angusm - Network

Like everyone else who’s ever written anything longer than a shopping list, my published writing has been slurped up into Meta's...

Like everyone else who’s ever written anything longer than a shopping list, my published writing has been slurped up into Meta's plagiarism machine. But so too has the writing of my namesake, an Australian academic writing about Indonesian politics, and I doubt the Machine knows we're not the same person.

The prompts "Write an SF novel in the style of Angus McIntyre” or “Write an essay on Suharto in the style of Angus McIntyre” might yield some amusing results.

The US government paying El Salvador to warehouse deportees from other nations could spark a wave of innovation in the developing field of...

The US government paying El Salvador to warehouse deportees from other nations could spark a wave of innovation in the developing field of Human Rights Violations as a Service (HRVaaS), a sector that some analysts believe could grow to generate hundreds of billions of dollars by the mid-2030s.

This is the subhead on an article in the New York Times:"The president revived a number of falsehoods he had used on the campaign trail...

This is the subhead on an article in the New York Times:

"The president revived a number of falsehoods he had used on the campaign trail last year, including his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.”

It took them long enough to get there, but the fact that the self-styled paper of record is now saying quite plainly that the President of the United States is a habitual liar is an indication that we live in ... unusual times.

Next time Amazon has a sale, I'm going to buy an Echo and set it up in a closet next to a Raspberry Pi with a speech synthesis program...

Next time Amazon has a sale, I'm going to buy an Echo and set it up in a closet next to a Raspberry Pi with a speech synthesis program that just repeats "Fuck off, Bezos" all day long.
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114162797633445947

Another thought-provoking article from @molly0xfff , which relates to something I was posting about the other day. This feels like a...

Another thought-provoking article from @molly0xfff , which relates to something I was posting about the other day. This feels like a starting point for a wider discussion.

She nails it in saying that rather than trying to put roadblocks in the path of the "vampires" (which hurts everyone), creators need ways to communicate our preferences AND make them enforceable.

But how we can do that isn't clear & the AI industry is lobbying hard for things to go the opposite way.
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/114162259291959966

Sam Altman says that Roko's Basilisk is designing a special hell for everyone who put:User-agent: GPTBotDisallow: /in their `robots.txt`...

Sam Altman says that Roko's Basilisk is designing a special hell for everyone who put:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

in their `robots.txt` file.

#AI

"We must be allowed to steal everyone's IP, or our business model will fail and we won't be able to buy ourselves yachts”...

"We must be allowed to steal everyone's IP, or our business model will fail and we won't be able to buy ourselves yachts” proved not to be a compelling argument, so the AI boosters have moved on to “We must be allowed to steal everyone’s IP, or the Communists will win.”

IMHO, the interesting & useful applications of ML mostly don't require stealing everyone's data, while the applications that DO require stealing everyone's data mostly aren't interesting or useful.
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114156035583897687

My partner has just figured out that not only are Ned Stark and Tony Stark not related, they don't even inhabit the same fictional...

My partner has just figured out that not only are Ned Stark and Tony Stark not related, they don't even inhabit the same fictional universe.

I think this means that my attempt to persuade her that they are the twin sons of actress Koo Stark is not going to succeed.

I got an email from “Tomb of the Eagles”, and my first thought was “Wow, that's the most metal spammer name EVER”, but then I...

I got an email from “Tomb of the Eagles”, and my first thought was “Wow, that's the most metal spammer name EVER”, but then I remembered that I'd backed a crowdfunding project to restore a Neolithic site in Orkney.

This is the project, by the way, for anyone who's interested:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tomb-of-the-eagles

#orkney #scotland #archaeology

It's noteworthy that all the most reported & reposted stories about ICE overreach involve young white women from Western...

It's noteworthy that all the most reported & reposted stories about ICE overreach involve young white women from Western nations.

What's happening to them is unacceptable, but they are the media-friendly tip of a much larger & uglier iceberg of rights violations. For every "deserving victim” there are hundreds or thousands of less mediagenic people whose basic rights are trampled in the same way, or worse. (And have been for years).

