200fifty

side note, but I freaking love Machine of Death. what a cool book that came into existence in such a weird way

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

Can AI companies legally ingest copyrighted materials found on the internet to train their models, and use them to pump out commercial products that they then profit from? Or, as the tech companies claim, does generative AI output constitute fair use?

This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. I'm not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like "using artistic works without permission of the original creators in order to create commercial content that directly competes with and destroys the market for the original work" is extremely not fair use. In fact it's kind of a prototypically unfair use.

Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like "uhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!" as though "fair use" is a magic word you say that makes the thing you're doing suddenly okay. They don't seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than "AI learns like a person!" (false) and "well google books did something that's not really the same at all that one time".

I dunno, I know that legally we don't know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers, but something about the way everyone seems to frame this as "oh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!" really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that there's a notable asymmetry here!

Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well.

This is why I love Perl. Larry Wall has a linguistics background and created the only programming language where you can conjugate variables.

(I know it sounds like I'm making fun of perl here, and I am, but I also legitimately do love perl)

First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard

Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you're "the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference." How is that fair? :-(

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"

[Time Cube] has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The [website] itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation. As a short work, it can't fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a "seed" of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.

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.

It's like pickup artistry on a societal scale.

It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts

For real though, we must have reached Peak Ad at some point, or at least we're deep into the realm of diminishing returns. This can't go on forever, right? I mean there's a finite number of things that need to be advertised and a finite number of people with a finite amount of time and patience to look at ads. How long until it all collapses?