kibiz0r

US Marshals, part of the executive branch. They recently deputized Elon’s security guards.

Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast."

"No," says the preacher. "I have faith in the Lord. He will save me."

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

"Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee's gonna break any minute."

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. "I shall remain. The Lord will see me through."

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

"Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance."

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, "Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn't you deliver me from that flood?"

God shakes his head. "What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter."

Just don’t fall asleep during the update.

Lemme know when they release an OTA for our parietal lobes.

Yikes, there’s a 25 around here that shows up as a 55 in Google Maps.

Also a 55 that goes down to I think 35 for just a moment when it joins up with a side road. I wonder what a Tesla would do if it was following that data.

Is that just to cover his ass cuz he was promising backwards-compatible FSD for models that don’t have LIDAR?

Just to be clear, I was referring to a poem by Dayna EM Craig, titled “A Narcissist’s Prayer”.

How does that one go?

SnotFlickerman nailed it, so I’ll just add that the “man or bear” saga taught me what a “scissor statement” is.

For me, that was the biggest revelation of the whole thing.

You had people encountering the same general words in the same general order, but understanding them to mean completely different things, and not being able to comprehend how anyone could disagree with them.

It was like a rehash of “the dress”, but not so whimsical.

It was really kind of distressing, the extent to which it laid bare (no pun intended) how poorly we’re actually communicating with each other online, even though it otherwise seems like we’re communicating more than ever.

Aaaaand then we just kinda shrugged that off and went back to internet as usual.