The really annoying thing is, the people behind AI surely ought to know all this already. I remember just a few years ago when DALL-E mini came out, and they’d purposefully not trained it on pictures of human faces so you couldn’t use it to generate pictures of human faces – they’d come out all garbled. What’s changed isn’t that they don’t know this stuff – it’s that the temptation of money means they don’t care anymore

posts you can hear

ngl his stuff always felt a bit cynical to me, in that it seemed to exist more to say “look, video games can have a deep message!” than it did to just have such a message in the first place. Like it existed more to gesture at the concept of meaningfulness rather than to be meaningful itself.

Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

Ew… stay away from my content, you creep!

If you think of LLMs as being akin to lossy text compression of a set of text, where the compression artifacts happen to also result in grammatical-looking sentences, the question you eventually end up asking is “why is the compression lossy? What if we had the same thing but it returned text from its database without chewing it up first?” and then you realize that you’ve come full circle and reinvented search engines

unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical

Well, if this guy’s quite confident, then I’m sure it’ll all pan out in the end. How hard could symbolic reasoning be, really? Incidentally, I’ve been in a coma since 1970

The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to “promote the progress of … useful arts”. Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law

I’m sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn’t totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I’ll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.

iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved “we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original,” which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I’m not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs

also again I’m not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don’t think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I’m not a libertarian. sorry ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

heck yeah I love Physics Jenny Nicholson Angela Collier

I mean, it seems like you’re reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I’m ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it’s probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)

As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it’s a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they’re using to do it is called “copyright.”

That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it’s bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits – in which case, I agree, but, well…

Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.

Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…

Yeah but this presumes “the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em,” right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that’s bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.

But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can’t do that because they can’t get the content licensed? Well… what if they do? Does that mean they’re going to be making stuff that’s better? Wouldn’t the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you’ll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?

Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn’t work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say “sorry no, you can’t use my stuff for this.” I don’t really find “well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you” particularly compelling.

Yeah, I think his ideological commitment to “all intellectual property rights are bad forever and always amen” kind of blinds him to the actual issue here, and his proposed solution is kind of nonsensical in terms of its ability to get off the ground.

More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I’ve seen the take floating around that’s like “hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it’s AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?” which I think kind of… misses the point?

A lot of artists generally are in favor of using their work for interesting collaborative stuff and aren’t going to get mad if you use their stuff for your own creative endeavors. This is why we have things like Creative Commons. The actual things artists tend not to like are things like having their work used for commercial purposes without permission and/or having their work taken without credit. (This is why CC licenses often restrict these usages!) With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s. (You may remember one of the big things artists were affronted by about AI art was the way it would imitate an artist’s signature, because of what that represented.)

In this case, artists are leaning on copyright not out of any particular ideological commitment but just because it’s the blunt instrument that they already have at their disposal. But I think Cory Doctorow’s previous experience in “getting mad at the MPAA” or whatever kind of forces him to analyze this using the same framing as that issue, which doesn’t really make sense in this case. And ironically saying “copyright shouldn’t count for AI” aligns him with the position of the MPAA so it really does feel like a “live long enough to see yourself become the villain” scenario. :/

Text in AI-generated images will never not be funny to me. N the most n’tural hnertis indeed.

Even with good data, it doesn’t really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper…

this reads like someone googled a list of gen z slang and then threw it in a blender with a bunch of weird race-science memes. who is this for

I think the only acceptable response to whoever is responsible for it is a highly aggressive “touch grass”

“You’ll also soon be able to test multimodal Meta AI on our Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.”

Now this is interesting. I’ve been thinking for some time now that traditional computer/smartphone interfaces are on the way out for all but a few niche applications.

Instead, everyone will have their own AI assistant, which you’ll interact with naturally the same way as you interact with other people. Need something visual? Just ask for the latest stock graph for MSFT for example.

God, I hope not. Maybe it’s just me, but this sounds insanely annoying? It kind of reminds me of the objection I’ve seen to the metaverse, where it’s actually a more inefficient way to do stuff, so it doesn’t make sense to imagine it replacing the text-based internet.

Like, I’m not even a fan of smartphones these days, but surely in a world where you could only access information via yelling at your smart glasses, the invention people would be crying out for would be a way to use it silently with your hands, with a screen you could use to easily show it to other people…?

Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one’s gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that’s for darn sure.