind most AI in marketing. They intentionally make it obvious so you get angry and talk about their ads. The goal is attention.
If you’re as principled as PETA wants you to believe they are, there is no “outweighing”.
Printing flyers on a paper is out too if there’s no consideration for good outweighing the bad
I hope one day they generically engineer a sushi salmon that can be directly sliced into sushi rolls like this.
Fish turned into nori… funniest shit I’ve ever seen.
I used to be very sympathetic to PETA but then I watched them operate for a while and it went away.
