Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 18 August 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 18 August 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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Not a sneer, but something that'll inspire plenty of schadenfreude:
Brian Merchant: The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground
Brian's done plenty of good sneers on AI, I'd recommend checking him out
Can AI companies legally ingest copyrighted materials found on the internet to train their models, and use them to pump out commercial products that they then profit from? Or, as the tech companies claim, does generative AI output constitute fair use?
This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. I'm not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like "using artistic works without permission of the original creators in order to create commercial content that directly competes with and destroys the market for the original work" is extremely not fair use. In fact it's kind of a prototypically unfair use.
Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like "uhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!" as though "fair use" is a magic word you say that makes the thing you're doing suddenly okay. They don't seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than "AI learns like a person!" (false) and "well google books did something that's not really the same at all that one time".
I dunno, I know that legally we don't know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers, but something about the way everyone seems to frame this as "oh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!" really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that there's a notable asymmetry here!
I dunno, I know that legally we don’t know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers
You're not wrong on the AI corps having good lawyers, but I suspect those lawyers don't have much to work with:
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Pretty much every AI corp has been caught stealing from basically everyone (with basically everyone caught scraping without people's knowledge or consent, and OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic all caught scraping against people's explicit wishes)
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Said data was used to create products which, either implicitly or [explicitly]((https://archive.is/jNhpN), produce counterfeits of the stolen artists' work
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Said counterfeits are, in turn, destroying the artists' ability to profit from their original work and discouraging them from sharing it freely
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And to cap things off, there's solid evidence pointing to the defendants being completely unrepentant in their actions, whether that be Microsoft's AI boss treating such theft as entirely acceptable or Mira Murati treating the job losses as an afterthought
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the trial being a bloodbath in the artists' favour, and the resulting legal precedent being one which will likely kill generative AI as we know it.
God, that would be the dream, huh? Absolutely crossing my fingers it all shakes out this way.
Stranger things have happened. But in either case, we should commit to supporting every effort. If one punch doesn't work take another. Death by a million cuts.
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Like, it seems to me that there’s a notable asymmetry here!
I think that's a great framing here.
The link seems b0rked, do you have another one?
Fixed the link - thanks for catching it.