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A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs

82 points · 316 comments · TMWNN

  1. tolerance · · focus · HN ↗
    > Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.

    > They gave her a day to "think about it."

    When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.

    1. ratelimitsteve · · focus · HN ↗
      why is talking about this with their community a threat?
      1. F3nd0 · · focus · HN ↗
        It’s more about the way it was phrased and presented. Just sharing publicly available facts with your community (or anyone really) is not a problem in itself, but the message does rub me the wrong way.

        The message’s author is trying to present themselves as someone helpful and compassionate (‘I understand’, ‘I’m trying to help’), but at the same time, they’re one-sidedly setting a firm and short deadline (‘I’ll give you a day’) unprompted and suggesting the café owner strike a deal with one of the people they’re going to recommend. They might have written this with good intentions at heart, but it also wouldn’t feel out of place in a mafia setting (as in ‘do business with us, or else’), so it’s a hard sell.

        If they really were compassionate and wanted to help, they easily could have suggested to get the owner in touch with some affordable artists and left her with time to mentally deal with the backlash and all. They didn’t need to emphasise how they were going to tell on her like they were about to launch a vendetta smear campaign or something.

        1. sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
          HN needing an explanation of how protection rackets work is like looking up money laundering in the dictionary in Office Space.
          1. ratelimitsteve · · focus · HN ↗
            protection rackets involve crime and violence. talking to people about a business doing things you don't like is neither of those things. that's just coopting actual victimhood in an effort to make people disapproving of how you do business a crime.
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