Does anyone know roughly how often the public retail chatbots are being retrained or updated from the Internet by the AI companies? How often from Reddit?
Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the *Bartz v. Anthropic* AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.
The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!
(They *wanted* $187,500,000.)
Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.
The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!
(They wanted $187,500,000.)
Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.
The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!
(They wanted $187,500,000.)
Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class-action settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.
The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!
(They wanted $187,500,000.)
Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.
The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!
(They wanted $187,500,000.)
TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the AI (or non-AI) artist and author community?
Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors and artists own their material and can benefit from it. A viewer might pay an artist a fee and take a copy of a work, but that paying viewer does not "own" the work and cannot redistribute it. The artist is the one who owns the work and is the one who can make money off of the work, because the author holds the copyright on the work.
If a work has no copyright on it, that work is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, revise new versions of it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an artist does not hold a copyright on a work, that artist effectively does not "own" that work.
Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then draw a visual work (or draft a book's text) yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draw the actual image or draft the book for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that image or book.
The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision, regarding a multi-prompted visual image, on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material. I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.
In other words, all that AI material, all those images, artworks, articles, books, etc., have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such an artwork or book, but a savvy viewer or reader will take it from you, and no publisher or dealer will touch it.)
What do the AI artists and authors here think about that? Is it concerning?
EDIT: Since I see this sub is anti-AI per its rules, I guess I will ask instead, are the non-AI artists here gleeful about this?
Note: I got thrown out of r/DefendingAIArt for posting this. I hope I get a more open-minded reception here. To be clear, I am not attacking AI artists and authors; I am warning them, and seeing what their response is.
TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the AI artist and author community?
Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors and artists own their material and can benefit from it. A viewer might pay an artist a fee and take a copy of a work, but that paying viewer does not "own" the work and cannot redistribute it. The artist is the one who owns the work and is the one who can make money off of the work, because the author holds the copyright on the work.
If a work has no copyright on it, that work is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, revise new versions of it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an artist does not hold a copyright on a work, that artist effectively does not "own" that work.
Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then draw a visual work (or draft a book's text) yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draw the actual image or draft the book for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that image or book.
The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision, regarding a multi-prompted visual image, on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material. I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.
In other words, all that AI material, all those images, artworks, articles, books, etc., have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such an artwork or book, but a savvy viewer or reader will take it from you, and no publisher or dealer will touch it.)
What do the AI artists and authors here think about that? Is it concerning?
Someone on Reddit was discussing the other day how the International Criminal Court (ICC) observes "complementarity" in exercising its jurisdiction, meaning that the nation involved is first given the chance to investigate and prosecute, and the ICC steps in only if the involved nation is "unwilling or unable" to genuinely investigate and prosecute the crimes.
We are all concerned about the recent ICE killings, and especially that those killings be thoroughly and properly investigated, which is quite troublesome given the current federal administration. That got me to thinking: In order to ensure the U.S. federal government genuinely investigates these killings and prosecutes any crimes shown to have probable cause, should we threaten to ask the ICC to step in if the federal government does not do a good job investigating and prosecuting this?
The ICC only pursues four crimes, one of which is "crimes against humanity," meaning widespread or systematic attacks directed against civilians, including murder, enslavement, torture, and other inhumane acts. The ICE killings may not rise to the classic level of crimes against humanity, but a government turning against its own people without criminal redress sounds like we might get there.
Among other avenues, ICC involvement can be initiated by the ICC Prosecutor.
I have two notes on this thought:
Note 1: The point here is not so much to actually get the ICC involved as to pressure the U.S. federal government to do its law enforcement job properly when it really doesn't want to.
Note 2: It is true that the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC legislation, but that does not prevent the ICC from moving against the U.S. or any other non-signatory for their crimes that fit the definition of one of the four crimes the ICC pursues. Lack of U.S. government cooperation would of course severely limit the ICC's ability to effectively pursue ICE killers, but even just investigation, or ultimately issuance of ICC warrants against ICE killers, would send a very strong public signal, as it did with Netanyahu.
