I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.

It’s also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.

It says “opt-out” in the title.

Indeed. Firefox already has “sponsored links” and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.

Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don’t want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.

It’s true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

And then goes on to enumerate what you’re licensing them to do with it. There’s also a section titled “Changes to these Terms” about how they can change the ToS going forward.

No problem. I’m not a lawyer myself, mind you, but I’ve encountered issues like these enough times over the years that I feel I’ve got a pretty good layman’s grasp. Plus I’ve actually read some of these ToSes and considered them from the perspective of the company running the site, which I suspect most people arguing about this stuff haven’t actually done.

I wish the Fediverse sites running without rigorous ToSes well, of course, but I suspect failing to establish clear rights to use the content people post on them is likely to end up biting them in the long run. At least the bigger ones. Hobby-level websites get away with a lot because they don’t have significant money on the line.

You could ask a lawyer, I suppose. But the basic gist of this is “we don’t know what we might need to do with this data in the future, so we put ‘we can do anything with this data’ into the ToS so that we know that if the need arises we won’t find ourselves unable to do what we need to do with it.” Any website that doesn’t do this could find itself unable to implement new features or comply with new laws they didn’t think of when crafting the original ToS.

At the very minimum a ToS needs to have some way to update and apply retroactively to old data, which ends up being “we can do anything with this data” with extra steps.

Have you not experimented with LLMs? They come up with new things all the time.

A user’s data still belongs to the user when they post it on sites like Reddit and such, too. The ToS doesn’t take ownership away from them, at least not in any case that I’ve seen. It just gives the site the license to use it as well.

If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn’t really harm anyone.

I’m just venting, really. I know it’s not going to make a real difference.

I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it’s mostly used for nowadays) there weren’t these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that’s just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.

The ironic thing is that kbin.social’s ToS has no “ownership” stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don’t bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance’s control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That’ll be nice.

Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the “I’ve seen this for decades” part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it’s always been this way and the “social contract we’ve adapted to” is “the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing.” I’m so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.

Combined with the selfish “wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I’m going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!” Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.

I wouldn’t really trust that promise, frankly. I just checked their terms of service and it has the usual clause:

You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services. ASSC requires licenses from you for that User Content to operate the Services. By posting User Content on the Services, you grant ASSC a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your User Content.

Which isn’t really surprising, it’s standard boilerplate for a reason. They don’t want to be caught in a situation where they can’t function legally any more. They say they won’t sell the company or your data, and they might even believe that right now, but who knows what the future might bring? They have the ability to do so if the circumstances arise.

Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users’ data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It’s not crazy.

From the WordPress Terms of Service:

License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn’t listen.

I’m sorry if I’m coming across harsh here, but I’m seeing this same error being made over and over again. It’s being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I’ve seen it sporadically over the decades that I’ve been online. So it bears driving home:

• If you are about to give your content to a website, check their terms of service before you do to see if you’re willing to agree to their terms, and if you don’t agree to their terms then don’t give your content to a website. It’s true that some ToS clauses may not be legally enforceable, but are you willing to fight that in court? If you didn’t consider your content valuable enough to spend the time checking the ToS when you posted it, that’s not WordPress’s fault.
• If you give someone something and they later find a way to make the thing you gave them valuable, it’s too late. You gave it to them. They don’t owe you a “cut.” Check the terms of service.

Are you serious? We’re speaking in the Fediverse right now. It’s notable in its difference. Though instances have their own TOSes, so it’d be pretty trivial to set one up to harvest content for AI training as well.

Indeed. I frequently use LLMs as brainstorming buddies while working on creative things, like RPG adventure planning and character creation. I want the AI to come up with new and unexpected things that never existed before.

If I have need of the AI to account for “ground truths” then I use things like retrieval-augmented generation or database plugins that inject that stuff into the context.

They’re giving you services in exchange for your contents.

Does nobody even think about TOS any more? You don’t have to read any specific one, just realize the basic universal truth that no website is going to accept your contents without some kind of legal protection that allows them to use that content.

I didn’t say that everything in Star Trek was AGI, just that you can find examples there.

I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described.

The field of AI has been around for decades and covers a wide range of technologies, many of them much “simpler” than the current crop of generative AI. What is often referred to as AI today is absolutely what the term once described, and still does describe.

What people seem to be conflating is the general term “AI” and the more specific “AGI”, or Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is the stuff you see on Star Trek. Nobody is claiming that current LLMs are AGI, though they may be a significant step along the way to that.

I may be sounding nitpicky here, but this is the fundamental issue that the article is complaining about. People are not well educated about what AI actually is and what it’s good at. It’s good at a huge amount of stuff, it’s really revolutionary, but it’s not good at everything. It’s not the fault of AI when people fail to grasp that, no more than it’s the fault of the car when someone gets into it and then is annoyed it won’t take them to the Moon.

Social markers are usually not a conscious thing. Once it becomes part of the “this is the way a proper person behaves” ruleset it gets internalized.

