donuts
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I’m not conflating anything. Just posting well-sourced and unbiased, objective historical record. Kind of odd how riled up that made you… (Remember, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.)
Frankly I’m not really interested in your interpretation of that history, especially since you don’t seem to have a very good or nuanced grasp of it in the first place. There are plenty of smart, informed and qualified people who have written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No offense but I’ll probably check out what they have to say before I check in with you.
Anyway, have a good one!
Are you under the impression that the Palestinians invaded Israeli lands in 1948, killing thousands of them?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
I don’t consider my gaming in terms of price/time because that just encourages buying games that suck away my time.
So true and well said.
I love playing a 70 hour From Software game or a 50 hour JRPG as much as the next guy. But some of my favorite games of all time are old classics like Super Mario World or Zelda: OoT, which can probably be completed in a single session or two if you know what you’re doing. And there have been some truly great, but short, indie games over the years.
Then there are also sim games and arcade/fighting games that had great reliability and you can get many hours out of if you like them.
In the end, as long as the game is fun and satisfying, I don’t care how long it lasts.
You’re making two, big incorrect assumptions:
- Simply seeing something on the internet does not give you any legal or moral rights to use that thing in any way other than things which are, or have previously been, deemed to be “fair use” by a court of law. Individuals have personal rights over their likeness and persona, and copyright holders have rights over their works, whether they are on the internet or not. In other words, there is a big difference between “visible in public” and “public domain”.
- More importantly, something that might be considered “fair use” for a human being do to is not necessary “fair use” when a computer or “AI” does it. Judgements of what is and is not fair use are made on a case by case basis as a legal defense against copyright infringement claims, and multiple factors (purpose of use, nature of original work, degree and sustainability of use, market effect, etc.) are often taken into consideration. At the very least, AI use has serious implications on sustainability and markets, especially compared to examples of human use.
I know these are really tough pills for AI fans to swallow, but you know what they say… “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
I’m simply referring to things like this, which I believe (but can’t really prove, so I could be wrong) happens more often than we’d like.
I’m probably wrong. I’m not claiming to be an expert, and I’m not trying to equate Taiwan with China.
As someone who grew up around doctors and knew a brain surgeon, I can say with 100% confidence that everybody who rides a bike should wear a helmet. I feel like the average person has very little idea of how fragile we are, how easy it can be to get a traumatic brain injury, and how much of a nightmare your life can become. (This applies even more if you need to ride on the street or if you plan to ride at high speeds.)
I think you’re being needlessly judgy, ebikes are great and it’s never been about whether you “need” one or not.
They’re faster than regular bikes, allowing you to cover a larger distance in the same amount of time, especially if you’re fit. They’re very fun to ride in general, and they can take some of the misery out of climbing hills or otherwise challenging/tedious parts of your commute. Cargo ebikes can carry a decent amount of stuff and even one or two small passengers in some cases, and in other cases they can replace your need for a car (like quickly getting to a store for something small). And they give you the ability to balance exercise vs convenience as the situation or your personalty demands (you get to decide how much work your body does and how much the motor does).
Finally, ebikes open the door for people to get into using active transportation instead of cars for people who normally wouldn’t want to, whether they need help because of fitness, want help because of living in a hilly environment, or because they just want to get from point A to B in a reasonable amount of time. Riding my ebike in an urban environment, I find that I can actually get around just as fast as in a car, if not faster due to traffic.
Because I’m not super fit and live in a very unforgiving and hilly American neighborhood (where I also have to ride on curvy roads where people drive too damn fast) I would have never ever considered getting a regular bike. I’m now riding a bike somewhat regularly, getting a bit of exercise (or not, depending on the circumstances), and having a great time riding on roads, bike lanes, sidewalks, through parks (at a reasonable speed for pedestrians), etc.
Yes, they’re more expensive than a regular bike.
Yes, they’re heavier than a regular bike.
Yes, having to worry about battery charge is inconvenient.
Yes, it can be dangerous to ride any bike at >20mph.
But as the old saying goes “don’t knock it until you try it”. Even if you think you’re a cycling purist, I recommend at least giving ebikes a try before judging others for using them. I think if you did you’d find that ebikes are an ally of and complement to normal bikes, and just like an electric guitar amplifies your strings, ebikes are amplifying your legs and not rendering them obsolete.
As someone who totally loves the Souls games (plus Bloodborne and Sekiro) but played Armored Core 2 on the PS2 way back in the day and thought it was just kind of OK, I’m not really sure what to think about AC6 right now. On one hand I don’t really expect them to diverge from the essence of what AC is and should be (deep mecha customization and intricate combat), but on the other hand I feel like the type of game that AC2 was is something that I don’t look back on super fondly.
Anyone else feel conflicted about whether to pick up AC6?
We need a license model such that AI is only allowed to be trained on content were the license explicitly permits it and that no mention is equal to it being disallowed.
That is the default model behind copyright, which basically says that the only things people can use your copyrighted work for without a license are those which are determined to be “fair use”.
I don’t see any way in which today’s AI ought to be considered fair use of other people’s writings, artwork, etc.
But this weird, almost religious devotion to some promise of AI and the weird white knighting I see folks do for it is just baffling to watch.
When you look at it through the lens of the latest get-rich-quick-off-some-tech-that-few- people-understand grift, it makes perfect sense.
