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   Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)'s status on Friday, 21-Aug-2026 00:21:10 JST Tech Tangents

   • Thomas 🔭🕹️

   @thomasfuchs
   My biggest frustration about the AI situation, aside from people offloading critical thought to it, is copyright has been completely ignored. For years I've been learning minutia of how US copyright law works for preservation. I only publish materials through archive.org because they're a registered 501c3. I've looked into what it would take to run my own legal archive as well. For videos I've also read more into what properly counts as "fair use" and try to work within those laws

   • Embed this notice
     Do-re-mi-so-la-ti-do (bremner@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Aug-2026 23:54:46 JST Do-re-mi-so-la-ti-do

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I think for me the main issues are environmental destruction, and what for want of better terms I will call plagiarism. I'm not interested in "per-inference" costs as long as enormous, energy and water hungry data centers are being built or proposed. Even solar and wind power (although vastly superior to fossil fuels and nuclear power in this sense) have significant impact at scale. I'm also skeptical about "local models will save us" on several grounds, unless the modestly powered machine ingests only data whose creators specifically consent to that use. Yes, it's impractical, but I thought we on fedi already had the "consent is impractical" discussion a few times. Finally (and you did invite unstructured!), I don't want to directly or indirectly support the businesses of some of the worst people on the planet. Every hour I spend reviewing AI generated PRs makes these services a little more useful. I'm not ashamed to say that I just want to the AI bubble to pop as goal, not as an means to some other thing. We didn't boycott South African wine because it tasted bad, but because it enriched terrible people.

     P.S. This post is not an invitation to "Change my mind", but a response to a request for thoughts about AI. Reply guys will be blocked.

   • Embed this notice
     alan w. smith :ablobfoxbongo: (theidofalan@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 20-Aug-2026 04:14:53 JST alan w. smith :ablobfoxbongo:

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs this nerd-snipped me into a blog post. it's not hard line ethical reasoning. more taking a moment to re-asses where things are and how I'm interacting with them.

     https://al9000.com/blog/01/n8/bg/4y/

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     yoasif (yoasif@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Aug-2026 00:21:07 JST yoasif

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @TechTangents @thomasfuchs What I am confused about is why fair use has been expanded to encompass wholesale piracy - does copyright law allow someone to abuse fair use to "transform" the original work into a virtual facsimile?

     It seems to me that somehow, the theory of the case is that if I can copy a sentence, it is fair use, so I can copy a paragraph, and a chapter, and then a book.

     Humans can't do that, but LLMs can.

     Is there some nuance we are missing or is this a new legal theory?

   • Embed this notice
     Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)'s status on Friday, 21-Aug-2026 00:21:08 JST Tech Tangents

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs
     PS: To pre-counter "but humans train on copyrighted material". Humans can be sued if they directly copy their training material
     - The street vendor selling air brushed Elsa shirts is obviously breaking the law
     - Parody laws exist as a carve out to protect works that transform existing material
     - Clean Room engineering exists because just seeing the source material "taints" you

     The law has been VERY clear on this for humans. But automate it at a huge scale and suddenly "it's okay"

   • Embed this notice
     Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)'s status on Friday, 21-Aug-2026 00:21:09 JST Tech Tangents

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs
     It is indisputable that AI companies are training on copyrighted materials, and that they seek to profit from it. But they have been deemed untouchable for this crime which has only emboldened them and investors into thinking they are unstoppable. The only solution I see is to nationalize these companies and make access free. But "muh freedums" will call that "socialism" while the entire economy, from fab throughput to electricity usage, is pillaged for infinite corporate growth.

   • Embed this notice
     Tech Tangents (techtangents@dialup.space)'s status on Friday, 21-Aug-2026 00:21:10 JST Tech Tangents

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs
     But then AI companies came and destroyed all of that. Apparently copyright law doesn't exist if you operate piracy at a large enough scale. I think there are two parts to why "we" accepted it. First was "Open" AI's weird corporate structure with the 501c3 that clouded the for profit motives. Second that the entire planet is being held hostage in a software cold war where the, legitimate, concerns are that rival countries will have more powerful AI that can exploit vulnerabilities