His beliefs are not currently protected. He filed a Title VII request, which was ultimately granted by his employer voluntarily. Because no court ruled that the employer had to grant the request, it is an open question whether Title VII protects them.
I would be shocked if, had the university declined, the courts ultimately ruled that it was protected. Congress is free to write laws protecting people against discrimination for various beliefs. But they law they have on the books now shouldn't be stretched to cover this.
It's worth understanding why sincerely held religious beliefs are such a big deal and in a different league from "strong personal convictions". It's because people who hold them generally are under and bound by two authorities: their state law and their church law (which might take many forms). If a person is in a position where they simply cannot abide both laws simultaneously, the state must yield. Otherwise the state is no protector of freedom.
A humanist may have strong, sincerely held beliefs, but he is not under any authority that compels those beliefs, so they aren't "religious". He is permitted by all his authorities to use AI. He just doesn't want to out of a private belief that it is somehow "wrong".
If your employer orders you to do something you believe is wrong, but you are not required to believe it is wrong by a higher authority, then your employment should terminate. Same as if you just didn't want to do your job, your employment would terminate. Title VII just isn't about that stuff.
This whole argument rubs me the wrong way. It requires the state to determine what a real religion is and isn't. And it removes equal protection, different people have the law applied to them in different ways depending on their religion.
Both of these seen to go against the first amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
It's an interesting bind, not at all unlike how some efforts to address racial discrimination end up being themselves racially discriminatory. So it's like, ok, is it ok sometimes or never?
I'd be fine if you argued that Title VII is unconstitutional for this reason. I like Title VII, but I see why it might be argued against on these grounds.
I get that "no religion" is a "religion" for the purposes of not discriminating based on which religion someone is. And if you want to distinguish humanism from "no religion", that's fine. But humanism doesn't bind anybody to believe anything. It's merely a descriptor of a set of beliefs. That's wholly unlike the major and minor religions of the world. If you're a humanist but are ok with AI, nobody and no thing has the authority to tell you you are wrong. Some people may have opinions to share to persuade you, but there is no authoritative answer from a person, text, tradition, or deity. That's the difference.
Courts don't like to wade into religious matters, precisely because of their deference to religious authorities, owing to the 1A. If your church declares you a "minister" be because you help lead kids' Sunday school lessons, SCOTUS is not going to debate that; they just take it as given.
But if you go to court and say, "well I'm a minister in my religion because I said so," that's not going to fly. You're free to exercise religion, not make things up and pretend like your private opinions are religiously imposed on you.
For exactly this reason, there are plenty of people from traditional religions who claim exemptions to things that I think are bad faith uses of Title VII.
It's very grey. Especially when it comes to newer religions. The LDS Church, for instance, was forced to give up polygamy before Utah could enter the union. The Scientologists have been very forceful at defending their faith. The Satanic Temple have done a good job of pushing back against localities which have tried to privilege the Abrahamic religions.
On the other hand, you have cases like the Native American Church which are allowed to use peyote as a sacrament, whereas other religions are not.
> You're free to exercise religion, not make things up and pretend like your private opinions are religiously imposed on you.
Isn't that how all religions start though? Someone claims to have received a message from the gods, and then converts others.
Employee: I need an accommodation. AI goes against my religious beliefs.
HR director, to employee's director: Does this guy use AI for anything currently? Do you need him to? If we grant this request, will it affect us negatively?
Employee's director: A couple people use AI. It's not required at all. Honestly, people don't know how to use it a lot of the time. Granting it would not change anything.
HR director, to employee's director: Okay, great. We've got 3 pending lawsuits right now and I don't think this guy would have a case anyway, but our legal bills are higher than we budgeted for. We have more important things to worry about.
HR director, to employee: Your accommodation request is granted.
Humanist organization press release: This is a landmark human rights case in American history.
Seems the religious people have a strong, sincerely held belief that they should follow a particular religious authority, and that seems to come outside of the religious authority itself. I guess I don't really buy this line of justification any more than just saying "because religion".
I would bet no. Because the original proof is so distributed, with parts of it being very old, and with parts of it being, as a first attempt, not the most concise or lucid route to the result, we were rapidly approaching a world where the empirical knowledge of how/why the result holds was literally dying.
The article refers to its use of the "first-generation proof". It would seem this proof is too large to be truly known by one person, and the group of people who "collectively knew" it grew old and started to die. Since its original formulation, mathematicians began to compile, consolidate, and revise the proof into a 2nd generation digested form (estimated to be 5000 pages instead of tens of thousands). But that effort was still so monumental in its own right that a 3rd gen proof project began to digest the 2nd gen proof before the 2nd gen proof was even finished. I believe both the 2nd and 3rd gen projects are still ongoing.
It will be interesting to see how small the proof gets once we finish learning how to obtain these results "efficiently" with the benefit of hindsight.
