the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.

Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I'm not shocked.

(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)

I expect they think they can get a precedent here.

That's true - the case is pretty clear-cut thanks to how much damning evidence they've managed to pull out. The old trend of using AI to make offensive shit in the Pixar style likely helped as well, but that's speculation on my end.

Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions. This is an AI company that is not a venture capital money bonfire, it’s an actual business.

I suspect Disney isn’t out to just shut Midjourney down. Disney’s goal is to gouge Midjourney for a settlement and a license.

In practice, I doubt Disney's gonna get to shake much out of Midjourney before they end up going under - given that gen-AI is built to facilitate plagiarism and copyright infringement, a win for Disney here would lead to a de facto ban on generative AI.

Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
• AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search

🎶 Guess who's back, back again

🎶 Holmes is back, tell a friend

Ran across an animation mocking AI art on Newgrounds recently - found it a pretty good watch.

Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm^: he's still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:

Now, some of you may be wondering "Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!" Well, as it turns out, it wasn't AI - Shad quite literally stole someone's artwork and passed it off as AI.

TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI "story generator". Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it "if we see that users don't find the story generator helpful".

“Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.

Their name is Legion, for there are too fucking many.

Update: As a matter of fact, I did. Here's some Python code to prove it:

# Counts how many times a particular letter appears in a string.
# Very basic code, made it just to clown on the AI bubble.

appearances = int(0) # Counts how many times the selected char appears.
sentence = input("Write some shit: ")
sentence_length = len(sentence) # We need to know how long the sentence is for later
character_select = input("Select a character: ") # Your input can be as long as you wish, but only the first char will be taken

chosen_char = chr(ord(character_select[0]))

# Three-line version
for i in range (0, sentence_length):
    if chosen_char in sentence[i]:
        appearances = appearances + 1

# Two-line version (doesn't work - not sure why)
# for chosen_char in sentence:
#     appearances = appearances + 1
# (Tested using "strawberry" as sentence and "r" as character_select. Ended up getting a result of 10 ("strawberry" is 10 chars long BTW))
    
# Finally, print the fucking result
print("Your input contains "+str(appearances)+" appearances of the character ("+character_select+").")

There's probably a bug or two in this I missed, but hey, it still proves I'm more of a programmer than Sam Altman ever will be.

Continuing a line of thought I had previously, part of me suspects that SB 1047's existence is a consequence of the "AI safety" criti-hype turning out to be a double-edged sword.

The industry's sold these things as potentially capable of unleashing Terminator-style doomsday scenarios orders of magnitude worse than the various ways they're already hurting everyone, its no shock that it might spur some regulation to try and keep it in check.

Opposing the bill also does a good job of making e/acc bros look bad to everyone around them, since it paints them as actively opposing attempts to prevent a potential AI apocalypse - an apocalypse that, by their own myths, they will be complicit in causing.

Not a sneer, but an interesting article from WaPo (archive link) about the rise/return of "dumb tech", and its link to the backlash against smart tech

Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:

The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts

(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)

(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)