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!

Not even -- it's a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)

Oh my god, I can't stop laughing out loud at "women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks," based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What's his explanation for why men didn't do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much

heck yeah I love ~~Physics Jenny Nicholson~~ Angela Collier

Ah yes, pragmatists, well known for their constantly sunny and optimistic outlook on the future, consequences be damned (?)

No no, it's "order of magnitudes". It's like "surgeons general."

Thank god I can have a button on my mouse to open ChatGPT in Windows. It was so hard to open it with only the button in the taskbar, the start menu entry, the toolbar button in every piece of Microsoft software, the auto-completion in browser text fields, the website, the mobile app, the chatbot in Microsoft's search engine, the chatbot in Microsoft's chat software, and the button on the keyboard.

yeah, I definitely think machine learning has obvious use cases to benefit the common good (youtube auto captions being Actually Pretty Decent Now is one that comes to mind easily) but I'm much less certain about most of the stuff being presently marketed as "AI"

Six fingers on the right hand

I'm just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for... some reason) I'm not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?

Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren't really doing it over "speech taboos", are they...)? Is he asking people "so how do you feel about the word 'n.....'?" Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.

even putting aside philosophy/ethics, have they never heard of common expressions like "too much of a good thing" or "the dose makes the poison"? it's just an extremely, extremely common idea basically everywhere except in the tech industry

It's like pickup artistry on a societal scale.

It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts