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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

    Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

    If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.


  • Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

    I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
    Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
    I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

    Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

    You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
    Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

    Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

    I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
    If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.




  • As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

    You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

    Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.



  • It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.

    So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
    It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.


  • There’s literally an approved solution to the problem designed explicitly to solve the problem.

    Install a transfer switch so you can disconnect utility power, switch to your generator and people can see the situation at the breaker.

    If you don’t have one, you use something called an “extension cord” to run power to your important devices for the duration of the outage.
    If you don’t know how to power a few appliances with a generator and some extension cords, you definitely shouldn’t be thinking you can use a dangerous cable that people who do know you should never use in the first place.


  • Yes, you minimize risk by being prudent and using reasonable and cost effective safety measures.

    In a car, that’s things like seatbelts, airbags, and other safety features.

    The equivalent for powering your house with a generator is the aforementioned transfer switch.

    What you’re doing is saying that driving a car without seatbelts or airbags is perfectly safe, you just need to not get in an accident.

    Stop powering your house with a generator plugged in via the dumbest possible cable and just install a fucking transfer switch. They’re not expensive and it keeps you from needlessly endangering people, or even just having a preposterously dangerous cord laying around.



  • It’s also thought but not confirmed to be used for parallel construction. If the information is collected through illegal or inadmissible means, the NSA can inform the relevant agency that they have reason to believe that the individual is doing “illegal activity in question” and relevant details. The agency, now knowing the conclusion, can use legal means to gather the needed evidence for something they otherwise would never have even looked at.
    The NSA isn’t supposed to monitor anything on US soil that doesn’t involve both terrorism connections and communication with foreign parties, but due to “reasons” they regularly collect a lot of stuff that isn’t that, and they’ll (likely) inform the DEA.

    It’s a preposterous violation of the 4th amendment, but it’s also nearly impossible to prove.



  • While that’s definitely a factor in global food trends, I don’t see that impacting the US price of food as drastically as companies thinking they can get away with raising prices.

    My reasoning is the web of tarrifs and subsidies that the US uses to stabilize domestic markets, prop up farmers, and generally ensure the US is the key grain player. Shortly after the war started the US and Canada also saw a better than average harvest of the grains that Ukraine typically exports.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU02120301 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU3112113112111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL

    The domestic prices paid for wheat and flour both started to fall shortly after the Ukraine invasion, while food prices maintained a rocketing trajectory without much if any changes, with only a slight decrease in the rate of increase about a year after.

    While protectionist US food policies are chock full of horrible problems, in this case they should have insulated people from radical changes in the availability and price of wheat.
    That consumer prices have risen despite falling costs paid to producers is a big indicator that the cost increases are due to something else in the US.

    None of this applies to countries that are dependent on grain imports who have to rely on the global markets instead of adjusting export profitability to stabilize things.


  • I think concerns about China in specific are overblown.
    That being said, what we’ve learned about the topic from US tracking programs (slight chuckle at China having scope or abilities beyond anyone else in that regard) is that all information can be fed into what is essentially a statistical model of interests, behaviors, expressed opinions, and contacts.
    From that, you can determine a few things that are specifically “useful”.

    The first useful thing is the ability to tell if someone’s behavior has changed in an unexpected way. If someone starts talking to someone new via text message and they “shouldn’t” know each other (no common acquaintances, never at the same place at the same time, no shared interests) you have an anomaly that can be processed further.

    The next useful thing is once you have this model of expected behavior you can start modeling stuff like “A talked to B, B to C and then C changed behavior. A talked to D and D talked to E, and E changed behavior”, and more or less direct chains.
    This effectively tells you that A is influencing the behaviors of C and D. By tracking how influence (and money and stuff) flows through a network of people, you can extrapolate things like leadership, communication pathways, and material support pipelines. If you’re the US, you can then send a seal team to shoot someone.

    If you’re, supposedly, anyone doing this you can more selectively target people for influence based on the reach that it’ll have, use your models to target them better, and generally improve the quality of your attempted influence.

    I personally have my doubts it’s being used that way because it’s just as effective and far cheaper to hire a public opinion research group to pay a significant sample of people $5 to figure out how to make better propaganda, and then like 75¢ each to get Facebook to target the right people.
    It’s really only valuable if you eventually care about an individual. Most unfortunate privacy violations are aggregates.

    Even if it’s not directly actionable or a threat, you should still be wary about letting your browsing habits leak because the information can much more plausibly be used for phishing purposes.
    If you just bought some clown outfits and get an email about your clown plants being held at customs you’re a lot more likely to click to figure out what’s going on.