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Comment by jrflowers | Hacker News Reader

It literally is not. You can maybe phrase it to sort of sound like a threat but “I’m going to share your public ad” is never a threat. It’s like if you angrily yell “I’m going to come to a complete stop at this upcoming stop sign!” in a threatening voice and then do that, it wasn’t a threat. Great. That’s what the sign is for. That’s what everyone wants you to do.

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In the context of how it was done, saying that they would give them a list of people and a day to think it over, it really is a threat, it's a kind of extortion.

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what extortion is. It's only extortion if the one extorting is the one receiving the benefit. Hiring a random artist on Fiverr would still make them happy (since the poster is not AI) but would not benefit them in any way.

That's not what the "threat" said. It said that they would give them a list of people, it isn't obvious that hiring some random would have made them happy. It's not even obvious whether this wasn't just a convenient way to make some money for a friend.

I understand if you don't like how the person phrased it, but the goal of the DM was obviously to get the store owner to replace the AI poster. Assuming that they would have gone on a crusade because they didn't pick a "preferred artist" is pure unsupported speculation on your part.

It comes across as spiteful, I don't think it is at all obvious and it isn't obvious to the store owner either.

We just disagree, and that's why this is the wrong approach to enacting whatever kind of change they wanted.

There is arrogance behind the use of "obviously" here.

It is worth pointing out that the article doesn’t even imply that the business suffered any negative outcome here (ie damage or loss of sales etc.) It also doesn’t implied that the person threatened that the business might suffer any negative outcome, just that they would talk about the ad that the business made and put out for people to see and share.

This article is very careful not to actually elaborate on what the “threat” might’ve meant because I’d imagine that baselessly speculating out loud about what they imagine it could be would open them up to getting sued.

It’s all just uwu smol bean coffee shop chiropractor bullied by mean anti-ai mob dreck

Search for "but at what cost" and you'll see news companies do it all the time.

You'll find these ridiculous headlines like, "Company cures cancer, but at what cost."

Saying you’ll do something that’ll harm someone (or, more precisely in this instance, their business) can reasonably be called a threat (in the broad sense of the word), though not necessarily the unfair kind of threat most people imagine when they say ‘threat’.

You can threaten someone with ceasing to be a customer if they don’t change their business practices, and that’s perfectly fine. Sharing publicly available information is generally not a problem, either. But in this case, the author of the message is coming off as very insincere, setting deadlines, and trying to strike up deals, which comes off as unreasonable and makes one wonder if they really are simply going to share publicly available information, or if they’re going to give undue focus over them being ‘uncooperative’. If they did not want their message to come off as a threat, this was very far from an ideal way to write it.

Can you quote the words in the article where somebody said that the business was or would be hurt

Because if not that would mean that this is an article about a threat that somebody imagined in their head

I think it’s pretty evident that letting ‘other artists’ (or ‘the community’) know implies hurting the business (since they are likely to disappreciate the use of AI, the way many other people have).

Hurt the business in what way specifically?

All we’ve got to go off is a screenshot of a vaguely weird DM. Seeing as the article didn’t mention any type of harm at all, what is the evident harm here?

This is an article on a news website about how somebody got a dm lol, there was never any threat, they would’ve written about it if there was

The very fact they are giving her an ultimatum/deadline holds that implication. At the very least, it would be likely to further the backlash and upset even more people (who oppose this use of AI). Whether they had anything else in mind is not clear, but it’s clear that it was nothing good, otherwise she would have no reason to give in to their demands and the entire captured conversation would be utterly absurd and pointless.

Hey now, these folks are -really enjoying- their highly contrived version of the events. How dare you limit their enjoyment by recontextualizing this into what most of my non-highly-online friends would view as the "normal" understanding.

As a person who went through and eventuall rejected the culture-jamming adbusters thoughts in the early 2000s, it's really hard for me to view a threat to share an ad as anything other than a "threat" to increase the "organic reach of the ad" or whatever "metric" that folks here would use.

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