* Posts by gbchew

16 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2022

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

gbchew

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

...stay away from all public buildings...

....due back in court...

America: AI artwork is not authored by humans, so can't be protected by copyright

gbchew

Utterly predictable.

US law is heading towards giving ownership and copyright to the people who can marshal the resources required to build, operate, own, and market AIaaS systems.

The point of the current set of rulings is to slow-walk toward a legal framework wherein it is possible for a Midjourney clone to sell licenses to consume and commercially u$e the output of their system, while retaining copyright and ownership in-house.

The AI is the going to be the art, you dig? The developers will be the artists. The user is just wallet on legs that generates marketable user preference and training data as they use the system for entertainment.

Expect the AI itself to be legally defended, the corporation to be empowered, and the consumer-users to be reduced to dues-paying subscriber licensees (for an extra fee).

The real money is not in generating static images, it's in generated live stereoscopic video. You get there by using millions of paying human customers to train an AI to generate static images, and you track them over time as they enter new prompts. The current crop of AI users are training the systems that will replace them.

Capital is going to start moving when you can generate and deliver a convincingly high FPS stream of conceptually interconnected image frames, along with an audio channel, driven by realtime end user biometrics.

Keeping AI users firmly within the precariat (if that's where they started) is the goal. Giving a kid with $20 the ability to generate copyrightable artifacts that allow them to change their economic fortune and become upwardly mobile is off the table. It's going to remain off the table for as long as captive regulators can keep propping up the over-capitalized technocrats that pay bureaucrats to pretend that the private equity pyramid isn't a just a social compliance tool.

Microsoft to cap daily Bing AI queries to stop the bot delivering daft responses

gbchew

Microsoft: Threat Actor

Bing-bot is malware, operated for profit, regardless of the risks to users.

If a human employee of a legitimate business was threatening to destroy the lives of customers, they'd be fired on the spot and charges would likely be filed.

Anyone deploying automation should be held legally responsible for the outcome.

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

gbchew

I'll take two.

More annihilative liability, please.

Limited liability is the toxic core of virtually every industrially-driven problem facing this planet and its inhabitants.

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

gbchew

Re: We'll get there

This exposes the underlying problem with the whole ML endeavour:

Getting the skate punks on the corner to do this kind of curation work is trivially easy *if* you pay them what their time is worth.

Convincing them to pay *you* for the opportunity to do your curation work for you, so that your bosses will approve a nice fat bonus for you, that's the hard part.

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

gbchew
Alert

Hack to the Future

I'm marking the square now for "script kiddies made my Big Dumb Truck give me skin cancer" on my precommemorative 2056 El Reg Bingo card.

Microsoft's new AI BingBot berates users and can't get its facts straight

gbchew

At some point we're going to have to start holding corporate entities and their officers responsible for the garbage-out their AI systems inflict on users.

"This does not reflect our opinions" is about as helpful as "thoughts and prayers".

If your team puts an AI online, your opinion is explicit: you're stating that the risks to your users and the wider public are worth the benefits you'll reap. At that point, you should be legally on the hook for every piece of content your hype-bot spits out.

Generative AI is out of control: Nothing, Forever is a Seinfeld spoof about nothing... forever

gbchew

"I would like to add that nothing that has been said reflects the opinion of the developers (or anyone else on the staff team)."

Except that it does, quite explicitly, reflect the opinion of the developers and the staff team that the known risk of their pet AI doing something hideously offensive or dangerous at any given moment is more than offset by their ability to benefit from accepting that risk.

Take the blue pill: Keanu Reeves has had enough of AI baloney

gbchew

Whatever will we do when AI is capable of creating an exceptionally profitable but otherwise unredeemable four-film series glorifying criminality, poor impulse control, and mass murder, Mr. Wick?

Amazon convinces FCC it can avoid space junk chaos

gbchew
Thumb Up

Raise your hand if you think Amazon or SpaceX wouldn't violate any agreement, contract, or law they could profitably afford to violate.

When your old gran gets smashed flat by flaming debris that used to be part of a flying sales funnel, they'll just tap the legal department, pay the fine, settle out of court, and launch two more.

Elon Musk's Neuralink probed over pathogen transport

gbchew

So does these count as "renewed", "refurbished", or "preowned"?

Please respond quickly, I need to get these ebay listings posted before my neuralink+ trial subscription runs out and my limbic system bricks itself.

Google's Go may add telemetry that's on by default

gbchew

"These alarmed developers would prefer an opt-in rather than an opt-out regime, a position the Go team rejects because it would ensure low adoption and would reduce the amount of telemetry data received to the point it would be of little value TO GOOGLE."

This is either transparently dishonest, or incredibly stupid, or a bit of both.

Either option satisfies developers who want the telemetry data more than they want privacy, and that's between them and their userbase.

Only opt-out satisfies Google, however, because they've built a global empire on the concept of monetizing and managing ignorance.

Pretending that this choice is for the benefit of users and developers is absurd.

Definitely on-brand though. Points for consistency.

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

gbchew

Re: "the confidential correspondence doesn't provide many details about the Throckmorton Plot"

Twitter is mostly just people complaining about the conditions of their captivity.

Originality is only rarely a defining feature of communication.

As Apple sales slide, Tim Cook says fanbois will tolerate higher iPhone prices

gbchew

Apple doesn't have customers, it has hostages.

It's your human hubris holding back AI acceptance

gbchew

Which is all fine and dandy...

...but the current crop of consumer-grade AI frequently provide incorrect answers and remain incapable of basic error checking, confidence rating, or source citation, so you'd be an absolute fool to rely on them.

If you're going to train a machine to mimic a human, the best possible outcome is a perfectly human machine. There are billions of perfectly human humans who will be happy to present thoughts and opinions of little to no worth in any given context. You may even think you've just spotted another one.

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

gbchew
Meh

Art is just this guy, you know?

If the ecological impact genuinely concerns you, then choose a low-carbon chain for your NFT, and compare it to the cost of physically manufacturing pretty art widgets in meat space.

If the economic impact genuinely concerns you, take a hard look at all the other pointless crap in your house, town, country, etc.

Every commercial product is a scam on some level. If someone paid to make you want it, you got played. At least an NFT (probably) won't end up in the landfill, the ground water, or in your lungs. As artifacts of capitalism go, the NFT can be comparatively harmless when it's built on decent infrastructure.

All this web3 cruft is, yes, very silly. That said, it's a lot less silly that all the physically manufactured cruft we're already swimming in. If we're going to keep consuming and by-producing, (which we are), then we're going to need to do it in a context that doesn't kill us. That context will have to be virtual.