rule
rule
169 comments
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Isn't it great when a flawed messenger lets you ignore an inconvenient message and give no further thought to any hint of outside influence? Even better when you can label any wrong thinker as part of their group!
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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.
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Animals aren't as good as humans at surviving climate change, so caring about one should include caring about the other...
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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"
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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.
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The animal they're asking us not to eat requires water to live. Something ai uses a lot of.
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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
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Sushi is generally salt water fish. AI uses fresh water.
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Pretty sure that's a trout, not a salmon.
A freshwater fish that will never see a kelp forest. Because those only exist in salt water.
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"Sushi" refers to the sour rice, not the fish. You can have completely vegan sushi.
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Heads up for anybody like me who loves their yam tempura and avocado sushi, they almost always add Japanese mayonnaise to sushi, but you can ask them to make it without it and then it is vegan.
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To wit, most sushi establishments have vegan options on their menus regardless of intent to accommodate. I had a delicious fully vegan sushi meal on my vacation just a few months ago.
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Affirming the Disjunct. -10 philosophical credits.
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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.
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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
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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.
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And yet you participate in society - curious.
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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
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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...
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imgdetector.ai says it's AI. I guess it's good OOP has all those extra fingers to compensate for the way they use a knife.
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Magic 8 ball also says it's AI
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AI image detection is a crapshoot at best, just fyi. They are poor indicators of whether something is actually AI, and shouldn't be trusted any more than a coin flip.
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Why did you post this 3 times?
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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.
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Yet again discounting the training costs...
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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.
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the training costs are real
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AI bad AND Peta bad, right guys!
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yes
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Do these people really think the use of AI for that photo outweighs the positive impact from that sort of ad campaign??
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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.
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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.
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The OP and its traction are the perfect encapsulation of the kind of dumb most people are... sadly.
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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.
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If you're as principled as PETA wants you to believe they are, there is no "outweighing".
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Printing flyers on a paper is out too if there's no consideration for good outweighing the bad
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Performative activism was a fucking mistake, but somehow it worked for the right with the satanic panic and the groomer panic.
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Anti peta memes doing the laps. Hmmmmm
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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.
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"Clowning on PETA is just like cheering on violence against immigrants"
Bozo take rejected buddy, try again some other time.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Oof.. I got owned there. Thanks for puttimg me in my place.
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I hope one day they generically engineer a sushi salmon that can be directly sliced into sushi rolls like this.
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Fish turned into nori... funniest shit I've ever seen.
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I used to be very sympathetic to PETA but then I watched them operate for a while and it went away.
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I know peta isn't perfect, but really now?
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gotta farm engagement
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They're masters of the art, look at the size of this thread.
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Yes, really.
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That "sushi" was supposed to swim upstream, spawn eggs, then die.
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Why is it crying a giant sperm?
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Because seas are full of seamen.
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you don't?
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PETA members always come out of the woodworks for these posts.
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Juxtaposing cattle trains with the Holocaust was all I needed to dismiss this organisation as chronically unserious. They're the equivalent of those antiabortion activists who think showing disturbing gory photos of medical procedures is a moral argument against said procedures.
The thing that made me question my meat-eating was not images of slaughterhouses, battery farms or being harangued by tone deaf social media posts that scold me as immoral. It was watching animals playing and showing affection for each other and for other species. Gifs of cows playing with a ball, a lamb begging for pets from a human, chickens recognising their human friend and running up to them for a hug, a cat and a crow being pals; that's the kinda shit that changes hearts and minds. PETA's tone and behaviour makes animal rights activism look like an emotional outlet for narcissists who don't actually have any expectation that they'll achieve anything, but just enjoy the recreational self-righteous hectoring.
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Isn't that what this post is trying to do? It's not using gory or disgusting pictures of salmon farms, the sushi even looks appetizing. It's humanizing the animal and talking about the joys a salmon was supposed to have before it was caught and served up to you.
A lot of the modern peta campaign is more in the vain your talking about. The ones I've seen recently are ads in the metro saying "I'm me not meat" with pictures of crabs and other animals looking cute
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Oh boy if comparisons of our treatment of animals to the way we treated victims of the holocaust upset you then wait until you hear about the first guy to do it. Let's just say he had some first hand experience...
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he wasn't the first. the Nazis themselves modeled the Holocaust partially on animal agriculture. but that's part of why the Holocaust was wrong: it treated people like they were animals.
