Also, all this reminds me of drama in the Skyrim and Minecraft modding scenes, when devs publish stuff under Apache or MIT or whatever.
Then the devs find out they don’t like what others are doing with their code. Drama ensues.
…That’s kinda the deal with permissive licenses. Or posting publicly, like here on Lemmy. People will do things you don’t like with your code or content.
Well… I’d rather the dataset be public and there, with an ostensible centralized opt-out, instead of every AI startup frantically rescraping the same things their predecessors did.
No.
Why would they? “Moderate” Republicans would get zero engagement on anything, and if they’re way down the MAGA rabbit hole they are on different platforms to indulge in that.
People here label “a particular liberal/leftist that’s not in my political tribe” as Republican all the time, though. It’s honestly mind boggling to me. Lemmy is in like the 99th percentile of the leftism scale in the US.
Just want to +1 the above.
I get what you’re asking, but in practice, a considerable blocklist has to exist for pure security and practical reasons (like spam, phishing, cp and such).
One more thing.
If you look at the artifacts on the poster, they look replicated. For instance, look at the little mark to the left of his face:
That, and other hints, are sus.
…Does that mean it’s AI? Maybe. Maybe they printed that way to give it a “rough” look, or maybe all the posters were in a stack when they got damaged. Or maybe someone asked ChatGPT or Gemini to tessellate this poster across the wall, which has the exact same artifacts:
Or maybe you can find the original poster JPEG if you keep digging.
Also, the original image? 6000x4000 pixels, precisely.
That the exact resolution of 24MP camera sensors (like the Canon R8 or R50), but it’s also something AI could output, too.
I just don’t want you to misinterpret me: this could absolutely be AI. 100%.
Could be real. I think its real.
But you’ll never get an answer, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
I’m arguing, with all due respect, that your original question of “Is this AI” does not matter, because you can’t trust random posts from strangers anyway. You never could. I’m not trying to be impolite, but that’s intended to be a cold bucket of water in the face.
Eyeballing the photo is hopeless.
If you want to check credibility, do it the old fashion way, before AI existed: Check the source.
I’ll take a stab.
OP is: https://old.reddit.com/user/RustySchmeckleford/
Post history is hidden. And in their entire history, they only have two comments. Weird, but inconclusive.
Dead end.
No results on Tineye. The exact image is one day old on Google Images, but it is showing a few visually similar posts. For example:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/31/a-week-on-the-block-where-alex-pretti-was-killed
An original photo from The Guardian? Reasonable to assume that’s real. But that’s from Minneapolis.
Alright… let’s look for clues. What’s NRG Arena?
An arena in Houston, Texas, as it turns out. Found this on Facebook searching for that text:
That’s definitely the poster. This is probably some real street corner in Houston. That concert was in 2025, so It’s reasonable to assume the poster survived into 2026.
And that lets us narrow down the search. For instance, local Houston news posted this:
https://cw39.com/news/local/houston-ice-agent-shooting/
https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/salgado_araujo_memorial3.jpg
CNN posted the original photo the poster is based on. Again, quite credible:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/us/houston-ice-shooting-death
So… is the photo fake?
Shrug.
RustySchmeckleford could’ve taken a random 2025 photo, a picture of the poster, and AI’d it onto the wall. It’s impossible to tell.
But all the components are real.
I’d argue you’re asking the wrong question. If some rando in the internet posts a picture, AI or no AI you have no idea if it’s real or not. You have to ingest it with that in mind.
To be blunt: you will never know if it’s AI or not.
You could dig into the Reddit user or analyze it all you want, you could trace the source of the poster template or pixel peep for artifacts, but fact is this post has zero credibility. That’s true of anything from internet strangers.
If you want credible, get info from credible source. It’s that simple. /u/RustySchmeckleford/ is not The Guardian.
Encoder-decoder language models and all sorts of stuff were used for translation and spellcheck, long before “LLM” was in anyone’s vocabulary. Embeddings models were used in documentation searches, in IDEs, and other places. Whenever you used any search engine, pre Sam Altman, you were likely hitting text models too.
They worked alright.
It was not an issue. No one hated them; they are simple tools with a specific function.