But we don't talk as much about them.
https://masto.deluma.biz/@dogzilla/114154109221520078

I just had a thought about Pinterest's plan to feed everyone’s pinned images into an ML engine: lots of the content on Pinterest is...

I just had a thought about Pinterest's plan to feed everyone’s pinned images into an ML engine: lots of the content on Pinterest is now synthetic (“AI”-generated) imagery. In general, training models on the output of "AI” systems is a really bad idea; it noticeably degrades the model, a phenomenon called model collapse.

Will they only train on images pinned before slop became ubiquitous? Or will they try to filter the synthetic images somehow?
https://mastodon.social/@angusm/114143550897370005

Future historians are going to find it very hard to describe the history of the United States in the mid-2020s without using the phrase...

Future historians are going to find it very hard to describe the history of the United States in the mid-2020s without using the phrase "perfect storm of assholes”.

@cstross Ekranoplans are back,...

@cstross Ekranoplans are back, baby!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2471527-largest-all-electric-flying-machine-begins-sea-trials/

#ekranoplan #TheEkranoplanFutureIsNow #CaspianSeaMonster

TL;DR: "Fair use" is good and valuable, & model training should be protected by it.But if a company like Pinterest can decide...

TL;DR: "Fair use" is good and valuable, & model training should be protected by it.

But if a company like Pinterest can decide to use the work of others for free for its own profit, or the makers or users of a generative tool can use the "fair use” of model training to authorize decidedly unfair use cases, then something has gone wrong & we need better legal (and ethical) frameworks to address this.

/END

There's also a 'remix effect'. Like cryptocurrency mixers that blur the origins of funds by scrambling transactions together,...

There's also a 'remix effect'. Like cryptocurrency mixers that blur the origins of funds by scrambling transactions together, generative tools blend inputs from multiple different sources. Even if a generator spits out a superficially close copy of someone's original work, the user or maker can say “Ah, no, this was the product of all these OTHER works too," & claim to be using a non-substantial part of the original.

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An AI-generated work based on a model could violate many of the tests for fair use (purpose & character, amount & substantiality,...

An AI-generated work based on a model could violate many of the tests for fair use (purpose & character, amount & substantiality, effect on market or value). But it's unclear whether "fair use” considerations apply once the model has been trained; it's almost as if model training (a "fair use”) acts as a firewall to protect the makers and users of generative tools (often an “unfair” one) from consequences. It's a transitivity problem.

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The problem is that training a model is (other things being equal) value-neutral. It's USING a model where the ethical issues arise...

The problem is that training a model is (other things being equal) value-neutral. It's USING a model where the ethical issues arise & where "unfair use" starts creeping in.

If someone uses a model trained on things I create to advance science or medicine, I'm all for it; if they use it to generate slop, deprive other creators of a livelihood, or power surveillance engines, I'm not. But there's no way to express my preferences.

4/

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a variant of the CC license that says “Free to use … but not for this." I use BY-NC...

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a variant of the CC license that says “Free to use … but not for this." I use BY-NC licenses that require attribution & prohibit commercial use. An AI image generator is never going to give attribution, and most are made and sold by commercial companies ... but Creative Commons themselves point out that training for generative AI may be covered by fair use.

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https://creativecommons.org/2023/08/18/understanding-cc-licenses-and-generative-ai/

I’m in something of a cleft stick, as I license my photographs and art under Creative Commons licenses. I like the idea of human beings...

I’m in something of a cleft stick, as I license my photographs and art under Creative Commons licenses. I like the idea of human beings being able to use what I make (subject to some small restrictions). I'm less thrilled by the idea that some BigTech company can ingest everything I've ever made so they can fill the world with worthless slop based on digested versions of my work and everyone else’s.

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Pinterest have announced that they intend to use all pinned content for training ML (aka "AI”) models, opting it all in without the...

Pinterest have announced that they intend to use all pinned content for training ML (aka "AI”) models, opting it all in without the approval of the original creators.

In the past, it was apparently easy to find all Pins on Pinterest from a particular source. It's probably no coincidence that this feature has now disappeared, making it impossible for content owners to identify their intellectual property without resorting, as @camilabrun has done, to custom scripts.

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https://mastodon.art/@camilabrun/114129242541126250