I am not willing to change my mind based on the case you have presented.
I have engaged. I am not persuaded.
786 karma · joined December 19, 2011
Director http://of Mattereum.de
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This is not legal advice, it's barely even life advice.
I have engaged. I am not persuaded.
The heart pumps. The heart is not a pump. There is neural tissue all over the place, hormones by glands which affect decision making and so on.
You will not easily categorise kinds of thinking in any objectively measurable way.
Type One thinking may have 72 subtypes once we get good brain imaging technology. They may decide the original category was wrong And So On.
You cannot use those concepts, like type one thinking, except as heuristics.
They are not true like “the sun is mostly hydrogen” is true.
If I worked at it, I would still suck.
Am I to be deprived of the capability to take images from inside my head and turn them into pixels TO PROTECT THE CARTEL OF PEOPLE WHO CAN DO IT MANUALLY?
Seems like a bad idea.
“good artists borrow, great artists steal” —- Picasso.
Whether AI generated work should be copyright able is a MUCH MUCH harder question.
Maybe the answer you seek is there.
Are we to ban this too?
Either we maintain that it is illegal to learn from copyrighted images without a license — which is going to destroy human culture very fast I believe,
Or we accept that anybody can study a copyrighted work and learn from it, including using a machine as their agent.
If a 12 year old kid prints out an image made by Hirst and hangs it in their bedroom that is fair use. If a corporation uses the image on a t shirt they need a license.
Now the same thing, but “in the style of Hirst”
The copyright infringement is generally at the point where somebody is depriving the artist of income and what I’m hearing here is HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC.
No, friends, refusal to enforce monopolies laws is killing music. Home taping is how music survived.
I thought about that extensively before I wrote it down.
If you think it is flawed explain why, please.
I'm not trying to pretend AI image generation is art. I have no interest in that question right now.
What I'm saying is that it's completely unreasonable to ban a tool that ordinary people find massively useful and empowering to protect people who have training and talent.
Billions can't make the images in their heads real to protect the class privilege of a few hundred thousand professional artists worldwide?
No.
More than 10 years ago.
Flattr were too busy.
The problem was not the idea.
Somehow work survived.
I can semi-draw with AI help. Good enough.
I'm not interested in the question of whether an image I make with AI is art or not. I've written decent fiction in my time. Maybe here and there I inhabit the artistic category of "an unpublished genre fiction author." But I can't draw or paint or any of that stuff better than a reasonably talented 11 year old, and I'm 52. If I had artistic pretensions it's not happening.
But once in a while I want to see an image that I can't make and, well, AI boom boom yes here we go.
I don't claim that's art. I don't claim that the AI is an artist any more than I claim that a submarine is swimming. Those categories are irrelevant to my interest, which is simple.
I wish I was artistically talented so I could do stuff and now I can do some of that stuff without being artistically talented.
I feel good about this. It makes me feel better in the world.
Are we going to take this away from billions of people to protect people who can draw and have some training?
If there was a pill that gave people +40 points of IQ would we have born-smart people trying to ban it? Yes, some.
If we had a machine that put knowledge right into people's heads by nanobot magic would we have people trying to ban it? "This four week doctor training is an unacceptable threat to the medical industry" You bet it is pal, you bet it is.
This is not to say that *art is not vitally important* but it's not so important that we should ban talentless people getting access to the ability to make something that you will not be able to visually distinguish from art just to protect the monopoly of the talented-and-trained ones.
I can't draw. Now I can draw-with-machine-assistance. Maybe it's not the same as "drawing" for some numinous reason. I'm too talentless to care.
Somebody is going to take this away from me to protect the people who can draw?
No.
I want to see a picture of a 5 kilometre high tower surrounded by spiralling cones of line on an infinite plane made of tessellating fractals.
Now I have that picture. Great.
I did not make than image "to be an artist". I made that image because I wanted that image. If it came out of a search engine rather than an AI, I wouldn't care.
This kind of utilitarian creation of images is like photography for things that don't exist. Fine art? Art? Craft? Search of latent space? Collage? I don't care.
Creator as an identity? I don't care.
Whether machines are allowed to learn from humans is a hot topic. Every working artist studies, in great detail, other artists. They often make exact copies, as exact as they can, of great works to learn how those artists made them.
Be very careful that in banning AI learning you do not also ban human learning. A law that covers one might also cover the other.
Iron ore is made into iron which is made into machines which shovel iron ore.
"Tell it like it is
Till there's no misunderstanding
When you strip it right back
Man feed machine
Machine feed man" to quote a (human) poet
It's like rich people saying money does not matter. "Easy for you to say." I can't draw. But now I can take the talent I have and extend it to make images.
Is it art? I don't know. I don't care. I was not able, now I am able, and the people who are able complain.
Screw 'em. This is what tools are for. The strong should not tell the weak they cannot use props.
Nope. Not doing it. Pointing and laughing is the right response, not trying to figure out why mummification in the Victorian era is a bad code smell for the mindset that produces it.
That is seriously enough to recheck everything because it seems to have blown up the founder. And if it does this to him, what's it gonna do to us?
It does not need to be more complicated than this.
Once you see that in his life the result of Utilitarianism was mummification in an era where that was batshit there's kind of a long pause and a "recheck everything" and oooh look its full of utility monsters and all sorts of other naive garbage which somehow we are expected to take seriously.
Point and laugh is the right response.
Not 600 page rebuttals.
