aithrowawaycomm

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Comment · 1 year ago
I don't understand your ridiculous pedantry! I am talking about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I am not talking about other front ends to these services, nor did I dispute that your example deserved copyright protection. Invoke is very very different from plain text-to-image generation, WHICH IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT.

I think it's best if I log off and ignore your replies.

Comment · 1 year ago
No, in general you cannot copyright them:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copy...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-copyright-office...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...

See the other reply for a half-counterexample, but the major difference is the specific software is more like generative PhotoShop, and the final image involved a lot of manual human work. Simply tweaking a prompt is not enough - again you can get copyright for curation, just not the images."

Of course AI can't be credited with copyright - neither can a random-character generator, even if it monkeys its way into a masterpiece. You need legal standing to sue or be sued in order to hold copyright.

Comment · 1 year ago
I am specifically talking about DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, your link describes something very different. The point was the "Google Images" analogy, which applies to 99.999% of AI art but this is an exception.
Comment · 1 year ago
"AI art generators enable the creation of ignorant and lazy illustrations by outsourcing understanding to an idiot robot."

"Yes, but is it not the intent of the artist to be ignorant and lazy?"

It is possible to repeatedly iterate AI art gen and get what you want, but that's not what happened here. And even so, it's not at all the same thing as drawing a picture: "iterating on what you want" is equivalent to curating art, not creating it. In the US you can copyright curation and that extends to curation of AI art - the US Copyright Office correctly said that tweaking prompts is the same thing as tweaking a Google Images search string for online image curation. But you can't copyright the actual AI-gen pictures, they are automatically public domain (unless they infringe someone else's copyright).

Comment · 1 year ago
I am unable to think of a single animal behavior popularly ascribed to intelligence but in fact explainable by rote instinct. Do you have an example?

OTOH there are plenty of animal behaviors that can only be explained by intelligence: seeing-eye dogs perform a task which is economically useful for humans yet far beyond the ability of AI (even if the robotics mech eng issues are resolved). But it also doesn't really make sense that one of my cats is "instinctually" able to understanding my words while the other cat is "instinctually" able to outsmart me when we play with toys. The more sensible explanation is cats are intelligent and intellectually diverse.

Comment · 1 year ago
The problem is that it also included "doxxing" DOGE employees, even though they are significant public figures and their anonymity is almost certainly illegal. Protecting the identity of government employees who are more powerful than cabinet secretaries is plain abuse of ToS. (I will add that I don't believe most of the alleged death threats were real. I think Musk's concern was the "doxxing" and the death threats were a pretext.)
Comment · 1 year ago

  Specifically, better scores on the measures of impulsivity, emotional awareness and flexibility, and also the personality trait of agreeableness were all linked to higher patience scores.... But these results do suggest that patience is not so much virtue as a method to help us to deal with frustrations — and that some of us are better equipped to employ this coping mechanism than others.
The flaw in this argument is that non-impulsiveness, emotional awareness, and agreeableness are all considered virtues! And I really don’t like the implicit suggestion that impatient people are just born that way and patient people won the luck of the draw: I was far more impatient before I started getting mental health treatment.
Comment · 1 year ago
> Here, we modified the part of Claude’s internal state that represented the "rabbit" concept. When we subtract out the "rabbit" part, and have Claude continue the line, it writes a new one ending in "habit", another sensible completion. We can also inject the concept of "green" at that point, causing Claude to write a sensible (but no-longer rhyming) line which ends in "green". This demonstrates both planning ability and adaptive flexibility—Claude can modify its approach when the intended outcome changes.

This all seems explainable via shallow next-token prediction. Why is it that subtracting the concept means the system can adapt and create a new rhyme instead of forgetting about the -bit rhyme, but overriding it with green means the system cannot adapt? Why didn't it say "green habit" or something? It seems like Anthropic is having it both ways: Claude continued to rhyme after deleting the concept, which demonstrates planning, but also Claude coherently filled in the "green" line despite it not rhyming, which...also demonstrates planning? Either that concept is "last word" or it's not! There is a tension that does not seem coherent to me, but maybe if they had n=2 instead of n=1 examples I would have a clearer idea of what they mean. As it stands it feels arbitrary and post hoc. More generally, they failed to rule out (or even consider!) that well-tuned-but-dumb next-token prediction explains this behavior.

Comment · 1 year ago
I struggled reading the papers - Anthropic’s white papers reminds me of Stephen Wolfram, where it’s a huge pile of suggestive empirical evidence, but the claims are extremely vague - no definitions, just vibes - the empirical evidence seems selectively curated, and there’s not much effort spent building a coherent general theory.

Worse is the impression that they are begging the question. The rhyming example was especially unconvincing since they didn’t rule out the possibility that Claude activated “rabbit” simply because it wrote a line that said “carrot”; later Anthropic claimed Claude was able to “plan” when the concept “rabbit” was replaced by “green,” but the poem fails to rhyme because Claude arbitrarily threw in the word “green”! What exactly was the plan? It looks like Claude just hastily autocompleted. And Anthropic made zero effort to reproduce this experiment, so how do we know it’s a general phenomenon?

I don’t think either of these papers would be published in a reputable journal. If these papers are honest, they are incomplete: they need more experiments and more rigorous methodology. Poking at a few ANN layers and making sweeping claims about the output is not honest science. But I don’t think Anthropic is being especially honest: these are pseudoacademic infomercials.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I am not disputing any of that, nor am I trying to put a positive spin on anything coming out of Trump. My only point was that it's misinformation to say that the US is unilingual by policy - that only became partially true in March 2025 via a toothless (and blatantly unconstitutional) executive order.

And it's not "soft acceptance of Spanish here and there," all levels of government are legally required to print official documents in whatever languages their community speaks; cities usually have ballots in dozens of languages. This is a constitutional requirement, bolstered by the Voting Rights Act, and Trump has not yet done enough damage to make those legal requirements go away via diktat.

Comment · 1 year ago
> a country which is unilingual English by policy?

To be clear the US only has a unilingual policy because Trump signed an executive order this year (and I believe even this SCOTUS would strike the order down as unconstitutional if anyone had standing to sue over it).

The US has always been de facto unilingual, but de jure we don't have an official language since Trump has no legal authority to establish that. The "policy" is political and legally empty.

Comment · 1 year ago
This would be a valid POV if there was any solid evidence that LLMs truly increased worker productivity or reliability - at best it is a mixed bag. To stretch the food analogy, it seems like LLMs could be pure corn syrup, without any disease-resistant fruits and unnaturally plump chickens that actually make modern agriculture worthwhile.

Or, since LLMs seem to be addictive, it's like getting rid of the spinach farms and replacing them with opium poppies. (I really hate this tech.)

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