I think people need to be careful of spilling (quite reasonable) hate of Tech Bro AI into the wider, older field of machine learning. In spite of the effort to conflate them, they aren’t the same thing.
That makes sense. The image host I used is pretty unreliable.
Which is the second issue. No image hosts even support JXL or AVIF, except catbox.moe, which is down now! It’s infuriating.
What platform is that, out of curiosity? Im pretty sure everything should load an AVIF.
Om Android, or iOS?
JXL is working alright for me.
As an example with a lot of dynamic range, here’s a JXL:
AVIF:
Both render in my desktop and iPhone browsers, just fine. I bet at least one renders for you. And I made them from RAWs from a really old camera!
The problem is, as you say… arbitrary lack of support. As an example, I can’t upload either file to Lemmy. Brand new social media software, and it doesnt’ recognize JXL or AVIF as valid image types, even though they should render just fine? Most image hosts wont take JXL either, hence I had to upload them to litterbox since catbox is down!
An HEIF, on the other hand, has basically 0 support outside of Apple:
All three of these render correctly on my phone, but only the top two do on other devices.
All the HEIC files from my camera are still busted.
To be fair, its a tricky issue. Its camera makers’ fault for using a format no one else wants to touch, and rendering them as HDR files instead of SDR with gain maps, as is standard practice for smartphones.
…But still, its annoying. They render fine on my iPhone, on Windows, or KDE Linux, out of the box. But they’re completely garbled in Immich :(
Fixed, for me:
And yet here we are, with the far right absolutely exploding in Europe as people clamor for more drilling, and climate change and renewables branded “woke” in the US, and much of the world increasing emissions still.
Guess who the groups stoking this are getting funding from?
As another example, my (scientifically minded) Dad showed me a WSJ article, just the other day, on how geoengineering makes any “risk” of climate change a non issue. The whole argument was that the economically optimal path forward was doubling down on petro.
Also, solar cells are cheap, but if we put fusion’s funding into them and geothermal, I think they’d be dramatically cheaper and more available by now.
The oil lobby is not a joke. Underestimating them has been one of environmentalists’ biggest mistakes, ever.
…And the oil shortage will make them fabulously rich.
I don’t think the technicals even matter.
What matters now is:
Popular public perception.
Incentives for decision makers.
And lobbying funds to sway both.
And this makes it tricky:
Fission looks bad to a layman. It’s scary, and failures and the waste feel dangerous no matter what the reality is. It’s a perfect fit for social media clickbait too.
New fission plants are a long term investment. They’re expensive, up front. In other words, they don’t yield any political points before a governor’s or mayor’s or or CEO’s term ends, basically, while even renewables like solar or wind are faster to set up.
There is a sizable nuclear lobby. This is a plus. But Oil will crush it like a bug if it gets “too big” and appreciably threatens petro power.
So as much as I love it, I thinks the best we can hope for in most regions is “recommissioning old plants.”
And to be clear, fusion is a completely different category to me.
I think it’s a waste of precious funds, and is “hopium” for the public. It’s theoretically interesting, but even with a breakthrough, in best-case scenarios, it’s still gonna be expensive to maintain and have many drawbacks. Some are even worse than fission (like more extreme neutron radiation irradiating and eroding components, and stupendously high up-front costs).
I think the funds would be better allocated towards maser drilling for geothermal and cheaper solar cells. And these would yield quicker political points, too, like coal/gas plants quickly converted to geothermal, or mass produced, cheap “backyard solar” the average person can buy and make money with.
Vibecoded self promo is a growing, specific spam problem though.
And a appreciable fraction of Lemmy/Piefed is “anti AI absolutist.”
I think that’s pretty unique.
Be sure to try the ik_llama.cpp fork. Basically, it specializes in MoE CPU offloading on Nvidia cards, and more efficient quantization types than mainline llama.cpp:
https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp/
And see this repo for specific 3090 configs: https://github.com/noonghunna/club-3090
Honestly I should just write up my setup in this community too.
Huggingface isn’t violating copyleft licenses here, I don’t think. And research projects that use it, with citations and documentation, wouldn’t either.
Now, if some business comes along and tries to make proprietary code derived from the dataset, that’s where things get hairy. But the people doing that are responsible for the potential violation, not Huggingface.