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Where do we draw the line

It’s ever-changing. We’re social animals, not math equations, so it’s all according to the kind of society we want.

how do we do that without limiting free speech?

All freedoms are in tension between “freedom to” and “freedom from”. I can have the freedom to fire my gun in the air. I can have the freedom from my neighbor’s randomly-falling bullets. I can’t have both of those codified in law (unless I’m granted some special status over my neighbors).

I think that, many times, what we run into is a mismatch between a group thinking in terms of “freedom to” and a group thinking in terms of “freedom from”.

The “freedom to” folks feel like any restriction on their ability to act is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom from”. If, for example, I live in the middle of nowhere and have no neighbors, what falling bullets do I have to fear except my own?

The “freedom from” folks feel like having to endure the effects of others’ actions is a breach of liberty, because they aren’t worried about “freedom to”. If I spend my life dodging falling bullets, I’m not likely to fire more into the sky.

And the days of believing everything you see are over but most don’t know it yet.

We said the same thing about the printing press. And it plunged us into a long period of epistemic chaos, with rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never spoke them). The fallout of this led the crown to seize presses and allocate exclusive printing rights to a chartered monopoly (with some censorship just for funsies).

We can either complain it’s too hard and do nothing, eventually leading to an overreaction to a policy that is obviously not sustainable… Or we can learn from history, get our heads in the game, and start imagining a framework that embraces the transformative power of large-scale computing while respecting the humanity of our comrades.

C2PA is a good start, but it’s probably DOA in the hacker zeitgeist. We tend to view even an opt-in standard for proof of authenticity as a gateway to universal requirements for proof of authenticity and a locked-down tyrannical internet forever and ever. Possibly because a substantial portion of us are terminally online selfish assholes who never have to spend a second worrying about deepfakes of ourselves. And also fancy ourselves utilitarian techno-solutionists willing to sacrifice the squishy unquantifiable touchy-feely human emotions that just get in the way of objective rational progress towards a transhuman future. It’s a noble sacrifice, we say, while profiting disproportionately and suffering none of the fallout.

A sketch would probably not convince anyone that the subject consensually participated in sex acts that never occurred.

What does the method matter? If the result is an artifact that is convincing enough for the average person to believe that the subject knowingly posed for sex acts that never occurred, the personal experience and social stigma is traumatizing no matter how it was made.

As the sociologist Brooke Harrington puts it, if there was an E = mc² of social science, it would be SD > PD, “social death is more frightening than physical death.”

People said the same thing when, after the printing press, there was rampant plagiarism and reverse-plagiarism (attributing words to someone who never said them).

After a period of epistemic chaos, the result was several decades of chartered monopoly and government censorship to get it under control.

I hope we won’t need heavy-handed regulation this time around. But that will only happen if we learn from history. We need to get this under control now, while we have the chance to start a framework for protecting our fellow human beings from harm. Complaining that it’s hard is not an excuse for doing nothing.

Might as well not make any laws then.

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“You may sit at the family table, but we do not grant you the rank of family member.”

They might be doing feature detection on one of the more obscure APIs, too. I know there’s some audio manipulation APIs that aren’t available.

Someone complained about Discord deliberately blocking Firefox users because of that, but it turned out that spoofing the user agent would actually break the feature.

At least we got alternative payment portals out of it.

But damn, the EU is 10 years ahead of the US on tech antitrust. And they are, themselves, 5-10 years behind the industry.

Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…

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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.

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.

It’s not the same issue at all.

Piracy distributes power. It allows disenfranchised or marginalized people to access information and participate in culture, no matter where they live or how much money they have. It subverts a top-down read-only culture by enabling read-write access for anyone.

Large-scale computing services like these so-called AIs consolidate power. They displace access to the original information and the headwaters of culture. They are for-profit services, tuned to the interests of specific American companies. They suppress read-write channels between author and audience.

One gives power to the people. One gives power to 5 massive corporations.

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.

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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.

This man…

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”…