Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There are at least two discussions going on here simultaneously. Is the process of a beefed up spell checker sucking up all the data the same as an artist looking at what had come before, before either of them churn out new art? I’m inclined to agree with you; the process does seem similar enough. The difference remains that one is a statistical model and the other is a human being. So even if the process appears similar enough, they are two different types of player and I can also agree that we should not treat them the same. One is able to throw constant massive amounts of spaghetti at the wall as long as there are chips and power and the other is limited by their health and more limited processing power. So where the compromise lands in this discussion simply isn’t clear yet. And while you and I can discuss this, I can say for myself at least I’m not smart enough to see where this goes eventually.

    The other discussion is how all of it collides with existing copyright/trademark law, which is essentially different in every country. Constitutional rights, like freedoms of expression and the arts, are given to real people, not computers. But at least one supreme court in this planet has made corporate money a form of free speech. So eff knows where LLMs end up.

    This is new territory we’re in. And I fear that’s why it will take another decade until we get a legal landmark decision or a political compromise that will be similar enough all around the world.


  • The law mostly disagrees with the memes = theft. A lot of it is covered through freedom of speech and fair use. If you have taken a bit of content, changed it a bit, recontextualized, and reposted it, you are most likely in the clear. Especially if the original content was publicly posted. This gets less clear if you are using the likeness of a private person but this will also depend on context. Where in the world you are, if this content was captured in a public space or from something published - the list goes on, like some stuff can be trademarked as well, and I’m no lawyer. A lot of these things run under the legal doctrine of “no plaintiff, no judge.” I feel artists in general have accepted that anything they post online is just potentially gone. And if no one steals their content to make money off it, they’re not going to hire a lawyer, whom they cannot afford.

    And I’m not saying any of this is great but that’s an established status quo.

    The reason why so-called AI generated art gets decried is twofold. It’s new and we don’t like new things. And in order for it to be created, the models have to suck in all the training data they can. And they don’t tend to pay for it. So that’s where some people see theft happening. But that’s not settled law yet because it’s fairly new, there are plaintiffs but not enough judges have passed judgement yet. Do they have to pay for stuff that’s publicly available? Where is the line, if any? Is imitation of a style okay if there is more to the work than just copying something from Studio Ghibli or Disney? These questions are going to keep a lot of legal professionals in bacon for a long time still.

    This shit is hard. It’s more gray than black and white.





  • I fear this will be an uphill battle for YT. I have this gut feeling that Meta and OpenAI here are employing the flooding the zone strategy to hurt and maybe displace YT. The sheer flood of slop with the occasional enjoyable nugget of content flooding YT from the pAIrates will be harder to filter out, clog up servers, and users like you and I will get annoyed and gradually consume less content. YT loses market share and some new platform can move in for the kill, operated by Meta, OpenAI and/or other such reputable companies. It’s not easy to monetize this crap, which is a loss leader at this point. It doesn’t look to me like enough people will subscribe to these services to be financially viable. They have to find other ways. So pivot to video 2.0 - this time with so-called AI! Sigh.




  • You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.


  • It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

    And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

    And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.



  • In my mind, it was never a hype. It was something they wanted hyped but - and of course I can only speak for myself - I never was sitting on the edge of my seat. It’s the technology version of new wonder drug could cure cancer. And then you read the story and reality dwarfs the vision quite quickly. I thought blockchain was a much bigger deal hype-wise. And that had all the oxygen drawn out by so-called AI.

    Quantum computing is a threat because if it became mainstream usable today it could render the entire password based login system hackable in a flash, probably breaking the internet. There are two things to consider though. It isn’t usable today. And the big companies that do a lot of the research have a vested interest in not breaking the internet. So we see passkeys today and other forms of authentication will follow before QC could become a reality - if in our lifetimes or if ever - who knows.







  • Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

    Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

    What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

    Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

    If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?



  • I wouldn’t buy these type of glasses either. I have neither the money nor the need so I’m not in the target group anyways. And if I had money, I would under no circumstances give it to a company like Meta.

    I don’t think the huge privacy concerns are going to hold. There is all sorts of equipment people can buy that is less obvious to film you surreptitiously. Always scan your air b’n’b, people. We are virtually all okay with strangers filming shit in our vicinity with their smartphones as long as we feel it isn’t us they’re filming. I think this will over time translate to an unbotheredness w/r/t smart glasses. And after a while even the LED light altering others to a rolling camera will disappear. These devices become main stream by their usefulness. The HUD for directions or names of acquaintances is one useful aspect. The immediate way to record your toddler’s first steps or the funny face they pulled. An interaction with the law. Over time, this will outweigh the creepiness that we have perceived since the Google glasshole days.