>Even if you posted on Twitter or something, nobody is coming after you.
Are you sure about that one? Are you saying if you posted say, a racist cartoon on twitter, and you forge my signature onto the thing, I can't come after you?
I don't know about the US but here in Germany the category for this is personality rights. The entire point of a signature is to establish authenticity, using someone's likeness or identity without consent will get you into deep trouble even without money being exchanged.
Not true in the US. It is true that most plaintiffs prioritize commercial copies, but you can obtain statutory damages even if there are no actual damages from the copying.
Many companies and artists simply allow technically infringing fan art etc. to exist without enforcement.
I remember seeing some documentary about an art forger who donated his works to museums where the authorities were profoundly frustrated that they couldn't do anything precisely because he didn't get any gain.
Edit: the documentary is "Art and Craft" [1] about Mark Landis [2]
> It appears that in donating forgeries to art museums, Landis has not actually broken any laws, even though his activities were clearly deceitful. If he had sold the work to museums or taken a tax deduction on them, he might have fallen under federal art crime statutes. But the fact that he did not gain economically from his actions (apart from a few gifts from curators), and that he addressed his donations to specialists who had the expertise to detect his forgeries but did not, protected him in the eyes of the law. No legal action has been opened against him to date (as of 2014). As one art crimes expert put it: "Basically, you have a guy going around the country on his own nickel giving free stuff to museums."
No one asked, but I'll analyze the differences between these two situations. Landis didn't impersonate any living people. It wasn't done against a backdrop of living people losing their jobs. What he made was still art, in that it was both a display of technical skill and worth discussion. Slop is neither. From now on, his forgeries will be clearly labeled as forgeries any time they're displayed. That's easy to do with a physical painting, but impossible when an image has been shared across platforms.
There's nothing illegal unless someone seriously thinks Obama signed it. The easiest example would be his signature on his wikipedia page. Clearly he didn't sign that page, nor (probably) did he authorize it.
I don't understand your argument. Wikipedia and a satirical cartoon are both things clearly not made by Obama, nobody in their right mind would be "fooled" by the presence of his signature.
These cartoons are intentionally drawn in the style of a cartoonist and feature their signature. The goal is forgery. The whole point of these AI-generated images is to look like the real thing.
>These cartoons are intentionally drawn in the style of a cartoonist and feature their signature. The goal is forgery. The whole point of these AI-generated images is to look like the real thing.
You can't seriously claim that the very person who prompted the AI image generator thinks the image it spit out was created by Brendan Loper?
I see the point (though I'd also say they're arguing it poorly, and that it's a departure from the point in their initial comments; note my comment is also not an endorsement of it). OP said that the LLM vendors should face legal problems for making the image, but the person they supplied it to was not tricked by its fraudulent nature, therefore the LLM vendor did not commit the fraud. Ostensibly, that is the dishonor of the person who prompted the model to create the fraudulent work.
What the LLM vendors are doing seems functionally identical to a paid forger. The forger and the buyer know that it's fake, but anyone else would think it's real.
It reminds me of the an Soviet officer who disobeyed early warning system's alert that US had launched four ICBMs and did not immediately relay the issue up to the chain of command.
Pedantic clarification: The (original German) song itself didn't mention an actor in particular who had released the balloons, just that there were 99 balloons that flew to the horizon and jet fighters being scrambled in response. The epilogue tells of the consequent whole bunch of lasting destruction as the narrator talks about their patrols.
The English translation "99 Red Balloons" is considerably different as far as the details go.
99LB (the German version) has the baloons getting released and the generals deciding to treat it as an opportunity for a show of force blowing them up intentionally.
99RB, on the other hand, has the EWS confusing them with a threat causing the system itself being the source of the attack.
The message between songs is different, the German version is a warning about the wrong people being in charge of the doomsday machine whereas the English version is a condemnation of the doomsday machine itself.
Interestingly the band was not satisfied with the English version, mainly because they wanted to be a pop band and not a protest band and they thought the English version was too "on the nose" in its condemnation of MAD.
Personally I grew up hearing 99LB on the radio but thinking about the lyrics of 99RB since I don't speak German. 99LB was more popular even in the english speaking world because it's better performed but we all saw it as an anti-MAD protest song which 99RB definitely is, but 99LB is not quite.
99RB has some really great lines missing from 99LB:
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
and
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
> generals deciding to treat it as an opportunity for a show of force blowing them up intentionally
Only kinda!
