The parallel between how little MBA-types understand about processes and how incapable their AI pet projects are of performing said processes seems so obvious in hindsight.

It’s Bezos sponsored, so take the good PR work with a grain of salt given the state of everything he and Amazon have touched

AI gets subs wrong, and thinking that doesn’t matter is both ableist and just a terrible lazy product, but that’s not the pressing matter.

It’s Israel. Because giving money to another party is not a value neutral action. Using a site that pays money to Israel—and you either know what that means or are purposefully avoiding the subject—means you are supporting Israel. Your consumption does not occur in a vacuum.

We’re really about to have AI turn a few bullet points into a report for another AI to summarize with a few bullet points instead of getting rid of reports that only exist to keep uninvolved leeches “in the loop”

In this ‘hypothetical scenario’ all the reports are also taking place within a college advancement office, an institution that employs hundreds of people to solicit gifts from wealthy people that can be invested in wealthy people’s companies so that future college costs can be offset by the dividends paid out by the constant growth of these propped up businesses. Enshrining the current world order instead of imagining a world where heads of businesses don’t make so much extra money that it’s worth wining and dining them in an effort to get them to share a bit of the money they took back with you (for you to give back to them) (and their friends want some too of course) (hypothetically)

It will impact weather patterns and severity. I’ve certainly not done the work on how much, nor do I really have a grasp on the scales involved, so that’s mostly a meaningless statement, but I can say with confidence the impact will be real. Just like dams affecting rivers, icecap mass affecting heat reflection, and solar panels increasing local temperatures.

Given that one of the impacts of global climate change has been increased weather severity and chaos, I am not afraid of positing that reducing the severity and chaos of the jet streams could be a good thing.

Similarly, there are some interesting projects going on surrounding the use of aerogel and other materials that could help focus sunlight at the top of the oceans, where evaporation can actually occur, that are focused on creating clean drinking water—and while I think this is a good end unto itself, a nice side benefit would be less solar energy reaching the ocean and raising the body temperature.

For once, it’s cool to hear about proposed industrial projects and their side effects and they’re maybe positive, instead of “well that sounds like it’s going to leech heavy metals into the surrounding community”

Of course, aerogel is horrible to work with and clogs if it doesn’t break, and nobody else has solved the problem of scaling up and dealing with the steam getting in the way. On the lightweight flying jet stream turbine front, well, I’ve been following development for 8 years and nobody has even solved the ‘limited supply of helium leaking away into space’ problem for starters. And it’s hard making an efficient generator so lightweight that it can fly. So we don’t have to worry about them potentially improving global weather severity just yet. Or potentially devastating our remaining populations of migratory birds!

Or realizing that sometimes you’re looking for something specific. I remembered an old website that described the seven major metropolises of Antarctica the other day and spent a month trying on and off to coax the result out of Google, which kept serving me results that only matched a few words from my search while Gemini tried alternately to educate me about how there were no real cities in Antarctica and to make up its own stories about imaginary cities there.

Don’t teach lol

Obviously not, the poor spec choices led to the price. Perhaps the company claiming to focus on ethics could focus on ethics instead of bezel-less design and 120 Hz screens, thus bringing it in at a lower price point. Feel free to critique me now

Realizing the power imbalance inherent in contract law was a major radicalizing force in my life. I believe Hobbesian and Lockean theories of social contracts are still so widely taught in U.S. civics classes (uncertain of their global reach in schools) because it’s important to convince kids early on that people choose to enter into these agreements with larger power structures for their own good. If that view isn’t ingrained deep within your self then you’ll realize how absurd it is to enter into a legally binding contract with a party that has all the power in the relationship. Why would you?! They write the language, they limit your rights, they reserve the right to change the agreement, they reserve the right to terminate the arrangement. Companies, countries, it’s all from the same playbook. If you break it, fines or jail. If they break it, good luck. If it’s not enumerated in the document it doesn’t matter because they fall back on their power to do what they please anyway. It’s wielded as a weapon that forces you to accept the status quo under threat of retaliation. How do you assert your right to anything in this system? Playing along by paying for someone to represent you and asserting your belief in and support of the legal structure that has disenfranchised you, of course. You still don’t even have a seat at the table.