TLDR: It will likely soon become an actual point of U.S. law that AI-drafted material cannot be effectively owned, protected, or benefitted from. Does that "move" anyone in the new author community, or in the AI author community?
Note: I reviewed this sub before posting and see it is no friend of AI material on creative grounds, but I hear that "AI authors" do show up here. Especially for "AI authors" I would like to raise an additional point from the legal side.
Stop me if you have heard this, but copyright is the legal way that authors own their material and can benefit from it. A reader might pay an author a small fee and take a copy of a story, but that paying reader does not "own" the story and cannot redistribute it. The author is the one who owns the story and is the one who can make money off of the story, because the author holds the copyright on the story.
If a story has no copyright on it, that story is in the "public domain" and anyone can freely use it, copy it, rewrite versions of it, make porno from it, whatever, all completely for free. Thus, if an author does not hold a copyright on a story or other piece of written material, that author effectively does not "own" that material.
Now, stop me if you have heard this, but for a few years now the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) has refused to register a copyright on materials generated by AI (as in, chatbots). Oversimplifying, the Copyright Office policy says that if you use AI as an organizing and thinking tool and then write the text of the story yourself, you can register a copyright on it. However, if you prompt a chatbot to draft the actual text for you, even if you prompt, review, and then re-prompt multiple or many times, you cannot register a copyright on that text.
The Copyright Office as a practical matter does control who can obtain an actual copyright registration, but its policy does not have the force of law like a court decision would. But now, there is a federal court in Colorado that is about to hand down the first U.S. court decision on whether there can be a copyright on AI multi-prompted material (the court case is about a picture, not a story, but the copyright law treats those two media just the same). I'm just going to guess (not the least because if it doesn't happen then my post here has no point) that the court ruling is going to back up the Copyright Office policy. That will mean an actual point of U.S. law saying that prompted, and in fact extensively re-prompted, AI material (again, oversimplifying) cannot have a copyright.
In other words, all that AI material, all those AI stories, have no copyright and cannot be protected or benefitted from financially. (I mean, you can still try to sell such a story, but a savvy reader will take it from you, and no publisher will touch it.)
What do new authors, and the lurking AI authors here, think about that? Is it concerning?
The U.S. Copyright Office is refusing to register copyright in AI-generated works. Does that mean no copyright in AI-coded software?
EDIT: A follow-up thought--do the Copyright Office's guidelines on AI copyright draw any distinction or make a particular exception for AI software copyright registration?
The U.S. Copyright Office is refusing to register copyright in AI-generated works. Does that mean no copyright in AI-coded software?
EDIT: A follow-up thought--do the Copyright Office's guidelines on AI copyright draw any distinction or make a particular exception for AI software copyright registration?
We have heard recently about the successes Ukraine and Iran have had with low-cost drones dispatched in batches toward the enemy. We have also heard that while U.S. advanced technologies like Patriot missile defense systems have little problem taking out the cheap incoming drones, this can be financially ruinous as a defensive unit costing millions of dollars is expended to neutralize an offensive unit costing only thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
It occurred to me that this is an apt metaphor for pro se litigants armed with an AI chatbot. Under AI's influence, the quantity of pro se filings is soaring, and the surface quality of many of those filings makes them harder to counter and dispose of, even though their underlying actual quality (or lack thereof) has not really changed from before.
This has driven up the cost of dealing at standard attorney-fee rates with the typical, meritless pro se case. Coupled with judges' natural disinclination to award full fees, and the inability to collect such fees from most pro se litigants anyway, this is driving the parties facing pro se litigants financially underwater from their own, unreimbursed fees and expenses. I can certainly point to one earlier case I was involved in where this eventually happened (it had seemed like the crazy pro se was getting occasional casual, lukewarm advice from some lawyer, and at the time we couldn't figure out how or why that would be happening), and I bet you can point to cases like this also.
