nalthis

From the ruling of Bartz v. Anthropic:

“And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.”

I’m not a lawyer, so it’s possible I’m missing something. But it seems to me like the ruling here implies fair use only holds so long as no net new copies, digital or otherwise, are created. If that’s the case, then it necessitates the destruction of the original.

Military sci-fi is full of mind-machine interfacing like this. There’s definitely value in being able to interface directly with a machine instead of having to push buttons or read outputs.

The problem is that anything based on LLM architecture is not going to be fast or accurate enough to allow someone to, say, fly a fighter jet with this interface.

IIRC, the bulletin of atomic scientists stopped tying the clock to nuclear war decades ago, and its recent moves towards midnight have more to do with climate change and AI than nuclear weapons.

The way I see it, this is the JDAM of drones. Will it perform better than purpose built aircraft? No. But the USAF has a few hundred old F-16s entering retirement that would be mothballed otherwise, and strapping some cheap sensors to them is a fast way to play around with the idea while they wait for Lockheed and Anduril to finish the good stuff.

Not to derail the conversation, but isn’t that true of every issue people say this about?

“ AI is a bubble. If it wasn't a bubble – if it was just a bunch of computer scientists and product teams tinkering with possible uses for advancements in back-propagation, generative adversarial networks and machine learning – there wouldn't be any controversy here.”

Hard disagree with this. There’s plenty of AI controversy driven by the open source AI scene. The vast majority of AI art controversy, for example, seems to be between artists and guys training SD:XL LoRAs to make porn on CivitAI rather than between big frontier AI companies and artists. While CivitAI is definitely profiting off that, the controversy wouldn’t go away if the guys using data science techniques and their own hardware to train fetish porn models went to HuggingFace or their own volunteer-hosted forums instead of relying on their current distribution platforms.

Skeptical that this would actually be illegal in Europe if all the details were provided.

I went through a similar thing at Amazon. Locked out of my laptop at 3 a.m. and emailed I was laid off. The key thing though is that my official end date was 90 days in the future. Legally, the 3 a.m. lock out was actually just a warning of impending layoffs. I got paid to “work from home” for 3 months after I returned my badge and laptop.

My understanding is that Europe may have longer wait periods, but most tech companies still essentially do the same thing there. Amazon’s laid off Berlin employees still get locked out at 3am and told to do nothing for months while legal does whatever it needs to do to get rid of them.