It's like its simulation model is confined to the renderable area. At the cost of increased computation, it would not be hard to generalize the technique to rendering a sphere centered around the POV to keep some of those artifacts at bay; however, the fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object. For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
> While it can maintain coherent environments over short sessions, visual details and object permanence can still shift or drift over time—especially as a simulation runs longer, after multiple complex prompt edits, or when navigating throughout the scene. Complex physical interactions, real-time audio accuracy, rendering legible text, spatial accuracy, and long-term consistency are active areas of ongoing research.
If it was actually not hard, they would have made their demo with it. I don't know the technical details, but I expect a product reveal like this to show the thing at its absolute best.
People seem to be leaping to the conclusion that this is "product" as opposed to, fundamentally, research work, posted on a lab blog post, showing off a capability they expect to be increasing interesting over time.
Just because they happen to be throwing in the option to sign up to to play with the Genie 4 into an Ultra plan, doesn't mean that this is a material part of the value prop for Gemini.
Presumably, they can learn something from how niche Ultra users interested in tech demos engage with it. If that's an upside, it's really unclear it why it would make sense for "a reveal" to promise something too expensive to deliver to such Ultra users. (None of which means that the suggestion that you are responding to is technically reasonable or possible--just that it is unclear that one should dismiss the idea because one views this through the lens of a consumer "product reveal"
Just because OpenAI had to crawl back from Sora to focus resources, and Anthropic proudly proclaims in their filing that they have been avoiding promising creative opportunities for the same reason, doesn't mean that Google can't continue to do lab/research stuff.
didn't they show off an interactive demo with genie3 where you could paint on a blackboard and go out through the window and come back and the same was still written on the blackboard?
I am not sure you need something so complex. If objects on scene could be tagged with their location, and the camera movement tracked to identify when it brings the same objects back into scene, then the model can use its positional information to validate if the next rendered scene contains all the objects that should be expected.
Though, I am not sure well this retains temporal stability. I am just thinking about how in 3D rendering, objects are tracked as individual things and only culled, but all the data about them still exists.
Maybe the models need to reason as a 3D space first, then turn chosen objects into renderings?
> For that to be made stable, you really need a whole 3D model of the scene, and the cost increase there might be huge.
I suspect it is, because the 2D -> 3D models I've seen are terrible, but more importantly the 2D -> 3d models are terrible. Noteworthy because I suspect the number of people who have 3D scans laying around is tiny.
What you're describing is vaguely how video games work, to my understanding. There may be interesting parallels if that becomes a technique (like how distant objects are sometimes still rendered, but at a lower resolution/polygon count).
> What you're describing is vaguely how video games work, to my understanding.
Your understanding is broadly correct. There is a 3D world, and the GPU computes how it looks like from a particular viewpoint.
In essence, objects are painted back to front, so that in the final image every pixel shows the nearest visible object. The details get complicated, but the idea is simple.
> fundamental limitation of "object permanence" remains if objects can evolve chaotically as soon as they are blocked from view by another object.
they got this working decently well for video over a year ago, maybe closer to two years ago at this point, time goes fast. so i assume it'll translate to progress in Genie too
I think it's exactly this. The rendering capabilities in a true world model would include the entire domain it exists in. This takes a ton of processing power.
Open weights ensures one company (or country) can't decide which actors are allowed to and not allowed to engage in this behavior.
Propaganda has always been there. The dynamics that allowed for all the fake news articles in 2016 to impact the elections are the same dynamics that allowed the articles in this case (shoddy news editors who aren't even verifying the identity of the authors). We didn't solve the original problem in the decade since - it's not going to be solved and is here to stay. The issue has shifted to who has access to this power.
Some random perspective: For years, I lived in an autocratic country where there was no freedom of speech and the government closely monitored all news agencies/publications in the country (before most people had Internet access). The dialog/debate was the same: "If we give freedom of expression, how will we address all the false propaganda coming in?"
Of course, times changed. They couldn't block the whole Internet, and false propaganda came in. Which version would you prefer - the one where they blocked it (but ran their own propaganda), or the one where they couldn't block it?
A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.
Decades ago I was at a party where some people were gathered around a rather nice table, and someone said "This is a lovely table". A french person said (in English) "Yes, she is, isn't she".
It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.
GP does not have it all wrong. A company desiring you to prove your identity often asks for a photograph of your government ID. Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
That the Apple Reference Image itself is not traceable to the device/user is beside the point in this use case.
> Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
The image will be authentic, but an authentic image of a fake id isn't useful to them.
Also--only two iPhone models support this technology. It'll be years before the DMV or whoever could count on enough adoption before they could support it.
I agree, but for this to matter, a critical amount of fraud should be based on people uploading modified photos of ID's.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
I think this is a good thing. Proof that an image is actually real is a valuable underpinning of society and being able to provide that is incredibly important.