These pro se AI-fueled drones are not only headed for the other, represented side, but also headed for the court and its administrative personnel. A lot more time is being expended by both the opposing party and the court, with nothing much to show for it. Something has to be done.
I don't have any specific solutions. However, Ukraine's example on the drone-defense side shows that what is needed is an equally cheap means of intercepting and knocking down those drones. As one example, I am familiar with a federal district court that had a dedicated pro per clerk to receive and deal with prisoner complaints. (I kid you not, the one guy I knew with that job had the last name of "Proper".) Perhaps some form of preliminary screening is needed to wade through all this new AI-generated chaff to find whatever kernels of wheat there may be. It would be poetic justice if such a screening process were powered by AI.
Victor Frankenstein, creator of the Monster (with a shout-out to Mary), is a great cautionary tale for the gifted, at least as Victor is portrayed in various movies. His cry of, “The fools! I’ll show them all!” might feel very familiar to members of the gifted group, and nothing could be more instructive, in the negative sense. In modern meme-speak, it’s Don’t Be Victor. His is compactly and entirely the wrong attitude and direction.
As someone gifted, you will likely be misunderstood or incompletely understood by the crowd, and ridiculed or otherwise alienated and hurt (hopefully not physically) as a consequence. You are reading this on Reddit, so it seems inconceivable (as Wallace Shawn would say) that this has not happened to you quite a bit already.
From this position, you now know what to do: Don’t Be Victor. Don’t give the crowd the power, don’t rent out your head to them, and don’t ever expect their approval even in the face of your wildest objective success. They will likely never really “get it,” whatever your “it” happens to be, they may additionally be somewhat envious or afraid (or both) of you, and now they are invested in being anti-you.
Ignore them, brush them off. You don’t have to show them anything. Do rummage through their jabs to see if there is anything of objective merit in there for your education, and then proceed on your vector. You will not be Victor. You will not be Ted Kaczynski. You may make a visible social mark on the world or you may not, but either way it will be on your own terms.
Now, it can be counter-argued that Victor Frankenstein’s anger at the fools is what drove him to his achievement, but then, in the end that Promethian modality didn’t really work out.
What’s the word? Grounded? Based? You got this. Peace out, O brainiacs!
I’m wondering whether maybe “dating service” might be a genuine “killer app” for AI. I, myself, am an AI cynic, seeing that the hype and concomitant human folly have far outstripped the proven, solid uses for this new technology. However, perhaps human matching is actually a task an AI algorithm could successfully tackle.
There already are a few AI dating services out there, even after removing the chatbot girlfriend/boyfriend providers and the AI dating advice sites, but even the current AI matchmaking sites apparently still rely on questionnaires and so they don’t go far enough for what I am talking about.
My not-very-controversial thesis is that good dating is an interpersonal information problem, not just acquiring the information on potential candidates but also what to do with it. Using voluntary questionnaires has proved suboptimal, and frankly, letting the participants make choices based on the information provided has no special track record, either.
What if matchmaking is best accomplished by moving candidate consideration all the way into true pattern matching using abundant loads of data? One success story for AI that everyone likes to point to is medical image analysis and lesion spotting. What is that but machine-learned complex pattern matching? Maybe the information fields we humans both throw off and also need to have about potential partners can be analogized to a good CAT scan.
I am not talking about questionnaires here, or perhaps any voluntarily produced information, though there’s no reason to exclude that stuff. Perhaps our true personal contours are best revealed by the digital footprint we lay down every day, both voluntary and involuntary, both personal and demographic, both past and current. We each have limited purview over our data store and can’t really influence it or “fake” it. Each person’s full data store is quite large, but certainly AI can hoover it all up.
Then what? Once you have those millions or billions of huge personal-profile data troves, what do you do with them? What comparisons do you make and what algorithms do you follow? Do opposites attract? Does like-mindedness really promote compatibility? Who knows? We have never to date anecdotally produced good answers to those dating and compatibility questions. So, keep hoovering!