It took me years to understand how weird that was and how massive his mental footprint is today.
I'm considering starting a public campaign to have him properly cremated and the ashes scattered at sea. Maybe that'll sort everybody out. Magical thinking but so is having yourself mummified as a gag.
*Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect.
It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it.
Problem one: Utilitarianism is bullshit. Jeremy Bentham invented utilitarianism, designed the Panopticon model prison, and lives on as a dried out lich in a chair that they still wheel out for board meetings at University College London because he wanted to win a posthumous argument about whether he could have utility after he was dead.
You just can't build on a foundation that rotten.
Problem two: Fake Buddhist-type suffering-minimisation thinking is sprayed all over the field -- even this story uses the term Bodhisattva -- but nobody involved in AI has any idea what "awakening" is and you can't be a Bodhisattva unless-and-until you're Awake. And Awake is pretty well understood in Buddhism and most cultures have their equivalent status. It doesn't generally mean what people think it means, but it means something.
A good model for thinking about traditional understandings of Awake is to think about traditional understandings of disease. "Bob has the symptoms of the red death and has a slim chance of survival" is probably pretty accurate. "The red death is caused by the evil eye" is probably not very accurate. The descriptions of the Awake state are probably pretty accurate. The understanding of what it is and what causes it are a lot more infused with medieval nonsense than anybody would like.
But reasoning from the Awake position is what Buddhist ethics are rooted in, not Jeremy bloody Bentham's desiccated corpse's utility.
Problem three: Nobody's using Rta, Tao and Equity (in the English Common Law sense, not in any other sense) as potential approaches to AI safety. And they should be.
If we say to a machine "right please read everything ever written by legal scholars about English Common Law's concept of equity, including all the case law, and use this principle as a guide for your conduct" you will get something with nuance. If you say "treating others as you would want to be treated by them" we hit real problems because it's just not information-dense enough to work very well in the real world, and relies on introspection of a kind that is notoriously difficult for humans never mind machines being asked to imagine they are humans.
I think we are taking instructions that were intended for illiterate pre-medieval farmers and hoping to train intelligent machines on them. This seems unwise. Let's take the best models from high society and use them instead, if we have to use anything at all.
It's all about licensing and social norms in the end.
We've been at this FOSS housing thing for 20 years, aiming for upgradable shelters for climate refugees rather than middle class housing. I've known the wikihouse folks from before the beginning and (frankly) I've always found the to be predatory jerks. Wikihouse came out of a potential collaboration between that team and the hexayurt project. We spent quite a bit of time discussing doing an FOSS house together, then they cut me out of the deal and six months later launched wikihouse.
Never have I been more grateful that somebody ignored every bit of advice that I gave them. Nothing of our thinking is in this bloody thing. Fortunately.
The core problem with wikihouse is that *it is designed to get grant funding* not to be buildable. The architecture group behind it is a grant farming operation with a rumoured tendency to implementing ideas that are very close to (but not exact copies of) things which are around in the ecosystem. So they took a good look at the hexayurt, ignored everything about it which made it practical (uses standard 4x8s, uses widely available fasteners like deck screws or aluminium tape), and then shipped something which they knew was never going to be economic to build but hit the grant funding sweet spot: CNC machines, parametric design, and so on. That's why it looks this way.
Like any technology which is designed to live on grand funding practicality has never been the point. The point is that universities etc. can noodle around with it, learn from it, get some ideas tested, make a contribution, and then move on. Architecture has a constant need for things to design and things to do.
Architecture for Humanity used to have a web site which collected together hundreds of designs for emergency shelter and basically it was just a place for students to publish impractical designs because they had to be published somewhere.
No harm in it as long as nobody expects it to be buildable and fortunately that mistake was not made: theory stayed theory.
Hexayurt Project has never been incorporated, and never taken grant funding. Once or twice people have paid me as an engineer to work on specific projects, but I make a living as a tech CEO. Many thousands of builders for Burning Man, and a ton of genuine grass roots innovation on multiple fronts. It is, by any standards, a pretty good open source project with a lot of contributors and a lot of users.
What it isn't yet is a refugee shelter. To turn the "well proven at Burning Man" design into something that can be built at scale to cushion climate refugees and other displaced people is going to require a serious investment from somebody in testing in a range of environments, and refining the designs particularly when it comes to flooring and variants like spraying the shelters with shotcrete to make them permanent where needed.
https://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_project/Master_List_of_D...
Donor driven aid is a huge problem. Lack of testing regimes for new shelter technology is a huge problem.
There is a total revolution in open source architecture coming but nobody seems to know how best to get it started. Neither one of these projects is it.
Not yet. Roll on the day.
1) a single loudspeaker for the speaker’s voice. For some reason stereo is tiring. Brain can’t locate the speaker in space already and then the voice comes from two different places? I don’t know. Hugely helps me anyway.
2) my own voice mixed back into that speaker. Louder than you’d think. Cuts my volume by maybe 30%. Voice is much better at the end of the day. Echo cancellation on zoom takes it out completely.
Those two tweaks changed everything for me during the pandemic. It took a lot of messing around. For example the speaker I use is a $15 Logitech because higher quality speakers feed back. And the mic is a long shotgun which minimises the amount of sound it picks up from that speaker.
All this should be easy.
It is not.
If not, that would change things.
Good luck.
Edit: the novel http://files.howtolivewiki.com/MOTHER_OF_HYDROGEN_NOVEL/inde...