He didn't say it's illegal (even if it's debatable and kinda loophole-ish, but lets pretend for now that society has fully embraced a world-encompassing copyright exception if you're named Altman or Amodei).
He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
If you consider it incredibly sad and depressing for the majority of people to have cheap access to things that would have cost a small fortune due to being inevitably hand-crafted only a few years ago, I hope you're renouncing clothing manufactured using automated looms, printed books etc. as well?
Absolutely, I think fast fashion brands like Shein and TEMU-style shops are incredibly sad, toxic for the economy and the environment, and I've never bought anything from them.
Are you arguing that the only type of clothing an automated loom can help produce is fast fashion? Is every piece of clothing you own hand-woven, crocheted etc.?
Man I hate this argument. You're comparing cognition to reproduction. You're giving examples of duplication but comparing them to unique artifacts. It's not the same and you must understand this.
On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.
We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.
I don't think the closest T-Shirt comparison is quite exactly either of those. E.g. you can get any image you like printed on a T-Shirt without hiring someone might be closer, though still not really the same. Thinking about that a bit more, everything seems like unique cognition until the technology to treat it as simple duplication exists. "Duplicate this project with this layout and style" has crossed that line now, just as taking a photo with a filter did long ago which itself long ago replaced a painter and so on. They technologies often produce something of lower quality than what the people they replaced would, few would say a photo filter is as good as a custom painting, but they tend to do the job well enough it replaces most of those kinds of workers.
I think the concern should be more on "you can't just extrapolate the same process forever and expect the same kind of outcome". Just because it was good in small amounts before doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently good to have an infinite capability to do that.
Regardless of all of that, I think it's important if we do have the AIs we're making we treat it as a common good in terms of wealth (regardless if people were paid) rather than a way to funnel a small amount of money to the companies who initially drive it as we are now. I.e. don't even mind if we "steal" (copy) everyone's available outputs as long as we all decide it should really benefit everyone rather than a handful.
> He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
We've been talking about being sad about a lot of different things in this thread.
But here's another thing to be sad about (somewhat related to what I was originally sad about): building "semantic photocopier" is probably quite an intellectual achievement, but so was the atom bomb. intellectual achievements, even impressive ones, can't be assumed to be good.
To hail a "semantic photocopier" requires a pretty myopic and parochial view. Looked at holistically, this stuff amounts to a project to rub out the human and replace it with cheap, inhuman slop. One aspect if that is when I see a picture like this, it's ruined because when I look at it I'm unsure if I'm communing with a human or getting fooled by a simulacrum. Another aspect is how the slop undermines the viability of creative and intellectually engaging professions.
We really ought to look at the kind of world we want to live in (which would probably have maximum satisfying creative work, and a minimum of drudgery), preserve the good parts of what we have, and focus on intellectual achievements to subtract the bad parts. But instead we're just mindlessly building whatever we can manage, damn the consequences or end result (which seems to be: more drudgery, less creative expression).
A Tailscale exit router with a small SFTP folder, and Seafile for public file access. Basically my own DIY file sharing for clients to avoid putting private stuff on WeTransfer.
Joking aside, a few early commercial Linux distro (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SuSe, Corel Linux) had really nice packaging and media artworks. I'd love to collect them.
This is an issue that is truly bothering me lately, given the alt-rightish slippery-slope that we're experiencing here in EU.
If I am getting arrested for taking part to an anti-genocide manifestation or anything related to climate change, I don't expect authorities to play by the book regarding my rights (Not taking a moral judgement here - they're taking care of their interests, i'm taking care of mine, I'm rather cynical about the whole endeavor) and let me easily get in touch with family or support groups.
My list would also include:
- Lawyer;
- Any relative, friend or acquaintance in a position of authority who I can trust;
- Any journalist friend I can quickly get in touch.
The question then quickly becomes: What information to relay? And how? Also, how to conceal that to whoever is waking you up at 1:00am to bring you in your pajamas to a police station to be questioned at 3:00pm of the following day?
> An iPad could give a similar experience with local compute if only Apple would let it.
It does, it's called the MacBook Neo.
iPad sales have been rather stagnant in the last few years, while they made bank with their low-cost laptop. On a purely conceptual level I don't think they're gonna merge the two anytime soon, even if they will probably start sharing the very same logic board from their next revision.
Stagnant because (1) they don’t want to cannibalize iPhone and Mac and (2) competitors have failed to do make tablets that do a lot more than become e-waste. Microsoft had a reason to make the transition as carriers didn’t allow them to make a phone platform but their other enemies like Dell, HP and Lenovo had neither the motivation nor engineering skills to come along.
Are the people who made the promise even still at Google?
It reminds me of those sketchy companies on Amazon promising "lifetime guarantee" on their products when they know already they're gonna close shop and reopen on a completely different brand the very next year.
The whole point of corporations is that the assets (and liabilities) created by the people working on behalf of the corporation outlive the term of their employment.
They don't (or at least shouldn't) get to keep the assets without also honouring the liabilities.
They are not - at least not in the way we commonly think; they simply have other priorities. They simply couldn't care less anymore about telling better lies than their predecessors.
> They simply couldn't care less anymore about telling better lies than their predecessors.
4 years ago, people didn't fill their pockets on the current scale, and they also didn't pitch their own businesses under the cover of national interests.
> The reason Wine/DXVK/Proton works so well is because it didn't fracture itself into a thousand downstream forks to fix one specific game.
Well... it sorta did, on the other hand the scope of the project is just too big for any of those forks to survive more than a few releases. There's a multitude of various Proton releases with a single-game support. The android-oriented builds are even a bigger of a mess.
> AI allows players to have decompiled and in turn ports of games to new platforms, enhanced versions of the game, etc.
We're ten years too early to do what you're suggesting. You need a really, really good understanding of the decompiled codebase and the original game and platform to port or implement new features.
You can't really ask "Claude, make Ocarina Of Time Widescreen" and expect it to work.
We're not ten years early. If you can afford the tokens, and can course-correct the agent when it gets off in the weeds, AI can do 95% of the grunt work of a decomp now.
Also, "widescreen OOT" is probably tweaking a pair of projection matrix floats in the binary so that might not be a great example :)
You could absolutely do that, because it's a narrow, targeted change. I give it 10% odds Claude could make that change to a binary ROM and 70% to a decomp.
It's sad that the community isn't exactly doing their best to separate developers using AI to debug poorly understood quirks and bugs of their emulation projects from those screaming "computah! Decompile me a Super Smash Bros".
MAME is doing some amazing reverse engineering work on some more recent arcade boards by using AI[1] that would've taken decades to do so by hand, and it's being conflated with some rando committing to github the result of 5 hours of Claude stirring over the Golden Eye N64 rom and then publishing on twitter "Done, here's my Patreon link, please and thank you".
He said it's sad, and no matter how you want to spin it, it still is incredibly sad and depressing that we're hailing the age of "semantic photocopiers" as some sort of intellectual achievement.
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