The main reason they were able to prosecute TPB admins was the claim they were making money.

I think in the Darknet Diaries episode about TPB, the guy said they never even made enough off of ads to pay for the server costs.

Over the past year, Microsoft’s support for artificial intelligence tools by backing OpenAI has helped boost its value

…which I’m sure is not just hype and grift obscuring a heap of pending lawsuits.

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.

–

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”.

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?

I’m dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

We’re mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content’s real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn’t a huge problem, because that’s the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the “real home” of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you’ll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

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There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don’t even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this “protection” gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

And then that copyright – the very same thing that was intended to protect creators – is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can’t speak out of turn. Fans can’t remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can’t pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what’s popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture – insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

But.

If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won’t solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

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:

Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.

This man…

Pronouns, what?

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.

About fuckin time.

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?

sales

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.

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”…

If Books Could Kill had a brutal episode on this chucklehead: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/if-books-could-kill/rich-dad-poor-dad/

All he knows how to do is pedal-to-the-metal on scams. It’ll catch up with him eventually, but too late for all the people he’s hurt along the way.

Yes. Yes it does.

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.

There’s also Craig Mokhiber:

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.

There’s a great interview with him here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wiGp2mvFLY0

Short form of “fixin to” (pronounced “fixin tuh”)

Usually implies “I’m” fixing to. Often said without much emphasis, as it’s just introducing the important part of the phrase. I think it’s actually a pretty neat way to keep the emphasis where it needs to be.

“Finna get outta here” uses 3/4 of the phrase to convey the important action of “leaving”

vs. “I’m fixing to get out of here” uses 1/2 of the phrase on useless info that “I” am the one doing the leaving and that it hasn’t happened yet but is about to.

Creepie brownie

Same. TouchBar Macs inadvertently forced me to move to a more comfy layout.

There are ways to watermark plaintext. But it’s relatively brittle, because it loses signal as the output is further modified, and you also need to know what specific LLM’s watermarks you’re looking for.

So it’s not a great solution on its own, but it could be part of something more comprehensive.

As for non-plaintext file formats…

A simple signature would indeed give us a source but not method, but I think that’s probably 90% of what we care about when it comes to mass disinformation. If an article or an image is signed by Reuters, you can probably trust it. If it’s signed by OpenAI or Stability, you probably can’t. And if it’s not signed at all or signed by some rando, you should remain skeptical.

But there are efforts like C2PA that include a log of how the asset was changed over time, providing a much more detailed explanation of what was done explicitly by humans vs. generative automated tools.

I understand the concern about privacy, but it’s not like you have to use a format that supports proving that an image is legit. But if you want to prove that it is legit, then you have to provide something that grounds it in reality. It doesn’t have to be personally-identifying. It could just be a key baked into your digital camera (assuming that the resulting signature is strong enough that it’s computationally expensive to try to reverse-engineer the key and find who bought the camera).

If you think about it, it’s kind of crazy that we’ve made it this far with a trust model that’s no more sophisticated than “I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time”.

Not quite how digital signatures work, but not far off from a likely scenario once issued keys start getting compromised and used to spread convincing images for a short period before being invalidated. Your uncle on Facebook: “They said this image was authentic yesterday, and now they say it isn’t! Who is making these decisions?!”

I did this once just to drive 2 blocks on totally empty streets. After 30 seconds, I had my passenger open the window and see if I was good on their side. Shit was terrifying. I can’t imagine doing it on a legit commute. You gotta convince yourself you’ve got 8-inch solid unobtainium plot armor to do that.