It's essentially a takedown of Korean imageboards and forums where political memes, especially of the current president, is very popular.
They are fully aware that these operators will not be able to afford the hardware and sustain their public squares by requiring a ridiculous ordinance targeting them.
I see GP is downplaying this very fact that its the "norm" in Korea and I can tell you that it's not. Korea has enjoyed free expression through the internet, now posting meme of the Korean president is going to be impossible/illegal for the site operator. This is definitely not normal and the AI narrative is just a convenient excuse.
You're the one downplaying here. How many other non-Islamic countries where porn is entirely banned with the websites blocked? Doing deep packet inspection by default? (The difficulty of getting around this isn't very relevant)
Besides authoritarian states and the US, how many where the government can read along in the most popular chat app? Can, say, the Belgium government read along with all messages on Whatsapp?
How many where they also know exactly who is sending that message due to mandatory real identity verification? Even if the Belgian government can't read the Whatsapp message content that Belgians send, do they by definition have the person's identity directly linked to the message?
No to all of the above. South Korea is an extreme outlier and this has been the status quo for years. Your focus on the "meme of the president", despite there being little evidence that this is the target, gives away that you're pushing an untrue narrative here. The GP has painted an accurate picture: all the things I mentioned above have been around for more than a decade across both blue and red governments, neither of them meaningfully opposing it.
> Can, say, the Belgium government read along with all messages on Whatsapp?
There is something to be said for "our populace relies on tech built by foreign companies" though. Said foreign company is at minimum less likely to install a backdoor for a local government (or be as easily hacked by said local government) than if popular language issues leave the ground ripe for local alternatives to be more popular.
Yes, that is about the single only upside to relying on US Big Tech rather than sovereign local tech. It doesn't nearly weigh up to the downsides, but it is a real thing. In Belgium's case though, even if every Belgian migrated iver to WhatsBelgian for their IMing needs tomorrow, given the competency of the government it would take at least a decade before they had things in place to read along.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, the point was that all above things do hold for Korea yet are not at all the norm in the West.
Korea's tax revenue has increased thanks to the AI boom, so the country is actively promoting AI at the national level, creating pressure that you have to use it or else, and continuously announcing projects with 'AI' attached to them. The problem is that a freelance individual like me has no way to get involved—it's almost entirely a business based on personal connections. Personally, I think if this is successfully operated in Korea down the line, it could be exported to other countries
No sane country would import what jdw64 is describing.
AI boom, but only the politically loyal can bid, is not only insane, its literally justifying corruption and censorship by forcing people to take out loans from them to buy GPUs to be compliant, which seems to be the crux of what he thinks other countries should follow.
I guess it can make for a cheap kdrama where authoritarians will use GPUs as collateral and force journalists and political into an everlasting debt and call it a "national AI strategy".
They are fully aware that these operators will not be able to afford the hardware and sustain their public squares by requiring a ridiculous ordinance targeting them.
I see GP is downplaying this very fact that its the "norm" in Korea and I can tell you that it's not. Korea has enjoyed free expression through the internet, now posting meme of the Korean president is going to be impossible/illegal for the site operator. This is definitely not normal and the AI narrative is just a convenient excuse.