• 1 Post
  • 210 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle




  • I see, so your argument is that because the training data is not stored in the model in its original form, it doesn’t count as a copy, and therefore it doesn’t constitute intellectual property theft. I had never really understood what the justification for this point of view was, so thanks for that, it’s a bit clearer now. It’s still wrong, but at least it makes some kind of sense.

    If the model “has no memory of training data images”, then what effect is it that the images have on the model? Why is the training data necessary, what is its function?


  • the presentation and materials viewed by 404 Media include leadership saying AI Hub can be used for “clinical or clinical adjacent” tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients’ personally identifying and protected health information. The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included “detect pancreas cancer,” and “parse HL7,” a health data standard used to share electronic health records.

    Because as everyone knows, LLMs do a great job of getting specific details correct and always produce factually accurate output. I’m sure this will have no long term consequences and benefit all the patients greatly.


  • We’re not talking about a “style”, we’re talking about producing finished work. The image generation models aren’t style guides, they output final images which are produced from the ingestion of other images as training data. The source material might be actual art (or not) but it is generally the product of a real person (because ML ingesting its own products is very much a garbage-in garbage-out system) who is typically not compensated for their work. So again, these generative ML models are ripoff systems, and nothing more. And no, typing in a prompt doesn’t count as innovation or creativity.



  • Oh this is just nonsense. This isn’t “gatekeeping being an artist”. You want to be an artist? Great! learn some skills and make some art (you know, your own art, which you make yourself). And yes I know “all art is derivative”. That is entirely beside the point.

    Machine learning is a vacuum connected to a blender. It ingests information which it combines with statistical analyses and then predicts an output based on an algorithm generated from the statistical model. There is nothing “avant-garde” here because all it can do is regurgitate existing material which it has ingested. There’s no inspiration, it can’t make anything new, and it can only make any product by ripping off someone else’s work.



  • Ah, hah, I’m glad you asked, I have thoughts on that too.

    Auditing. The government (every government) should employ a team of auditors. In a case like this, the auditors will be attached to the offending company for the purpose of reviewing their operational and financial records. The auditors will be part of (inside of) the company operations for as long as it takes to untangle the details and assess the total sum of revenue gained from the illegal activity, and if that interferes with running the business well that’s too effing bad.

    While the auditing is ongoing, the company will be responsible for paying the auditors’ salaries and expenses, and providing office space and whatever other resources they need. There will also be a representative of the auditors assigned to the executive board, present at all board meetings, with voting and veto privileges. Effectively, the company is on probation and under observation until their debt is paid. Any other violations discovered during the audit will result in additional prosecutions.

    If the company finds this too burdensome, or if they have tried to obfuscate their records, then they can simply forfeit the revenue of the entire department/operational area in order to expedite the audit.


  • however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero […] I dont understand nothing

    This is going to be a problem, unfortunately. You’ll need to define your use case first:

    • How much music do you want to have access to? Hundreds, thousands, millions of files? How large is your collection?
    • Do you have downloaded copies of all the music you want to listen to? Are they all in one place, well organized and tagged? If you just have downloads in the Spotify app, you won’t be able to use those files, you don’t actually own that music. You’ll need DRM-free audio files.
    • Where and how do you want to be able to access them? Just from one device like your phone? Many devices? Is having access at home good enough, or do you want to be able to access your collection while you’re away from home?
    • Will you be the only user?
    • What kind of budget do you have to work with?

    An old PC might be enough to act as a server, but there’s more involved and the answer to what you need depends on what exactly you want to do. You will not be able to build a personal version of Spotify with just an old PC, for instance.


  • This is really it. Businesses are about making money. If you want to change the way businesses behave, you have to change the financial incentives. You can condemn the capitalist greed motivation if you want, but that really only amounts to moralistic posturing, it doesn’t accomplish anything practical. It’s more useful to understand how businesses make decisions, and then adjust rules to incentivize the behavior you want and disincentivize the behavior you don’t want.

    An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.


  • Why would they care about the consequences of fines, when they themselves don’t have to pay it, they can just cash out and not lose a cent, its the company that gets fined.

    Because if you lose a company a substantial amount of money without generating profit for the shareholders then you won’t get an executive position at any other companies.

    In 5 - 10 years, we’ll live in the era of mass surveillance

    It definitely feels like that. In a lot of ways we’re already there. Stingrays have been around for more than a decade - but of course they’re technically legal.

    Technology will always move faster than government, and unfortunately that means technology companies will always find ways to gather data on people with things that we don’t have laws for. The only way I can think to slow that down would be to kill the demand for tracking data, but it seems like every government and major business is into collecting, buying and selling data on human behavior right now so I don’t even have a theory as to how to actually reduce the demand for it. It’s way out of hand.

    The best option for individuals right now is to live in a place that has some decent legal restrictions, like the EU or California, and of course vote for politicians who favor privacy regulations.


  • Well… look, I’m all for punishing white collar crime, we should do more of that, but I’d much rather incentivize preventing this kind of thing in the first place than punishing people after the fact.

    Taking away the revenue (remember revenue means all the income, not just the profit) from criminal behavior does that, because it means the business risks financial collapse.

    For instance, in this case if LinkedIn’s EU ad sales department violated EU law, then all revenue from the EU ad sales department should be forfeit, for the entire time period during which the violation occurred.

    This would be a lot more effective than threatening rich people with jail time, because rich people can always make a deal to serve their time in a nice facility or house arrest or something. Instead, we threaten to wipe out the business financially.





  • I always feel like the solution is to make this sort of thing unprofitable. Rather than just having a cost-of-doing-business fine, the company should have to forfeit all revenue generated by the illegal activity. The fine should then be assessed in addition to the revenue forfeiture, making it a real penalty rather than a wrist-slap.

    Businesses operate on cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments. If violating the privacy regulation risks the loss of all revenue for the ad business, they won’t do it.


  • Firefox is the spiritual successor of Netscape Navigator, as the Mozilla community was created by Netscape in 1998, before its acquisition by AOL. Firefox was created in 2002 under the codename “Phoenix” by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.

    The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. The nascent browser was originally named Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rose triumphantly from the ashes of its dead predecessor (in this case, from the “ashes” of Netscape Navigator, after it was sidelined by Microsoft Internet Explorer in the “First Browser War”).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

    On January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that its Netscape Communicator browser software would be free, and that its source code would also be free. One day later, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape registered mozilla.org. The project took its name, “Mozilla”, from the original code name of the Netscape Navigator browser—a portmanteau of “Mosaic and Godzilla”, and used to coordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite, the free software version of Netscape’s internet software, Netscape Communicator. Zawinski said he arrived at the name “Mozilla” at a Netscape staff meeting. A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with coordinating the new community.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla

    Everything that was useful in Netscape became the basis for Firefox.

    See also the documentary.