• 0 posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 4th, 2023
  • I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.

    Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.

    I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.

    And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.

    And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.

    Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.

  • Is there any particular piece of information that he revealed which could have been used by anyone really to… I dunno… bypass defenses or take advantage of people or whatever in some a way that could actually hurt people?

    I dunno. Everything I’ve heard is that everything that he leaked that has been released was super innocuous militarily (not that the military is a bunch of knights in shining armor or anything) or national-defense-wise. It is (or at least should be) very embarrassing to the U.S. “intelligence apparatus”. And it’s clearly good reason to believe that Uncle Sam clearly doesn’t have our (American’s) best interests at heart. But what could possibly have even hypothetically been used to cause any harm?

    (And, I don’t know, maybe you know something I’m unaware of, but it really seemed like he went out of his way to avoid any harm to anything but the reputation of the intelligence industrial complex. And maybe a few presidents.)

  • They’re openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.

    They’re a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO’s own pocketbook. Don’t fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to “never abuse customers”.

    I’ve written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I’m fully convinced they’re way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they’re not to be trusted.

    They’ve soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as “Open Source” and I’ve gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven’t followed Rossman at all. I’ve got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can’t in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.

    Edit: Oh. I honesty didn’t even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I’m very interested to go read that article.

    Edit 2: Shite. I’ve now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.