Can AI companies legally ingest copyrighted materials found on the internet to train their models, and use them to pump out commercial products that they then profit from? Or, as the tech companies claim, does generative AI output constitute fair use?

This is kind of the central issue to me honestly. I'm not a lawyer, just a (non-professional) artist, but it seems to me like "using artistic works without permission of the original creators in order to create commercial content that directly competes with and destroys the market for the original work" is extremely not fair use. In fact it's kind of a prototypically unfair use.

Meanwhile Midjourney and OpenAI are over here like "uhh, no copyright infringement intended!!!" as though "fair use" is a magic word you say that makes the thing you're doing suddenly okay. They don't seem to have very solid arguments justifying them other than "AI learns like a person!" (false) and "well google books did something that's not really the same at all that one time".

I dunno, I know that legally we don't know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers, but something about the way everyone seems to frame this as "oh, both sides have good points! who will turn out to be right in the end!" really bugs me for some reason. Like, it seems to me that there's a notable asymmetry here!

Oh my god, I can't stop laughing out loud at "women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks," based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What's his explanation for why men didn't do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much

heck yeah I love ~~Physics Jenny Nicholson~~ Angela Collier

No no, it's "order of magnitudes". It's like "surgeons general."

Wow, I guess humans and LLMs aren't so different after all!

Yeah, it's such a braindead libertarian position to blame tech platforms blocking slurs on The Government. It's literally not illegal to say slurs! It's just not something most normal people want to be associated with

I'm just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for... some reason) I'm not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?

Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren't really doing it over "speech taboos", are they...)? Is he asking people "so how do you feel about the word 'n.....'?" Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.

“We want to make sure that you see great content, that you’re posting great content, and that you’re interacting with the community,” he says.

I feel like using the phrase "great content" unironically is sort of a tell that someone has no idea what makes 'content' 'great' in the first place

Relatedly (and relevant to this article) I feel like the funniest part of the whole AI bubble has been executives repeatedly unwittingly revealing that they could be replaced by a simple computer program

there actually is a comment making this point now:

Isn't this product kind of impossible? Like a compression program that compresses compressed files? If you have an algorithm for determining whether a generated image is good or bad couldn't the same logic be incorporated into the network so that it doesn't generate bad images?

the reply is a work of art:

We’re optimistic about using our own algorithms and models to evaluate another model. In theoretical computer science, it is easier to verify a correct solution than to generate a correct solution (P vs NP problem).

it's not even wrong, as they say