xenomor

I really cannot fully express how much I have grown to hate all these motherfuckers and their awful work - and I work in Silicon Valley.

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

Rich idiots failing upward, unite!

The problem with what creeps like Mann are claiming comes down to the difference between “art” and buying an “interest” in art as a speculative investment. Mann conflates these two ideas, trying to bestow the wholesomeness of artistic expression with his investment business venture. I’m all in favor of getting artists paid, and structuring society in a way that encourages the production of art, but Mann wants to weaken securities regulations and consumer protections to do that. That’s a terrible idea because it will lead to many more people being conned and defrauded.

If investors were merely trying to support an artist’s work, and not seeking to profit from their investment, they wouldn’t need a securities mechanism like NFTs to do it. We already have money for that.

If a side effect of regulating NFTs as securities is to somehow damage the regular fine art marketplace, as I think Mann’s suit is warning, that is no great loss for society. The fine art market is a blight, a fraud-riddled playground for ultra wealthy douchebags to sequester wealth and does nothing to advance art or promote the creation of artworks writ large.

Mann has ridden the crypto speculative bubble and has an inflated impression of the value of his work. He’s carved out a niche as a sort of court jester for billionaires like Mark Andreesen who want to rebuild financial systems in a way that would dismantle the regulatory state and enshrine an elite class as technologically empowered feudal lords. He thinks the money is compensation for his songs, but it’s largely just a side effect of crypto bros forever trying to find a greater fool to hold the bag in a pyramid scheme. In that effort, his lawsuit is basically a marketing campaign for his investment business. I hope the court puts an end to this once and for all, but I’m not optimistic.

‘This is outrageous,’ said the spokesperson from Meta. ‘Spying and tracking and manipulating domestic politics is something private industry does, not some creepy foreign agency.’

How about reigning in Israel and not, like, genociding. That would be nice.

Joe Biden is a fucking monster. He and his State Department toadies are criminally liable for the atrocities they are perpetrating. Furthermore, Harris owns ALL this now that she pulled the mask off at her DNC coming out speech. Don’t come at me pointing at the hollow, uninspired gestures she made to humanity in her speech. She made it very very clear that she’s fully locked in to both excusing and fueling the genocide of Palestinians just like her beloved mentor.

I’m going to start calling it the ‘camera tumor’. Thanks for that.

Don’t forget that Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 for providing critical coverage of the US invasion of Iraq.

Is RFK a character in an ARG? What is happening on this timeline?

“The matrix.” Dude, you are a billionaire. You hang out with billionaires, and the most powerful public officials in the world. You are the matrix. Fuck off with this gaslighting fake-populist bullshit.

When assholes like Musk and Friedman say garbage like this, they are advocating for taking away people’s power. People as collective wield power through government. They want to, instead, concentrate power in a small ruling elite class of oligarchs. It’s fundamentally un-democratic, and un-American.