We have the Internet, and independently vast demographic records, not to mention evolutionary knowledge, at our AI disposal. So, let’s find out what all those data themselves tell us for how to go about finding those tumors, I mean, those successful matches. Let’s look at the history of successful togetherness (and perhaps more importantly, failed togetherness) and see what the ocean of data tell us. Anyone who has run a statistical “t test” and watched solid causative factors come out of seeming random splotches knows the magical feeling of organization rising from apparent disarray.
Sure, the Internet and all other records are wildly poor indicators of human romantic success, at least to our human eyes. We are talking tons of chaff per each small grain of actual reliable index to happy couple-hood. On the other hand, there is so much data that even if the ratio is a ton to an ounce, with enough grinding it may still produce a usable amount.
And of course, the patterns found from such peta-analyses may be not only beyond human intuition but beyond human comprehension. The proposed matches might be mind-boggling and foolishly implausible. But, it similarly does not matter how the medical-image AI analyzer finds the tumor, only that it reliably does. Even if the first few proposed matches were unappetizing or felt laughably foolish, still, the only way to know for sure is to try a few. And if some of those matches actually worked, that would produce high quality, focused data for moving forward.
Would it work? Who knows? Is it any worse than current AI slop from clearly inappropriate AI uses and crazily stretching to fit AI to everything? Hardly. All I can say for sure is that with this post I have just killed the seminal conceptual patent for AI dating by making this public disclosure. You’re welcome.
Miles Taylor just said, "authoritarianism doesn’t run on one villain alone. It runs on a million volunteers."
The California billionaire wealth tax has qualified for the November ballot.
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* It would impose a one-time 5% tax on personal net wealth above $1 billion
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* It targets about 200 people
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* Estimated it would raise about $100 billion
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* 90% of the money raised would go to California's medicaid plan (which serves the poor)
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* The SEIU union is for it
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* Gavin Newsom is against it
I don't know where (else) to post this.
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For all these years, scenes in movies using rear projection as a special effect looked perfectly fine and believable when shown on TV. Then a few years ago, suddenly every older movie using rear projection suddenly looked incredibly, even laughably cheesy on TV. What happened?
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I have a theory: It's the lack of flashing.
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Before digital movies and TV, both movies and TV were not continuously displayed, but were instead displayed as a series of flashing, discrete pictures with the smallest moment of darkness in-between each one. The human mind ignored the flasing and connected all those discrete pictures into a continuous flow. Within this context, rear projection was similarly flashing and discontinuous.
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Then, with the advent of digital movies and TV, there is no longer any flashing. The displayed image is continuously bright, and just changes its content 24 or 30 times a second.
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I think against that constant brightness, the flickering of rear projection no longer carries a realistic look. I realize that rear projection is synced against the 24 fps of the movie and should appear solidly. I don't know the actual mechanism of it, but I am convinced it is the lack of frame flashing that makes rear projection now look foolishly unrealistic.
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Assuming I'm posting in the right place, what does anybody else think?
It is powerful and huge to note the disconnect between the easy rejection of evidence-lacking, extravagant theories in all other areas versus the "well, nobody really knows" pass that a belief in God receives. I came to see this disconnect in this very sub, and it was *yuge* for me. (Thanks, everyone!)
BUT, counting the words above that it takes to describe this important concept, it is cumbersome to have call it out anew each time. We need a single word or a 2- or 3- word phrase for it so that we can quickly and easily identify it when needed.
I don't seriously think we can coin that word or phrase in this thread and get it generally accepted, but you never know.
Throwing the floor open, any suggestions?
I know this is kind of rare, but ...
Who passed the legislation a few years ago killing the Medicare Part D drug coverage "doughnut hole" and capping the out-of-pocket drug outlays at an annual $2,100 "catastrophic care" level? I have just been reviewing my Medicare EOB and I would like to thank those politicians!