A couple of weeks ago, I got into a… I don’t want to say ‘fight’, more like a debate, and I’ve had similar debates where people debate you using scenarios saying ‘if this happened…’ but the scenarios are always completely unrealistic and would never happen, so what are they even saying?

I’ll give you an example: about a month ago (the first one) I made a post about the sheer mass of AI content now choking Pinterest up. To be clear: I was critiquing the mass of AI content, I don’t believe that AI content is too bad in small doses (e.g. 1 or 2 AI images for every 20 real ones, maybe). One of the commenters went through my profile and found that I had previously, to another community, posted 1 AI image (one of a donkey, that was to test the commonly stated axiom that Lemmy users hate AI slop). When the commenter brought it up, I politely clarified my stance and explained that I was critiquing the mass of AI content.

Then, another commenter jumped in and said the following:

When 1 million people post “just 1 Ai slop image” that’s how you get Pinterest.

Once again, I politely explained to this user the reality of the situation: I, and only I, had posted 1 single AI image (one of a donkey) And that was only to test the theorem. I wasn’t harsh or abrasive, but the problem I had with his comment was, not only had what he described (1 million people posting 1 AI image) not happened, but I knew and he also knew full well that such a scenario was not going to happen, (nobody believes or expects 1 million Lemmy users to suddenly en masse publish AI photos, not least of all because Lemmy doesn’t have near enough that many people, but of them people, none are going to post AI images so why he was making that point, I wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, I once again tried to reiterate not the fantasy, but the reality — namely that I alone had posted one single image to a completely different community, simply to test the notion that AI images are despised here. Out of nowhere, the user then accused me of trying to ‘make Lemmy like Pinterest’ (despite the fact that I moderated a community literally called ‘Fuck Pinterest’):

Sounds to me like you aren’t too broken up about Pinterest then and you’re wanting lemmy to become more like it by posting that shit here too

Once again, I was baffled. How the hell was this guy getting that I was trying to ‘turn Lemmy into Pinterest’ by posting one AI image? My patience was wearing a little, but I resolved to be cordial and once again explained the reality of the situation (I (me, only) had posted 1 AI image only). Then, he said the following:

And as others have already pointed out, you’re missing the point. If EVERYONE on lemmy just posted 1 AI image you’d end up with the same shit you have on Pinterest.

At this point, I just had to have it out with him. I said, look, you know as well as I do that that’s never going to happen, so what’s the point of saying ‘if everyone did…’ when you know as well as I do that that’s literally never going to happen. The point is, you’re never going to get EVERYONE on Lemmy doing that, so saying it’s bad because ‘if it happened’ is just meaningless. He is conflating me posting 1 AI image with EVERYONE posting 1 AI image despite the fact that that scenario is pure fantasy and would never occur. I’m not saying that that scenario wouldn’t be bad, I’m just saying that that scenario wouldn’t happen in the first place. Trying to warn me against a fantasy scenario seems lame.

My question is, why do people make such pithy arguments against you? Is it because they don’t have any better points? I just don’t think it’s a very good argument to say ‘you shouldn’t do something, because if this other fantasy scenario happened then everything would be bad’.