Yes, she said that. But what she said there just doesn’t make any sense.

I thought she made some very good points, but the quote in the title makes no sense to me.

Haywire. You don’t see that often anymore.

The article alleges, though without evidence, that the tracking is just an excuse to raise rates.

A quick search didn’t turn up quite the right statistics, but traffic fatalities have been seriously on the rise in the US. That probably implies higher payouts. (WP)

But also, when trackable unsafe drivers have to pay more (and trackable safe driver less), then the unsafe drivers will prefer to be untrackable. You may be on the receiving end of the recalculated actuary tables.

that will ultimately be used to create huge amounts of wealth for very few,

But… That is what these poisoning attacks are fighting for. They are attacking open image generators that can be used by anyone. You can use them for fun or for business, without having to pay rent to some owner who is not lifting a finger. What do you think will happen if you knock that out?

This attack doesn’t target Big Tech, at all. The model has to be open to pull off an attack like that.

This doesn’t have anything to do with tracking. This is supposed to sabotage free and open image generators (ie stable diffusion). It’s unlikely to do anything, though.

Hard to say what the makers want to achieve with this. Even if it did work, it would help artists just as much, as better DRM would help programmers. On its face, this is just about enforcing some ultra-capitalist ideology that wants information to be owned.

looking at SF, California

There are a number of US states that have legalized it sooner and more thoroughly than California (not to mention Germany). What did SF specifically do?

The most obvious reason for this is that whatever they were doing doesn’t seem to help a lot.

I am aware what the datasets contain.

I don’t see non-profit AI drawing less rage, so I don’t believe that the concern is about AI being used for profit. Maybe, when you say “for their own profit” this is another special expression like “taken” (by which, I believe, you mean copying without authorization)?

I don’t really know why so many people are coming through for the rich. I am not an eat the rich kinda guy, but giving them money for nothing is just absolutely bonkers to me. What I know is that a lot of people were simply hoodwinked. I strongly suspect that others feel that they have to support that because of some ideological conviction. But eventually, I simply don’t know what’s going on with that. It’s why I originally posed the question.

IDK what you mean by “migration of that goal post”.

Arrows pointing out from Germany indicating a pointless quest for more space. Why do I feel like I have seen that before?

I am just pointing out the meaning of words; originally just left vs right-wing.

Labor is not capital. The factories owned by Tesla were built by workers, just like the robots in them. Time was expended on their design. And yet, all that is still property. When some worker in such a factory takes a wrench home for personal use, then they are not stealing the work of Elon Musk or the other share-holders.

To make a point about policy: None of the owners of the NYT, or Getty, or others like them will starve because of fair use. They are rich people, they will stay rich, and I see no reason to give them more money simply because they own a lot of intellectual property. Anyone at actual risk of starving will only be hurt by sending more of the national income to the top.

US copyright exists “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. The idea is that this can be achieved by introducing a profit motive. Requiring license fees for existing, publicly accessible works, can’t conceivably serve this purpose. It seems obvious that it will only hurt the purpose.

I wonder what it will do to the stress levels of parents, knowing that their kid can be on the hook for $150k if they share some fake. Would any liability insurance cover this?

Good question. So let’s look at how stocks get their value.

A company sells shares to get funding. Say, you want to make microwave dinners. You need to hire people, an industrial kitchen, packaging and packaging machines, ingredients, and probably a whole lot more. The company takes in revenue from selling the dinners, which pay for the running costs. Anything above that may be reinvested or turns into profit. The profit is paid to the stock-owners to pay them for their investment.

Now the question is: What is the value of a stock?

Imagine you take out a loan. That gives you money right now, in the present. You pay back the loan with the money that you get from your stocks; your share in the profit. Now imagine that the company goes out of business (and the value of the stock becomes $0) right as you are done paying back the loan + interest. Then that loan was the present value of the stock.

In theory, the value of a share is the present value of the future money that you get paid. Of course, one cannot know how much that is, so this is useless for actual investing. Still, the market price of a share should be the best guess of people with money. If the stock is trading higher than someone’s guess, they sell. If it’s lower, they buy. So the market cap should reflect the future profits.

But what’s the value of a crypto-coin like bitcoin?

Let’s start by thinking only about a coin being used to transfer money. And to make it easier, let’s say that coins are only exchanged for money once a day.

Say people want to transfer 10 million USD each day. The senders buy coins for 10 million USD. They don’t care how many coins that gets them, only that the coins represent 10 million USD. If there are 2 million coins being sold on the market, then each coin must transport 5 USD and that will be the market value.

New coins are constantly being “mined” to pay for the upkeep of the system. Let’s say that’s 100,000 coins per day.

The intended receivers of the 10 million USD sell their coins to get the money. The miners also sell their coins to pay their bills. So the next day you have 2 million + 100,000 coins on the market. The senders again want to transport 10 million USD, so they buy the 2,100,000 coins on the market. The market value of a coin is now ~4.76 USD. Adding more coins lowered the value of the coins. That is inflation. The “missing” money goes to the miners to keep the system running. That’s not a problem for senders and receivers. Transferring money costs money, however you do it. (That crypto is an extremely expensive way to do this, is one underlying reason why it has no adoption as a payment system in the normal economy.)

