Rep. Joe Morelle, D.-N.Y., appeared with a New Jersey high school victim of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes to discuss a bill stalled in the House.
People said the same thing when, after the printing press, there was rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never said them).
After a period of epistemic chaos, the result was several decades of chartered monopoly and government censorship to get it under control.
I hope we won’t need heavy-handed regulation this time around. But that will only happen if we learn from history. We need to get this under control now, while we have the chance to start a framework for protecting our fellow human beings from harm. Complaining that it’s hard is not an excuse for doing nothing.
What does the method matter? If the result is an artifact that is convincing enough for the average person to believe that the subject knowingly posed for sex acts that never occurred, the personal experience and social stigma is traumatizing no matter how it was made.
As the sociologist Brooke Harrington puts it, if there was an E = mc^2^ of social science, it would be SD > PD, “social death is more frightening than physical death.”
It’s ever-changing. We’re social animals, not math equations, so it’s all according to the kind of society we want.
how do we do that without limiting free speech?
All freedoms are in tension between “freedom to” and “freedom from”. I can have the freedom to fire my gun in the air. I can have the freedom from my neighbor’s randomly-falling bullets. I can’t have both of those codified in law (unless I’m granted some special status over my neighbors).
I think that, many times, what we run into is a mismatch between a group thinking in terms of “freedom to” and a group thinking in terms of “freedom from”.
The “freedom to” folks feel like any restriction on their ability to act is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom from”. If, for example, I live in the middle of nowhere and have no neighbors, what falling bullets do I have to fear except my own?
The “freedom from” folks feel like having to endure the effects of others’ actions is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom to”. If I spend my life dodging falling bullets, I’m not likely to fire more into the sky.
And the days of believing everything you see are over but most don’t know it yet.
We said the same thing about the printing press. And it plunged us into a long period of epistemic chaos, with rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never spoke them). The fallout of this led the crown to seize presses and allocate exclusive printing rights to a chartered monopoly (with some censorship just for funsies).
We can either complain it’s too hard and do nothing, eventually leading to an overreaction to a policy that is obviously not sustainable… Or we can learn from history, get our heads in the game, and start imagining a framework that embraces the transformative power of large-scale computing while respecting the humanity of our comrades.
C2PA is a good start, but it’s probably DOA in the hacker zeitgeist. We tend to view even an opt-in standard for proof of authenticity as a gateway to universal requirements for proof of authenticity and a locked-down tyrannical internet forever and ever. Possibly because a substantial portion of us are terminally online selfish assholes who never have to spend a second worrying about deepfakes of ourselves. And also fancy ourselves utilitarian techno-solutionists willing to sacrifice the squishy unquantifiable touchy-feely human emotions that just get in the way of objective rational progress towards a transhuman future. It’s a noble sacrifice, we say, while profiting disproportionately and suffering none of the fallout.
They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know there’s some audio manipulation APIs that aren’t available.
Someone complained about Discord deliberately blocking Firefox users because of that, but it turned out that spoofing the user agent would actually break the feature.
You know, I’m something of a failed game developer myself.
The #1 thing I learned was: Set your sights low. Lower than you think you should have to. And then lower than that. And now take that and cut it in half. Got it? Okay, now, from that, figure out what you think you could get done in 2 weeks. And now imagine that you’re 2 days in and someone told you you actually only have 1 week to finish completely. Pencils down, you can never work on this again. What would you focus on?
If the design is only fun if there are heaps and heaps of content, hyper-realistic art, epic soundtrack, and intricately-tuned parameters, you’re pretty much doomed to fail. It has to be fun even with one basic level, placeholder art, some sfxr audio clips, and wildly unbalanced stats.
My grandmother wants to install Mahjong onto her phone. I couldn’t find any results on the Play Store with no ads or in-app purchases. She doesn’t understand technology and could get tricked into purchasing stuff or compromising her data.
Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.
Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.
One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.
We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.
Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?
The artists (and the people who want to see them continue to have a livelihood, a distinct voice, and a healthy engaged fanbase) live in that society.
The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering
Isn’t this exactly the problem though?
From books to radio to TV, movies, and the internet, there’s always:
One group of people who create valuable works
Another group of people who monopolize distribution of those works
The distributors hijack ownership (or de facto ownership) of the work, through one means or another (either logistical superiority, financing requirements, or IP law fuckery) and exploit their position to make themselves the only channel for creators to reach their audience and vice-versa.
That’s the precise pattern that OpenAI is following, and they’re doing it at a massive scale.