Why would anyone be using images of government IDs when modern documents have NFC chips with the data, signed and with anti-cloning mechanisms on them? If they can verify an Apple Reference Image they can verify an NFC document.
> If they can verify an Apple Reference Image they can verify an NFC document
Interfacing with images is easy. Interfacing with NFC takes work. I have experienced precisely zero identity-verification workflows which NFC'd anything, and that includes my banks, which could easily ask for my debit card's NFC but don't.
Counterpoint: all of the identity-verification flows I have experienced in the last few years used NFC to read the chip in my identity documents - from car rental apps to my bank doing KYC.
If anything, verifying NFC is easier than images. Asking the chip in my identity card to provide a cryptographically-signed "This document belongs to Jane Doe" request is a handful of lines of code. Doing the same with images? Good luck coming up with an approach which isn't fooled by a photocopy!
ICAO doc 9303 validation is about 10 lines in Python (on top of importing the right packages) last time I did it around 2012. I doubt it has become harder since then.
Revocation checking seems like a big gap, yeah. I’m not aware of any public revocation lists (but I’m also not super familiar with the industry), so I can only assume (hope?) that there are some shadowy but highly accurate databases that KYC providers are tapping into.
The CA public key I just got off my country’s website, they were kind enough to just publish it :)
My credit card company’s app (in Europe) reads my ID through NFC when logging in for the first time (besides requiring ID photos).
Our national app for logging into government sites and confirming things also requires a step where the ID’s NFC is read to reach the highest trust level.
So it’s definitely becoming more and more common here.
They just have you tap your identity document against your phone. Works pretty well in my experience.
The phone is just a relay to a remote server here, as newer ICAO machine readable travel documents intentionally don't support signatures/non-repudiation anymore, so you have to run the entire exchange against a component you trust (i.e. your server, not so much your app on a rooted/manipulated phone).
The article abridged the history too much.
It was first imported as an exhibition of plants from Japan in 1876. It's usefulness as a ground cover in the US was understood later, and in the 1930s (Dust Bowl times) the USDA advocated farmers intentionally plant it as a way to hold down the soil. After that, you might say, it far exceeded its usefulness as a ground cover.
This can be very interesting- take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum for example. A nice tall beautifuly flowering plant suitable for the hard environment of the Caucasus, for hundreds of years a rarity grown in a few aristocratic gardens in Europe.
Then times changed, many of those gardens were no longer maintained, regular people found those nice plans & started passing seeds and planting them to their own gardens.
Turns out the nice plan comes right out of hell, prospers in European climate, if you cut it the sap is extremely caustic & will give you painful blisters from a single drop. If you survive cutting it down (in some places it creates impenetrable grooves) it just regrow ls from the root, multiple times.
So yeah, nice new plans showing up can cause a lot of fun. Well, at least as long as they don't walk its fine...
Common sense cannot be trusted on matters like these. Common sense is calibrated for reasoning over matters encountered in daily life. The further away we get from that, into more and more exotic phenomena, the less common sense can apply. Black holes are very far from the domain of common sense.
I always suggest looking at the quantum eraser experiment to see how bad common sense works with quantum mechanics. It's fairly simple but intuition fails most people when it comes to explaining how it works.
No need for funky stuff, just do the classic (lol) Young's slits experiment which should be more than enough oddness for anyone.
I was shown it at school, using microscope glass slides that we waved over a Bunsen burner running cold, to coat with soot. We then carefully etched parallel lines with a compass by hand. Our (~17 y/o) efforts were a bit random but we did get some smudgy banding results on the screen.
It was the '80s so safety razor blades were available but in a posh public school (UK version) aged ~17, compasses were everywhere and large old style razor blades were not - the modern style razor with one or two thin blades was a thing. We could have probably got some needles from matron for a finer point, than a compass.
It's one thing to argue, even vehemently, that this should not be a felony (either as a matter of fact in this case, or as a matter of just law). But granting that it is or is liable to be prosecuted as such, I strongly recommend against giving advice on how to commit a felony and get away with it.
I would be shocked if, had the university declined, the courts ultimately ruled that it was protected. Congress is free to write laws protecting people against discrimination for various beliefs. But they law they have on the books now shouldn't be stretched to cover this.
It's worth understanding why sincerely held religious beliefs are such a big deal and in a different league from "strong personal convictions". It's because people who hold them generally are under and bound by two authorities: their state law and their church law (which might take many forms). If a person is in a position where they simply cannot abide both laws simultaneously, the state must yield. Otherwise the state is no protector of freedom.
A humanist may have strong, sincerely held beliefs, but he is not under any authority that compels those beliefs, so they aren't "religious". He is permitted by all his authorities to use AI. He just doesn't want to out of a private belief that it is somehow "wrong".
If your employer orders you to do something you believe is wrong, but you are not required to believe it is wrong by a higher authority, then your employment should terminate. Same as if you just didn't want to do your job, your employment would terminate. Title VII just isn't about that stuff.
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