I was replying with something snarky like ‘hey Alexa how many people did we kill in the Middle East while I was big chilling’ so thank you for producing an actual productive response first

Rubber bullets are sold under the legal pretext that they’re acceptable to use in this fashion, while the manufacturer and the police department and probably every lawyer and judge in the country knows they’re just going to shoot at people.

That’s unreal. No, you cannot come up with your own scientific test to determine a language model’s capacity for understanding. You don’t even have access to the “thinking” side of the LLM.

If you would like to link some abstracts you find in a DuckDuckGo search that’s fine.

Coherent originality does not point to the machine’s understanding; the human is the one capable of finding a result coherent and weighting their program to produce more results in that vein.

Your brain does not function in the same way as an artificial neural network, nor are they even in the same neighborhood of capability. John Carmack estimates the brain to be four orders of magnitude more efficient in its thinking; Andrej Karpathy says six.

And none of these tech companies even pretend that they’ve invented a caring machine that they just haven’t inspired yet. Don’t ascribe further moral and intellectual capabilities to server racks than do the people who advertise them.

Yes, this includes ultraviolet light.

Why? Does it also include x-rays? That’s only one step further on the electromagnetic spectrum. Seems arbitrary to stop at ultraviolet waves! Does that mean thin sheets of steel aren’t opaque? Or is the term “opaque”, without any modifiers attached, colloquially used to describe whether something permits visible light through?

For the record, they’re not opaque. The original article actually says they work better if you close your eyes.

I have also worked shoe retail. US household name brands makes single widths for the majority of their available shoes. If you have narrow feet try the equivalent size in the women’s model. If you have wide feet try the men’s options. The lasts are different. I’m aware you can do better than what is available in a standard retail setting. I’m generalizing.

Just like in the US

The letters denoting widths exist, but they’re not used. Very few US shoe brands offer different widths on the same size shoe. Some offer two. A handful three, and now you’re talking about workwear, not trainers or anything else. Generally, US shoe widths are decided by whether it’s a mens or womens model.

I don’t think you can separate art and interpretation and critique, but they are often done by different parties. You don’t have to have an opinion on everything. Fair enough. I thought your opinion was that you opposed the misrepresentation of what a piece of art was about, e.g. My Little Pony is about x not y. I merely wanted to know the nature and extent of that opinion.

I agree on the 50 Shades front but am surprised—she took existing characters and wrote a new story around them, which both precludes the original author from ever writing anything in that vein and changes how those characters are seen. The facade of a name change is just that in my opinion.

I’ll admit that I’m confused as to the scenario where you were using MLP AI but it’s not my business! If it was not in a fan fic vein though, I’ll point out that while you take issue with the AI including non-canon material in its MLP training data and thus being non-representative, the owners of the MLP intellectual property would take issue with the use of their material and being too representative. Copyright is not used to preserve sanctity, it is used to monopolize profit opportunity.

The Babel program is merely representative of the actual library of Babel. Read the story. It’s short and it’s thoughtful.

Consent is a valuable concept, not a magical one. If we declare that all creators own rights to their creations for 500 years who cares? Most everything created will be forgotten long before then, people who have never heard of Rachel Ingalls will create countless stories about a mute person meeting a sea creature, and she won’t have a thing to say about it because she’s dead, and she doesn’t seem to have said anything about Del Toro making his movie about the same damn thing. Or perhaps she doesn’t have access to the funds to fight for her claim to the story? Since the other issue is that copyright only protects people and corporations who sue every fractional and imagined impingement upon their property, and it’s not always up to you as the creator what that process looks like. If you get hurt in an accident your insurance company will probably sue whoever hurt you for damages, and likewise if you publish a book through Tantor Media and someone writes a thoughtful continuation you bet Tantor’s not asking for consent.

Look at Star Wars. George Lucas creates a smash hit trilogy. People love it. They write tons of licensed material in-universe. He writes three more movies. They aaaare not a smash hit, but hey. People keep writing more tales in the extended universe. Who does this hurt? Fans get more material, writers make livings, Lucas makes money without having to do more work. But most creators do not make it so easy to create derivative works. Either they create more or their universe and characters die, and for whatever reason, that’s completely up to them. The absurd length of copyright claims ensures the magic their audience found in their work will whither away by the time someone who is willing to fan the flame is legally permitted to do so. Firefly will never resolve. Scavengers Reign is over, and if we catch you trying to finish the story you’ll face jail time. Westworld isn’t just unfinished, it’s functionally gone. It has been taken away. And those works were genuinely gargantuan undertakings and there is no way that was the desire of everyone involved.

