My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.

This isn’t true with AI generators. You can absolutely draw in a shitty stick figure with the pose you want and it’ll transform that into a proper artwork with the person in that pose. There are tons and tons of ways to manipulate the the output.

And again, we give copyright to artists that incorporate randomness into their art. If I throw darts at paint filled balloons I get to copyright the output. It would be absolutely impossible to replicate that piece and I only have vague control over the results.

These are my thoughts as well. It seems obvious that putting in ‘cat with a silly hat’ as a prompt is basically the creative equivalent of googling for a picture.

But, as you say, that sort of AI usage is just dumb, bottom tier usage. There’s going to someday be a major, critical piece of art that heavily uses AI assistance in it’s creation and people are going to be surprised that it’s somehow not copyrightable under the laws and rulings they’re working on now.

I remember in the LOTR behind the scenes they talked about how WETA built a game l like software to simulate the massive battle scenes, giving each soldier a series of attacks and hp, etc. They then used this to build out the final CGI.

Stuff like that has already been going on for ages and it’s only going to get more murky as to what ‘AI art’ even means and what is enough human creativity and editing added to the process to make it human created rather than AI created.

Predictable? How are people ‘predicting’ those abstract paintings made by popping balloons or spinning brushes around or randomly flinging paint around. Where does predictable come in? Humans have been incorporating random elements into art for ages.

Following this reasoning (it’ll get misused by the American media mafia), it’s simply better off to get rid of copyright laws altogether, and then create another legal protection to artists both against the American mafia and people using image generators to create rip-offs.

Certainly no disagreement from me on this point

You’re ascribing full human intelligence and sentience to the AI tool by your example which I think is inaccurate. If I build a robot arm to move the paintbrush for me, I would have copyright. If make a program to move the robot arm based on various inputs I would have copyright. Current (effective) AIs prompts are closer to a rudimentary scripting rather than a casual conversation.

AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.

To me this is a potential can of worms. Humans can study and mimic art from other humans. It’s a fundamental part of the learning process.

My understanding of modern AI image generation is that it’s much more advanced than something like music sampling, it’s not just an advanced cut and paste machine mashing art works together. How would you ever determine how much of a particular artists training data was used in the output?

If I create my own unique image in Jackson Pollock’s style I own the entirety of that copyright, with Pollock owning nothing, no matter that everyone would recognize the resemblance in style. Why is AI different?

It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.

A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.

I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.

Also, AI isn’t some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?

Almost like voting with your wallet doesn’t actually work. Or only works in same way ‘communism’ and ‘well regulated free market capitalism’ concepts work… in theory only.

This feels like shutting down road access to the local stripmall just because the bar there doesn’t properly handle it’s drunks. Oh and leaving that decision up to a private, not elected and not accountable citizen

Exactly. I’m tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that’s more than a private company. And don’t even get me started on ‘voting with your wallet’. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule ‘trickle down economics’.

To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn’t be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn’t be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn’t totally up how one CEO feels that day.

Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?

I very much appreciate the self publishing that’s been possible, but I do know that the way they enable this is pretty exploitive and I think we still have massive room for improvement. My understanding is that it relies heavily on exclusivity agreements to force the majority of players onto their platform. I think we would’ve seen the Amazon self publishing business smacked down by anti trust lawsuits ages ago if we lived in a more sane timeline.

Despite the exploitation going on now, it’s still better than the old monopolies the traditional publishers held, but I hope we can eventually see self publishing flourish outside of the Amazon ecosystem

To me there’s a bit of a difference because humans are not controllable and cannot (legally) be slaves. So in the case of this hypothetical artificial brain, that brain could leave and take the profits of it’s work elsewhere, with the creator no longer benefiting.

What do you do for contractors, Doctors, etc?

Yep. Between ad blockers/sponsorblock and my content choices it’s actually extremely rare that I encounter any traditional advertising. I don’t even know how I used to sit through the old cable TV ads. Now I’m already searching for something else to do 5 seconds in

I did not say future AI is limited. I said our current approach is flawed and very unlikely to ever result in a true AI. Whenever we do build that AI, it won’t be with a better version of the tech were using now, but a very different approach will have been taken.

It’s the same way we realized you couldn’t build a true AI by just trying to create enough if/then statements. You can make some fancy software, but the approach was inherently flawed.

People are also waaay overestimating how close we are to the classical AI shown in media. They see ChatGPT and understand that it has problems, but also know we went from dumb phones to super fast smartphones really quickly, so apply the same logic to AI, when it’s closer to the ‘bird in the picture’ xkcd comic. (Ironically that problem can now be solved by ‘AI’, but the point still stands). End users are bad at estimating the complexity of a given task and taking something like our current AI models to something like Cortana from Halo is a completely unknown amount of time away. Most likely decades if not centuries from now. The current approach to AI will most likely never work like that, because it has no true ability to learn and grow. At least not in the human sense.

Wife got caught with a similar phishing attempt, except this was a text. She had legitimately had a missing package and was in the middle of dealing with it and was waiting on a communication for a fix when the fake text came in. Just incredibly unlucky timing that made it all feel ‘right’. Realized it like 30 minutes later when the real communication came and cancelled the cards, but at the scale and frequency of spam these days they’re bound to find people in plausible situations where their scam doesn’t feel quite so out of place.

It’s surprising to me that they didn’t at least have a human write/steal the title and blurb. You’d think that’d work better than books with obviously gibberish titles.

I mean, most of my reading comes from authors who are literally only on amazon. And they’re only on amazon because it’s impossible to make a living trying to sell your book anywhere else. Brandon Sanderson has brought attention to this issue.

I’m supporting indie authors in a sub-genre that you literally can’t even find in a physical bookstore. I get that bookstores are hurting, but I had to make a choice between small time authors and small time book stores.