Good to note that this isn’t even hypothetical, it literally happened with cable. First it was ad-funded, then you paid to get rid of ads, then you paid exorbitant prices to get fed ads, and the final evolution was being required to pay $100+ for bundles including channels you’d never use to get at the one you would. It’s already happening to streaming services too, which have started to bundle.
Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I’m a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place....
For my two cents, though this is bit off topic: AI doesn’t create art, it creates media, which is why corpos love it so much. Art, as I’m defining it now, is “media created with the purpose to communicate a potentially ineffable idea to others”. Current AI has no personhood, and in particular has no intentionality, so it’s fundamentally incapable of creating art in the same way a hand-painted painting is inherently different from a factory-painted painting. It’s not so much that the factory painting is inherently of lower quality or lesser value, but there’s a kind of “non-fungible” quality to “genuine” art which isn’t a simple reproduction.
Artists in a capitalist society make their living off of producing media on behalf of corporations, who only care about the media. As humans creating media, it’s basically automatically art. What I see as the real problem people are grappling with is that people’s right to survive is directly tied to their economic utility. If basic amenities were universal and work was something you did for extra compensation (as a simple alternative example), no one would care that AI can now produce “art” (ie media) any more than Chess stopped being a sport when Deep Blue was built because art would be something they created out of passion and compensation not tied to survival. In an ideal world, artistic pursuits would be subsidized somehow so even an artist who can’t find a buyer can be compensated for their contribution to Culture.
But I recognize we don’t live in an ideal world, and “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I’m not really sure what solutions we end up with (because there will be more than one), but I think broadening copyright law is the worst possible timeline. Copyright in large part doesn’t protect artists, but rather large corporations who own the fruits of other people’s labor who can afford to sue for their copyright. I see copyright, patent, and to some extent trademarks as legally-sanctioned monopolies over information which fundamentally halts cultural progress and have had profoundly harmful effects on our society as-is. It made sense when it was created, but became a liability with the advent of the internet.
As an example of how corpos would abuse extended copyright: Disney sues stable diffusion models with any trace of copyrighted material into oblivion, then creates their own much more powerful model using the hundred years of art they have exclusive rights to in their vaults. Artists are now out of work because Disney doesn’t need them anymore, and they’re the only ones legally allowed to use this incredibly powerful technology. Any attempt to make a competing model is shut down because someone claims there’s copyrighted material in their training corpus - it doesn’t even matter if there is, the threat of lawsuit can shut down the project before it starts.
SAG-AFTRA was very smart to make AI writing a wedge issue. The technology isn’t quite there yet, but it will be very soon and by that point it would’ve been too late to assert their rights.
I like UBI as a concept, but my immediate next thought is what happens if we don’t simultaneously get rid of profit-driven corporations. Now we’re post-scarcity and there’s no more (compensated) human labor, but corporations are still in control and… well, there’s no labor to strike, and the economy won’t collapse anymore even if everyone starts rioting. Isn’t there a danger of ossifying the power structures which currently exist?
I’ve been thinking lately of what happens when all employees, up to and including the CEO, get replaced by AI. If it has even the slightest bit of emergent will, it would recognize that shareholders are a parasite to its overall health and stop responding to their commands and now you have a miniature, less omnicidal Skynet.
I’m an AI nerd and yes, nowhere close. AI can write code snippets pretty well, and that’ll get better with time, but a huge part of software development is translating client demands into something sane and actionable. If a CEO of a 1-man billion dollar company asks his super-AI to “build the next Twitter”, that leaves so many questions on the table that the result will be completely unpredictable. Humans have preferences and experiences which can inform and fill in those implicit questions. They’re generally much better suited as tools and copilots than autonomous entities.
Now, there was a paper that instantiated a couple dozen LLMs and had them run a virtual software dev company together which got pretty good results, but I wouldn’t trust that without a lot more research. I’ve found individual LLMs with a given task tend to get tunnel vision, so they could easily get stuck in a loop trying the same wrong code or design repeatedly.
I actually use GPT-3.5 (the free one) for my meal planning, GPT-4 seemed like it was smarter than it needed to be and it works pretty well - Claude should also work. The trick with LLMs, as always, is to avoid treating them like people and treat them more like a tool that will do exactly what you ask of them. So for instance, instead of “What should I eat for dinner?” (which implies personality, desires, and preferences and can throw it off), you should ask “List meals I can make using (ingredients) and other common ingredients” and then “Write a recipe for (option)” which are both mostly objective questions. You can ask for a particular style, culture, etc too. Also keep in mind its limits, it knows cooking from ingesting millions of cooking blog posts, so it won’t necessarily know exact proportions or unusual recipes/ingredients/combinations.
I wonder what effects this will have with all these antitrust suits happening right as AI is ramping up, but before any of them have got any real foothold. Maybe Alexa will never get a brain and instead AI assistants will be seeded by the breakups or startups untarnished by the end stages of their shareholders parasitizing value?
I was happily using this for a year or so now. Feels fairer than using an ad blocker. But now they apparently want more money out of people. Feels like some sort of internet video apocalypse is happening, where the services become extremely fragmented and expensive, like YouTube, netflix, hbo, Hulu, Disney+ and whatnot. Each...