• Nothing comes to be something from nothing. Stephen King’s It has many things in common such as the seemingly sentient balloon with Ray Bradbury’s Something This Way Wicked Comes, who took its title from Macbeth, and says he was only really convinced to write it by his friend Gene Kelly—I do not think there is something inherently immoral about this iterative process of inspiration, creation, interpretation, amalgamation and recreation. I do think there is something inherently immoral about taking claiming “the buck stops here” and arguing for the total independence of your own work. It’s all borrowed from our experiences, and our experiences are borrowed from the universe, and when we die no one should really give a shit about whether or not we would consent to something if we were, you know, not dead. Stephen King may have a legal claim to It but it is not his work alone. Maybe a strong case for outsider art being unique could convince me otherwise but I do not believe we can come to a point of finality where, after we and everyone we’ve learned from and everyone who has fed us, led us, derided and inspired us has worked on something, after we’ve taken our materials from the planet and our inspiration from nature, we can say “it’s finished, and no one else may touch it.”

Bonus material.

Interesting. I hope you don’t mind me distilling that into a few bullet points.

• you don’t like anyone opening your creation up to interpretation.

If Da Vinci felt that the Mona Lisa was a happy painting, would he have a right to stop others from finding her fascinating because her expression is somewhat ambiguous?

If that’s a bit too Minority Report, what about writing about her being sad, like a lot of journalists and critics have?

What about when they earn income by writing about it?

• You don’t think derivative works should compete with the original

Fifty Shades of Grey was born on Twilight fan fiction forums. Erika Mitchell/E.L. James originally used the names Edward and Bella before editing and publishing work was done. There’s a lot of reader overlap—should she be allowed to earn money on this work without Stephanie Meyers’s consent?

This also offers a second example of reinterpreting characters. What right does she have to change Edward from a protective to an openly exploitative individual? Is it okay because she changed the names?

A quote:

I am ok with others making thoughtful stories that don’t mess with my characters and some world aspects

If you believe you should have rights in perpetuity to this work and protection from ideas that damage your work’s image, what happens when someone purchases those rights from you, like how musical artists sell the rights to their musical catalogs?

Do those rights still last in perpetuity?

May the individual of corporation who purchased those rights interpret and rule out damaging ideas as they see fit? May they rule out things previously seen as acceptable use by the creator?

If you don’t approve of sales of rights, what about inheritance by estate? What about their rights to further interpretation?

Another quote:

I often independently come to conclusions other logical people may also come to. I wouldn’t know whether they have tho because I forge my own path.

If you independently dream up a scientist who creates a humanoid being out of various body parts, brings it to life, and is then horrified by its appearance and the responsibilities he has toward it, doesn’t Mary Shelley still have the rights to the idea? Can’t she shoot down your right to publish, or your right to recognition? What would be your method of proving it was an independent idea?

Does it matter? Should you receive praise for an idea you had that someone else has previously had (200+ years ago!)?

Along the same vein, my use of a smiley face last comment was clearly derivative and meant to imitate you in this moment, but I’m much older than you, and I wrote that way far earlier than you ever did, so can you still claim it was an imitation of your writing style?

Are you familiar with the Library of Babel as a story? As a concept? An author was inspired by Borges and made a website in 2015 that generates random combinations of letters and punctuation on command. You can “search” through the library and it will find places where the algorithm generates, at random and without intention, exactly what you wrote. People can bookmark their best finds. You can find the first page of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone here.

Now, if JK Rowling said she no longer wished for her works to be published, may we use this website to generate her works anew?

And in that vein, what rights would she have to withhold the material? I’m sure she does not like me because I’m not a TERF. But I enjoyed reading the books anyway. She has created a cultural keepsake. What right do we have to continue to enjoy her works despite her? For our children to imagine new adventures?

• You actually do write fanfiction, and use AI to generate content in the style of the original work

That’s just amusing. No notes.

Just looking for a bit of intellectual rigor is all :)

You’re familiar with the realm of fan fiction, I assume? What’s your stance on their right to write?