It’s not new. Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, all of these companies started with a public pitch about democratizing access to content. But a private pitch emerged, of becoming the main way that people access content. When it became feasible for them to turn against their users and liquidate them, they did.
The difference is that they all had to wait for users to add the content over time. Imagine if Google knew they could’ve just seeded Google Video with every movie, episode, and clip ever aired or uploaded anywhere. Just say, “Mon Dieu! It’s impossible for us to run our service without including copyrighted materials! Woe is us!” and all is forgiven.
But honestly, whichever way the courts decide, the legality of it doesn’t matter to me. It’s clearly a “Whose Line Is It?” situation where the rules are made up and ownership doesn’t matter. So I’m looking at “Does this consolidate power, or distribute it?” And OpenAI is pulling perhaps the biggest power grab that we’ve seen.
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Unrelated: I love that there’s a very distinct echo of something we saw with the previous era of tech grift, crypto. The grifters would always say, after they were confronted, “Well, there’s no way to undo it now! It’s on the blockchain!” There’s always this back-up argument of “it’s inevitable so you might as well let me do it”.
Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:
Yeah, that’s not market share. iPhone users are more likely to keep their phone for longer. Search “iphone market share us” and see that every result confirms the >50% figure.
I like Apple. Their UIs are comfortable, their OSes are reliable, their hardware is top-notch, and they design better SDKs than 99% of the world.
But their greed has completely eradicated the “damn the man” ethos that they espoused in the early iWork days. “Microsoft wants to lock you in. You gonna let them?” Well now who’s the jailer?
My homie in Cthulhu, I guarantee you that trans folks are among the most ready to stand up for a group of people who’ve had their basic humanity denied by a vicious regime eager for a scapegoat.
December’s jobs report showed employers added 216,000 jobs for the month while the unemployment rate held at 3.7%. Payroll growth showed a sizeable gain from November’s downwardly revised 173,000
Same level of unemployment, but a ton of new employees. So… the same number of people are simply working more jobs? And this represents a “strong economy”…
U.S. per-capita healthcare spending (including public and private as well as compulsory and voluntary spending) is higher than anywhere else in the world, with second-placed Germany trailing quite far behind.
On average, healthcare costs in the U.S. amounted up to $12,318 per person in 2021. In Germany that number stood at $7,383 - 40 percent lower. Yet, the U.S. lags behind other nations in several aspects such as life expectancy and health insurance coverage.
On October 28, 2023, Mokhiber stepped down as the director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), four days before he was due to retire. In his final letter to High Commissioner Volker Türk, he harshly criticized the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, calling Israel’s military intervention a “textbook genocide” and accusing the UN of failing to act.
But he actually started his resignation in March of 2023, citing human rights violations in the West Bank.
Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content (www.nbcnews.com)
Rep. Joe Morelle, D.-N.Y., appeared with a New Jersey high school victim of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes to discuss a bill stalled in the House.
I would have disowned him too. (lemmy.world)
Teams apparently can't call when using Firefox (lemmy.world)
Teams also doesn’t support multiple “work” accounts, so I had to boot up a laptop to accept the call. 🤷
Game derulepment (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Now that 24 hours have passed we have our winner!...
Are there any FOSS Mahjong apps for an elderly person?
My grandmother wants to install Mahjong onto her phone. I couldn’t find any results on the Play Store with no ads or in-app purchases. She doesn’t understand technology and could get tricked into purchasing stuff or compromising her data.
Supreme Court declines to hear Apple-Epic antitrust case, meaning developers can point customers to the web (techcrunch.com)
Meta admits using pirated books to train AI, but won't pay for it (www.techspot.com)
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"Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?" (fosstodon.org)
Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2 (www.apple.com)
I honestly doubt this will take off, but it’ll be interesting as a tech demo for what AR/VR can be at the highest end.
“It’s not that hard” (sh.itjust.works)
U.S. Moves Closer to Filing Sweeping Antitrust Case Against Apple (www.nytimes.com)
Inside Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees (www.972mag.com)
U.S. payrolls increased by 216,000 in December, much better than expected (www.cnbc.com)
December’s jobs report showed employers added 216,000 jobs for the month while the unemployment rate held at 3.7%. Payroll growth showed a sizeable gain from November’s downwardly revised 173,000
This best-selling personal finance author of 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' Robert Kiyosaki, says he’s racked up more than $1 billion in debt (www.marketwatch.com)
You deserve it :-) (lemmy.world)
2nd Biden admin official resigns over president's response to Gaza war (www.axios.com)