Unbanking the banked

Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

Ew... stay away from my content, you creep!

unironically saying "the sharing economy" in the year of our lord 2024 is... certainly a choice

also

God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better

idk dude I've talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn't actually try very hard to be cynical

Yeah, I think his ideological commitment to "all intellectual property rights are bad forever and always amen" kind of blinds him to the actual issue here, and his proposed solution is kind of nonsensical in terms of its ability to get off the ground.

More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I've seen the take floating around that's like "hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it's AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?" which I think kind of... misses the point?

A lot of artists generally are in favor of using their work for interesting collaborative stuff and aren't going to get mad if you use their stuff for your own creative endeavors. This is why we have things like Creative Commons. The actual things artists tend not to like are things like having their work used for commercial purposes without permission and/or having their work taken without credit. (This is why CC licenses often restrict these usages!) With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s. (You may remember one of the big things artists were affronted by about AI art was the way it would imitate an artist's signature, because of what that represented.)

In this case, artists are leaning on copyright not out of any particular ideological commitment but just because it's the blunt instrument that they already have at their disposal. But I think Cory Doctorow's previous experience in "getting mad at the MPAA" or whatever kind of forces him to analyze this using the same framing as that issue, which doesn't really make sense in this case. And ironically saying "copyright shouldn't count for AI" aligns him with the position of the MPAA so it really does feel like a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" scenario. :/

It is always kind of bewildering to me though. Like, has no one ever explained to these people the health problems that highly-bred dogs tend to have? Have they never heard of 'hybrid vigor' or issues with smaller gene pools making populations more susceptible to disease? Were they just asleep during biology 101? I don't get how people who think they're so smart can have failed to consider even the most basic issues with planning to turn humanity into Gros Michel bananas.

I mean, you say this as though Banning Self Driving Cars is some controversial policy action, rather than just literally the current state of the law in most areas. The point is that it's weird to legalize them when they're not ready for prime time just because you figure "the future is coming," because usually we make laws around technology based on how the technology works in the real world, not how we figure it'll probably work in the hypothetical inevitable magic techno-future.

[Time Cube] has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The [website] itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation. As a short work, it can't fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a "seed" of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.

I feel like such a hipster. "I hated them before it was cool!"

Well all I know is I definitely trust the research and knowledge and informed-ness about biological sex of the person who uses the word "hermaphroditism" with regards to humans. Now that's a person who knows what they're talking about, I think to myself

It's a veritable paradigm shift. Just think of the synergy.

Raise your hands if you’d rather go back to a world without Airbnb.

I mean the sneers just write themselves