„Hielt man fuer UFOs aus dem All / darum schickte ein General / eine Fliegerstaffel hinterher“ They believed that the balloons were unidentified flying objects from outer space. The general panicked and sent a squadron to investigate.
„Dabei waren dort am Horizont nur 99 Luftballons“ However, what they found were only 99 balloons.
Still, there was a problem: „99 Duesenflieger / jeder war ein grosser Krieger / hielten sich fuer Captain Kirk“ The pilots of those jet fighters thought of themselves as warriors on par with Captain Kirk (which is funny; Starfleet is primarily a scientific organization that only incidentally wields weapons).
The neighboring countries concurred: „Die Nachbarn haben nichts gerafft / und fuelten sich gleich angemacht“ They weren't able to suss out anything about these activities and felt provoked by them.
Here's where the war ministers make a show of force though: „99 Kriegsminister / Streichholz und Benzinkanister / hielten sich fuer schlaue Leute / witterten schon fette Beute / riefen Krieg und wollten Macht“ The war ministers brought a proverbial match and gas can to the whole affair. They thought themselves shrewd and crafty and could smell the scent of prey, so they called for war.
„Mann, wer haette das gedacht / dass es einmal soweit kommt / wegen 99 Luftballons“ Man, who could've thought that it came this far because of 99 balloons?
> 99LB was more popular even in the english speaking world
This song predates me by just a handful of years, so I never caught it during its radio heyday, but I can't verify this assertion from personal experience. Perhaps this is a UK-centric view? I'm unsure that much of this kind of cultural exchange made it to the US.
It reminds me of laughing at the stupid old Europeans starting a war because an Austrian numpty got himself shot in Serbia. Like, we almost sunk a Chinese ship because an AI thought the sour candies they were transporting were nukes is in the same category of shitheadedness. (I'm embellishing–we don't know what was on board.)
The basic problem is that they had built a domesday machine in Europe, which was the mobilization schedule.
After the Franco Prussian war people realized that the next war would involve massive armies full of mobilized (conscripted) men and the country that could mobilize first would win. Countries spend decades planning for this by manufacturing enormous stockpiles of uniforms, giving their entire male population military training, etc.
But the mobilization schedule for even the fastest country was still measured in weeks, but this was a process where days count. Basically once the decision was made to mobilize millions of people across an entire modern society would leap into action transforming itself into a marshal society. Millions of people getting called up, trains full of equipment going everywhere.
Turning off a mobilization that was in progress was fairly difficult to conceive of, so once the decision was made the flywheel would take over, but decision to mobilize had to be made in a pressure cooker environment where hours mattered.
The death of the duke wasn't the "cause" of WWI it was the starting gun for a race where the horses were all waiting impatiently at the starting line.
Not really. It took a full month for the austrian to send Serbia its ultimatum. If the ultimatum was given imediatly after the assassination, both France and Russia would have let Serbia go.
Also, in France Caillaux, one of the most powerful pacifist in the government (he had the economy and was _good_ at it, which is rare enough to be noted), who was anti-war, had to be let go because his wife killed a journalist (not really a journalist, but adjascent enough so that the difference don't matter) around the same time, leaving Jaurès alone to push Viviani to let it go. Plus Viviani was with the Tsar in Russia when the ultimatum was given, which surely did not help _at all_. Especially since Rasputin was out of the capital at the time. Truly an unfortunate timing here.
Plus the death of multiple diplomats involved in the prevention of WW1 at least once in 1911, who all decided to die around the same time (the last two in 1914, Pressensé and obviously Hartwig, whose death was truly, truly unfortunate).
And here i'm only aware of French people who would have prevented the war (beside Hartwig and Rasputin, but everybody know about them), but i'm pretty sure even more people in Germany and in Austria could have done the same.
Using the same logic (important diplomats dead or retired or disgraced) you could say that firing Bismark caused the war.
If the top diplomats had managed to avert the Serbia crisis then the war would have been delayed until the next crisis.
The fundamental problem is Europe had built itself a civilization-strattling war machine with no "abort" button and put the start button on a hair trigger (the interlocking treaty system).
Yes, a common view at the time was that the only de-escalation possible would have been through workers cooperation, which is why so much of the Marxist flank of the SFIO argued in favour of pacifism: to buy time for the workers to unite.
Which probably wouldn't have worked, but maybe it could have been a much, much smaller conflict.
Understanding the lesson of the Guns of August was a big part of the anti-MAD/nuclear disarmament movement during the cold war: if you build a doomsday weapon eventually you will use it. A country does not spend as much effort and money as the European powers spent preparing for war without eventually going to war.