I think that’s too convenient and loaded an explanation. I suspect a better one can be found in social identity theory, with positions like these being social markers that they use to establish firm boundaries around their in-group. Every group tends to develop social markers, things you’re expected to believe or otherwise exhibit to show that you’re “on their side.” There may be some particular reason why any given marker first shows up, but once it gets adopted it becomes essentially self-perpetuating.

Ah, that might apply, then. Though that appears to be specifically about abortion clinics, and my googling suggests Mount Sinai might not provide abortions, so it might still be fiddly if it actually went to court.

Even if not, they should probably have still routed around it if only in recognition of the "on edge"ness.

It was made clear to you, immediately and concisely. You should have accepted that clarification and moved on with your life. Instead you continued poking and prodding after that in search of some way to misconstrue what was being said.

Seems like it might be a bit more nuanced than that. From the article:

There is a federal law, C-3, which deems it an offence for anyone who “intentionally obstructs or interferes with another person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided by a health professional.” As far as I saw while I was passing the hospital, the entranceway was clear and no one was stopped from entering or exiting the building. Other than vague mentions, I found no specific evidence that people were prevented from entering or exiting the building.

Update, Feb. 15, 11:06 a.m.: It has come to our attention that the University Ave. entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital closes at 6 p.m. daily. The protest passed by the hospital around 8 p.m., two hours after that entrance had closed. See the bottom of the map below for the University Ave. entrance hours, accessed today from the Mount Sinai Hospital website.

So this may not have broken those laws. There was apparently an incident where the crowd blocked the car of a doctor that was trying to drive home, so perhaps some more care needed to be taken, but I think everyone’s just really on edge right now and looking for things to get angry about.

I’d say it’s not even really their place to be “examining the whole economic system.” Each individual is just a regular Joe who put in their time at a job over their life and would now like to reap the rewards of their effort in retirement. It bothers me when people insult other people simply for being caught up in a systemic issue that’s beyond their control.

The solutions for systemic problems need to be systemic as well. If we as a society don’t want to see housing move over to an exclusively rent-based system then we’ll need to address it through things like zoning changes and other legal reforms. When people oppose those things by voting against them, then we can start to apportion blame around.

That’s a false dichotomy.

Maybe something like these “tinyshelters” would be a good compromise - they’re safer and more comfortable than ramshackle tent-and-cardboard encampments, but they’re still far short of what I’d call a “free apartment.”

It’s a bit of a catch-22, unfortunately. Homeless camps are not exactly safe places to live. Fire codes and zoning laws are not arbitrary things, they exist for reasons.

I would find it reasonable to require that the government has to have someplace for those homeless people to go before dismantling their camps, though.

It’s also got a substantial helping of “here’s how things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future.”

You realize how a word like that can have ambiguous meanings, yes?

I mean, ultimately we’re going to want to spend energy doing stuff. Everything we do has “emissions problems” because everything we do consumes energy. Even if the energy it’s consuming is entirely “green” you still need to build the power plants and that energy still costs something.

All analogies eventually fail when you dig into them far enough, by nature of what an analogy is. That is, an analogy is not exactly identical to the thing being analogized. If you want to be able to use analogies but refuse to acknowledge that they eventually lose relevance when you stretch them too far then you’re simply not amenable to reason.

And then you go and explicitly beg the very question under debate with an “of course I’m right.” No, AI art isn’t a “scam,” whatever you mean by that.

Is AI art literally violent, or is this another analogy?

No, just pointing out who’s in the “loud but wrong” camp on that one. If ecological concerns are why you think crypto is bad, well, that’s not clear cut any more.

You want to keep going with this analogy you brought up, then?

Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake a year and a half ago, it no longer has a significant environmental impact.

Oh wait, this is an analogy, isn’t it?

That seems fairly evident

Hardly. There wouldn’t be much debate about it if it was, would there?

You were fine engaging fastfood until I pointed out it, like AI " art " was terrible. Only then did you deride the metaphor as off topic.

Alright, in future I will try to remember to immediately reject any metaphors you bring into play rather than attempt to engage with them.

Things that are bad for society should be suppressed and things which are good for society should be promoted. That would seem to be the point of a society.

Great, now we just need to establish whether AI art is “bad for society”, and if it is then whether the effects of attempting to ban it would be worse for society.

Further, I notice a pastern in your replies of bringing up metaphor then rejecting the very metaphor as off topic or irrelevant when it is engaged to it’s logical conclusion.

What metaphors did I bring up? You’re the one who brought fast food into this. I don’t see any other metaphors in play.

Unhealthy things should be forbidden? Even if they were, this is drifting off of the subject of AI art.

And yet there’s still plenty of traditional restaurants.

Fast food provides a new option. It hasn’t destroyed the old. And “terrible” is, once again, in the eye of the beholder - some people like it just fine.

He put quotes around the word “art”, which gives me the opposite impression.

Break it down into chunks and assemble it like Lego.