Pretty much the same for me. I’ve got close family in the US that I haven’t seen since before the second Trump administration. Have been invited over multiple times but did not and still do not feel safe going there.

As a non-american, while the mid-term results make me feel good, and seeing all the various moves to “right the ship” is great, the fact that so much trust, which much of the world treated as foundational in many ways, was so easily broken in the first place, is what I feel gives the rest of the world pause. It’s a basic fact that breaking trust is easy, building it is way harder, and SOOOOO much trust was broken globally by the Trump administration.

I’m hopeful, but I do agree that building trust back is gonna be a multi-generational thing and quite likely, people are going to put more systems in place to never HAVE to trust another nation as much as much of the world used to trust the US. I do believe some things were irevocably broken, but that doesn’t meant things can’t get better.

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It’s not about OC in memes but yes, the authenticity. Memes are “self replicating units of culture” so of course the same images will be posted again and again and again with changes that evolve the memes over time.

The insertion of AI into meme culture feels like someone introduced a cancerous mutation into our memes. Whenever I see an AI take on an older meme there’s a genuine feeling of unease. I think it’s the uncanny valley between the authentic feeling that comes from the context and connection we have with the actual meme it’s mimicking and the soullessness of AI imagery.

In this particular case I feel a badly edited crop of Sam Altman’s face pasted onto the meme would hit better, but I’ll admit, I’m old and maybe out of touch.

I haven’t done too much research into it, but there is the Swiss Apertus AI which is part of the Swiss AI initiative. It claims to be “fully open” and “responsible at scale”. They’ve partnered with Proton/Lumo for opt-in training. Maybe worth looking into?