Copyright originally maxed out at 28 years. Corporations rewrote the laws over and over, so that now copyright can last over 100 years, turning intellectual property into yet another rent extraction scheme.
Now, in this case, OpenAI argues that “fair use” is for the good of all. OpenAI doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for all. They want the ability to define intellectual property rules so that they can extract rent from someone else’s property.
If they want to benefit everyone, why aren’t their models open? For that matter, why is their name OpenAI, when they are not open? They’re publishing tons of work in mathematics, supposedly to benefit everyone. Instead, why don’t they forgo all research themselves and dedicate their work to supporting existing mathematicians in using AI effectively, so that the people that built the base of knowledge get credit for the new work?
Because OpenAI wants to extract the maximum shareholder value out of other people’s work.
Does anyone actually believe PR like this anymore?
Usually when you look deeper at failures like this, it’s because there’s a morass of bad incentives from the surrounding human system that enforces this kind of behavior.
Here is a plausible alternative explanation:
They’ve probably seen false warnings over and over and overridden them enough times that they lost sense of the risk. They need to keep trains on schedule, using a buggy system, with a manager looking over their shoulder. They override the warnings over and over, nothing goes wrong, and they forget that it may actually be right. Look at the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, or any other failure like this, and there’s usually a bureaucratic process that has run amok, and the individual is just following perverse incentives that have been socially normalized over time.
So I’ll wait until I have more information before I proclaim this as human negligence and the system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. We don’t know how often it was doing the wrong thing and confusing the fuck out of the human.
Normalization of deviance [0], wherein a clearly unsafe practice becomes considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe: "a long incubation period [before a final disaster] with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely
I recently saw a doc on the 2013 Spanish crash and it was full of absurd system problems. The govt pinned it on the driver as best they could but it's clear that it was entirely preventable.
"They need to keep trains on schedule, using a buggy system, with a manager looking over their shoulder."
Also lots of potentially angry passengers who want to get to their destination in time.
Will miss important appointments, or even the last train connection for the day and be stranded if the train drivers decide to wait a little bit longer to be on the save side.
Yes indeed. But stressed passengers tend to not think about that, so the pressure they put on the traindriver is real.
(have you ever been in a train on hold, unclear information about delay and seen the looks and talks of passengers towards the train driver walking outside who announced before he also does not know when the ride can go on? Like he is personally responsible for the delay and incompetent or straight evil)
Like, frankly, any passengers that are aggressive towards the train crew might as well be told to walk back to the nearest bus stop. Like seriously, in this case especially (a high speed train) the utmost focus should be given to safety, so anyone going against that (like putting pressure on the train crew) should be ignored if not fined/booted of the train.
Also in this case - why the hell they just did not wait for the primary safety system to go back online before doing anything ? Is it so faulty that they get used to it being broken or what ?
And baring that, how is the train even able to go full speed without the primary safety system being operational ? It really should be hardwired to cap the speed at 40 km/h or even less (including zero) unless the safety system is confirmed online and operational.
IIRC the japanese Shinkansen trains use a system called ATC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_control#Japan) since 1964 (!) which automatically starts breaking if a train goes faster than the maximum allowed speed in a track circuit. So presumably if connecting with the track circuit is lost the maximum speed defaults to 0 & all trains stop until proper protection is restored.
> human negligence and the system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do
Negligence is not limited to the single human who issued the order. it's pretty unlikely that their order could have caused this without a significant amount of other negligence that eroded the safeguards. Nevertheless, the negligence is human, not machine in nature.
Trains in spain have been running at reduced speed, delayed or even cancelled for a while due to aging infrastructure, which might've actually caused another deadly accident back in winter, so this behavior does not surprise me.
That sounds like a reasonable statement, but actually you do need to place punctuality or costs over safety at some point. If you want to chase absolute safety, you can dump infinite money in it or just not operate a train network. There must be such a thing as a socially accepted safety level, otherwise you simply don't do that thing. That's not limited to railways, but to everything you do. In the end humans are still mortal fallible beings.
I don't mean to absolve people for negligence, but when margins are very small and paychecks may have become a necessity to survive on this planet, sometimes within the complex process the collective behaviour gets pretty weird.
There are not that many people who (care to) see the big picture(s) and the consequences their semi-small actions may have in the long run.
(Un)Fortunately, finding someone who is "at fault" generally helps neither in investigating root causes nor in preventing similar problems in the future.
Usually it's detrimental, hence (criminal) investigations of personal liability in such cases are often only allowed after systemic investigation has concluded.
In court, you are allowed to withhold information that makes you look bad, which is simply lethally unhelpful when we want safer trains.
People need to assume that ALL information on social media is lies, misinformation and PR, unless it’s coming from someone personally vetted to be a non-bullshit-oriented honest human.
It’s crazy that people still scroll on X/BlueSky/whatever and mindlessly consume whatever BS is shoveled into their brain. We know that it’s a cesspool of bullshit and yet half the population still wades into it every day.
I usually get very angry at the excessive use of animations everywhere, so I expected that this would give me a nice hit of righteous indignation to top off my afternoon. But this is a fantastic use of animation. In a UI like this, animation is great to helpfully draw your attention to where it’s needed and give you some indication of why you should look there. Very nicely done!
What if a company had human developers doing these same things? What would happen to those developers, those companies? Would anyone be so blasé? Just because it’s AI, it should be forgiven? How is that just?
And don’t forget, OpenAI is supposed to be a non-profit / public benefit corporation creating AI for the good of humanity. These incidents are clear evidence that they are being extremely reckless and are not living up to their supposed standards. What does it matter if they “mean no malice”? They are in a blind rush for profits and that has made them reckless and dangerous. They cannot be trusted.
The company should be shut down or fined into oblivion, as a warning to other companies to not pursue the same reckless path. If they get away with this, then that risks normalizing this behavior.
Copyright originally maxed out at 28 years. Corporations rewrote the laws over and over, so that now copyright can last over 100 years, turning intellectual property into yet another rent extraction scheme.
Now, in this case, OpenAI argues that “fair use” is for the good of all. OpenAI doesn’t give a shit about what’s good for all. They want the ability to define intellectual property rules so that they can extract rent from someone else’s property.
If they want to benefit everyone, why aren’t their models open? For that matter, why is their name OpenAI, when they are not open? They’re publishing tons of work in mathematics, supposedly to benefit everyone. Instead, why don’t they forgo all research themselves and dedicate their work to supporting existing mathematicians in using AI effectively, so that the people that built the base of knowledge get credit for the new work?
Because OpenAI wants to extract the maximum shareholder value out of other people’s work.
Does anyone actually believe PR like this anymore?