Notices by Walter van Holst (whvholst@eupolicy.social), page 2

@evan @slothrop There are plenty examples of people being pretty good at all of these things while being shitty at the same time.

@evan @slothrop And then there was William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, recipient of a Nobel prize for physics, who was a bloody white supremacist pushing for eugenics. We may have to live with the idea of humans being able to be brilliant at one thing and otherwise mostly failing as human beings.

@pettter @BarrenPlanet @rysiek They are embodied in hardware, grounded on pre-selected data sets, with the social context (and bias!) of that pre-selection.

@pettter @BarrenPlanet @rysiek Being more objective does not preclude an ability to attain knowledge. While I don't buy much of the AI/ML hype (it's mostly the same technology as thirty years ago, just a lot more data), I don't buy into dismissing it as fundamentally unable to "learn" either. If any lessons learnt must be subjective, there cannot be any knowledge transfer between humans either.

@pettter @admin @rysiek Claiming that your server can be spam-free to the point that you never needed a spamfilter because "you put some thought into it" definitely is claiming that anyone who ever got spamruns on their server just hadn't put enough thought into it. It's simply bollocks.

@admin @pettter @rysiek You may not have intended it a such, it still is victim blaming. No amount of thought put into running a mailserver will prevent you from being spammed. You just have been incredibly lucky so far.

@pettter @BarrenPlanet @rysiek And green is passing certain thresholds and staying below others in the visual cortex. There's no objective concept of "green" among humans either. Even without colour-blindness. It's not a helpful argument, more of a Plato's cave one, to claim computers cannot perceive reality the same as humans do when no human does it the same way either.

@pettter @BarrenPlanet @rysiek 0x000 0xFFF 0x000

@pettter @rysiek There's a very interesting and growing body of research on transforming neural networks into rule sets.

@pettter @rysiek It can be more things like "measured average brush width of a stroke" than "lossy compression".

@pettter @rysiek Because requiring licensing large corpora of text before being able to analyse them would introduce sufficient amounts of friction that it would put them out of reach of everyone except the large publishing houses.

@pettter @rysiek Yes. And learning a style is something you do by analysing lots of copyrighted works. So, a difference without a distinction. I stand by my position: if you cannot analyse works and the patterns in them, you cannot learn from them either. You cannot have concordances, which historically have been understood as not copyright-infringing either. Or as someone noted: the Stable Diffusion neural network is only a few GB, good luck in proving that it is a copy of TBs of art.

@rysiek @pettter In Europe we specifically carved out exceptions to copyright for large corpora for the purpose of AI/ML, one of the few upsides of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive.

@pettter @rysiek I disagree with Rysiek's reasoning, but not with his conclusion. Usenet died because of spam. Mail is in the dying spasms because of spam. Search is gravely ill because of spam. ChatGPT and its likes will finish it off, because it will be used by linkfarm spam bastards.

@rysiek @pettter I disagree with your foaming at the mouth at Midjourney etc, and the most level-headed analysis of the copyright cases I have seen so far give them little chance of truly succeeding. Regarding plagiarism in education: introduce open book, but offline testing in secondary education (which won't be easy) and it will be managable.

@rysiek @pettter The sampling decisions were super bad and logically inconsistent with copyright law themselves. It shows that the large media conglomerates get to play by different rules. When it comes to the visual arts, there is no such concentration of power, so I wouldn't expect that reasoning to be applied here.

@rysiek @pettter Furthermore, I disagree that training a neural network on styles is the same as sampling. But then, we already deeply disagree that this is "training" to begin with.

@pettter @andrea My memories are hazy, I think the first book of that series carries the haziness until pretty much the end. But you are probably right.

@pettter @andrea I think some of Ann Leckie's books really leave some characters' gender identity completely unclear. Which would make the christian ayatollahs go ballistic anyway.

@autiomaa @rysiek @miklo @ares Yeah, and wifi-p in automotive probably is similarly problematic (even though I prefer that over UMTS-based connectivity).