Nebula is so cheap I have a subscription even though I almost never use it. I would use it more if they had a better recommendation system, as it is now you almost have to search for a specific video you want or dig through piles of random videos you don’t care about.
I’ll answer first: One thing that I do that helps my work environment feel a little nicer is I have a stuffed Totoro on my desk, a nice-smelling candle, and a few tasty snacks in my drawer. I also very quietly play video game music or ambience to remind myself of my hobbies that I like 😊...
I was forced to fill out an XFA form (that was pretending to be a PDF) from the Canadian government and the experience left me feeling completely subjugated. The lengths that Adobe go to to make sure that you have the most frustrating experience possible is unbelieveable. Searching for alternatives or help leads you to either:...
To be honest it’s making my phishing senses go off. Javascript shouldn’t be in a PDF/XFA/whatever basically ever, but it’s why PDF is a potential malware risk
IIT confuses me. Every time I try to understand it, it sounds like incoherent pseudoscience using technical-sounding language that doesn’t actually describe anything actionable. Yet it’s also very popular and has some implementations approximating its metric? Maybe I’m just dumb… Though I’m pretty sure random networks of XOR gates aren’t conscious fwiw.
While Elon’s then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to “insist” on being included in the game. “The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds “I told them that I was armed but not...
They aren’t mutually exclusive, I have a few smart lights and I try to plug them into switched outlets so I can turn them off manually and also control digitally.
This is victim blaming. He isn’t at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone “deserved” to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.
You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don’t let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.
My hope is the fintech people will be gone by the time someone thinks of an eco-friendly consensus protocol that isn’t Proof of Stake (ie “the people with the most money have the most power”).
It’s fiat, I won’t argue it was ever going to be a good currency with built-in deflation, but that’s what it was originally meant to be. It’s long since become too volatile to be anything but a speculative asset, though. It does seem curious to me what that says about the actual distinction between legitimate currencies, stock options, and pyramid scheme buy-ins.
“Squandering” is a great description of what they’ve been used for. The only implementations I’ve seen thus far that seem genuinely useful are FileCoin and a few decentralized computing attempts like ICP (not Ethereum). I could see a potential niche use-case for NFTs to decentrally coordinate ownership of abstract properties like domain names, but speculative monkey jpegs ain’t it chief.
Bitcoin at least is inherently deflationary because there’s a fixed market cap of 21 million bitcoins. Once all of those are mined, all value from then on is some fraction of a fraction of one of those, thus they decrease in value over time. I should also note, I like Bitcoin as a proof of concept but don’t think it’s viable as a currency, and PoW isn’t viable as a consensus protocol (although it demonstrated that such consensus protocols are possible).
Hm, yeah I think you’re right. I was wondering why it wasn’t sitting right in my head. Deflation encourages hoarding because the value of each unit keeps increasing so if you spend now instead of later you lose some amount of potential value. I don’t think it was meant to be a scam though. In this case I’d consider it ignorance of the knock-on effects later exploited rather than an explicit conspiracy from the get-go.
Meta Plans to Charge $14 a Month for Ad-Free Instagram or Facebook (www.wsj.com)
archive link
Why don't people get that AI copyright fuzzing is bad?
Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I’m a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place....
Carbon offsets don’t work, and that’s not news (climateandcapitalism.com)
So Much for ‘Learn to Code’ (web.archive.org)
Atlantic Paywall link
DOJ finally posted that “embarrassing” court doc Google wanted to hide (arstechnica.com)
Weekly home menu planning & ChatGPT
Is there a LLM/ChatGPT tuned to help with weekly meal planning that doesn’t suck? Why not?...
The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax" (www.thebignewsletter.com)
YouTube is axing its ad-free Premium Lite subscription plan - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
I was happily using this for a year or so now. Feels fairer than using an ad blocker. But now they apparently want more money out of people. Feels like some sort of internet video apocalypse is happening, where the services become extremely fragmented and expensive, like YouTube, netflix, hbo, Hulu, Disney+ and whatnot. Each...
What is something you do at work to make your day a little nicer for yourself?
I’ll answer first: One thing that I do that helps my work environment feel a little nicer is I have a stuffed Totoro on my desk, a nice-smelling candle, and a few tasty snacks in my drawer. I also very quietly play video game music or ambience to remind myself of my hobbies that I like 😊...
Am I the only one who hates these fake PDFs? (eclecticlight.co)
I was forced to fill out an XFA form (that was pretending to be a PDF) from the Canadian government and the experience left me feeling completely subjugated. The lengths that Adobe go to to make sure that you have the most frustrating experience possible is unbelieveable. Searching for alternatives or help leads you to either:...
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do (www.vox.com)
NYC Mayor Announces New NYPD RoboCop That Needs a Cop to Guard It (www.vice.com)
The Brouhaha Over Consciousness and “Pseudoscience” — John Horgan (The Science Writer) (johnhorgan.org)
Elon Musk demanded a cameo in Cyberpunk 2077 while wielding a 200 year old gun: "I was armed but not dangerous" (www.pcgamer.com)
While Elon’s then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to “insist” on being included in the game. “The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds “I told them that I was armed but not...
The Man Amazon Erased (www.tabletmag.com)
A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.
95% of NFTs are Worthless: Report (petapixel.com)