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Yeah, PETA's propaganda is so focused on showing the horror side and gross out shit that they forget to show why we should be grossed out or horrified in the first place. If someone showed me a pumpkin getting dissected, I am not going to care how "violent" or "gory" it is unless you give me reason to empathize with it. We have alienated people from their food so much, I think people forget that animals are more than food. And secondly, I believe there goals (veganism) are unsustainable, privileged, and unhealthy.
I am not a vegan or vegetarian, despite believing harming living things is ethically wrong. This is because I do believe humans need meat to survive. There are certain nutrients from meat that we simply need, and those nutrients are far too difficult to get without meat. There are just sometimes things that are unethical that we have to do anyways. Sometimes there simply is no ethical choice. That is not to say you shouldn't strive to make those things as ethical as possible though! We can make meat consumption more ethical, and we should.
I just do not think getting rid of meat from our diet is possible, at least not without some serious innovation in science and our economy. You would need to be able to supply the world's population with suppliments for every nutrient, vitamin, etc that non-meat food sources struggle to supply in any meaningful way.
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Major health experts agree that well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets are healthy. For example, a 2025 position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics states that “appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns can be nutritionally adequate and can offer long-term health benefits”. Harvard Health (citing the American Dietetic Association) likewise notes that such diets are “healthful, nutritionally adequate” and can help prevent chronic diseases. In fact, plant-based eating is even included as a recommended healthy pattern in recent U.S. dietary guidelines.
Research shows real health gains on plant-based diets. Mayo Clinic reports that vegetarians (when they eat a variety of foods) often have lower risk of heart disease, diabetes and certain cancer. Large cohort studies confirm this: one pooled analysis of over 76,000 people found vegetarians had about 25% lower heart-disease mortality than meat-eaters. These benefits make sense because vegetarians tend to eat less saturated fat and more fiber, vitamins and antioxidants, leading to lower LDL cholesterol, blood pressure and BMI – all factors linked to longevity.
All key nutrients can be covered without meat. Proteins, iron, calcium and healthy fats are abundant in plants: beans, lentils, nuts, soy and whole grains supply ample proteinhealth.harvard.edu (even vegans meet protein needs by eating diverse plant foods). Iron can be obtained from legumes and greens (with vitamin C-rich foods to boost absorption), and calcium from leafy greens or fortified plant milks. Omega-3 fats (ALA) are in flaxseed and walnuts, and algal or fortified foods can provide EPA/DHA if needed. Vitamin B₁₂ is the one nutrient not found in plant foods naturally, but health experts point out that vegans simply use fortified foods or a low-cost B₁₂ supplement to meet the requirement. With these adjustments (which many omnivores also make, e.g. vitamin D or fish-oil supplements), a plant-based diet easily meets nutritional needs at any age.
Finally, plant-based diets aren’t just a privileged fad – they’re common worldwide. For instance, roughly 39% of Indian adults say they are vegetarian, and many cultures eat mostly plant foods Vegetarian and vegan eating is growing (millions of Americans now follow these diets) and is explicitly endorsed by public health authorities as sustainable and healthy.
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I just do not think getting rid of meat from our diet is possible
And yet, here I am.
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Im in the mood for sushi now.
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Wow, this is so edgy and hilarious!
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Thanks! I'll be here all week!
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hellooooooo gpt image gen-
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Even though it isn't real, the thumb being practically under the knife is triggering me. The sushi looks pretty good though.
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No, but your body goes into a sushi roll! Now stop squirming! It only makes it worse!
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The PETA add is also factually wrong, because that fish's body is definitely my sushi roll. (minus the skin, obvs.)
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it’s AI generated
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Mmmmmm sushi...
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They can call me when they have a technology to make my body work without consuming plants or animals
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slopaganda
peta is giving vegans a bad name
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I agree but If you really value life in all forms you can't eat vegebles either. All lives matter right?
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Comments like this really explains why things are as bad as they are right now.
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yikes.
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Vegan Bullshit Bingo #22:
If you really care that much about the welfare of plants, you should go vegan, since many more plants "die" for animal feeding. Do you feel bad while mowing your lawn? And would you rather rescue a potted plant than a dog from a burning house? Is docking pig tails the same as branch trimming to you? Question upon question...-
Branch trimming actually serves a function to make the tree healthier if it's done correctly.
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they're clearly saying they don't care
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Well, first, nobody who actually cares about the environment has a lawn, and second, trimming branches (when done right) makes the plant healthier.
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169 comments