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 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 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 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.
They aren’t promoting an environmentalist message here though, but an anti-animal-cruelty message. You can agree or disagree that it’s a good message, but it has nothing to do with their shitty AI ad.
Animals aren’t as good as humans at surviving climate change, so caring about one should include caring about the other…
Firstly, human beings are animals.
Secondly, there are plenty of examples of different species of animals that benefit - nay, thrive - because of climate change. Blanket statements such as yours is not helping either side.
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It’s a single AI image. The impact of generating a single image is basically nothing. I think it’s a stupid post, but they should be able to post it without being denigrated about the effects of AI generated images
This is a universal thing that happens to anyone advocating for positive change even if just tangentially to the environment. Constantly told it isn’t perfect enough. Greta Thunberg had her efforts constantly belittled, no matter how she did it. She spent months crossing the ocean on a boat to avoid taking a plane, but was still put on blast for it
Advocating for a more sustainable way of life shouldn’t be met with a persistent, “but you’re not perfect”
they should be able to post it without being denigrated about the effects of AI generated images
That’s generous of you to give this specific organization a pass on this but that’s your personal choice.
Your ability to justify it is part of why everyone else thinks peta is a joke. It’s so dogmatic it’s become a religion.
I agree. However if you do stuff primarily for the animals, you almost always are secondarily doing things for ecology and society too, even if that isn’t necessarily the intention. There are a lot of beneficial external side effects to spreading veganism.
The animal they’re asking us not to eat requires water to live. Something ai uses a lot of.
a big fish requires smaller fish to live. something that himans eat a lot of
ai does use a lot of water, but i dont think its a driving factor that majorly affects fish. there may be places where industrial water use is “drying up” rivers, lakes, etc, but ai data centers are not likely a proportionally large part of this. most water use goes towards agriculture, and a lot of that agriculture is used for animal feed (for the animals that people eat) and creating ethanol to power cars. ai is bad, but not in a way tgat greatly affecta fish
Sushi is generally salt water fish. AI uses fresh water.
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.
they are very easy to hate and there’s a lot of misinformation about them online. I used to hate them too before going vegan and I still don’t agree with some of their activism
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…
And yet you participate in society - curious.
Everyone here salivating over the easy opportunity to ridicule peta is no different than right wing nut jobs celebrating attacks on migrants. Its orchestrated hate to distract you from the real issues. Ffs wake up.
Just like the “right wing nutjobs celebrating attacks on migrants” that YOU enjoy ridiculing in your post, PETA has earned their ridicule also.
They stopped being People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals long ago. They are now just another money grubbing organization.
Oof… I got owned there. Thanks for puttimg me in my place.
I mean honestly the real issue is that there are no salmon that we can easily slice into sushi rolls like this. Come on scientists and do your fucking job.
“Clowning on PETA is just like cheering on violence against immigrants”
Bozo take rejected buddy, try again some other time.
i was shocked to see that comment with so many votes
fuck PETA and its “tactics” and i encourage everyone to consider perusing this filterable table of vegan charities and nonprofits for your dollar consideration
bro what i just dont like peta they do bad things
same reason i make fun of republicans and scientologists and certain churches
peta is NOT veganism
peta is a failed organization that directly defeats its stated purpose and that’s hilarious. you calling me a nazi is obtuse and joyless.
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
Yet again discounting the training costs…
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…
the training costs are real
Why did you post this 3 times?
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.
They aren’t against the concept of having pets themselves they just don’t like that pets are specifically bred for domestication when millions of pets are put down in shelters because they couldn’t find homes.
https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/pets/
And sheep do get hurt being shared because the industry focuses on the end result of as many fleeces as fast as possible rather than the well being of the animals not to mention the fact they have to be shared or else they overheat because we bred them into wool producing machines.
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-clothing/wool-industry/
Peta very much are what they say they are. There’s just a lot of smear campaigns at them because “haha these crazy vegoons say they’re against animal cruelty but they actually kill heaps of animals themselves” is a narrative that drives engagement.
They aren’t against the concept of having pets themselves they just don’t like that pets are specifically bred for domestication when millions of pets are put down in shelters because they couldn’t find homes.
…and yet PETA shelters have higher kill rates than many/most others.
This is yet another example of anti-peta misinformation.
Peta has high kill rates in their shelters because they have a no turn away policy. They will take any animal into their shelter and unfortunately many animals typically the older less cute ones are harder to find homes for and rather than keep them locked up in cages for the rest of their lives they settle for the less cruel option which is putting down the animals that aren’t going to find a loving home.
No-kill shelters have a trick up their sleeve where they look good on paper but in reality they turn away animals that aren’t likely to be adopted or even send animals that aren’t likely to get adopted to peta where they are then put down. In other words peta aren’t uniquely evil and bad at their job, the system funnels more animals into their hands because the alternative is leaving animals on the streets or locked up in cages for the rest of their lives.
This is yet another example of anti-peta misinformation.
Peta has high kill rates in their shelters
so… it’s not misinformation
A stat divorced from it’s context in order to make a benefit look like a failure certainly feels like misinformation. It definitely results in misinformed people.
Why?
It’s an out of context stat. They run a kill shelter of last resort. It saves hundreds of animals a year who would be killed otherwise, but as it’s a last resort, as one would expect it has a higher kill rate than the other shelters they transfer failed adoptees from.
It’s shocking how many people parrot the decontextualized fact without ever looking up it’s context, which is readily available. Like a half dozen times in this thread alone.
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.
AI bad AND Peta bad, right guys!
yes
I know peta isn’t perfect, but really now?
Yes, really.
gotta farm engagement
They’re masters of the art, look at the size of this thread.
Im in the mood for sushi now.
Wow, this is so edgy and hilarious!
Thanks! I’ll be here all week!
Performative activism was a fucking mistake, but somehow it worked for the right with the satanic panic and the groomer panic.
That “sushi” was supposed to swim upstream, spawn eggs, then die.
I hope one day they generically engineer a sushi salmon that can be directly sliced into sushi rolls like this.