They naively see AI as a magic box that can make infinite “content” (which of course belongs to them for some reason, and is fair use of other people’s copyrighted data for some reason), and infinite content = infinite money, just as long as you can ignore the fundamentals of economics and intellectual property.
People have invested a lot of their money and emotional energy into AI because they think it’ll make them a return on investment.
At any rate, if you train your NN using appropriately licensed or public domain data, more power to you. But if you feed a machine a bunch of other people’s writing, artwork, music, etc., please understand that you will never truly own the output.
I am.
It is only the profit maximizing hyper capitalists who intend to use AI to exploit workers and rip off artists. I have no problem with the technology behind AI, I just don’t think people should be using it as a tool for continual, industrialized mass exploitation of the little people (like you and me) who actually own the data that they put online.
I was wrong to use the dismissive term “AI bots”. I’m genuinely sorry about that and I let my feelings as an artist get the best of me, but other than that my point still stands. To be fair, “you’re wrong” and “shut up” aren’t exactly the strongest counter arguments either. No hard feelings.
The objective truth is that “AI” neural networks synthesize an output based on an input dataset. There is no creativity, personality artistry or other x-factor there, and until there is real “general artificial intelligence” there never will be. Human beings feed inputs into the machine, and they generate an output based on some subset of those inputs. If those inputs are “fair use” or otherwise licensed, then that’s perfectly fine. But if those inputs are unlicensed copyrighted works, then you would be insane to believe that you own the output that the algorithm produces–that’s like thinking you own the music that comes out of your speakers because you hit the play button. Just because you’re in control of the playback does not mean that you created the music, and nobody would seriously think that.
I’ve worked as an artist and a programmer, and a simple analogy is the concept of a software license. Just because you can see or download some source code on GitLab does not mean that you own it or can use it freely for any purpose; most code repositories are open sourced under some kind of license, which legitimate users of that code must comply with. We’ve already seen Microsoft make this mistake and then instantly backtrack with Github Copilot, because they understand that they simply do not have the IP rights to use GPL code (for one example) to train their AI. Similarly, if a musician samples a portion of a song to use in their own song, depending on various factors they may have to share credit with the original creator, and sometimes that make sense, in my opinion.
No matter how you or I feel about it, copyright law has always been there with the basic intent to protect people who create unique works. There are some circumstances which are currently considered “fair use” of unlicensed copyrighted works (for example, for educational purposes), and I think that’s great. But I think there is zero argument that unlimited automated content generation via AI ought to be considered genuine fair use. No matter how much AI fans want to try to personify the technology, it is not engaging in a creative or artistic process, it is merely synthesizing an output based on mixed inputs, just like how an AI chat bot is not truly thinking but merely stringing words together.
You do realize individuals can train neural networks on their own hardware, right?
Good luck training something that rivals big tech, especially now that they’re all putting “moats” around their data…
We, the little people, don’t have the data, the storage, the processing power, the RAM, and least but not least, the cash, to compete with them.
At any rate, if you train your NN using appropriately licensed or public domain data, more power to you. But if you feed a machine a bunch of other people’s writing, artwork, music, etc., please understand that you will never truly own the output.
You seem to be imagining a future in which AI is the great equalizer that ushers us in to some kind of utopia, but right now I’m only seeing even more money, power and control being clawed away from the people in favor of the biggest, richest tech conglomerates. It’s fucking dystopian, and I hope people like you will recognize that before it’s really too late.
Wrong. Copyright protects works, not ideas.
The part that you AI bots always forget is that the machine doesn’t do shit without a dataset. No data input, no output. And if you don’t own the inputs, what the hell makes you think you can claim ownership over the outputs?
If you ask an AI art program to paint you a “pretty kitty cat”, it can only do so because it has been fed enough pictures and paintings (plus metadata) to synthesize an acceptable output. Your human intent is an insignificant filter over their data, and if they haven’t trained on any pictures of cats, you will never achieve anything even close to your intent. Your prompt has the value of a Google search.
Finally, there is a key thing called the “artistic process” in which a human artist imagined vision of their finished work takes shape as they work. This is nothing like what happens under a neutral network, and it is why you are never going to be an artist simply by filling in a web form. You have no vision, and even if you did, the AI will never achieve it on your behalf.
Sorry, but if AI art sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is simply exploiting and distorting other people’s copyrighted artwork. It gives you the illusion of having created something, like the kid mashing buttons at the arcade machine without putting any money in. But the good news is that it’s not too late to learn how to draw.
Not at all… In fact, it’s totally batshit insane to determine that the biggest tech companies in the world can freely use anybody’s copyrighted data or intellectual property to train an AI and then claim to have ownership over the output.
The only way that it makes sense to have AI training be “fair use” is if the output of AI is not able to be copyrighted or commercially used, and that’s not the case here. This decision will only enable a mass, industrialized exploitation of workers, artists and creators.
Search engines are rightly considered fair use because they provide a mutual benefit to both the people who are looking for “content” and the people who create that same “content”. They help people find stuff, which basically is good for everyone.
On the other hand, artists derive zero benefit from having their art scraped by big tech companies. They aren’t paid licensing fees (they should be), they aren’t credited (they should be), and their original content is not visible or being advertised in any way. To me, it’s simply exploitation right now, and I hope that things can change in the future so that it can benefit everyone, artists included.
Microsoft basically tied with Apple for the title of richest company in the world, by the way.