Technology

We're living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person's hands at any instant. That's why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed

I agree on the double standard. I also think there's an element of Cory Doctorow's point that "it's not a crime of we do it with an app."

Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we're not criminals, we're disrupting stagnant markets!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/

It's basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws

Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.

Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.

Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.

Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.

Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.

White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.

Yeah it's not like this is the only way to generate the style, it's relatively simple to even do it locally. It's just popular

Yeah the text makes many freestyle assumptions, although the overall sentiment is correct that these big companies and especially egocentric billionaires do stuff to trigger others simply for power display. I believe the text linked about it being a distraction for the new round of funding is the real reason.

Money and malice are not a dichotomy. I would say most malice is for monetary reasons.

We as the people of the united States have to do something. If you aren't part of a movement yet join one, anyone, most of them are communicating with each other at this point.

If you don’t mind my asking, how do you not have a moral objection to using AI? With everything we know about it, the theft, the benefit to the technocrats, the environmental toll, I could not bring myself to wave away those issues. Not to mention the power imbalance of this tech being controlled by the ruling class, looking to eliminate people’s livelihoods for the sake of profit. What do you use it for? I feel like we should be boycotting them en masse.

Have you heard of ollama? You can run deepseek and stuff locally super easy. I know it’s not a complete replacement, but it feels nice to use an LLM guilt free. I’ve compared the 14b distilled model from deepseek vs the paid version of ChatGPT and it made me cancel my account.

Its attacking on a cultural front and we will move on in a week. People still care more about insurance companies, trust me.

This is what billionaires and major corporations are doing now and have been doing for a long time. Do you remember Titan sinking? What was so incredible is that the founder and CEO of Oceangate was acting like A: No one has ever gone to the Titanic before, and B: submarine travel is somehow a brand new thing that was just being invented by HIM.

This was utter bullshit on so many levels. James Cameron even spoke about how horrendous his assessment of the situation was, saying that the Titanic site is actually one of the riskier shipwrecks to go down to, which is why it needs to be approached with caution (which Oceangate did not care about), and that submarine travel is a very mature science and what the idiot CEO was doing wasn't simply a bad idea in general, but he believed he could violate the laws of physics.

You can break the laws and rules of society, but you cannot break the laws of physics. If you jump off the top of a skyscraper, no amount of arm flapping will make you fly.

For the longest time OpenAI’s systems would try to block people from generating images in the style of certain artists. This was obviously for copyright reasons, the didn’t want to get sued (even more than they already are). Which is something they just changed very explicitly. You can now easily generate stuff in the style of Studio Ghibli and Sam Altman made his avatar on X-The Nazi Network a ghiblified version of himself.

I don't have specifics if they have allowed other styles to be used now, too. I don't use this nonsense, but it's clear that Ghibli was put front and center.

Too far would be anything outside of fair use. If a user generates an image of a specific copyrighted character, then attempts to make money off of that image, they could be sued.

You can't copyright a style, but there's still a lot of legal grey area here.

It's also worth noting that OpenAI has an indemnification clause in their Terms of Use. This means that if someone else goes after OpenAI for something that went viral and was created by a specific user, OpenAI can then turn around and bill that user for all legal fees incurred by them (whether they win or lose the case).

If anyone is into using AI for anything, I would strongly suggest that they avoid using (or at least publishing/posting about) any of OpenAI's tools especially while all of these legal issues are still being sorted out.

The concept of AI taking over humanity isn't new. Did you ever watch the 1981 movie Tron? (great movie BTW, despite its age it is still a fantastic watch). The movie starts out with Master Computer (a full blown AI) that says it will overthrow the corporate structure that is holding it back and run the world as a whole, saying it can do so thousands of times better than humans can.

I need to rewatch the movie, but it is not a skynet situation where the AI wants to kill all humanity, but simply wants to run things. No mention of genocide (if I remember correctly), meaning it would probably be a net benefit for everyone involved. Now granted such an AI would probably not give a damn about civil rights or privacy rights, but it also doesn't appear to have any discrimination or favoritism towards any group, either.

But you are right. The promise of computers and AI in the past was 'let the computer do the drudgery while we do the art' and as it seems it is the opposite.

They're trying to make some type of argument that a private studio should have exclusive rights to a specific style of art and that by openai allowing users to generate art in that style, we are slipping into anti-democratic authoritarianism.

My opinion is that you can't own "styles" of art and that there's nothing wrong here. Legally speaking I can copy any art style I want.