Again, boarding a Chinese vessel similarly wouldn’t “cause” WWIII. But it would be a trigger and for non-pedantic usage of causation, proximate causes are also causes.
WW1 happened due to the crazy web of treaties between nations. It's not unlike nuclear holocaust and MAD doctrine. There could have been other triggers for WW1, but that's not really a guarantee.
That is to say, definitely possible and maybe even likely but not inevitable.
There's an argument to be made that WWI started because Wilhelm II was an incompetent statesman who disassembled his country's relationship with friendly states, and turned them into enemies.
Several leaders were itching for war, to build empires. Emprice building was normal to them as was going to war to achieve it. They opinions we hold today on war (largely from reflecting on the world wars) are not the opinions they had about war.
They gave commands to prepare for war and just needed the excuse to say go. I think the not-war outcome was very unlikely.
Which leaders? I don't believe any of the players thought they would gain empire in Europe. Everyone was trying to be defensive, combined with slow communication and poor politics. Now that historians have access to much of the internal documentation it doesn't seem like an inevitable war. If only the Habsburgs had been more decisive, or Wilhelm more politically astute, instead of making grand gestures then going on a boating holiday with his British naval mates.
It's not that they needed an excuse to say no, it's that they each thought backing down would be worse. And tbh I don't think any the current leaders are better. Nicholas II "I will not become responsible for a monstrous slaughter" vs Putin's war of choice.
He asked for his country to go to war more than two dozen times leading up to the outbreak. Ferdinand was the main opposition to his desires
The first episodes to the YT channel go into many of the details. I really like that group, they make week-by-week war documentaries with many mini-series on special topics. Top notch content and production quality.
Same goes for pre-WWII Germany and the rise of Hitler. He takes the blame but the German electorate was toxic, bloodthirsty and humiliated. They would’ve elevated the next monster in line if Hitler hadn’t been available.
only 31-40% of the german electorate was that. And it was on the decline, which is why Von Papen convinced himself he would be easy to negociate cabinet postition with Hitler.
Not sure what is there to laugh at when millions died in pretty horrible ways including americans, anyway that was classical war mongering where one of the parties got exactly what they wanted (prussians/germans). That they got more than they wanted and how it folded them is part of history.
This case, its bullshit machine bullshitting randomly in between specs of stolen wisdom. Nobody asked for that, nobody is in control. We all humans lose in all cases. Quite different scenarios if you asked me.
Dark/gallows humor is a thing, and also plenty of people use humor as a coping mechanism.
It's fine not to share the same sense of humor, but if you truly lack an understanding of what someone else would find to laugh at that's an easy thing to learn to broaden your understanding of the world.
I agree that it's misleading but harness is now an essential part of LLM's effectiveness. It's safe to assume that LLM-alone-AGI is not coming anytime soon, given most of the frontier LLM vendors are developing their own harness.
Also the training dataset is proprietary and they'll drive the LLM's behavior, so it make sense for the vendors to invest in the harness and bake in prompts that work best with their models.
The concerns are legitimate but the proposals are nothing more than a stopgap solution.
If US wants to maintain engineering superiority, we needs to invest in it -- education, research and infrastructure. Bring in top researchers across the globe and not make it harder.
China is building infrastructure for the future generations and investing in growth sectors while the US is cutting of university grants and spending billions on a war without clear path to resolution.
I don’t disagree but the timeline for Dario’s concerns are quite short. Open weight models could feasibly lead to serious bio safety concerns in the next year or so while the US’ current issues are going to take a long time to work through.
China is also financially repressing their people to build often useless infrastructure projects to be fair they are also not the good guys.
> During the questioning, agents repeatedly asked Tunick to unlock his phone and warned they would seize it if he refused. When he finally provided a passcode, the phone appeared to restart.
I'm confused to understand if Tunick did anything illegal here. If the authorities want the phone, they should have the warrant and seize it without Tunick's permission.
It appears authorities did not have the warrant which give Tunick all the right to do whatever he desires with his property.
Among other things that CBP does not need a warrant to search or seize anything and everything at a border. Everything is subject to search at the border. To make a seizure all that is needed is reasonable cause that customs law/regs were violated. And there are specific federal laws relating to thwarting such seizures.
If you don’t want something searched do not bring it across the US border. There is very clear constitutional and statutory authority for these searches.
CBP doesn't need a warrant to search at the border, including electronic devices.
However, if Tunick was smart he would have refused to provide the PIN, and let them seize it. He'll get it back eventually, but it was in his right to refuse.
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