So far, you wouldn’t expect anyone to store or “hodl” coins. The value is just going down. But obviously, this is only true as long as the amount of USD to be transferred stays constant. If the system is more widely adopted and more money is transferred (outpacing the inflationary effect of the newly mined coins), then each coin has to transport more USD and the “value” goes up.

Now, if you believe that adoption continues to grow, it becomes a reasonable strategy to stash some coins to sell them later at a higher “value”. Maybe the problem is already obvious, but let’s continue to take it slow.

So, let’s say, it’s a bit later. There are 15 million coins and they are to transfer 100 million USD. The market price of a coin is now $6.67. (Let’s also say that there are no more coins being mined and the upkeep is paid some other way.) Now we bring in some venture capitalists. One day, they buy coins for an additional $50 million. Now the coins trade at $10 per coin. 15 million coins bought for $100 million + $50 million, right?

The VCs now have 5 million coins. But note where the money went. It went to the transfer receivers when they sold the 15 million coins for $10 each. They got a windfall profit. That’s how it goes in crypto. All the money that people “invested” by buying coins is gone. It was either used to pay miners/for the system upkeep, or early adopters took it and ran. It’s all gone. That’s the big difference to shares.

If the VCs sell their coins again, they lose. Because when there is only 100 million USD in the market for 15 million coins, they would only get 6.67 USD per coin. The money that they spent is gone. If they want to make a profit, new money has to come from somewhere. There are only 2 ways to achieve this.

One is continuing adoption. If more money were to be transferred, with the same number of coins, the price goes up. They can siphon off some of that money by selling into that market. But that lowers the price again, so that only yields a profit if adoption increases enough.

The other is that someone else also removes coins from the market. If there are fewer coins for the same (or a decreasing!) amount of money being transferred, then the market price will also go up. (In this scenario, too, they would be siphoning off money that other people are trying to transfer. The cost of transferring money would be increased for no very good reason; not a great feature in a payment system.) But note that this, too, lowers the price again. That only yields a profit, if “hodlers” sequester the coins sold by the VCs for a higher price than the VCs paid.

I’m not saying this is a Ponzi scheme because everyone has heard that already.

So that’s it. If you want to know the effect of 50k bitcoin on price, you need to look at the trading volume (minus wash trades): How many bitcoin are actually “in use”? You also need to know how many of these coins will be promptly removed from the market by “hodlers”.

The market cap is bullshit. It doesn’t work like stocks.

You have to ask how much this is in relation to the volume actually being traded. If(!) this is sold, will people actually pony up 2 billion?

I don’t trust any of the numbers coming out of that industry, so IDK.

This appears to be the bill: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24397944-defiance-act

For reference, this is the section getting altered: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/6851

This looks to be an absolute shitshow. I fear it’ll be made even worse before it passes. Maybe they’ll curtail the abuse potential. Then again, maybe not. It may be seen as hurting the right people.

Ok, so you’re all in on some weird ideology and give a fuck about the livelihood of your “artist friends”. You had me. Great job. Good propaganda.

Corporate control is not the only thing you get (and actually not what I was leading to). You also get free money for the wealthy.

Getty claims to have the biggest private photo archive with 130 million images. How many does an artist own? The NYT owns all its archive a hundred years back; each daily newspaper having about as many words as a novel. How many novels does an author own? Of course, that’s still small fry. Meta has trained its image generator on 1.1 billion images that were generously opted in by users of insta and facebook.

So that’s how the licensing fees are going to be split. More money for the owning class, without any work required.

The money comes from subscriptions. Who pays subscriptions for image generators? The same people who pay Adobe for a subscription. People who have to make lots of high quality images. Professionals artists.

But you don’t care cause you don’t actually have artist friends. Fine. I have no idea what kind of crazy ideology you follow that you think a cyberpunk dystopia is the lesser evil.

As for what I want, I want generative AI banned entirely,

Well, you can see the moral (and political!) problem here. Maybe the people who crunched numbers before electric computers wanted them banned. Maybe people who make diesel engines want EVs banned. That’s asking the public to take a hit for the benefit of a small group. Morality aside, it’s politically unlikely.

or at minimum restricted to training on works that are either in the public domain, or that the person creating the training model received explicit, opt-in consent to use.

This is somewhat more likely. But what then?

I’ll start. Opt-in means that you have to obtain a license to AI train with something. You have to pay the owner of the intellectual property. What does this mean in our economy? What happens?

I see. Thanks for explaining.

This view of property rights as absolute is what right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, etc… espouse. Usually the cries of “theft” come when it gets to taxes, though. Is it supposed to be not right because it’s about intellectual property?

Property rights are not necessarily right-wing (communism notwithstanding). What is definitely right-wing is (heritable) privilege and that’s implied in these views of property.

ETA: Just to make sure that I really understand what you are saying: When you say “stealing someone’s work” you do mean the unauthorized copying of copyrighted expression, yes? Do you actually understand that copyright is intellectual property and that property is not usually called work? Labor and capital are traditionally considered opposites, of a sort, particularly among the left.

I think you would find it easier to help your friends if you approached the matter with reason rather than emotion. Your take on fair use isn’t is missing a lot, but that’s beside the point.

Assume you get what you wanted are asking for. What then?